#i suspected that this was one of those fandoms where the source media was worse than the fan made media

[certifiedfae]

watched wicked for the yuri. the only good part was defying gravity. everything else mid as hell

chat am i gonna have to watch wicked for the yuri

[seaofthemind-art]

The “Abuse” Trope in MCU Spider-Man Fan Fiction: Part 2

In the first post, I provided a rec list looking at some of the major categories of stories which fall within these tropes. Now, lets breakdown some of the themes within the stories and those that are missing.

Please be aware that as I will be looking at the content of individual stories, there will be spoilers for them ahead.

Firstly, I do not intend to invalidate anyone's personal experiences, especially as I know that some stories are written by authors from personal experience. What one person may class as unbelievable will be another person's lived experience. The same as that what one person classes as abusive may be reasonable behaviour to another. On that note, although I don't go into detail about the stories, I may still mention things that are triggering to some people.

A few of the points I make below are currently short of examples: writing this I often ended up in that familiar situation of remembering the plot but unable to find the actual story to reference. I also have not linked the individual stories in this post, but you can find most of them listed on the rec list in Part 1.

I also haven’t really mentioned any of the Skip Wescott stories as these aren’t something that I usually read. Although, it would be interesting to know how these fit with the trends mentioned below.

The review below is split into a few key themes, followed by a brief look at some ideas which have only been glossed over in the fandom (to my knowledge).

On Peter's Reaction to Abusive Situations

I've seen discussion before regarding these types of stories where people state that they do not find the stories believable as they believe it goes against Peter's characterization. This is a fair point, and in the one example we have in comic canon he speaks up almost straight away regarding the abuse. However, on the other side, there is the truth that anyone can find themselves being abused, no matter how strong they may be. On the basis of this, the stories span a large range of reactions from Peter himself, on which readers mileage will vary.

There are several stories where Peter puts up with verbal and emotional abuse, but he draws the line at physical abuse: fighting back or reporting straight away when it occurs (”i get by (but it's eating me alive)”, “to this day”).

There are also stories where Peter puts up with it until someone else ends up being the target (“A Peter Parker Problem“). These are often the stories where he internalizes it as being fine if it only happens to him as "he can handle it" (following the same vein as many of the stories dealing with him being bullied at school).

The abuse trope is also a common origin for the "Homeless Peter" trope. This is where Peter's reaction to the abuse is to remove himself from the situation; usually this is when the abuse occurs in the foster family situation (“The Third Option”, “Unexpected Finds”). This may happen instead of reporting, or due to not being listened to when he tries to speak up about the abuse.

The most common situation, often linked with the scenarios listed above, is where the abuser manipulates Peter in to believing any of: 1) that the abuse is his fault (playing on guilt for being a burden/getting Ben killed/etc); 2) that things will be worse if he reports it (loss of financial support/loss of other characters' happiness); 3) that no one else cares (implying other characters are already aware of the situation/making it seem like other characters would agree with the abuser). All of these are real life situations which keep people in abusive relationships, and in this sense the stories do provide a range of different, potentially possible, scenarios.

These last points are sometimes extended to the point of Peter protecting his abuser: that when other characters suspect what is going on and confront him, he denies the situation (”Your Heart Changed (mine stayed the same)“). This can also include trying to return to the abuser after being removed from the situation (“Please, Understand“). The stories that take the trope to this point are usually the "Dark/Abusive May Parker" stories where his belief in the love of his Aunt overrules the truth of the situation, and Peter coming to terms with the reality of the situation is part of the conflict.

On Timescales within Stories

The build-up to the situations in the stories is one of the areas where there is a large variation between the stories.

For those stories which have May or Ben as the abusive person, most of the stories rely on the pre-existing relationship to build the story on. This can be either already happening from childhood (“the second law of thermodynamics”, “I told you I had issues”), or a development because of something which has happened within the movies (“Your Heart Changed (mine stayed the same)”, “Please, Understand”).

When it comes to the "May's Abusive Boyfriend" Trope, the stories cover a large amount of timescales: from those where the abuse starts from almost as soon as he meets the abuser (”Fear all else but never me. Please”, “The Black And The Blue (All That It Takes Out of You)”), to those stories which show a gradual build up in the abuse over months - generally mentioned as being between five months to a year (“to this day”, "i get by (but it's eating me alive", "promotions aren't always a good thing").

Since Endgame, there has now been the appearance of stories which use the time-skip as a way to build up a relationship off-screen which becomes the source of the abuse. Set in an AU where May wasn't dusted and created a new family in the time-skip, these stories use the five years as a way to build up the backstory off-screen, and use Peter's return as a factor in the abuse ("A Peter Parker Problem", "Your Heart Changed (mine stayed the same)", “Vertigo”). This also has the narrative advantage of giving an easy reason for other characters not to notice what is occurring due to the chaos post-Endgame.

