#but she’s so used to being defensive and not listened to

[rootspiral]

Agatha All Along deep dive: episode 5 part 1

(Wandavision entries: [1][2][3])

(AAA entries: ep1 [1][2][3][4] ep2 [1][2][3][4] ep3 [1][2][3] ep4 [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][+1] ep5 [1])

in which I FINALLY get to episode 5 Darkest Hour/Wake Thy Power

oh wow this is legit the first time I see the Salem Seven's face makeup, a world is revealed every time I brighten a scene.

jen with her leaf mask. sweet baby alice with her hands tucked between her knees

rio just squatting there watching everybody else sleep. agatha nowhere to be found, because after what happened with rio she had to be dramatic and sleep on her lonesome

doesn't rio just like to torment lilia? just a little bit? keep her on her toes for shit and giggles? she would not be above sneaking behind her at night and going boo! in her ear

rio: I'm so fucking angry at agatha.

also rio: okay she might have killed the whole salem coven but her mother was a humongous piece of shit so let's jot that down real quick. just so we are all on the same page

jen: look here girl I'm not being dragged in the agatha harkness defense squad just because you two smashed

alice is STILL the only adult in the room

agatha always had a soft spot for children

lmao she was absolutely listening from behind a tree trunk, waiting for the perfect moment to make her clown entrance

kathryn hahn was given a swooshy coat and by god she's gonna make it swoosh every chance she gets

I love shots where they're all together because that's some excellent costumes and character designs. look at all the silhouettes silhouetting.

rio is ready to cut a bitch. "but rio you're the natural order of things you're not supposed to intervene and harm-" AGATHA IS IN DANGER. NEXT QUESTION

everybody being like no ew we're not using brooms!! meanwhile rio is going AW YASS BROOMSTICKS

lilia I adore you but also time and place, time and place

agatha making a pretty leafy broom for rio

rio making a cool butchy broom for agatha

"pro te delecta aperio via" for you my beloved I open the way???? WHO IS COMING UP WITH THESE SPELLS I JUST WANT TO TALK

lilia is pissed because she put lil flowers on jen's broom! why didn't SHE get flowers too, jen???

tfw you just had a fight with your ex so you have no choice but to look at them wistfully from behind a broomstick

selflessness? the iRONY

they brush hands and she SNAPS it away. clown behavior! clown!!!!!

LET'S GO LESBIANS LET'S GOOO

awwwww alice made a broom for billy and she's being shy about it

no transformation from actual owl to owl makeup because we're running on vibes and zero cgi budget

alice has a big stick!!! alice SMASH!!!!!!

aubrey skipping along pretending to fly lmaoooo

look at the athletic gesture

this is so grainy, they really had no budget. only a lot of heart.

and I just covered a whole 5 minutes of show. I'll never see the end of this

go to episode 5 part 2

[postcardsfromheapside]

No. I wasn't missing the point of most criticism. Literally, I saw post after post of people saying they wished the characters could be mean to each other. Some posts were more specific, like "I don't like Taash," (and I'm sure you can imagine what THAT'S about) and some were more ambigious but cited DA2 and how everyone was bitchy toward each other.

I honestly don't care where you work and what you do, because hopefully most of us after the age of 30 have experienced an adult job where we have to be reasonable with our coworkers, even if we strongly disagree, or outright dislike them. I had the suspicion that most people who think that there is "no conflict," or "low conflict" or "bad writing" in this game haven't experienced this kind of setting in any capacity. What I'm now hearing is that you might have, but you didn't absorb any of the dialogue, or switch out your party to listen to banter, which is an essential function for picking up information in any DA game.

I walked around Arlathan with Lucanis and Harding, and they have a whole ongoing conversation in which she threatens him with one of her special arrows. And he agrees that if Spite should take him over, she should do something about it. Harding isn't frightened, because Harding isn't a pushover, but she's not taking any shit either. Did you walk around with just the two of them right after recruiting Lucanis? Did you frequently visit the rest of the companions so that you could see just how much Lucanis and Davrin *didn't* get along? Neve mentions what sounded like a knock-down drag out fight.

