#genuinely outrageous

[msburgundy]

being self-destructive with the bose speaker tonight

[remxedmoon]

y’know what? fuck you. *UNGRAYSCALES YOUR ISATS*

no wait come back there’s greyscale versions under the cut :(

[livsmessydoodles]

remember when will sent a very irritated letter to the hawkins post to criticize their movie review. cause i think about that constantly

[ladykakata]

Explain why Noel Fisher didn't get a single fucking award or nomination as Michailo 'Mickey' Milkovich I'm genuinely fucking mad about it, he was FANTASTIC in the drama pieces and fucking hysterical in the comedy parts

[aingeal98]

I love writing about female characters I love making them silly and flawed and hypercompetent and moral at the same time and watching fandom's brains explode because they're not one dimensionally chill and supportive or mustache twirling evil and are allowed be jerks and overreact and make mistakes and still be good people worth rooting for or not even good just Interesting. This is very fun to do in male centered fandoms because sometimes they get so confused and scared like no she's supposed to be Nice to my fave guys why isn't she validating them and being supportive? Why are you letting her exist like that? She's being mean to my blorbo she needs to either be written as evil or erased from the narrative.

And every time I see that I get more determined to either make her meaner and have everyone support her or erase your blorbo from the narrative. She doesn't think about him at all actually he's irrelevant to the story now. Yeah sorry to break it to you she made him cry and everyone told her good job so he left the country. Also she's got a girlfriend and they're going to fuck in his house which is theirs now that he no longer exists.

[syn0vial]

regrettably, neither is them being even a little bit ironic

[not-poignant]

Hi Pia

Sorry is this ask is bothersome but I need some advice.

I while ago I was going through a really bad time mentally but found solace in a fandom. I became friends with a person that I met in a particular fandom and they encouraged me to get into fanfiction and it really helped my mental health as a form of escapism.

After about a year I took the plunge into writing my own fanfics for the fandom and at first they were well received. But then a gender swapped the characters.

For context- in this fandom most of the characters are male and almost all the fanfics available are canon compliant in this regard and I so I wanted to explore an au where all the characters were women instead. I posted a few chapters and was excited for feedback but then my friend from the fandom saw my new fic and messaged me telling me to take it down because it was problematic.

I asked them to explain why and they said that changing canon like that just for the "fun" of it wasn't ok and that if I'm going to "mess around with the characters identities" then I should make them trans instead.

I told her I wasn't comfortable making the characters trans because I myself am not trans and don't feel like I am educated enough to write about gender identities/experiences that I haven't gone through and I don't want to accidentally write something disrespectful.

My friend got back to me and said that take was even more problematic. I asked her to explain further because I was really confused by this point but she didn't get back to me.

A few days later I found out she had told all the people in the discord we were in together that I was being problematic regarding canon and I'm guessing she also went to my bookmarks and sent screenshots to everyone of the "problematic" ships and fics I like??

And now I'm getting hateful messages from people who used to be my friends in the fandom and I don't know what to do.

Should I make the characters male again like they are in canon? Or take the fic down altogether?

Hi anon,

So the short answer is:

You can write genderbending. Every fic is problematic somehow to different people and audiences. Trans people don't all agree on genderbending so you're not going to get a single "correct" answer. Don't take down the fic unless you want to. Don't change the fic unless you want to. Get some better friends. It's worth educating yourself further about this subject.

The longer answer is behind the Read More:

Genderbending is complicated and nuanced and there's a ton of discussion about it. I highly recommend you go somewhere like FanLore to check that out. Especially the further reading section, to see multiple sides of the discussion to then decide how you feel.

There are trans people who love cis genderbends. There are trans people who hate them. There are trans people who don't think they should exist. There are trans people who don't give a shit. There are trans people who want more to exist. There are trans people who think only trans people should be allowed to write any kind of genderbend. There are trans people who think no trans person should ever want to write cis genderbend.

My perspective (as a trans person) is closest to this archived Tumblr post linked here.

With this quote from mercurialmalcontent:

Changing a character to the ‘opposite’ cis gender is a very different thing than making them trans or nonbinary. Insisting that people only change characters to trans is also really damn invalidating, because it implies that being trans is interchangable with being cis. Whoopsie doodle!

And then the entire response from roachpatrol, especially:

so like. people now reducing the issue to ‘cis people are gross and hate trans people’ is pretty ridiculous. it ignores basically twenty years of women questioning, confronting and then dismantling the de-facto heteronormative, exploitative male gaze in order to create the radically progressive fandom atmosphere as we know it today on tumblr. 

And then also this from curriebelle:

there’s nothing inherently transphobic about art that explores gender - quite the opposite, I think - and that’s what genderbends are about. It can be hugelybeneficial to imagine male characters as female in order to explore roles that aren’t traditionally given to women

~

I think the main thing is that in fandom, many trans people have been forced to confront how they feel about genderbends (or cis swaps), whereas many cis people never have to think about it due to cis privilege. That doesn't mean writing it is bad by default, it doesn't mean fics that feature it shouldn't exist, and it doesn't mean problematic fanfiction is bad either. Like I said, everything is problematic to someone.

What actually bothers me the most is that people who you think of as "friends" are trying to police you in this way. Obviously I don't know the full story or the content of the fic, so maybe there's greater context going on that I'm missing. But on the surface, genderbends aren't inherently transphobic, even if some trans people don't like them, or feel dysphoria over them existing.