On Abuser Redemption

In general, within the fandom abuse is shown as a bad thing, and that there is no redemption for abusers. Once the truth comes out, the abusers either face legal action and/or are banished from the characters' lives. The idea of forgiveness is consistently shown as a bad thing: Peter gives the benefit of the doubt to his abuser, and this is repaid in further abuse.

The major exception to this is stories where Tony is the abusive person. This generally falls into the area of neglectful parenting, rather than physical abuse. However, understandable with the popularity of "Irondad", this is usually played as a redemption arc (Ie: "Tony is trying to be better than Howard", "he didn't mean it"). By the end of the story, Tony realizes what he has done wrong and is forgiven by Peter providing a happy ending and father-son relationship.

Examples of this range from thoughtless one-off situations (”I Do Listen To You”), to neglectful Bio-Dad AUs where Tony's canon story arc stops him from being a good parent ("love dares you to change”), to AU-Endgame situations where he fails to balance having two children.

This does become rather jarring when compared to the "all abuse is wrong" standards of the fandom in general. This inconsistency is due to the main reason for the "abuse" trope being popular: in that it is a way for many authors to create the "found family" trope. This is Tony coming to the rescue, with the majority of stories having Peter either confiding in the abuse to Tony ("i get by (but its eating me alive)", "Who Saves The Hero") or Tony discovering what is occurring ("The Black And The Blue (All That It Takes Out of You)", "Promotions Aren't Always A Good Thing"); and in the case of either May or Foster Carers being the source of the abuse, providing a situation in which Tony adopts Peter. Whereas, when Tony is the abuser, the aim of the story tends to be the repair of the Irondad Dynamic.

Missing Stories

All of the examples above are stories revolving actual situations of abuse. Interestingly, one thing that I have seen very few stories dealing with is allegations of abuse. AKA: stories where outsiders believe there is abuse when there isn’t, and the issues this causes.

One of the stories that actually made me realize this is an area which hasn’t been explored was Everyday Superhero by  stoneage_woman. Within the story it is pointed out that teachers are mandated reporters, therefore that they are legally required to report possible cases of abuse  and are trained in how to spot them. With the amount of stories that  have Peter going to school with injuries due to Spider-Man, as well as  various stories dealing with the mental health effects of superhero-ing,  it seems plausible that an outsider may take the wrong idea about what  they see and report their suspicions. This could potentially cause a  snowball affect of problems: How does Peter prove he isn’t being abused without telling his secret? What are the effects when the legal spotlight turns on May and/or Tony?

There are a few stories that do touch on the idea:

Those where there is a situation of abuse and characters jump to the wrong conclusion, ending up accusing the wrong person (such as in "The Homes We Make" where, from what he sees, Flash believes that Tony is the one abusing Peter; however, he confronts Tony directly rather than go to a third party).

“Dead Aunt May” trope stories where Tony is refused, or loses, guardianship of Peter due to being viewed as being unfit ("Losing Home", "And Then You Saved Me"); or where the media (traditional or social) gets involved and speculates regarding their relationship to negative results.

There are several stories where Tony is accused (falsely) of being in a relationship with Peter, by either the media or via the bullying of Peter by Flash; however, these rumours are always shut down quickly in these stories.

Although these scenarios play with the ideas, it would be interesting to see the conflicts developed further.

Anyway, I’m interested to hear other people’s opinions or insights into what I’ve listed here.

[raptured-night]

Hi! I’m part of the lgbtq+ community and Severus is my favorite HP character and I was wondering (if you have the time and feel obliged) if you could please give me a few examples of how he’s queer? It’s been a few years since I reread the books, and def before I came out, so I’m a little in the dark here lol Thanks!!

First of all, I just wanted to apologize for how long it has taken me to properly respond to your ask. I’ve been dealing with some ongoing health issues that have turned me into something of a moody writer. I’ll get random spurts of energy and inspiration and then hit a wall of absolute writer’s block assisted by a major case of executive dysfunction every single time I try to respond to the multiple asks languishing in my inbox. Fortunately, I found myself involved in a discussion just today that addressed your ask so perfectly that I wanted to share it with you.  In the very least, that discussion has also managed to shake off my writer’s block temporarily so that I have found myself in the right head-space to finally be able to give this lovely ask the thought and attention that I feel it deserves. 

Although, in regards to the Snape discourse I linked above, I feel that I should warn you in advance that the discussion was prompted by an anti-Snape poster who made a rather ill-thought meme (I know there are many in the Snapedom who would rather just avoid seeing anti-Snape content altogether, so I try to warn when I link people to debates and discussions prompted by anti-posts) but the thoughtful responses that the anti-Snape poster unintentionally generated from members of the Snapedom (particularly by @deathdaydungeon whose critical analyses of Snape and, on occasions, other Harry Potter characters is always so wonderfully nuanced, thought-provoking, and well-considered), are truly excellent and worth reading, in my opinion. Also, as I fall more loosely under the “a” (I’m grey-ace/demisexual) of the lgbtqa+ flag and community I would prefer to start any discussions about Snape as a queer character or as a character with queer coding by highlighting the perspectives of people in the Snapedom who are actually queer before sharing any thoughts of my own.