**Just because this isn't explicitly mentioned to you doesn't make it bad writing - it means you haven't had the time we had with Inquisition to play the game over and over and switch out your party so you can see everyone's interactions with each other. You will actually have to play the game multiple times and switch your party out a fair amount in order to see these interactions. Or wait for people to post them to tumblr. You can complain about how unfair this is, or remember that Inquisition has 10 years on this game, and it's been out for just shy of a month.**

Why in the absolute fuck would Davrin manufacture conflict between himself and someone he could easily conjecture isn't pro-slavery based on the fact that within five minutes he could find out she's from Dock Town, she's a private investigator working with the Shadow Dragons, and LITERALLY WHEN YOU GET ONTO THE DOCK WITH HIM, her first priority as she's running back to Minrathous is to say "if the dragon wrecks havoc, the Venatori will take over." Davrin isn't an idiot, he could pretty well surmise that she's not "pro slavery" with only the barest of interactions and Rook saying "yeah Neve's cool."

Why would Neve yell at you? Why is it bad writing for the writers to give Neve a personality you don't agree with, because you're uncomfortable with how she reacts? Neve's an adult who is used to working on her own and people not showing up for her - she says this MULTIPLE TIMES - it's actually a large arc of bonding with her, as a friend and a lover. She's not going to scream at you, she's so far past the point of being loud about disappointment, she's on the other side, for one, and for another, she does in fact understand that the entire North of Thedas is on fire and blighting Treviso is pretty fucking bad when it has no major defenses. Rook doesn't endlessly apologize. She came back after a short pause and while I didn't have her healing abilities after that, it didn't take long for me to boost my bond with her back up and feel like we were friends again.

This honestly feels like you're having a personal reaction that you need to examine, and it's not something to do with the writing, since the game mechanics and the dialogue don't actually bear out what you're putting down here.

All of the companions who have conflict initially have to figure out how to trust each other and it sometimes takes most of the game for them to do that. If you didn't spend the time listening to their banter as they work their way through it, that's not Bioware's problem. That's you. And...I don't want to have repeated conversations where I go into Emmrich's (my romance) room and "vent"? I didn't do that with Cullen. I didn't do that with Anders. Why would it suddenly be a thing here? But if you listen in to people's conversations, they do express dismay and doubt and fear about the various quests they've been on. Again, it feels like you didn't spend the time eavesdropping or taking people out and listening to banter.

I have no idea what you're talking about with flirting. I flirted with every companion at first even though I knew I was running for Emmrich, and all of them responded according to their personality. I romanced Cullen in Inquisition, and he was pretty quiet initially, until you get to Skyhold, and similarly, most of the companions here retain a certain reticence until the game progresses. But if you're looking for people who get flustered - Lace and Bellara absolutely do! And Emmrich isn't flustered, but he's taken aback a few times before he collects himself and flirts back - though whether you'd actually recognize it for flirting, I'm starting to wonder. The fact that you can't tell with Neve is actually making me tilt my head at the screen, and I say this as a self-confessed disaster who is very very bad at knowing someone is interested. Even I can tell what's going on in DA romances.

This is probably a lost cause, but I urge you to either spend time playing the game again, or watch someone else who really loves DA (and is Veilguard positive) play so that you can watch without being in the thick of it, and hopefully experience more dialogue and different choices.

No, I'm not done yet, I'm house sitting and she left me snacks and soda and not even god could keep me from venting my spleen at this point.

"I wish the companions were meaner to each other in this game, like in DA2."

While I think there's a larger argument to be made discussing the similarities between DA2 and Veilguard, I need everyone to get so close to me right now about a glaring difference:

DA2 involved a ragtag group of assholes with their own agendas coalescing around Hawke's personality or exchange of favors. There was no larger "goal," except maybe Varric's expedition - everything else is encountered as circumstance. You wend your way through your companions' stories while a city winds ever tighter into itself, a spring about to literally explode.

There's zero reason for these people to be nice to each other. They have no point in being around each other except Hawke. They can bitch at each other all they like.

