#discourse of the fandom variety

[queerbauten]

the “missing the point” meme except it’s for the Interstella 5555 rerelease, and the point being missed is “of course the notoriously shambolic anime industry is using AI to upscale a film; Daft Punk were almost certainly unaware (or, at the very least, unable to do anything about it); none of this would be surprising if you were paying attention to the actual issues with AI and labour” in favour of “I can’t believe Daft Punk would use AI :(“

[queerbauten]

With Joost specifically, I really think it’s a case of the project taking a vastly different direction in light of [gestures at the second half of last year]. I get that some people don’t like the amount of singles that have come out, but I’d rather have that than nothing to hype up what is almost certainly a delayed (and drastically different than planned) album.

So I know I'm showing my very advanced age here but do artists just not put out albums anymore? Is that just not a Thing The Kids Do?? It's just a drip feed of songs two or three times a year?

[musicalmoritz]

I am an aroace Tsukasa truther but I feel like at some point this fandom is gonna have to chill out abt Tsukasa ships, ppl have been acting extremely childish for years and now that fandom spaces outside of Tumblr are starting to understand how shipping works again, I hope we can all calm down a bit

[taehyungfirst]

what’s upsetting to me is that both jm and jk are so willing to toe the company line and make Tae look and feel like an intruder, cause it wasn’t just the subtitles that were weird, both of them kept telling him he was a guest even when it was clear it started to bother Tae and you can see his mood go down…

like have some balls and stand up for yourselves, and we know jk is chronically online so he knows how insane jkkrs are and yet he was a willing participant too…

we always say Tae can speak up for himself, and he did, but they still didn’t stop that weird shit…

just left a bad taste in my mouth about both of them…

and i know some dumbass tkkrs are gonna be like “Tae still hangs out with him”, and I’m like yeah, cause Tae is a good friend and wouldn’t ever make someone feel uninvited even as part of a script. like if this was a tkk show and the directors told tae to make jm feel like an intruder, he would have laughed in their faces.

More than making his mood go down, I think that throughout the episodes where the company ship repeated that joke thinking it would become remotely funny at some point after the first 77th times, he just got bored with it. Imagine you’re doing everyone’s a favor saving the show and you get this joke repeated over and over again.

Considering how they invited EVERYONE and then made it sound like he was insane when he expected Joon presence, how one of them loooves repeating the word guest but then reveals how they were begging the whole group to join, I just think everything about that show is eye opening and interesting about their dynamics.

[queerbauten]

[ID: a .gif of a woman laughing and popping a piece of popcorn in her mouth. End ID.]

me reading joostwt right now:

so who's got the moral high ground now?

tumblr bad, yes?

[bookwyrminspiration]

politely, can we please express our differing opinions without being rude/using ad hominem attacks? "you just can't handle [thing]" is so condescending for no reason, and unhelpful/inaccurate to boot. "just say [different point]" is, once again, condescending and dismissive. "how did you even come to [certain conclusion]?" logically, same as you. disagreeing doesn't mean it's senseless or baseless. these are just some common examples; there are others

no, you don't have to agree with everyone else's opinions/theories/characterization/analysis. I certainly don't. but the way a lot of the fandom's been expressing it lately feels so antagonistic and unpleasant.

[seaglassmelody]

People really are out here acting like Veilguard is the first roleplaying game to ever limit your ability to pick morally grey/evil options

Like are y'all new here????

[shivunin]

There is no objectively "correct" background to romance a companion with. Likewise, nobody is obligated to romance a particular companion based on which background/race they chose. Someone is not objectively incorrect for romancing a companion differently than you because there is no incorrect way to play a game intended to produce a variety of experiences and endings.

[flamingtoads]

There is such a ridiculous divide between canon!Bobby and fanon!Bobby. I think your precious anon has forgotten that just bc fanon might interpret a character a certain way doesn’t make it true. Like we’re all here to have fun, what a weird take to attack how someone does that in a way that isn’t harmful. PLUS Kinky bathena is not only canon, I could write an essay on canon behavior that isn’t explicitly kinky (like past is prologue is) that could support kinky bathena. You keep doing you with the cute art and ignore these haters.

Canon or fanon I wish we could all just co-exist together at opposite corners of the fandom playroom! We don't have to agree on everything and that's fine! (Normal even!)

Not only that but this kind of behavior just makes more of a divide and might cause people to be afraid of joining the fandom because it's not a safe space to create or enjoy characters the way they may like to!! Someone very well could share your views or love your ideas but if you turn it into a toxic environment it could dissuade them from even participating in the fandom at all!!

And it just bums me out that someone could really enjoy something but someone makes them feel unwelcome! Especially for enjoying something like two consenting adults?! LIKE ARE YOU KIDDING MEE?! Like out of all the things to be mad at in the world and you choose to be upset about something that's fictional... that you can avoid if you wanted to...? Okay I guess!!