In addition, I also wanted to share a few other posts where Snape’s queer coding has been discussed by members of the Snapedom in the past (and likely with far more eloquence than I could manage in this response of my own).

Source

Source

Source

Source

Source

Source

Source

Source

Source

Source

Along with an excellent article in Vice by Diana Tourjée, in which a case for Snape being trans is convincingly argued. 

Importantly, you’ll notice that while some of these discussions do argue the possibility of Snape being a queer or trans character others may only discuss the way that Snape’s character is queer coded. That is because there is a distinct but subtle difference between: “This character could be queer/lgbtq+” and: “This character has queer/lgbtq+ coding” one which is briefly touched on in the first discussion that I linked you to. However, I would like to elaborate a bit here just what I mean when I refer to Snape as a character with queer coding. As while Rowling has never explicitly stated that she intended to write Snape as lgbtq+ (although there is one interview given by Rowling which could be interpreted as either an unintentional result of trying to symbolically explain Snape’s draw to the dark arts or a vague nod to Snape’s possible bisexuality: "Well, that is Snape's tragedy. ... He wanted Lily and he wanted Mulciber too. He never really understood Lily's aversion; he was so blinded by his attraction to the dark side he thought she would find him impressive if he became a real Death Eater.”) regardless of her intent when she drew upon the existing body of Western literary traditions and tropes for writing antagonists and villains in order to use them as a red-herring for Snape’s character, she also embued his character with some very specific, coded subtext. This is where Death of the Author can be an invaluable tool for literary critics, particularly in branches of literary criticism like queer theory. 

Ultimately, even if Rowling did not intend to write Snape as explicitly queer/lgbtq+ the literary tradition she drew upon in order to present him as a foil for Harry Potter and have her readers question whether he was an ally or a villain has led to Snape being queer coded. Specifically, many of the characteristics of Snape’s character design do fall under the trope known as the “queering of the villain.” Particularly, as @deathdaydungeon, @professormcguire, and other members of the Snapedom have illustrated, Snape’s character not only subverts gender roles (e.g. his Patronus presents as female versus male, Snape symbolically assumes the role of “the mother” in the place of both Lily and later Narcissa when he agrees to protect Harry and Draco, his subject of choice is potions and poisons which are traditionally associated more with women and “witches,” while he seemingly rejects in his first introduction the more phallic practice of “foolish wand-waving,” and indeed Snape is characterized as a defensive-fighter versus offensive, in Arthurian mythology he fulfills the role of Lady of the Lake in the way he chooses to deliver the Sword of Gryffindor to Harry, Hermione refers to his hand-writing as “kind of girly,” his association with spiders and spinners also carries feminine symbology, etc.) but is often criticized or humiliated for his seeming lack of masculinity (e.g. Petunia mocking his shirt as looking like “a woman’s blouse,” which incidentally was also slang in the U.K. similar to “dandy” to accuse men of being effeminate, the Marauders refer to Snape as “Snivellus” which suggests Snape is either less masculine because he cries or the insult is a mockery of what could pass for a stereotypical/coded Jewish feature, his nose, Remus Lupin quite literally instructs Neville on how to “force” a Boggart!Snape, who incidentally is very literally stepping out of a closet-like wardrobe, into the clothing of an older woman and I quoted force because that is the exact phrase he uses, James and Sirius flipping Snape upside down to expose him again presents as humiliation in the form of emasculation made worse by the arrival and defense of Lily Evans, etc.). 

Overall, the “queering of the villain” is an old trope in literature (although it became more deliberate and prevalent in media during the 1950s-60s); however, in modernity, we still can find it proliferating in many of the Disney villains (e.g. Jafar, Scar, Ursula, etc.), in popular anime and children’s cartoons (e.g. HiM from Powerpuff Girls, James from Pokemon, Frieza, Zarbon, the Ginyu Force, Perfect Cell, basically a good majority of villains from DBZ, Nagato from Fushigi Yuugi, Pegasus from Yu Gi Oh, etc.), and even in modern television series and book adaptations, such as the popular BBC’s Sherlock in the character of Moriarty. Indeed, this article does an excellent job in detailing some of the problematic history of queer coded villains. Although, the most simple summary is that: “Queer-coding is a term used to say that characters were given traits/behaviors to suggest they are not heterosexual/cisgender, without the character being outright confirmed to have a queer identity” (emphasis mine). Notably, TV Tropes also identifies this trope under the classification of the “Sissy Villain” but in queer theory and among queer writers in fandom and academia “queering of the villain” is the common term. This brings me back to Snape and his own queer coding; mainly, because Rowling drew upon Western traditions for presenting a character as a suspected villain she not only wrote Snape as queer (and racially/ethnically) coded but in revealing to the reader that Snape was not, in fact, the villain Harry and the readers were encouraged to believe he was by the narrator she incorporated a long history of problematic traits/tropes into a single character and then proceeded to subvert them by subverting reader-expectation in a way that makes the character of Severus Snape truly fascinating. 

