#bad faith actors come up with bad faith framings who could've thought!

[caparrucia]

Making my own post, because I'm derailing horribly and I know it. But I find this thread and @carriesthewind's addition key to a realization I just had about fandom drama.

Yes, there's this toxic dynamic where people demand the most good faith reading of their words, with generous opportunities for mistakes and misunderstandings, but go about reading everything they encounter in the worst possible faith, assuming malicious and harmful intent in everything.

And yes, that's one of the key drivers of fandom drama, because most people find people who go about doing that incredibly incendiary and annoying and often don't think twice to go back and call them out on it.

But the entire thread is talking about House of the Dragon as "the incest show" and how pointing out that "there's incest in the incest show, and if you're uncomfortable with incest, you'll be uncomfortable with both the canon and the fandom surrounding the incest show, because, y'know, all the incest," which... yeah. Valid points all around.

But I find it fascinated because it crystalized something for me and one of the reasons why most of fandom's tantrums about censorship vs harmful depiction annoy me so much. And I don't think mine is a unique experience, but... I don't have a stake, most of the time.

To wit, we all know Game of Thrones crashed and burned at the end and it's been such a meme there was a solid eight months worth of youtube video essays chronicling every single factor that went into turning the heir to the Sopranos as far as prestige TV went, into a fucking meme. But the thing is... Game of Thrones was something ELSE before it was the incest show. It was a whirlwind of high production and amazing acting and competent writing! ...right up until it wasn't. Yes, there was incest in it. There was also rape and violence and gore and maiming and a whole lot of shocking things, to a mainstream audience. It reveled shamelessly in its Adult rating and being gatekept behind HBO's paywall.

What I'm trying to say is, the people who watched Game of Thrones as it came out, myself included, and the people who left in disgust as the writing declined in quality and the plot became more and more obvious and stupid in direction and execution? We weren't there for JUST for the incest. To us, it wasn't the incest show. It was the dragon show. Or the politics show. Or the obscenely detailed costume work that makes me scream in paroxysms of ecstasy (yes, Bernadette Banner has a bunch of series breaking this down and salivating about it right along with us, go check them out over on youtube) show. Or it was the Charles Dance set the bar so fucking high every actor sharing a shooting site never mind scene with him has been forcefully dragged into a higher level of performance and it's fucking jaw dropping to witness show. Or the this is reigniting my love for D&D and fantasy because no one's ever taken it this seriously before and it's inspiring me to go look at those hobbies again show.

Sure, there were people who were absolutely in it for the incest. And you know what? All the power to them. Glad they were fed. But implying everyone has to be either gleefully consuming incest and celebrating/endorsing it, or being harmed by it, that's it, that's the dichotomy, the evil people who celebrate or the good people who're martyred (wow, some of you carry your evangelical damage VERY prominently and will find a way to work it into every conversation, yes), kind of erases the agency of the rest of us who looked at the incest and went "huh, not for me" and then moved on. Because that's a thing! That people with agency! Can do! Different people can have different tolerances for stuff. You don't get to erase us just because we're not convenient to the narrative.

Bad faith arguments about a show's morality - and let's start from the fact all arguments surrounding a show's moral standing are bad faith from the gate - will find the one thing they find objectionable - the incest - and try to eclipse everything else, pretending there was nothing else to the show, but incest. Because that's how they set the stage and cordon off the bits and pieces that sort of don't fit their argument. They're trying to get a head start in the conversation by delimiting the grounds. Not cool, but also understandable. All bad faith takes do that.

The weird thing is that in most other scenarios, when someone does the bad faith narrowing down of the field like that, the general answer is "this is more complicated than that and you're being stupid for being so narrow-minded, go away." When evangelicals try to do it about creationism and fossils. When evangelicals try to do it about science and religion and politics and a million other things, because this is a very (though not exclusively) evangelical way to frame problems and it's part of their preaching methods so they've internalized it.

But when it comes to media? And when it comes to Queer issues? Somehow people don't immediately go "your framing of this is objectively incorrect and also stupid, go away". People go in engaging in that same framing.

So now GoT and HotD are "the incest shows", and you can't have an opinion about them without identifying at the door if you're in for the incest or against it, as if incest is the central point of the discussion and the thing everyone is hyperfocused on. Like... no? IDK, I don't care about the incest, I'm more interested in X/Y/Z. But this framing makes it so that from the outside, if you don't know what's happening, you assume that, yeah, the incest must be the most important thing. Everyone talking about it, pro and against are basing all their thoughts and comments about the incest. So it must be true! So a bad faith framework, unchallenged, becomes the good faith standard that people use to gauge the conversation, because there's no challenging in that framework.

Bad frameworks are bad, and more than that, they're harmful. Because when you let them go unchallenged, you're letting bad faith actors dictate the tone of the conversation. This is annoying and irritating in fandom discussions, but it escalates to actively fucking harrowing when it comes to the other thing that keeps following this pattern: conversations about queer people, particularly trans people, and the concentrated efforts from right wing extremists to reframe their entire existence as predators, and specifically child sexual predators.

So, like, absolutely call out people who do that good faith for me, bad faith for thee bullshit. Absolutely recognize when someone is trying to bias a conversation or forcefully frame it in a way that tries to box you into a gotcha. But when you see the bad framing, for fiction and for queer issues, and you wouldn't tolerate that in a science conversation. Or in a history conversation. Or in a linguistic conversation... yeah, call THAT out. And remember the only people who benefits from you engaging unquestioning in that bad framing, is the asshole who set up that bad frame in the first place.

Additional twitter threads about bad framing/bad faith arguments:

"Why fiction was used to groom me is a shitty argument and you need to stop engaging with it."

"Doxxing/Suicide baiting is bad, actually, stop letting people reframe them as valid activism."

"TERF/Kink-critical/RadFem rhetoric speaks the language of abuse and you'll never be able to argue your way into being seen as a person if you engage in their framework."

"Discomfort is not harm and you can't have conversations about harm-reduction when someone keeps bath faith derailing to try and force you to take accountability for THEIR discomfort."