[gascon-en-exil]

Its kind of funny when the topic of sexualization of characters comes up, especially in gacha, because you have several minor and obscure fetishes that most people dont know about like the previously mentioned zettai ryoiki. No joke I recently saw a guy lose his shit and go on several rants because the character he pulled for in a gacha had bare feet in the character art but the character model was wearing shoes but somehow nobody connected the dots on the guy having an obvious foot fetish.

It must be doubly difficult with gacha games. I imagine almost all of them avoid explicit sexual content for the same reason that most social media platforms are squeamish about it, and so you get references to a lot of fetishes that don't necessarily look like fetishes if you aren't aware of them, like feet or the stockings thing. That reminds me of when I was watching a YouTuber (Sarah Z, I think?) discuss one of those AI girlfriend programs, and she noted that the avatars come with socks by default and that you have to pay extra to see them barefoot. The creators clearly knew their audience.

Generally speaking, I've always had an open-minded philosophy about kinks. It's a practical necessity in my offline work, and even if it weren't for that I just don't see the point in judging people over what they get off to - even if it's something I'm not into myself. Feet for example do nothing for me, either playing with someone else's or having someone play with mine, but it's something I can indulge if the situation calls for it. What I can't understand and certainly can't work with however is the refusal to acknowledge that something is a sex thing. I don't expect anyone to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of kink, but I would hope that people were at least sufficiently aware of their own interests.

[queerbauten]

the best part is that Joost is going to continue seeing the content he wants to see—which, as we’ve seen, is high-quality Jeest content

[lemon-astra]

.

[renthony]

A significant amount of my opinions about modern queer television are influenced by researching older queer media.

I see a lot of the same vitriol in modern queer fandom discourse that has been playing out in queer spaces since film and television were invented. Shows in the 70s started making steps toward sensitivity consulting in queer media, even as the networks fought them on it. Imperfect but earnest queer representation was met with aggressive protests by homophobes and queer people who thought it wasn't good enough. The argument over good representation vs no representation has been happening for decades and decades.

You spend enough time immersed in old queer media and you really start to vibe with Harvey Fierstein's words in The Celluloid Closet documentary. Or at least, I do.

Harvey Fierstein: "I liked the sissy. Is it used in negative ways? Yeah, but, my view has always been visibility at any cost."

The way I see it, the way to genuine, loving queer representation that showcases a vast array of experiences is to stop demanding perfection. The fewer queer stories that are allowed to exist, the more of the heavy lifting those stories have to do in the representation department.

When we have numerous queer stories, it's suddenly much less important to argue over whether the queer characters in question are "good" or "positive." They can just be queer characters who exist in the same infinite variety as straight characters. They can be messy, they can be flawed, they can be honest portrayals of the complexity of human existence.

Queer representation will never be perfect, and striving for perfection is how we shoot ourselves in the foot.

Some starter reading for those interested:

Alternate Channels: Queer Images on 20th-Century TV (revised edition) - Steven Capsuto

Hi Honey, I'm Homo!: Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture - Matt Baume

The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies - Vito Russo

[destinationtoast]

Hello! I keep hearing that fandom culture has changed, and there are less comments now than there were years ago. Have you noticed this in your analysis? Is the percentage of comments being left today lower than before?

Hey! Thanks for the question -- it prompted me to start collecting data about comments (after procrastinating on it for a while, because I had to write new code to gather comment data). I've also seen other discussions from folks also thinking about how to do this kind of analysis (like in the fandom data projects community) -- hopefully we'll end up with multiple people attacking this from different angles and getting a variety of data about comments!

I'll give a sneak preview that partially addresses your question and contains some good news. If we look at the fraction of AO3 works that get at least one comment (focusing just on one-shots for now), I think things have gotten better over the past decade on AO3*:

In other words, it tentatively looks like more works were getting at least one comment in 2024 than in 2014 (for a variety of time periods). One caveat, though -- if a bunch of works with no comments got deleted in the interim, there will be survivor bias here. I'll try to look into that possibility later. Another caveat: this is based on only like ~100 randomly selected works from each year -- this may all change with more data!

Another interesting tidbit: I still see some of the 2014 works getting comments. In fact, ~30% of works have gotten new comments over 5 years after they were posted, and it looks like ~10% of one-shots posted back in Mar 2014 got a new comment in 10 years later, in 2024.