We can certainly debate the authorial intent vs. authorial impact where Snape’s character is concerned. Particularly as we could make a case that the polarizing nature of Snape may well be partly the result of many readers struggling against Rowling subverting literary tropes that are so firmly rooted in our Western storytelling traditions that they cannot entirely abandon the idea that this character who all but had the book thrown at him in terms of all the coding that went into establishing him as a likely villain (e.g. similar to Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Snape is also coded to be associated with darkness/black colors and to represent danger and volatile/unstable moods, while his class status further characterizes him as an outsider or “foreign other,” and not unlike all those villains of our childhood Disney films which affirmed a more black-and-white philosophy of moral abolutism, such as Scar or Jafar, the ambiguity of Snape’s sexuality coupled with his repeated emasculation signals to the reader that this man should be “evil” and maybe even “predatory,” ergo all the “incel” and friendzone/MRA discourse despite nothing in canon truly supporting those arguments; it seems it may merely be Snape’s “queerness” that signals to some readers that he was predatory or even that “If Harry had been a girl” there would be some kind of danger) is not actually our villain after all. 

Indeed, the very act of having Snape die (ignoring, for the moment, any potential issues of “Bury Your Gays” in a queer analysis of his death) pleading with Harry to “look at him” as he symbolically seems to weep (the man whom Harry’s hyper-masculine father once bullied and mocked as “Snivellus”) memories for Harry to view (this time with his permission) carries some symbolic weight for any queer theory analysis. Snape, formerly portrayed as unfathomable and “secretive,” dies while pleading to be seen by the son of both his first and closest friend and his school-hood bully (a son that Snape also formerly could never see beyond his projection of James) sharing with Harry insight into who he was via his personal memories. For Harry to later go on to declare Snape “the bravest man he ever knew” carries additional weight, as a queer theory analysis makes it possible for us to interpret that as Harry finally recognizing Snape, not as the “queer coded villain” he and the reader expected but rather as the brave queer coded man who was forced to live a double-life in which “no one would ever know the best of him” and who, in his final moments at least, was finally able to be seen as the complex human-being Rowling always intended him to be. 

Rowling humanizing Snape for Harry and the reader and encouraging us to view Snape with empathy opened up the queer coding that she wrote into his character (intentionally or otherwise) in such a way that makes him both a potentially subversive and inspiring character for the lgbtq+ community. Essentially, Snape opens the door for the possibility of reclaiming a tradition of queer coding specific to villains and demonstrating the way those assumptions about queer identity can be subverted. Which is why I was not at all surprised that I was so easily able to find a body of existing discourse surrounding Snape as a queer coded or even as a potentially queer character within the Harry Potter fandom. At least within the Snapedom, there are many lgbtq+ fans of his character that already celebrate the idea of a queer, bi, gay, trans, ace/aro, or queer coded Snape (in fact, as a grey-ace I personally enjoy interpreting Snape through that lens from time-to-time). 

Thank you for your ask @pinkyhatespink and once again I apologize for the amount of time it’s taken me to reply. However, I hope that you’ll find this response answered your question and, if not, that some of the articles and posts from other pro-Snape bloggers I linked you to will be able to do so more effectively. Also, as a final note, although many of the scholarly references and books on queer coding and queering of the villain I would have liked to have sourced are typically behind paywalls, I thought I would list the names of just a few here that I personally enjoyed reading in the past and that may be of further interest should you be able to find access to them.

Fathallah, Judith. “Moriarty’s Ghost: Or the Queer Disruption of the BBC’s Sherlock.” Television & New Media, vol. 16, no. 5, 2014, p. 490-500. 

Huber, Sandra. “Villains, Ghosts, and Roses, or How to Speak With The Dead.” Open Cultural Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2019, p. 15-25.

Mailer, Norman. “The Homosexual Villain.” 1955. Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays, edited by Sipiora Phillip, Random House, 2013, pp. 14–20.

Solis, Nicole Eschen. "Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater." Queer Studies in Media & Pop Culture, vol. 1, no. 1, 2016, p. 115+. 

Tuhkanen, Mikko. “The Essentialist Villain.” Jan. 2019,  SBN13: 978-1-4384-6966-9

[olderthannetfic]

It does work... eventually

riotbrrrd

reblogged your post

“wishforsomewherenew reblogged your post “A New History of Fandom Purges” ”#fandom#i feel like i need to start adding...”

