#just to reiterate: criticising his WRITING is valid

[miaoqing]

my biggest regret in life is writing that post about reducing airplane to a "shitty author" because i forgot that a lot of people on tumblr read with their eyes closed and misunderstood my point completely. "sacrificing your morals for the sake of appealing to the masses is tragic but sometimes necessary if that's the only way you can pay your bills" and "criticising bad writing is valid, especially if you're confident that the author could write well but you're under the impression that they choose not to" are both valid takes and can coexist. however, "an author should always put their artistic vision above what their audience wants even if it means that they will literally starve" is NOT a valid take and definitely comes from a place of privilege, and agreeing with/defending it is... weird, to say the least.

airplane's writing was definitely flawed in many ways, but at the end of the day, he did what he had to do. in vol 3 he tells shen yuan that he's thankful that he made the story go back to what he originally wanted to write but had to abandon because he literally couldn't afford to live otherwise. he did his best. criticise his writing if you want to, but have a bit of compassion, too.

[tonyglowheart]

This entire thing is a rant, feel free to ignore it, but I saw your post about how destiel fans can’t win in this context, and yeah. So have some rambles.

I’ve been thinking about the fact we (current spn/destiel fans) can’t win all night... I’ve seen so many people talking about how homophobic it is - and while I would very much like to argue, as every point I’ve seen made by a non-spn fan has been wrong so far, if I did everyone inside the fandom would agree and everyone outside would either call me straight or pity me for believing it’s okay.

(Cas wasn’t even sent to hell lmao. He was sent to angel death (the empty), a place he has escaped in the past. Other points, like that meta about spn has been predicting exactly this for months, that Dean ended up sobbing on the floor because he was so upset, like that death means next to nothing on spn, like that there is two episodes left, etc etc. you feel me right? I just don’t want to post wank to other spn blogs atm, we’re getting enough frustration as it is, no need to add to it.

It’s also worth pointing out that the bar is very, very low. Spn is a prominent TV show - not a Netflix show, or indie, or whatever - and it just said “main character in gay love saved the world”. [insert gif of ghostfacers dude saying that gay love can pierce through the veil of death and save the day here]

I just saw someone saying that spn having Naomi try to brainwash Cas out of loving dean makes spn homophobic (it is a conversion therapy parallel). My first response to that is that Naomi was the villain lmao? I guess we can’t write villains doing anything homophobic because having villains do homophobic things makes, uh - checks notes - villains look homophobic, and clearly we can’t have that.

There certainly are legitimate things to criticise spn about, but this isn’t it lol.

Also now some people are unironically trying to cancel Jensen because “his acting was homophobic, and so he’s clearly homophobic”, nevermind that he’s an actor and his character struggles with understanding his emotions (which I think he played excellently, myself. That scene had a very Dean delayed emotional response), nevermind the support he’s given to us queers in the past. Like. Idek man.

We would have been laughed at if we got no destiel, too.

It would have been worse, had the writers pulled a dumbledore. At this point I also trust the writers not to pull a GoT - they have explicitly criticised that ending in spn’s canon.

Spn’s writers did that by making the main villain of this season, Chuck / God, say GoT had a good ending. To reiterate a previous point I had: villains do bad things because they’re bad. And the bad things they do make them bad. For the people out there not still following, if someone does something in a story and it makes them a villain, that is explicitly telling you the story (and probably the writers) thinks that thing is bad. In this case, Chuck likes to write things for him, and we the audience have been shown and told that is bad.

Apparently thinking a gay confession is good in 2020 makes me straight. Seems unlikely, but whatever. Sorry for the length, I guess I went overboard, I’ve been holding it in lol. Anyway, DESTIEL IS CANON 💚💙 hope you have a good night

Helloo supernatural anon I hope you are living your best life right now. Yeah I’m like..... skeptical and leery myself but having lived through some absolute garbage discourse that is general purity wank, as well as the C/QL greater fandom here and on Twitter I find myself... much more wanting to question the “general wisdom” of things esp in terms of negativity, bc a lot of the time I find.... it’s wrong? Like so wrong. Or at least presents such an incomplete picture of the whole situation and also presents it in such a removed context that words that have meaning and are operationalized in a certain way for a reason, no longer have meaningful usage.