I'm still doing other analyses; there may be other factors that better match with the discourse around how comment culture has changed. It could be that comment activity peters out faster now than it did back then, for instance. Or the total number of comments left on the popular works is less now than it was back then (though my current methods may not be able to capture that). Edit thanks to quick eagle-eyed readers: it's likely that some of what people are thinking about is ratio of comments to hits -- that is hard to compare in 2014 to 2024, because we don't know which hits came from which years. But I am working on some analyses along those lines. :)

If you have other hypotheses about what's changed in commenting culture, feel free to share! I'll look into what I can.

Some methodology notes:

*I've been tackling this by comparing AO3 one-shots posted in early 2014 to one-shots posted in 2024, and comparing activity in the days/weeks/months immediately after the works were posted. (To start with, I'm only scraping the first page of comments for each work -- meaning the first 20 comment threads -- so there are lots of comments I'm potentially missing for the really popular works. But for many works, this captures all the comments, and I think it may be sufficient for a lot of the analyses I am interested in.)

I'm choosing to focus on 2014 vs. 2024 because 2024 is close to now (but it's been long enough for comments to have settled down a bit), and 2014 was well after AO3 was established (thus it was already a pretty lively time on AO3). I don't want to collect data about every single year because it's too time intensive/too hard on AO3's servers. But if people think that I should be looking at different years, I'm interested in feedback.

Because it's only been ~10 months since March 2024, I am limiting a lot of my analyses to only look at commenting activity the first ~10 months after works were posted in both cases.

[thrumbolt]

So, I cancelled Nyxlin Week and deleted the event blog. Edit to clarify: I DELETED THE BLOG MYSELF! IT WAS NOT TAKEN DOWN BY TUMBLR BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY THERE WAS NOTHING ON THERE THAT WENT AGAINST TOS.

I originally wanted to do this event mainly because me and Copy have a bunch of Nyxlin art planned anyway and that way we could also encourage some more content out of a few other peers.

I expected SOME people to get miffed, maybe some angry anons, some hate posts, because we all know this fandom has lost all its hinges somewhere long ago (if it ever had them) and people are absolutely incapable to just ignore something they don't like. At first we thought a super silly banner might help against that, but clearly that was a big lapse of judgment on my part lol Either way, I wasn't too worried because there's nothing people can really do that bothers me and once the event would roll around everyone would realize there's nothing actually sinister about it, so I figured it would be fine.

What I did not expect, however, was the absolute insane behavior that ended up taking place, where people got targeted and their posts mass reported to take advantage of tumblrs shitty report system over absolutely fucking nothing. People who were not even involved in the event, just happened to write for the same pairing. So let me ask this very plainly: What the fuck is wrong with you? Because something definitely is and I hope you all are getting it checked out.

So I decided to call it quits because people getting hurt over it is obviously not worth it. And again, no wonder this fandom lacks a nice variety of artists who participate in events. What's the point? You canon obsessed pea-brained pearl-clutchers don't understand fan spaces or creativity. All you seem to be here for is virtual signalling, hate, bullying and demonstrating a severe lack of reading comprehension. I've had months of this high school bullshit now and I've really had enough.

I'm still gonna post my art (oh and all that Nyxlin stuff is not going anywhere, don't worry), but I am taking a step back from participating in fandom weeks and fandom discourse and whatnot. You guys can rip each other apart on your own.

[matan4il]

I saw your post about Noah and it just but a bee in my bonnet about how people in all sorts of fandoms have been doing similar things to Jewish actors (but it’s not as well known cause they’re obviously not as high profile as stranger things). I follow you from the 911 fandom, and I also watch 911 Lone Star and both Ronen Rubinstein (who plays TK) and Lisa Edelstein (who guest starred so isn’t a regular anymore but is iconic in her own right) have gotten hate. Ronen removed his twitter after people started calling him a Zionist and harassing him. Lisa turned comments off on some of her ig posts and specifically said it was so she wouldn’t get attacked. The only things those two have said are in regards to getting the hostages home safe or in reaction to the immediate events of Oct 7. Yet they’re being called supporters of genocide. The antisemitism disguised as “antizionism” is so fucking obvious and it’s sad how it’s infiltrated even the smaller fandoms if actors involved dare to be Jewish and express concern for fellow Jews.

Hi Nonnie!

First of all, yes. Sadly, there is not a single fandom I have been active in, that has been a safe space for Jews in general, and they've all become worse since Oct 7. So I'll talk a bit about the 911 fandom, but let's be clear that this fandom isn't the issue, it really is a symptom of a much bigger problem, which is very prevalent in online spaces, not just online fandoms. What I'll talk about is obviously not true for every single person, but it IS true for enough people, and especially for some very vocal ones, who shape what the "allowed" discourse is.

I have not been following what the 911 fandom does and says about Ronen Rubinstein for at least 2 years, but I can't say I'm surprised by what you told me.