#fandom#good points of reflexion although I wonder#if a story places a black character in a position usually filled by a white character#will the audience react to it the same way?#I fear racism would stick us into a corner where people would suddenly find flaws to the archetypes they usually like#because we know people tend to be less indulgent with poc in general#so the snarky geek would suddenly be read as pedant and annoying#and the dashing thief would be read as a thief#which isn't to say we shouldn't try to give these roles to poc#we need poc in more diverse roles!#just saying I'm not sure white fandom would just naturally follow#there is work that needs to be done directly with the audience#but it's certain that this work needs to be larger and more thought out than deleting entire popular ships

In practice, it’s a mix. The canons where the dashing thief, woobie, or geek is black are sometimes less popular overall than a similar canon where that character is white. On the other hand, part of the issue is that fandom size is roughly correlated to canon viewership, and it’s rare for a massive, massive franchise to cast a black lead in installment 1.

Fandom trends tend to get set very early in a canon’s history, and expanding the cast later doesn’t always change them. Black Panther was never going to derail the Stucky train or any of the other big established patterns of MCU fandom. Neither was introducing Sam, though Sam/Steve did get pretty popular. New Star Wars is a rare case where there was a black lead from the beginning in a super mega franchise, and Finn/Poe was the biggest ship by far right at the beginning of that fandom. It dropped behind Kylux and Reylo later, but it’s obvious that people did like Finn. That kind of casting and role does work. If people did more of it, it would work better.

The trouble is that the vast majority of fandom meta acts like an average fandom should look like MCU or Harry Potter. In reality, those are extreme outliers that are completely irrelevant to how most fandoms operate. Most genre media with black leads is material with a much smaller viewership than a MCU movie. Those media have smaller fandoms, but the black lead is usually pretty popular relative to the overall fandom size if they are indeed a trope fandom likes for white characters.

The three examples I chose weren’t random. They were from the three shows I mentioned: Hustle, Leverage, and Almost Human.

Hustle is a small fandom, at least for fic, and a moderately popular TV series overall. The original team leader, suave con artist Mickey Bricks (played by Adrian Lester) was one of the more popular characters. Mickey/Danny tends to be one of the biggest ships, and Mickey/Danny/Stacy is reasonably popular too.

Leverage is quite a popular fandom, and Hardison, the geek, is a fandom fave The big ship is the OT3 of Parker, Hardison, and Eliot. The component ships are also popular, especially the canon one of Parker and Hardison.

Almost Human was a bit of a trianwreck, but the entire fandom is basically shippers of the woobie android Dorian (played by Michael Ealy) and grumpy android-hating cop John Kennex.

Yeah, fandom can be pretty racist, but give us a Caves of Steel ripoff, and we will always go for the ship of the woobie bot and the human bot-hater who learns to be a better man--and probably gives gratuitous speeches about it in the process. It doesn’t matter if it’s DRN or RK800 or R. Daneel Olivaw: this trope is fannish catnip.

In fact, DBH and Almost Human are an excellent case study of this: They’re remarkably similar, right down to Minka Kelly being wasted in a trite love interest role. Both have a black android, but in AH, he’s one half of the iddy buddy cop duo (and popular for shipping), while in DBH, the equivalent character is white (and similarly popular). The black android in DBH gets saddled with some pretty dire civil rights allegories as he leads the android revolution. He has more foils with less iddy ship fodder for each, and his canon het ship is not very popular. People do talk about the character positively, but they don’t write all that much fic about him.

Characters of color do get held to a higher standard, but a lot of the problems are often coming directly from canon, even if they’re sometimes subtle. The rare canons that do a better job produce fandoms that appreciate the characters of color.

It helps to have ridiculous episodes involving bets, rivalry, and public nudity...

Or hurt/comfort...

Or Leverage’s... everything.

The main issue is that we need 100x the amount of media with a black character in a lead or main ensemble role that is specifically the Fandom Fave role. We need that media to be big budget and omnipresent, and we need that to be the status quo for a decade. That wouldn’t magically erase racism, but it would have a dramatic effect on what fic gets written.

Look at Sleepy Hollow! That show jumped the shark like whoa, but no matter how much people complain about the evil fans who liked the canon ship, 99% of that fandom is actually Ichabbie shippers. Even on AO3, bastion of inexplicable white man slash, most of it is still Ichabod/Abbie or Ichabod & Abbie.

Right now, the status quo is that these sources are rare, and fandom theorizing tends to ignore them in favor of a tiny handful of the biggest fandoms in fandom history. We’ll get another Almost Human long, long before we’ll get a superhero franchise where something like Black Panther is the first movie out of the gate. (Though, to be honest, Black Panther has like 3x the fic of most of my fandoms, and most of it is about T’Challa, so it’s doing pretty well.)

