#ii gotta reblog some shit here ngl

[daveyaps]

"L8ter 2day" i said, "I gotta get off tumblr"

...

gahh screw it ill post it rn but then im gonna go draw sum mor.

[sneakyboymerlin]

Babe you gotta tell me more about this racist blog and what happened bc I follow them and I didn’t see this (not saying it didn’t happen, I just can’t find it to see for myself) so I gotta know how bad it is

I really love their blog and I’m sad that they’re a piece of shit 😭

(Also if you don’t want this public just let me know and I’ll dm you so it stays private)

Summary of events is at the end, but here’s what happened. Things got pretty heated between us towards the end, but that’s just how it goes ig.

They now predictably have me blocked, so I can’t access the DMs or the post about this first incident. As for what happened on Tumblr, a while back, they made a greyscale gifset with Gwen in it, and someone (iirc this someone was indeed a poc, though I don’t remember who exactly) told them that it was whitewashed, and their response was more or less just “but I did high contrast, this is impossible to do, that has to be good enough!” I decided to DM them to say “Hey, here’s how you can do greyscale gifs without whitewashing, you should go back and fix those gifs” but was ultimately ignored to my knowledge. Other people who I’ve talked to about whitewashing in their works have actually gone back and changed them, so Idk what their deal was. They just. Didn’t wanna. I thought maybe they just didn’t see it or something but… nope.

Now, as for the other incident(s), which took place off of Tumblr… A year later or so, idk how much time passed, Queen Elizabeth II dies. You may have noticed my pinned post is about people sympathizing with colonizers instead of their victims. Well, that is actually pinned because of the situation this all stemmed from.

If you’re a merthur shipper, then I doubt you’re in the Non Merthur Server, the Discord where this all took place. You probably wouldn’t find anything unsubtle on their Tumblr that indicates how they actually are, but what they chose to say there completely obliterated any hope I had for them. I have a much longer post in my drafts about what happened, but it began because I said that we shouldn’t make excuses for a colonizer. Someone in the chat was doing this (I’ll discuss that more in another post), so me and another member (who left due to the way the situation was handled by the mods) immediately corrected this person on the queen’s various crimes/atrocities. This conversation somehow turned to how I stated (some days prior to the queen’s death) that I avoid reblogging off of a certain person because they have posted racist content in the past. That’s where Neednoggle comes in.

Neednoggle said that this was “controlling” behavior because I was “telling people who they can or can’t interact with.” Now, again, I was simply putting out a warning that the individual I mentioned had put out racist content before. I certainly expect people to take that into consideration once they know. But I didn’t expect anyone, especially someone who preaches about racism towards one of their favorite characters, to die on the hill of “umm but I have the first amendment RIGHT to reblog off of racists!” There’s a reason we don’t reblog off of homophobes, misogynists, TERFs, abusers, etc.. If you draw the line at racists… that’s a double standard, and frankly, it’s self-absorbed.

They then proceeded to bring up a different person who I avoid for different reasons as an example for why my very detailed explanation on the other user’s racism was unreliable. This example was an extremely bad faith interpretation. Basically, they said that I called someone transphobic for… being in favor of the fictional ban on magic. In truth, I called this person transphobic for the transphobia that was in their fics (namely jokes about how men can’t get pregnant/that being able to get pregnant is what determines man from woman). Because that fic author happens to also be anti-magic, neednoggle attributed my discomfort with these jokes to the magic thing. It was really odd ngl, since I have pretty openly stated that, while you can make comparisons between having magic and being queer, it is ultimately a metaphor for religious persecution. (It’s… The Old Religion.)

A friend of mine, a brown person from the global south who I will keep anonymous unless they permit otherwise, called out the sympathy that people were projecting onto the queen. However, this was not handled well in the chat, especially not by the mods who you’d expect better from. I don’t think that this friend’s perspective was really taken into consideration at the end of the day, it was like they were talking to a brick wall. I ended up making a strong statement that people don’t get to just opt out of learning anti-racism, and that was taken as offensive by… everyone.

Despite reading these messages from my friend (who is, again, a brown person from the global south) and myself, neednoggle’s concern was more about how I was censoring(?) them by stating that some people in the fandom are racist and that I avoid spreading their posts for this reason. They ditched the conversation and a day later I found them talking about how it sucks so much for them, a white person, that there’s not a lot of fanfiction about Elyan. Maybe that wouldn’t happen if you didn’t tolerate racism, thus alienating fans of color while coddling racists? And maybe, just maybe, you should care about racism outside of its impact on your own personal entertainment? Hence my statement that enjoying a character of color does not make one anti-racist. Anyone’s capable of racism, and you can’t use a character as a shield.

Anyways, I ended the conversation with: “either you have zero tolerance for racism or you do tolerate it” and was ignored, much like I was ignored with the whitewashing thing. Avoidance must be the bread and butter of people like this.

In addition, I believe they’re also guilty of this trope I see a lot where Merlin and Morgana or whatever white characters have to teach Gwen and Lancelot or whatever brown & black characters how to read/write, despite nothing in the canon suggesting that they couldn’t already. That said, I could be thinking of someone else’s fic, idk. I seriously see this a lot and I have no idea when it got so prevalent, but when put alongside everything else, it becomes pretty suspicious. I’m not entirely confident on this one so take it with a grain of salt, but I’m pretty sure I’ve read a fic of theirs like this, and it’s just… Gwen and Lancelot were already literate in the canon, so I find it weird that it’s usually those two in particular who get singled out, especially since 1) Merlin comes from a very similar background, 2) Lancelot was exchanging letters with him for as long as two years, and 3) Gwen helped run a whole smithy.

So, in summation (because this is rlly fuckin’ long) neednoggle chose to die on the hill of “You can’t make me NOT reblog off of racist people! Also I should just be allowed to ignore racism if it makes me as a white person uncomfortable!” and then tried to say that my perception of who is/isn’t racist is not reliable by undermining and misattributing my discomfort with someone’s transphobic jokes (just to be absolutely clear, I very much stated when it happened that it was the person’s transphobia that made them transphobic; however, defending Uther’s ban on magic—even if it’s only a fictional genocide—is pretty disturbing, just like when someone defends a fictional character’s abuse, bigotry, etc. How do you apply those morals across the board?). They and everyone involved in that conversation either ignored or missed the point of what my friend, someone who has been directly affected by colonization and racism, had to say about all of it. And of course, there’s the whitewashing thing, which I only just randomly remembered today ?!? And, possibly, the trope thing. Basically I tried to #fix them but they’ve gotta be willing to fix themself, ya know?

Personally, although I do tend to discuss these issues with people before coming to any conclusions, I think that blocking or avoiding a handful of people is worth not potentially spreading their bigoted beliefs, and I don’t really wanna be in kahoots with people like that anyways, so I guess it’s difficult for me to understand why they were defending tooth and nail their right to hypothetically reblog off of hypothetical racists. It sucks when it turns out someone you liked is doing this stuff, but we’ve gotta have some integrity, even if it’s not easy. Neednoggle doesn’t seem to have that integrity.

I have screenshots and the like too but I’m saving them for the Actual Post about all this so I don’t have to dig through them an extra time. It’s a lot