I've written more than once about the fact that Jews are not white, not even the white passing ones. Also, I'm hardly the only Jew raising their voice about this, and yet I've noticed that the 911 fandom, which raged when half-white Eddie Diaz was not recognized as a POC by one fan, the fandom which has accepted Christopher Diaz as a POC (even though he's canonically only 25% Mexican, and is played by an actor who actually IS white, which means there's no arguing over the fact that Chris looks white), is also the fandom which has repeatedly conceptualized Ronen as a white guy, same for his character TK (even though he's canonically only half white), and with that view in mind there's been hostility towards Ronen that I've come across not long after 911LS just started. Ronen's family is from an area where Jews had been repeatedly slaughtered, including during the Holocaust for NOT being white less than one hundred years ago. TK looks white (you know, exactly like Chris), so that's enough to ignore Jewish identity, history, being native to the Middle East, and anti-Jewish persecution. Ronen gets conceptualized as a white oppressor. And as such, he's a fair target, even an encouraged one.

Gavin, whose character Chris is recognized as a POC, even though he himself is completely white.

Ronen, whose character TK is not recognized as a POC, even though the actor is fully Jewish.

Natacha, whose character Marjan is recognized as a POC, even though the actress herself is half white. She's also half Lebanese, Marjan is fully so, and whatever Arabs are, Jews are the exact same, because both groups are native to South West Asia (similarly, both groups come in a variety of skin tones).

So I'm not surprised that Ronen is being mistreated. Jews are mis-conceptualized as white, and the Israeli-Arab conflict gets mis-conceptualized by applying to it a race-based model imported from the US, in which Israelis are white Jews (even though 21% of our population is Arab, a part of our leadership is Arab and has been since the first Knesset was elected, over 70 years ago, and even though many of the Israeli soldiers fighting to protect us are Arabs... when the conflict is explained, they're all erased, and Israelis are only understood as - and blamed as - white Jews), who are evil oppressors of brown Arabs (even though some Arabs are just as white looking, or even whiter than some Jews). Then, this conflict is used to vilify and justify harassing Jewish actors, whether Noah in Stranger Things, Timothee Chalamet, or Ronen and Lisa.

Here are some white looking Palestinians, who always get ignored by the people conceptualizing the conflict as white vs brown people:

Two pics of Israeli soldiers killed, each pic from just one day in this war in Gaza, and you can see the diversity of skin tones...

Like I said, I haven't been following Ronen, but I did happen across a post that claimed he needs to be canceled for the crime of blocking people who the poster said were pro-Palestine. But in my experience, even when you're a Jew who is not being hateful towards Palestinians, you're just pro both groups, because you recognize they're both humans, the fact that you have the "audacity" to stand up for Jewish people and Jewish rights, and against the mis-representation of Jews in Israel, is enough for antisemitic bullies to use that to come after you with antisemitic abuse under the guise of being pro-Palestinian (here's just one example. I wonder how many Palestinians have been liberated by harassing Jews online. Pretty sure the answer is zero. I also always love how this crowd never actually stands up for Palestinians when they're wronged by fellow Arabs, in Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon or Syria. It's only the Jews who bother these "pro-Palestinians," not the actual well being of Palestinians). I'm sure that if we could see who Ronen was blocking, it would be the same kind of people who have been sending me these very caring, human rights-oriented messages:

^ This ask was specifically a response to my reply to an anon telling me I lost my claim to humanity when I became an Israeli (and me answering that that was at the age of 5 months, and that my parents' decision to bring me to Israel actually saved my life).

^ Just a small collection, nowhere near what I actually got, but I kept them 'coz I wanted to show people at some point what Jews who dare to not want Israel destroyed are subjected to. And Ronen probably got similar ones, he blocked them, and for saying he was blocking them, he got further hate... At what point are people going to wake up and see that this is how an antisemitic misinformation campaign works? Lots of Germans genuinely believed in the narrative that Jews backstabbed them during WWI. If you were to ask them in the 1930's whether they hate Jews simply for being Jews, they'd say no, that they hated Jews, because Jews deserved to be hated due to their actions. In the exact same way, now support of the existence of the Jewish state, not even of its specific policies, is being spun as justification to hate on Jews.

I'll say this again. This reply isn't about Ronen. It isn't about Noah. It isn't about Lisa. This isn't about a specific fandom. This is a call for people to wake up and smell the antisemitic coffee, the legitimization of Jews being harassed. Please don't be a part of it, and if you can, please speak up when you see others being a part of it. I KNOW that online, and def on Tumblr, the majority of posts you see justify the vilifaction of anyone who is pro Israel's existence, even while also being critical of its leadership. And it's easy, and it feels right, to go with what everyone else in your echo chamber says. But you can be that one guy in 1930's Germany who didn't do the heil Hitler. If you will be, it may not be easy, but I very much doubt you'd ever regret it.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)