Rook becomes Varric's second in command (I've seen one post say it's about 6 months before the events of the game) with an explicit purpose: find and stop Solas. Harding and Neve are recruited as experts in their respective fields for this particular goal. When it all goes to shit, Neve recruits another expert, Lucanis, to deal with the fallout, and Harding finds Davrin, *also* an expert in his field (monster hunting). When Rook has to make a particularly consequence heavy decision, two more are added to the crew: Emmrich (Fade expert) and Taash (dragon expert). All of these people are extremely competent, and know from the jump that they have one particular goal in mind.

They join ready to work together on Day 1 because if they don't, there's simply no other alternative. It's lights out. Even when they mistrust each other, the direness of the situation is not lost on them. Infighting serves no purpose. That's why the struggle is directed inward: clean up your own house, so we can move as a single unit.

Honestly the fact that what people took away from this game was "I wish my friends were meaner to each other" and not "wow, I wish we all worked together to keep evil dictators from taking over" is fucking mindblowing when I sit back and reread this.

[i-didnt-do-1t]

Man I love Katherine So Much

[razzle-zazzle]

wait what's the betrothal au??

I'm glad you asked! The premise of the Betrothal AU, in a single sentence, is thus:

Cole and Skylor are arranged to marry each other by a contract made before either of them were born, and they take issue with this.

Of course, there's more to the AU than just the premise—how the whole contract was made and how Skylor and Cole feel about it are major questions I wanna explore in the AU, so I'll do my best to summarize them a bit here:

The contract was made by Chen and Cole's Currently Unnamed Grandfather (I used to call him Shane but I'm not liking that name as much now tbh); Chen had the upper hand in those negotiations. Like it was clear from start to finish who was in control. He initially asked for Lilly's hand, but her father threw a fit and managed to change the terms to "Chen's child will marry Lilly's youngest child by the time both are 20" (but with. more legalese). Because surely, Unnamed Grandfather thought, Chen couldn't possibly have children as an exiled-to-an-island war criminal, and surely, if Chen did find a way to father offspring, Lilly would have multiple children and her eldest would inherit the power of earth, thus preventing the earth master line from getting tangled up with the likes of Chen.

Except then about six months after Skylor was born Chen sent several baby pictures to Unnamed Grandfather to gloat. And Lilly only had Cole because she and Lou only ever wanted one child. So Cole and Skylor are engaged from... not quite birth because Skylor was born almost a year earlier and Chen waited to see if Lilly would have any other children, but definitely since they were both young enough to toddle.

Sooooo... how do Skylor and Cole feel about this? Well, for the most part.. they're kids. Yeah, they meet when they're both five and they're given their halves of a pendant and told that one day they're gonna marry each other, but at that point they were literally just children. Marriage was more of a concept to them, a silly thing they could pretend to do and think about that otherwise didn't really impact them. Especially since they only saw each other once a year (and Lou & Lilly would always throw a fit when Unnamed Grandfather took Cole to Chen's island. But Unnamed Grandfather is going to honor his debts, dammit, even the ones that suck).

But even as they did get to be kids, even as Skylor would eagerly await the 2-4 weeks every year when Unnamed Grandfather would visit with Cole in tow, even as they would run around the labyrinth and into the jungle and all over Chen's compound like the kids they were... well, Chen's a dick. Oh, sure, he wasn't trying to make them feel bad about the engagement, but he definitely wouldn't let them forget it.

So the marriage became a sort of inevitability, for Cole & Skylor. When they were 11-12, they had these cute puppy crushes on each other that they would not have had were it not for the whole "you two are going to one day marry and then spend the rest of your life together" thing hanging over their heads.

And then Unnamed Grandfather dies, and Lilly's fallen ill, and Lou is absolutely not going to go to Chen's island under any circumstances. So Cole and Skylor haven't seen each other in person since they were 13, and wrote letters instead.

So they inevitably drifted. For Skylor, the marriage was an inevitability, but one that she could deal with later—being Chen's daughter gives her way more pressing concerns to deal with daily, anyway. And it was the same for Cole—the engagement, when he thought about it (which wasn't super often) was a distant sort of inevitability, like a project due at the end of the semester that you don't think about until then because you've got assignments due now to worry about.

When Chen invites the ninja to his tournament, when Cole and Skylor see each other on that ferry...