Anyway I don’t... know too much about the specifics of Spn but someone I follow is into it and talks a lot about the Gnostic stuff and that all was very fascinating to me, and I also have been grappling a lot with cultural Christianity bc of cmedia and the way ppl just *clenches fist* unthinkingly or uncritically slap some Christian norms on it and call it a day 😩 help I’m Tired. My thing here being... I actually got tired of the uncritical “superhell”s at some pt bc I am, in fact, incredibly exhausted with cultural Christianity, and because it does seem like, even possibly(?) without the Gnostic stuff it’s different from a “hell” or other Protestant-derived afterlife concept, and also yeah that it wasn’t seeded out of nowhere, it was set up to happen, which then... lends credence to the idea that whatever the current era of Spn is doing, the current showrunners are doing it with purpose.

And idk I just... refuse to believe the concept that ALL of the fans of Spn - esp the ones who have been following it still, or got back into it and are following it currently, are acting under delusion or are fooling themselves into liking it or thinking it’s good or whatever. I personally find that kinda infantilizing and patronizing and playing into issues of dismissing things women and/or other marginalized identities like.

Plus I find the concept that (from what I think I’ve been seeing Spn fans say) that the current era of the show is quite actively grappling with itself, its past, its legacy. to be very interesting and compelling; it hearkens back to like an old lore kind of feeling, of a thing that has grown into a nigh undefeatable monster and realizing that, also realizing that the only way to defeat itself is through grappling with its own nature and transforming and transmuting itself into something else. I personally find that more plausible and compelling than “Supernatural has been actively and continuously queerbaiting for 15 homophobic homophobic years., so right now we’re all very sorry for you because this maybe is no longer queerbaiting but it’s still homophobic and it can never be anything different ever.” I’ve been sort of tangentially aware of Spn thru the years and didn’t we agree, around the time of that in-universe play about Spn and with the lil Destiel shoutout, that Spn has come a ways as far as coming to terms with its fandom and working to treat its fans better? Why the sudden regression into “oh no, Supernatural is and forever will be homophobic and a hate crime”? 🤔 

The rest under a cut bc the ask is already long and then my rambling will get longer-

But yeah I mean..... I get that the legacy of Supernatural has been certifiably Rough, but I think people also forget how different of a time 2005 was? Hell, how different of a time 2015 was, even, prior to, say, Obergefell v. Hodges. Now I’m not saying that to blanket-excuse Supernatural, but like, you look at mainstream shows from the era and... there’s a lot of shit lmao. The fact that Supernatural has existed this long seems to me like.... maybe we CAN look at how it’s developed through the years vs just insisting it is what it was 15, 10, hell, 5 years ago. Especially since, to my knowledge, there’s been showrunner changes? Which seems to me like it would... affect things? I mean honestly, I remember back when I got into Spn for a hot second because of Castiel, I remember watching panel, Q&A, etc vids thru the years, and like... I thought we agreed that... it was the fans who were going a bit far pushing the shipping question like literally ALL the time to the actors, who are not in control of the show and.... like at the time.... that could have had personal implications for them? And yes homophobia bad, and people can still be allies despite that, but again like.... I do feel like - from what I’ve seen - that these guys were NOT ready to deal with a lot of that but they’ve (okay Jensen I’m talking about Jensen here) genuinely grown and learned? Also how many years ago was the essay autograph thing that people keep trotting out, like what year was it in and what year of spn was it, and what were the prevailing opinions on LGBT issues and bisexuality then.

I’ve been seeing some murmurings of identity politicsing surrounding ppl who enjoy Supernatural, and I’m sorry that that’s happening to you, it really fucking sucks and it’s also the dumbest way to “make” or “win” an argument because it shouldn’t ever be a final determiner, just factors to consider when considering what life experiences might have informed someone else’s PoV and views as well as maybe how you can better communicate with them. Instead of it being a “weapon” or “tool” to either dismiss someone or de facto validate an argument.

