#instead of immediately dismissing them as Hateful Homophobes/Racists just looking to stir sh*t

[ladymajavader]

I’m going to take that “it’s an entry point to conversation on fandom etiquette and healthy communities” in good faith and enter the conversation with an opposing view of the situation - even though my experience of tumblr so far has been that replying to a post disagreeing with OP leads usually to immediately being blocked, not a discussion, but let’s try this. We both share the goal of ensuring the RNM tumblr fandom is a friendly, welcoming space, we disagree on the methods and the underlying moral philosophy, let’s see if we can have a conversation about it and get closer to achieving that common goal. Warning: this gets long and I assert my value system as assertively as OP above.

I come from a former-soviet country. The communism was abolished when I was still in school, but still I come from a culture deeply marked by totalitarianism and censorship and with very firm ideas on freedom. Which are - my freedom is limited by the point it encroaches on other people’s freedom and rights. Other people disliking my behavior/thoughts/opinion/values is not that point. Religious fundamentalists cannot tell me what to do with my body, my homophobic grandma cannot tell me what romantic relationship I should be in and stranges in fandom cannot tell me my what to think and feel about a piece of fiction.

Essentially, everyone is free to think whatever they like, even if I find it wrong, distasteful, or outright horrible. I have no right to police their thoughts - that’s a totalitarian concept straight out of 1984. It’s when they turn their thoughts into words and actions that actively harm someone else, is when I have the right and duty to intervene. And no, hurting somebody’s feeling is not the harm I mean - in fact, ask me sometime about the trial three Polish feminist/lgbt+ activists are facing for “offending religious feelings” by depicting Virgin Mary with a rainbow halo right now and how the argument of “hurting people’s feelings” is not a tool of the opressed against the oppresive system but a tool the majority uses to silence a minority. By living in a pluralist, free society I accept the risk that not everyone will think how I think, that some people might hate what I love and might even hate me - and as long as their hatred is contained in their own spaces and stopped from harming outsiders I tolerate it like the grown up I am.

There is a tendency in online fandom spaces to conflate hurt feelings with systemic opression - and yeah, encountering a racist comment is a case of both. But actual outright racism or queerphobia are quite rare - what I’ve seen is mostly hearsay of ‘people on fb said miluca is endgame because michael wants kids so he has to be with a woman’ or ‘someone on twitter called Maria a racist slur’. Remember the short-lived blog https://rnmfandombiphobia.tumblr.com/ which tried to collect examples of biphobia in fandom and found like two heavily contested cases? It provided proof that most criticism of Michael Guerin and his relationship choices is not biphobic, but fans who empathize highly with Michael and are hurt by any critique of him might like to believe that the opposing side is just Morally Wrong.

Even if I’m 100% certain that at the root of somebody’s dislike for the thing I like is some horrible -ism or -phobia - so what? Unless they express their dislike in a -ist or -phobic fashion, what right do I have to get inside their head and police their thoughts to seek the root of that dislike? I don’t go into DMs of somebody who says “I just don’t see any chemistry between Malex” to tell them the heteronormative society they grew up in conditioned them to view mlm relationship as less valuable or even wrong or reply to a post saying “Jenna is much prettier than Liz IDK what Max sees in her she’s so aggresive against him all the time poor bb” with a rant on how white-centric beauty standars skewed their perceptions and also racist and misoginistic systems make them view WOC as brash and vulgar when they express their anger, because at the end of the day it would accomplish nothing to actually help the minorities I want to protect and my spoons are better spent elsewhere.

People having a diverse range of opinions on same subject and contrasting likes and dislikes is not harmful to a community in and of itself. People expressing their opinions, however coarsely and crudely, on their own blog, with and appropriate tag - is not harmful to tumblr community and I’d argue it’s actually good fandom etiquette.

OP, you paint a picture where “calling in” people is an act of care - for the community that is threatened by those people and for those people themselves, because they are having ”not a good or healthy response”. This presumes that 1) you have moral authority over people who have different fandom opinions than you and that the proposed “calling in” will be 2) effective in correcting their thoughts which 3) pose a danger to the community. Except what you’re actually proposing and doing in the post above is not “calling in” but calling out. You can only call in a person that you either have an authority over (a school principal can call in a student, boss can call in an employee, parent - a child) or a close relationship with (you can call in a friend or family member). In fact, the only responsibility and possibility we have for calling people in over their “bad behavior” = thought-crimes contained in their own spaces, is with our own close ones, whose thinking or at least expressions of the thought process we can actually influence. As in, I will tell my mum who swoons over how “all Black people are so musical” that work in entertainment was for a long time one of the only career paths socially allowed for POC in US and music became a community-building tool for them so it’s all nurture not nature, we are not a different species from them mum and “positive” stereotypes are still stereotypes, but I will not harass strangers on the internet over shipping preferences or headcanons I suppose might stem from racism because as long as they are not actually expressing definitive racist beliefs they have the right to be wrong and I don’t care for the purity of their thoughts and salvation of their soul - I care about making fandom a fun space for everyone so I might ask them to tag content I know will upset people, so everyone who needs to can avoid seeing just how much other people dislike something they like.