Skylor had been sort of vaguely aware that she wasn't interested in Cole that way. From her memory, he was sweet and rowdy, and her only childhood friend her age. Not the worst person to be tied to on the legal level of marriage, but not exactly someone she was interested in. Seeing Cole in person for the first time in years, and connecting that familiar face with the most recent letters—it crystalizes, for Skylor, that she's not into him that way.

But her father always gets what he wants, and the contract is airtight. So Skylor grits her teeth, swallows her venom, and sidles over to Cole to test the waters. Hope he's not as into her as she remembers feeling about him once, when they were younger and friendlier and liked to talk about what they wanted for their wedding together while digging in the mud for cool jungle bugs.

Cole hadn't thought about his engagement as often—sure, he used the new pendant half that Chen sent him after the monastery burned down to finance every meal the grieving ninja ate at Chen's, and sure, he sent letters monthly at least. But the notion of marriage has become so distant and unimportant in the wake of Garmadon, the Great Devourer, the Overlord, and Zane's death. When he sees Skylor, standing off to the side in a cloak but nonetheless recognizable, it hits him—they really hadn't seen each other in years, and he doesn't feel anything romantic for her.

But Chen has Zane, or might have Zane and be lying—and Cole can't chance that. He needs to know for sure if Zane is alive, so he hopped on the ferry alongside the others, pendant half in hand in case it'd come in handy. But now that the reality of his engagement is staring him in the face and sidling over to him—oh, Cole just knows it's going to cause problems. He's always been good at running away from problems—but he can't run away now, can he?

so yeah tl;dr chen's a little bitch and cole & skylor are gonna have to try and work around that

[jeremiahthefroge]

Every appearance of the red-haired menace that is early Laurence forces me to sit here and stew upon how I will fix his introduction in the rewrite. As a coping mechanism. Unfortunately since I can't remember the parts where his character isn't just harassment so I can't cook with the themes the way I'd like to. Like the way he calls Aph "my love" after she very explicitly in the text of the game tells him not to do that... bad vibes. I think I could rock with his character if he'd done the same sort of approach in hitting on Aphmau as heavily, but the moment she lays down an actual boundary, he backs way the hell off. I could even fuck with her trying to be subtle about the boundary and him not getting it and continuing to make her uncomfortable before she snaps at him and he apologizes, saying that he truly didn't mean anything by it, and he respects the boundary she lays like his life depends on it from then on out. It would create some immediate complexity in his need for explicit communication, and backs up the sort of deeper character hinting they seem to try to do when he's talking about Castor and Cadenza, this idea that he deeply cares, if being a bit pushy on accident. It would also make a good detail fueling the conflicts later on with the love triangle that can sort of prevent Laurence from looking like TOO much of a dickhead (him being unaware or misinterpreting situations, and the delicate nature of it making him uncomfortable asking questions, is a compelling reason to see somebody hurting his friends' feelings, and makes him significantly more sympathetic, opening him up for feelings of remorse and guilt).

[stop-breaking-my-heart-dragonage]

Me, when Sebastian joins my party for the first time: Okay, this time I'm not going to forget about you, Sebastian. I'm going to make an effort to use you a lot this playthrough so I can better understand you.

Also me, immediately forgetting about Sebastian while finishing Act 2 and making it halfway through Act 3 before I finally notice his Faith quest: ......................Oh. Right. My bad.

[corinneistherainbowsign]