Ultimately genderbends aren't also often about the trans experience. It's really weird for your friends to assume that writing a story about a bunch of cis women, and a bunch of trans women is going to be exactly the same, or that one is inherently "better" than the other. Trans women experience some different issues (depending on the world), and the stories are likely to have different elements to them. And you're right, not feeling comfortable telling a trans story when you're a cis person wanting to write about cis women does actually make a lot of sense. That doesn't mean you can't do it, but it does make it clear why you didn't do it.

Anon, a friend who is quick to tell a whole bunch of people on a Discord server that you're writing a fic with content they don't like is not a friend, let alone a good friend. They might have once been very caring, but their response here indicates they're putting up a chance to seem righteous and 'moral' above actually caring about you or what you have to say. Especially in a situation where honestly a lot of trans people don't agree with each other, but we all mostly agree not to be dicks to people who write this stuff and to just live and let live.

(Also, trans people can write trans fic that other trans folk feel is transphobic! Something that heals and helps one person, hurts another, that's why the rule in fiction for things like this is very much: "don't like, don't read" and also: learn about it, do some research into it, but you don't have to morally justify what you like in fiction and fiction is the place to write this stuff - it is literally pure fantasy. Heck, some trans people love cis swaps precisely because it's a cis swap instead of a specifically trans narrative, the same reason some trans people hate them. We're not all a monolith with one opinion. Thank god).

Going into your bookmarks to reveal the 'problematic' things you like to a bunch of randos screams of anti-nonsense, people who judge other people's morals based off the fiction they enjoy. Folks like this think it's okay to humiliate, degrade and abuse people over what they enjoy in fiction.

Honestly, if it were me, I'd block these people. Trans people aren't magically free from being abusive shitheads, just like everyone else.

Your friend may have been a friend once, but what they're doing now is just shitty. Ironically, it's also pretty transphobic to the trans people who love and write cis swap and also the trans people who love and read it.

[saintharvest]

“HER MEAT, I SEE HER MEAT”

“okay well. dont say that..”

[absolutelynotsanebaby]

.

[ropebunnykant]

people really have no sense of joy and whimsy huh

[cyberpunkboytoy]

Hey y'all, I might be taking out my ass here, but the timing of this new data-selling AI business is either an extremely unfortunate coincidence or a calculated attempt to draw attention away from Tumblr's transphobia problem.

Like, if they were hoping to use bad press to distract from The Thing They Have Lawsuits Over, a pretty safe move would be to shift focus onto something that by Tumblr's own admission has very few existing laws. Just a thought.

[jonathanbyersphd]

Tiny baby Nancy screaming at the population of Hawkins Middle to sign her petition to save the whales. Tiny baby Jonathan being the only person to sign other than Barb.

[inchidentally]

I'll admit I was worried to see where you would end up when fandom split over Hungary. Ty for not being one of the people who think an F1 team should only have one driver 💝

oh god babe like not only am I real happy being a fake sports fan I would rather poke myself in the eye nonstop for a year than genuinely go to bat for a rich white men racing cars for a living !! I enjoy my stupid little fun parasocial narratives about these men for my own enjoyment but I will never get drawn into thinking that internal F1 racing melodrama is a legitimate thing to form rage-fuelled conspiracy theories and bastardized moral outrage over. I find myself wanting to point out blatant contradiction or unfairness about this sport and am like wait why am I doing this lasgfjlsagf. I am by nature non-biased bc I do not care enough about if these spoiled men surrounded by beautiful women and paid staff coddling their every whim are "happy" or not like lmaooooo what a tragic waste of time that would be! and I do agree that the institutions within F1 and F1 itself are !!shocker!! inherently corrupted by greed and founded on boys-only playground rules and that all progressive labor and intent is solely being done by minorities. but anyone only just now waking up to that bc their boy didn't get treated the way they think he should be ... like ??? it's been that way the whole time ! it's not just relevant or worth discussing bc of your fave boy ! it's harming real people in a way your boy will never experience !

I did write a whole Thing about the way in which stan culture harms and dehumanizes the very celebrities these people claim to adore and that they regularly rob said celebrity of agency by disbelieving their own words to fit a world theory that revolves around the notion that said celebrity must be protected from normal, human consequence and criticism.

but then I realized the people it's aimed at are exactly the ones on whom it will never land and I've got zero interest in any engagement with those people - so I'm just letting myself block and unfollow more freely lately lasfgjslagfl

[silver-horse]

no you don’t get it ... a consenting man having sex in fantasy shape-shifting form when both parties communicated their boundaries  -> it will cause people to attack poor defenceless bears in the woods, people will touch bears’ genitals, the bears won’t be able to defend themselves, people will put dildos inside the asses of wild bears. the bears will cry out in pain and sob but they will lie down for their human masters. you can’t promote this to bear cubs!!! they will turn into humans!! 

[unlimitedbutchworks]

thinking of that one incredible femmepathy post that was like “of course im obsessed with dick im a lesbian” so fucking funny genuinely s tier posting

[menlove]

back to that post abt mickey.... idk I just find it really odd that in the dw fandom it's pretty common to completely discredit moffat's run bc of his sexist writing (which is understandable don't get me wrong) but when you bring up rtd's racist writing it barely gains traction Or you get white (or non black in general, which I am also not black for a disclaimer) fans saying you're crazy for thinking it's racist. when like. for me personally? the way rtd wrote martha and mickey completely poisoned the rest of his writing and run for me. like how am I supposed to enjoy these white characters knowing it's on the backs of black characters they treated like jokes or emotional punching bags?

and it's the same way lots of ppl feel abt moffat's run bc of his treatment of women but weirdly enough it's way more scandalous to say you don't like rtd bc of his racism than it is to say you don't like moffat bc of his sexism