Also yeah I get it that you don’t want to send discourse to spn blogs bc I imagine you guys ARE actively grappling with all the bs rn and it’s a lot. Even just from like, the stuff I see around, I’m like tired of it. I’m genuinely having more fun with ppl who are having a good time with Supernatural than the ppl who are hating on it, even in this sort of backhanded “oh we’re not clowning YOU we’re clowning the writers and showrunners who think you should be satisfied with this,” when... yeah? the people who HAVE been watching the show and therefore... know what’s up.. DO seem to be? And all this based on *fake gasp* context. And that’s where the backhandedness becomes kind of poisonous to me, because it implies that it IS bad, and that you SHOULDN’T be satisfied, but poor little you are but don’t worry, we’re not making fun of YOU for liking garbage, you’re just the hapless victim who is consuming the garbage bc... idk, whatever reasons ppl are coming up with ig.

idk man it’s 2020. Fandom isn’t activism, performative or otherwise, it’s okay to let people enjoy things even if you think they’re “objectively” bad, and like... I don’t know if people can call something bad when they’re not even working with the whole context and instead are dealing with rumor and reputation. 

[clarenecessities]

so shit’s fucked

here is a timeline

09/03/2019.

two people in a 70 person server discuss the SU movie in the general chat channel, using spoiler tags because it had just recently been released. this lasts five posts.

09/07/2019.

alyson comes into the general chat channel and says man, isn’t it a bummer that SU is n*zi apologia and racist and actively harmful?

Donnie says yes, it’s harmful, but drop the n*zi comment because RS is jewish (alyson does not, then or the other two times donnie asks, despite donnie being jewish himself). He later says he doesn’t care about SU at all

Synth says it’s understandable that people would drop the show because of poor handling or the racism issues, but agrees that n*zi is too far when there’s genuine propaganda out there

Beta says yes, the writers could have handled things better, but reducing the message of the show to “n*zi good” is a deliberate misinterpretation

A fourth person comes in briefly to say they also don’t care about SU and that this should probably be in the discourse channel.

About halfway through the conversation, after his second request to stop calling SU apologia was met with a sourceless insistence that other jewish people criticized it (though alyson did not specify whether they used the term n*zi apologia), Donnie told her she was taking this very personally, which Alyson met with “Am I? I said a thing, said it was unpopular, and left it. and then got swarmed?”

At this point she held ~46% of the conversation.

She then abruptly left, saying, “like. Hooooboy, there's so much assuming and passion and defensiveness going on here, so I guess I'll leave since I've seen this all before and know for a fact that no one is going to let it rest.“

She held 41% of the final conversation. Everyone who weighed in was either explicitly open to criticizing SU or completely indifferent, and were simply asking her not to refer to the work of a Jewish nb woman as n*zi apologia.

09/10/2019

Alyson writes a post. The introduction is more or less “if you uncritically like SU, unfollow me” and goes on to say she underestimated how few people in the neopets fandom recognize its harmfulness. She says she’d been thinking about leaving the Neolodge discord for a while, but her mind was made up on the 3rd when she saw "a lot of hype and support" (5 posts), four full days before she posted in the general chat. She says she "was swarmed by questions asked by people who didn't want to hear [her] answers." (there were two questions asked of her: “did you just kind of want to get mad at us for enjoying steven universe?” and “were you venting?")

She says that SU is her “litmus test” of sorts, implying--possibly by accident--that she was then testing the Neolodge by dangling some SU-discoursey bait. 

The post was tagged #the problem isn’t liking a thing and #it's denying anyone from not-liking it for very valid reasons

Except the problem was demonstrated to be specifically that she was asked not to use a particular term to describe that not-like

7 months later, 4/16/2019

There is a Neolodge board on our own neopets.gov. Alyson shows up and is polite & sociable until more people that she recognizes filter in. She neomails hollis to broach the subject of what had happened in september, saying “from what i remember it was mostly synth who was very reactionary and aggressively posting at me because i criticised steven universe“ which, if you’ll review the logs, is both not about synth, who only posted twice (probably an honest mistake), but also grossly mischaracterizes the nature of the incident. Over the next day or so she and Hollis discuss the nature of the lodge and what transpired in September. Hollis emphasizes that the Neolodge has never been a place for bigots or their sympathizers, and Alyson goes radio silent.