it is awesome that me and my roommate and my coworker have all had iq tests it is so random (for me it was because my stepmom was a psychologist and she needed to train someone on how to conduct one and for them it was because the town they're from is polluted with lead and a research team came down to test the effects of lead pollution on children's intelligence) so we talk about it sometimes (it started at work where my coworker and i got on the subject of iq and found we have both been officially tested and we are both "technically geniuses" according to this metric) but both of us mentioned we were insecure growing up knowing the number because we aren't extraordinary geniuses like 170+ so we never disclosed our numbers until relatively recently (idek if we were given the same iq test i know the numbers are different between the different tests. idk which test i was given and idk which test he and my roommate were given) but regardless i have the higher number 😈 and he told my roommate my number and she was like omg we have the same iq!!! but he actually told her the wrong number and i am actually one singular point higher than her. me and her have discussed our personal intelligence analyses of the people we know and we have ranked everyone in our minds and our rankings are exactly the same except i think i'm the most intelligent and she thinks she is the most intelligent. like my ranking is 1) me 2) her 3) coworker 4) other roommate 5) our other friend and hers is the same except with her at the top and me as number two. all of this is just for fun because none of us actually subscribe to iq as an important metric (i am a college dropout and i work at a gas station for example and people i went to school with who i know were less "innately intelligent" than me are like in law school now so yknow. it doesn't necessarily predict success and "innate intelligence" does not outweigh hard work it just makes certain cognitive tasks easier for us regardless of what we do with that) and i admire my friends and peers who have strong work ethics so much because i think i am the laziest most "voluntarily" dysfunctional person on the planet. the most inspiring person i have ever known is my high school friend alivia i loved and love her so much and she would get mad in school because she would study for weeks for an exam and i wouldn't study at all (once i didn't even know we had an exam until a few hours before) and i would score higher than her but i think the fact that she cares and has a genuine drive to succeed is more important than any potential "innate intelligence". work ethic is so important... alas i have very little. my inspiration comes from a desire to help people i care about. like at my current job i want to work hard and get tasks done because i care about my coworkers and i don't want to slack and make work harder for them and my manager is actually awesome and i know she is going through a whole lot of personal shit and i want to at least make work less stressful for her. i do like working and being productive so it is fine but she gave me and my coworker a verbal warning a few weeks ago because she was watching cameras and just observing the store and realized we were not getting shit done like we should and i felt so bad so i have been working moderately hard instead of totally slacking lately. we work at a gas station it isn't hard yknow. idk what the point of this is i think it is nice to have my number in my head in some ways even though it was torturous in others when i was younger. i wanted to be like. albert einstein. i'm not. i'm corinne and that is awesome which i have realized with age. me and my coworker were talking a while ago (haters will call it an insecure cope) but we feel like we are in the sweet spot of iq where we can still connect meaningfully with the people around us despite being "more intelligent" (think about flowers for algernon... neither of us are at a point where we are so "above" everyone that we can't connect).

[dandelion-system]

If I could ask one thing of my mum it’s that she stopped calling alters ‘invaders’ or ‘intruders’. We all have a right to live in this body and experience whatever emotions we want. Our palatability to you does not mean we shouldn’t get to be here.

[minglana]

i think me forgetting to reply to messages is going to be a dealbreaker with [redacted]😬😬😬

[iftitah]

<3

[rupertholmes]

and its like. i cant even act the same towards them because that just goes against my moral code and will make ME worse as a person. that used to be what it was like and thats why i was so mean to irl friends in high school

[look-at-the-stars-tonight]

I'm just slowly falling back in love with marcia

[sereniv]

apologies are hard and can be embarassing

but life is too short to let your grandma go to bed sad

[dollfat]

i really just want to get the conversation over with

[alexanderwales]

"I don't think I could have the relationship with you that you have with me," she said. She was very casual about it, and I was immediately on the defensive.

"What do you mean by that?" I asked.

She put the book she'd been reading down. "It's just, the way you've described it, and the vibe that I get, I don't think I could do it how you do it."

"I still don't know what that means," I said.

"You're always doing this like ... micro calculation thing," she said. "You weigh your words. You try to time things. You have never once called me up while I was at work, or asked me for something when it was inconvenient for me, and you check and double check that you're not being a nuisance."

"And ... that's bad?" I asked.

"No, I love that about you," she said. "It's very kind and considerate. I know that if I tell you I'm not in the mood to hang out, you'll apologize and not push it. If you suggest that we get pizza and I say I'd rather have Korean BBQ, you fold instantly and we get Korean BBQ. I like that. I get the things I want. But it seems like an exhausting way to deal with people."

"I want you to be happy," I said with a small voice.