I’ll be interested to see what happens with the Rivers of London TV adaptation. I suspect that will provide both the next big fandom fave who is black and a breeding ground for toxic wank so horrendous it drives half the fandom away--Because whatever standard fans hold characters of color to in canon, it’s a thousand times worse in fic.

[liz-marcs]

A Little Fandom History (AO3, LJ, and Tumblr)

NOTE:  This is a version of the response I made to that post going around that is kicked off by someone claiming that AO3 was started “in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works...”

There’s a long list of responses from fandom crones like me, but some of the memory of that whole time is a bit muddied.

Since I was one of the main people in fandom (BtVS fandom at the time) chronicling in real time, I thought it might be interesting to add my .02 and my perspective on what the future holds for Tumblr.

Just to add my voice to the historical context about the foundation of AO3, the Livejournal strikethrough, and mess that Tumblr has started...

I was one of the main people blogging about the LJ strikethrough back in the day while it was all happening. I weirdly ended up being a centralized hub for information about what was happening. Hell, my LJ is even cited as a source on Fanlore, if you can believe it.

Nice to know my journalism degree and my past as a newspaper reporter wasn’t entirely a waste. [j/k -- sort of]

If you want a pretty good idea about the chaos and panic and how quickly it spun out of control, you can start with this post here, and then follow all of the links to subsequent posts as the bad news kept rolling in.

By the way, to this day, I was the only one in fandom who managed to get any kind of response out of the “Warriors for Justice,” a right-wing, Christian supremacist group who started the whole mess.

It should be noted that “Warriors for Justice,” while claiming to be an “organization of volunteers who work with law enforcement” was never anything more than a loose band of RWNJ who happened to frequent a chat board. For whatever reason, they got a bug up their collective asses about LJ and decided to target it.

Keep in mind, this wasn’t that long after LJ had recently been sold to 6 Apart (owners of Wordpress) and they were trying very hard to monetize what was a  freewheeling frontier of blogspace.

To say it wasn’t going well was an understatement.

They had tried ads. Tiered pricing. Just about everything. To make matters worse, LJ really didn’t have a central identity. It had spheres (fandom spheres, support community spheres, slice-of-life spheres, professional spheres, and yes, some spheres of some really dank shit that would be right at home on 4chan), and there wasn’t much crossover between those spheres.

How badly did it go for 6 Apart? LJ is now owned by a Russian company. That pretty much tells you everything right there.

In any case, that’s the commercial background for strike through. 6 Apart was trying like hell to monetize LJ and not really getting anywhere. Along comes “Warriors for Justice” claiming that they are some big, bad group with big, bad connections in the media and that they were going to start making some noise about all the dank shit on LJ.

And 6 Apart pretty much panicked.

And that’s how we got strikethrough (and eventually bold through and eventually fandom moving off of LJ en masse).

I think I should make one thing clear, though. The main target for “Warriors for Justice” was never the pedos and the other really dank shit on LJ. That was just the handy excuse. Their real target was anything they deemed “unchristian.” Or to spell it out in letters you can understand, their real target was this:

LGBTQA

That’s it. That’s what really pissed them off.

And if you didn’t agree with them, you were branded a “pedo” or a pedo apologist.

(They came to really hate me through all this. I was, according to them, the worst of the worst. They tried to get me TOS’d. One small problem:  They had nothing to get me on. There was nothing on my LJ that could be judged obscene under any law or TOS. By the way, the fact that I had to be that “good and nice” online to avoid a TOSing is, simply put, fucked the hell up.)

Read and learn from the posts and the comments on those old LJ posts, young ‘uns. The panic was palpable. People were losing years of their journaled lives, not just fanfic or fan discussions, but also personal entries where they just talked about their lives. And it could all be gone at the snap of a finger with no way to recover any of it. And if you had a paid journal? Too bad. You were out the money, too.

Not everything that squicks you out, not everything that makes you uncomfortable, is inherently bad. It’s your right to be squicked, it’s your right to be uncomfortable. But it’s also your responsibility to curate your own experience. Targeting people because you don’t like their fannish output puts you on the same side as the “Warriors for Justice.” You wind up hurting a lot of innocent people who never did anything to anyone outside of a fictional space.

And if that doesn’t convince you, do one thing for me. Look at the person to your virtual right. Look to the person on your virtual left. Then look in the mirror. Then realize this one simple fact:  sooner or later when you get that perfectly sterile and safe online experience you crave, someone, somewhere, is going to decide that it’s not sterile or safe enough. And that means that one of you, either the person on your right or the person on your left or even the person looking at you from the mirror is going to find themselves out in the cold.

It happens every single time. Every. Single. Time.

Now I’m not saying that Tumblr wasn’t allowing some fucked up shit, but there were ways to handle it properly. THIS IS NOT HANDLING IT PROPERLY.