4/24/2019

Alyson writes a new post. It tells a different narrative than we see play out in the logs. Her summary of events is as follows:

So, when wondering on the chat if anyone else was critical of the franchise, instead the chat suddenly sped up and i was swarmed by a bunch of anti-criticism fans who almost immediately -instead of reading my beginning attempts to elaborate on where i was coming from- posted over and over again that rebecca sugar is a marginalized voice and as such, immune to criticism, and how dare I insinuate a jewish woman of writing nazi apologia.

To reiterate, she began a discussion. Every person who responded was either openly critical of SU or indifferent. They were not suggesting RS is immune to criticism because she’s marginalized; they were in fact largely agreeing with the criticisms that Alyson raised, but asking her to be more conscious of the impact her choice of terms could have (and in fact was having).

I (a neurodivergent, mentally ill, pansexual aromantic woman, aka also a marginalized voice) was talked over and treated as if i ate babies. Obviously, I left the neolodge discord after that.

Again, she held 41% of the conversation--and by her own admission had already been planning to leave the Neolodge, and had thrown down this final ‘litmus test’ despite not wanting to engage with the results.

Now, obviously marginalization isn’t a contest. There’s no “I have more problems” or “I have worse problems” that will ever get us anywhere constructive. As I said in my own reply to her post, this was not a matter of RS being untouchable because she’s marginalized, but of Alyson’s behavior when asked not to draw the comparison between RS’s work and literal N*zi apologia.

Hollis refused to read and think about what i had said and the information i linked to, despite apparently going back in the discord chat and viewing the whole mess, where i had also laid out information to back up my observations.  Instead, my voice talked over, my words and concerns discarded, I was treated as if I had committed some heinous act, and if i had changed as a person then maybe they might let me back in to the neolodge.

Now being privy to the entire conversation, I can assure anyone reading this that Hollis read & thought about everything Alyson said very seriously. We had an in-depth and nuanced discussion, and ultimately realized that this was not simply a matter of whether or not SU is a poorly handled cartoon or full-on apologia. It was a matter of Alyson’s unwillingness to engage in a discussion she herself began, her repeated refusals to respect the comfort and wishes of our Jewish members, and her later misconstruals of the conversation as a ‘bombardment’.

Alyson insists she did not call RS a n*zi, and that critiquing the show is not equivalent to doing so, but unfortunately ended that thought with this:

Words mean things: look up apologia.

Now, I’ve already pointed this out, but apologia means “a formal written defense of one’s opinions or conduct.” Thus, every time Alyson has insisted SU is actual, literal N*zi apologia, she means that a Jewish nonbinary woman conceived of and executed an explicit defense of fascism, n*zis, the H*locaust, regardless of how involved she was or wasn’t in the production of the show itself.

Personally, I choose to believe that Alyson herself is unaware of the definition, and instead meant that SU makes excuses for fascism, or alludes to n*zis, or much gentler (if still harmful) language. I choose to believe that she’s conflating it with an apology, and simply didn’t follow her own advice.

The Neolodge is home to actual children/minors/underage people and most of the people in the incident were younger than 21. That is children.  I was getting annoyed at young non-adults. 

This is blatantly false. The Neolodge has always been a minor-free space, and there’s been discussion of upping the minimum age to 20. That Alyson herself is 30 may have skewed her perception, but as you can see in our response to this angry anon, we have always been concerned with the protection of minors & the promotion of a safe, comfortable atmosphere.

Alyson goes on to say that she had liked & trusted Hollis, and this came with no prior warning--presumably because Hollis had been polite and even friendly when she came to our board, and they hadn’t interacted much over the previous months since her exit from the discord.

So if you’re like me, and don’t put up with bullshit, and refuse to lie down and let bigotry get further footholds into western culture and be lauded for it, consider staying away from the neolodge and users like hollis and synthaphone

I still don’t quite understand how we got here, tbh. People standing up against a stark refusal to respect someone’s comfort as a Jewish person has somehow been skewed to mean they’re the bigots, and “western culture” is in danger, specifically from this gay nb & their nefarious lesbian pal, who spoke the least of anyone in the conversation.