"I am happy," she replied. "You're great. You remember when we first got together I was like 'hey, look, if you want pizza, we can get pizza, it's just not what I'm in the mood for', and you kept insisting that you didn't care, that you would rather have me follow my needs? And I just thought, 'you know, maybe I should just trust that's what they actually feel'. And it is, as far as I can tell. There's not some secret part of you that wants me to break your way."

"You think I'm ... a simpering coward?" I asked. Even as I said it, it felt too accusatory, the wrong thing to say in the situation.

"Whoa, no, not at all," she laughed. "I think you do all that stuff because ... I don't know, you want to? Because otherwise why would you do it? It's how you are with every aspect of your life, you're a tryhard. I mean you said to me that you wanted to reclaim the term. Your relationship with me is that you're a tryhard (affectionate)."

"And you're ... not?" I asked.

"I'm not that way with anyone," she replied. "You know why I hang out with you so much? It's 'cause I like you. Most days, I am very much in the mood for you, and if you ask for a meetup, I'll say yes, and if you don't ask for one, then I'll ask you first. And for you ..."

"What?" I asked.

"It's like ... you're keeping track," she said. "You want to make sure that you're not sending me more messages than I'm sending you. You're balancing social micro stuff that I don't pay attention to. You're consciously monitoring how much each of us has said and making sure it's the right number of words or whatever."

"It's really not about the number of words," I replied. "It's more ... making sure that social and emotional labor is equitable, that there's a good rhythm to the conversation. I don't think you'd get good results by tracking word count."

"But see, I don't do any of that," she said. "I talk because I feel like talking. I listen when you need to vent because I like you and it feels good to give you an outlet. I mean you are undoubtedly putting in a bunch of work, and for me, there's no work. That's all I meant, really."

"You've thought about it," I said.

"Oh, I'm just reading this book, and there are two characters like us in it, and I was like 'yes, exactly', and then 'that would not work for me'." She shrugged.

"And if I stopped 'putting in the work'?" I asked. "Would we still be ... friends?"

"See, I don't know," she said. "Because that's never who you've been. You're asking me if I would still be friends with you if you changed your personality and how we interact with each other. Maybe? Probably? Who knows? Maybe we'd be better friends somehow. Maybe we're just two basically compatible people, and every time you've ever worried about anything it would actually have been completely fine."

"Or maybe it's load-bearing," I said.

"Maybe!" she replied with a smile that slowly faded. "You okay?"

"I'm thinking," I said. I didn't know if I could verbalize what I was thinking in a way that would be palatable.

"Do you not like being this way with me?" she asked. "Because I have never asked you to. I've made my preferences known, but if you've been bending yourself into knots and feeling a burden, then ..."

"No," I said, because I knew it was what she wanted to hear. "No, I like the way things are between us."

"Good," she smiled. "I do too."

[autistichalsin]

In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn't limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn't happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.

Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it?

Isabel Fall's case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.

More specifically, she used the phrase "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.

But... well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn't be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.

A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn't all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.

Only... we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don't we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.

So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but "Isabel Fall" is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.

Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.

It's heartbreakingly familiar, isn't it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel's shoes, even if the outcome wasn't so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of "the community" as a nebulous undefined entity.

There's a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:

The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader. This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings. “[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”

A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why "proship", once simply a word for common sense "don't engage with what you don't like, and don't harass people who create it either" philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it's an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It's an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side's faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.

It's not about joy. It's not about resonance with plot or characters. It's about hate. It's about finding fault. If they can't find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.

And that's if they even went so far as to read the work they're critiquing. The ones they don't bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it's bad, it's fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it's unforgivable. It's a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who "deserve it." Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.

Isabel Fall's story follows this so step-by-step that it's like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.

Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection... they zeroed in on the discomfort. "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can't even type out the words "kill" and rape", instead substituting "unalive" and "grape." We don't deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.

So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn't be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.

Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; "there is a callout thread against them" is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.

So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn't matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.

And that's the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It's never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group's vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.

And that's what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.

And that's... fandom, anymore. That's just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don't make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.

Isabel Fall's harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, "more, please." It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.

Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It's a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).

It's a deeply toxic environment and I'm sad to say that Isabel Fall's story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I'm sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don't think we can ever go back to peaceful "for joy" engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.