Let’s dissect the case that prompted this post, because I abhor vagueblogging and believe it’s the cause of a lot of resenment in this fandom - as an intermittent lurker I see what seems like every month a different explosion of outrage over somebody who did something horrible on the other side of the fandom. So let’s look at the posts. Original post by caitlesshea stated that people who hate Alex Manes can get f*cked. Darlingnotso’s post that OP referred to vaguebloged about it changing “hating Alex” into “mentioning character flaw” and OP took the “character flaw” premise into a very politely worded essay above. I don’t see any “harm to the community” the first post supposedly poses or how it is “bad behavior” to say on a post tagged Alex Manes that Alex-haters GTFO. There was no “lashing at people”, “directly flaming” anyone, “behaving loudly as bullies” or “stifling the community”. And what you did OP isn’t going to help caitlesshea (in what? seeing the error of their ways for feeling how they feel? or having “good and healthy reaction” as determined by who?) or the community. I’d argue, what you did OP is much more potentially harmful to the community, as trying to censor what opinions shouldn't be expressed because they are simply "bad" and "stifling the community" - even when they're appropriately tagged so that random Alex haters cannot stumble into a post telling them to get f*cked unless they really wanna - is always a bad idea and I have a wealth of historic examples to pull from. It's much more "good and healthy" for the entire community to simply walk away from people Having an Opinion that Upsets You (after making sure it's properly tagged!) than to vagueblog about how those Others are Harming the Community with their Bad Takes.

TL;DR People have a right to their opinions and expressing them in their own, properly tagged spaces. To maintain a healthy community with diverse opinions, welcoming to newcomers and protecting their minorities it is essential to delineate those spaces (by tagging, tagging, reminding people to tag, not getting ofended when asked to tag something, and once again tagging) and also taking the responsibility to keep your distance from the content that upsets you (I cannot stress enough - someone disliking the stuff you love doesn’t automatically make them a racist/homophobe/ableist a*hole UNLESS they actually act/express opinions of a racist/homophobe/ableist a*hole etc). If you hate Miluca and go into the Miluca tag and see something that offends and disgusts you because of difference of taste, opinion, headcanon interperatatoin etc. - that’s on you. If you see an actual homophobic comment, feel free to engage. But if you feel the need to rationalize your very real hurt feelings over people’s opinions you imagine might be stemming from homophobia, into the belief that the other side is Essentially Morally Wrong - only ever vent in private/well tagged spaces. And learn to live with the knowledge that there are people who literally Hate What You Love.

I saw a post today that I strongly agree with, and felt like talking a bit more about.

In general, the post asserted that telling someone to “get fucked” for suggesting a character has flaws is not a good or healthy response... and that fandom has a responsibility to say doing so isn’t cool.

This shouldn’t be a contentious stance... and yet somehow, it is.

This isn’t limited to a single instance of similar behavior. This isn’t the first instance this week. It’s actually far from the most egregious in the fandom in question. It’s just an entry point to the conversation on fandom etiquette and healthy communities.

And listen. If you’re going to put that bad behavior on your own blog, sure, that’s a better thing to do than directly flaming the person who dared suggest that any particular character is flawed (news banner alert- they all are flawed in some way! In every fandom!). Tagging your vitriol properly can mitigate the harm to a degree. If you must behave badly, please do try to limit the harms you inflict.

But there is a difference between it being right, and being a right you possess.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

I do in fact believe that we in fandom have a responsibility to create places where many varied and diverse people can engage. I think there are tensions that can and must be explored. I think we should have lots of room to disagree. I think it hard to get it “right”... and I think we should get caught trying.

None of that inherent tension is an excuse to lash at at people you don’t agree with, though. And we should not condone this as the norm we all have to slog through, the price of admission to engage with fandom— that a handful of people behaving very loudly as bullies and who are acting in bad faith get to set the community standards.

Calling people in is essential.

We should try it whenever possible. It’s a starting point to help when someone’s willing to make a good faith attempt to address their bad behavior, or when the harms are inadvertent, or traceable to a lack of awareness.

Calling out systems and patterns of behavior- like personal attacks, manipulation, racism, and various other bigotries is also necessary.

Those harmful behaviors stifle the community and put the fandom under duress. Engaging in those behavior chokes out engagement, they causes people to leave the fandom- often the voices who have some of the most necessary perspectives to add. They dissuade new fans from entering fandom spaces at all.

And so it’s on the rest of us- flawed though we are as well- to show that we care, and that loud cruelty is not what we endorse.