I can’t speak to what’s going through her head right now. I don’t even know if she read the replies enough to know she was spreading misinformation about the Lodge’s age restrictions, let alone her (hopefully accidentally) drawing an obliquely antisemetic portrait of RS. I’m not even mad at her at the moment so much as confused. I genuinely don’t understand her rationale or what she thinks would motivate us to do the things she says we’ve done. I don’t think she’s a bad person, or even that her actions would be unfair if the situation were what she’s purported it to be.

But the fact of the matter is, it isn’t. She tried to start a fight seven months ago and has been hanging onto it since, convinced that she was in the right, never considering the express opinions of the people she claimed were so passionate about the show she so loathes. She’s attempting to drag Hollis’s name through the mud because they were kind enough to give her a chance to explain her side of things & she squandered it by instead parroting the talking points of the video we had all watched back in September, when she originally posted it.

She’s throwing Synth in for good measure, because they’re the only person she could be bothered to identify.

It’s not a true account of events, she made no effort to have a good-faith conversation at any point (particularly about her own behavior), and frankly it’s unfair. It’s easy to dump snippets of DMs and announce that you’re blocking anyone who disagrees with you, sure--it can even be good for you. But in this case it’s more of what we saw all those months ago in the discord, when she tried to stir the pot and left after scarcely 30 posts had gone by; it’s cowardice. It’s a way to frame the narrative in such a way that she can maintain her illusion of moral superiority, secure in the knowledge that everyone who has criticized her or her behavior is a bigot and and writes n*zi "apologia” apologia.

She’s isolating herself from the community one group at a time, and I still don’t know why, because she won’t talk to me about it. She won’t talk to any of us about anything that isn’t SU, and I don’t care about SU. I care about her & her motivations, and I’m starting to accept I’m never going to truly know either.

[ninjaotta]

demiromantic is a harmful label with ties to slut shaming & homophobia, the Dan & Phil fandom is... toxic to say the least just like any fandom that writes porn of & ships real people together... both things are worthy of being criticized

demiromantic is a valid label and has nothing to do (inherently) with slut shaming. like with any aspec label, slut-shaming may be an individual problem but is not related to the label itself. i’m sorry if you’ve been misinformed about demiromantics!

as for the dan and phil fandom, trust me, i know it can be toxic. within the last two years drama has included someone faking a pregnancy for clout and someone else creating false accounts threatening to doxx themselves to gain sympathy and attention. i know it can be toxic, same as any other fandom can be.

shipping real people is wrong and dan and phil should never have been shipped in the first place but at the same time, dan and phil themselves have encouraged fanfiction about them, reading ‘a creepy one’ in dan’s tumblr tag video and dan even writing a vampire-phil fanfic that he did a dramatic reading of on his channel. again, let me reiterate, SHIPPING REAL PEOPLE LIKE FICTIONAL CHARACTERS IS WRONG. however, dan and phil have created a weird space in which they have openly said that, as long as shipping of them wasn’t invasive (people did find the address of their old london flat for example), then speculation, fanart, fanfic, etc, was all okay. phil used to have a section called ‘draw phil naked’ because people kept drawing (sfw, often using nudity as childlike humour not sexually) images of him naked.

i never shipped them myself because i felt it was weird and invasive, but i did privately wonder if all the hype had anything behind it simply because unlike any other white boy slash youtuber pairings of 2012, this one never seemed to die down. then last june happened and dan said “obviously we were more than friends” and shit went wild.

TL; DR: inherently, as i said in the post i believe you’re referring to, there’s nothing wrong with being demi or liking dan and phil. if you use your demi status to slut shame, that’s a you problem worthy of criticism, but has no bearing on the label itself. large parts of the dan and phil fandom are weird, invasive and toxic and like any fandom, can and should be criticised. however, if i remember correctly my response on the post you’re referring to is a challenge to cringe culture, which can be toxic, pointless and is inherently downright ableist (especially to autistic and ADHD people). i hope this better explains my points!! :)