It’s the beginning of the end, my Chili Babies. I’ve been in this movie before (hell, I had a significant supporting role in the previous movie). Tumblr will tick-tock along for awhile, but I guarantee people are feverishly looking for the next fandom thing because Tumblr has now proven to be unsafe.

At least fanfic writers have AO3. Right now it’s the fanartists who are pretty much screwed until the next new thing comes along.

So I guess:  Good night. Good luck. And I’ll meet you at the new fandom space when you find it.

Oh, I’m not going anywhere. But I suspect that I will be moving (again) when the time is right.

[elizabethrobertajones]

Hey you, during the course of this season i Have seen more and more people leave the fandom or grow disinterested in spn, and im confused why that it. I get why maybe s12 wouldnt be a fave season but if I look at the wank and bads of the previous ones (destiel fiasco in/out the show s9, charlies death Dean cruelty to Cas in s10, Dean/baby love interest s11) s12 didnt really do much that would drive people away en masse I feel? Yet it seems like more people left it :(

Heya! :D

Idk, maybe it was that more vocal people drifted off? I always feel like people’s attention spans are usually only a few years or so. I mean, I feel like I’ve been in the fandom a Long Time and I’ve only been here since the end of season 9, so really this is only my 3rd hiatus, and coming up to 4th year watching with fandom, on a 12 year show I’ve been watching for nearly 10 years, for the most part as a moderately casual viewer… I think I clock up about 5 years major interest and then drift, based on me vs several other things like how invested I was in LotR or Harry Potter or Animorphs, or whatever (to go back in time to my pre-teen interests :P) and it’s not a bad thing and I still love 2 of those franchises and have engagement in them but back to being a casual fan (if “religiously watches LotR at Christmas” is casual allowing for cultural/social stuff, but I’m not composing Legolas/Aragon smut in my teenage journal in secret code any more :P) 

Anyway the season 8 bubble of fandom could be deflating about now - that’s long enough for people to feel they’ve given the show their full attention and it’s still going so it’s getting tiring. That’s the major feeling I get - people are exhausted and we had a baby boomer fandom around season 8 so that ~generation~ of fans is now reaching the natural end of its attention span in a very human natural way. But there’s a ton of new or newer fans who are still enjoying the heck out of it, and the fandom’s still huge and full of people with a commitment to the show or ships. And some people don’t work like that and are loyal from start to finish or commit to TV shows fully to see them to their end. I would dump a show I was getting bored of but come back to watch the end later in a big marathon to find out what happened, but Supernatural hasn’t given me a reason to get totally un-invested until that time… I suspect a lot of people will watch the entire show ONE DAY but don’t want to do fandom and give it all their leisure time any more either.

[under a cut for meandering rambling]

But yeah I think you’ve named some pretty big mass exodus moments (I would like to clarify “Dean/baby” is “Dean/Amara-as-an-infant” right? Because Dean/Baby totally was a thing in 11x04 and it was GLORIOUS :P) and I feel like I DID lose people from my dash all through the time I’ve been watching. Heck, I hit up fandom right after 9x18, and started following people, and that was the JIB of “we don’t play it that way” so I immediately was following several abandoned blogs and I’d barely even started to get to know the landscape :P I feel like people HAVE been jumping ship the entire time and I remember most of those instances as sadly clearing several favourite people off my dash or turning them into different fandom blogs that I eventually unfollowed out of confusion… 

I don’t know, I think people leave when they want to leave because as long as you like the core of a thing and it holds your interest, you can forgive or ignore or scowl at but hold out for better the bad bits and problematic parts. I’m sort of weary of them killing all the women and PoC but I’m still at the stage where I identify it sucks, but I still care too much about the main characters that I’m sort of stuck on this ride with them. 

(I have 2x21 paused on the screen next to me right as Sam meets all the special children, aka introducing Lily the lesbian who dies horribly as a disposable red shirt to show how awful this situation is, and Jake, a black guy whose power is being super strong and to fall to Azazel’s manipulation, kill Sam, and then get killed with extreme overkill by Sam. In the same season he set the cops on Gordon, also a black man who was really aggro and cruel, but in the next season becomes a monster and Sam kills him also one of the most brutal kills he has up there with Jake. Basically, the show’s always had some issues and if we carried on watching all the way to season 12, well, apply self-reflection, but at this point if you’ve been watching as long as I have, you just kind of accept the show sucks at certain things, and for ME personally it’s not kicking off the sort of weariness that others felt about Billie and Alicia and Eileen being killed off this season)

… I don’t really have a point, expect about the demographics of fandom during season 8 getting to the end of their interest now. I don’t think EVERYONE who did will leave, and we’re getting fresh blood all the time, but I think that’s just part of the nature of being in fandom. I don’t think season 12 is particularly bad from my experience, although some pretty high profile bloggers have gotten exhausted - again, they’ve been maintaining blogs and producing content since single digit seasons so they’ve contributed a LOT to the fandom and there’s a fatigue about contribution as well… 

That’s partially why I meta and gif and write fic and occasionally make random shitposts… I don’t want to burn out because any one of those things on its own can get pretty boring, even writing fic. Or especially, idk, as a writer I tend to bounce around projects, so this is keeping me weirdly focused on writing my original fiction on one side of my brain and fan fic on the other and it seems to be a better way of splitting my attention… But I digress. :P 

I know how to manage my own brain to some degree but I have a lot of time to contemplate and self-reflect on why I’m in fandom and what I get out of it, and mostly I just conclude I’m bored and house-bound and I’ve found a few tried and tested things that get me some positive attention in a non-weird rat with a pleasure button way like people running hate blogs or something… But I know my own head and that I can get bored of stuff so I marathon a lot of other shows and think about other things than fandom stuff as much as possible and just let this be the gutter my brain drains into when my attention span is too shot to hell to do anything else and I just want to slump over a keyboard and do the easiest activity I know bar playing Animal Crossing for hours. 

Other people with busier lives and actual jobs and energy and limbs that don’t just randomly stop working when they do anything for more than 5 minutes and so on might not be casual fans but they make a certain space in their life for fandom and get out of it what they need but it’s a high quality demand thing so if their carefully allocated me-time isn’t rewarding them like it should it’s totally their right to go find another OTP to amuse themselves with a fandom producing stuff they want to see and a media source that’s giving them what they want immediately and in a way they don’t have to “look for scraps” as some people were saying about Destiel in season 9, 10 and 11 while things were thinner on the ground.

And as one of the too-much-free-time fandom contributors, I’ve got an enormous luxury to stick out things people who don’t have time for being jerked around or over-analysing to find what they want to see have… Although I’ll try and pass on my thoughts for the people with less time to think them to try and help them enjoy themselves as much as possible :P Anyway I think a whole range of reasons happen that people might get fatigued of the show especially as lives change and people blogging enthusiastically one day might get a job or a new relationship or a dog or SOMETHING and just not spend quite so much time online and then discover they don’t NEED to spend so much time on fandom, and drift naturally… Then try and find some reason on the show they’ve stopped watching, but often it’s just that things look worse after time away when the spark has started to fade because it’s not being nurtured in the same way any more. 

And 12 years is a LONG ASS TIME to be invested in something, so I think in general the fatigue or changing interests is all over the place and we might see it more and more as people drift… People who might watch it all as a catch up one day maybe a year or two after the show ends, but just don’t have the patience to stay in fandom and put in that energy over and over and over. 

Also the show is in a really weird place where it has some of the best writers it’s ever had in Berens and the newbie writers, and Dabb’s doing some fascinating things with the plot, but Buckleming are the executors of the story, in several interpretations of that phrase :P And there are people who skip MotW and find them unimportant or would judge the season on the plot, not the heart of the story… It’s a pretty precarious place, quality-wise. I think season 11 and 12 are a proper like, silver age revival of the MotW (with Nancy Won and Robbie giving last season a massive boost) where I think those episodes are really innovative and interesting, and the writers are being allowed a lot of freedom to play on THOSE canvases, but while the character development and *reasons* for the story have been fascinating and important, obviously 5 of the plot episodes this latest season were Buckleming and crucial to watch to know wtf was going on, even though the writers of those episodes seem to have such a terrible problem with hating the audience (literally, it’s in their scripts and off-screen comments), the genre, second drafts, common human decency towards characters and understanding why they’re important, pacing, you name it… :P So the show literally has 2 faces these days and depending on which one you see when you think of season 12, probably defines how you feel about the show as a whole and all that. I treat the plot episodes these days as a necessary evil between episodes written by people who actually like the show and care about it and its characters (see also: my non-stop sobbing about 12x22 since it aired)… But seeing the other face can really cast a cloud over the show and I’ve seen it make people wonder why the other writers even try. (I mean Perez did an incredible salvage job on Crowley in 12x15 only for it to immediately get yanked away again the next time BL wrote him and I think only they really got to play with him for the rest of the season, meaning all that work to make it seem important and thematically relevant that Perez had set up in 12x12 and messed with in 12x15 ended up being for nothing and Dabb had no time to do anything deep with Crowley, because 12x13 turns out to be the big Crowley & Rowena farewell episode, except for how it flubbed the entire premise of Grand Send Off Episode a la 7x10 or something despite all the ingredients being there…)

I am just rambling now so… Gonna hit post. Hope this makes sense :P This is just my interpretation of how people are feeling/how fandom as an entity seems to work, so it’s pretty subjective and others might feel very differently especially people who have been in negative echo chambers while I’ve built myself a reasonably positive one plus SENSIBLE and CONSTRUCTIVE wanky criticism that doesn’t go off the deep end :P