#like of all the subsets of the fandom that you have to explain nuance to. this is not one of them i fear

[bvckbiter]

yes the titan army demigods were manipulated yes their leaders were fighting for a cause hypocritically and yes everyone who stayed was probably lying to themselves about what they really wanted from the war. theyre victims and theyre also morally questionable and unreliable

[waheelawhisperer]

I've found the best RWBY fans to interact with are the ones who like the show but still acknowledge its flaws.

Like, so much of the FNDM seems to have this "All or Nothing" mentality where you either unconditionally love and praise everything Rooster Teeth does or base your entire personality around hating everything Rooster Teeth has so much as breathed on, and honestly both extremes are horribly unhealthy.

I mostly agree with this, though I feel like it's worth pointing out that a lot of the "unconditional love" fans are really just fed up with the years' worth of negativity on the part of people who make hating the show their entire identity. I think it stems from the YouTubers, to be honest. For a lot of them, producing content is an actual job. While I don't personally care for that content and have no interest in watching any RWBY YouTuber, I can't dunk on any of them too hard because they actually get paid to do this and I'm well aware that there's a certain price for which my personal integrity is for sale: if it meant I would never have to sacrifice my physical and mental health working 40-60 hours a week ever again, if it meant I'd have time for myself and the people I care about, if it meant I could devote myself to the things I love or use my hypothetical wealth to make the world around me better... yeah, I'd absolutely base my brand around hating a show and appealing to shitheads, as long as I'm not expected to start shoving people down the alt-right pipeline. I like to think there's somewhere I'd draw the line, that there are things I wouldn't do for money, but the thought of not being fucking miserable and in physical pain at almost all times is really tempting.

Anyway, the point is that for at least some of these people, hating on RWBY is an actual job, as stupid as it sounds. It puts food on the table, which means they have a vested interest in building their brand, which means promoting their content and getting it exposure, which in turn means that avoiding negativity can take actual effort and isn't always as simple as just blocking people you don't like if you want to participate in fandom spaces that aren't total echo chambers. I don't know how blocking works on reddit because I mostly use my reddit account to look at pictures of breasts, but what I do know is that even going to the main RWBY subreddit to do something like read the reaction thread to a new Ice Queendom episode runs a not-insignificant risk of at least passively exposing me to the newest stupid take to escape quarantine in r/rwbycritics. As a result, there's a subset of the audience that feeds itself by whipping up negativity, by targeting emotional responses, that can be pretty hard to escape. I don't blame people who just don't want to deal with it anymore for responding defensively, though I'll concede that it can make having nuanced discussion... difficult.

This is not to say that everyone who is critical of RWBY is exactly the same. What most people think of when they talk about the critical side of the community contains people with anything from the relatively uncontroversial belief that the Battle of Haven was poorly choreographed or that some of the early voice acting wasn't very good to people with spicy hot takes like "Team RWBY are the real villains" and "Blake abused Adam and ruined his life". I guess I'm technically a critic, given that I post about things I like about RWBY, things I dislike, things I think worked well and things I think didn't, and then try to support and explain my views, but I don't really like thinking of myself that way because I don't want to be lumped in with the more extreme elements of either RWDE or rwbycritics. It's why I use the "analysis" tag instead of "rwde" (well, that and I think using "rwde" inherently sets a more hostile tone than I'm going for in a lot of cases).

I do think it's funny that RWDE and rwbycritics frequently come at the show from completely opposite directions (think "I'm worried that Rooster Teeth is using Bumbleby to string queer viewers along with the promise of representation without ever delivering on it" vs. "Rooster Teeth defiled Monty's memory* by making his action show political (read: gay)" and think the possibility for friendly fire between the two is hilarious. My solution is simple:

So yeah, the critics ("critics") definitely annoy me more than the people who are just relentlessly positive (though this may be because I've never personally experienced the harassment that each group supposedly directs at the other) given that most of the people who like the show at least engage with the text in good faith, while certain critics... do not. There are definitely a couple RWDE blogs that I think are reasonable, and even r/rwbycritics will inadvertently generate something resembling a coherent thought every once in a while, but I don't particularly care to engage with that community beyond browsing it once in a while out of curiosity because the good isn't worth wading through the garbage. RWDE is better in the sense that content is associated with specific blogs rather than threads posted to a subreddit, meaning that if someone posts nothing but stupid takes you don't want to interact with, you can just block them.

As for Rooster Teeth the company, I'm not an expert on its history by any means, but I know they've had issues with crunch in the past, I'm aware of the drama after Monty's death, and I know their brand was built on dudebro humor, so like... I'm sure there's been plenty to criticize in the past and is still plenty to criticize now, but I don't really care about Rooster Teeth beyond the fact that it produces RWBY and don't watch any of the studio's non-RWBY-related content. There's really not much I can give anyone here. Other people are a lot more invested in the company one way or another than I am.

*I really hate the "Monty's vision" argument. Nothing proves a point like dragging a dead man's name into your argument so you can pretend you knew what he wanted better than the people who actually knew and worked with him. Just utterly classless.

[karamfilmare]

Why I Dislike Fanon Oikawa

Ok, soooooooo

I have only been in the Haikyuu fandom since...late July, after the manga ended. I’m a bit of a late bloomer. Anyways...

Ever since Oikawa crosses my screen, I was ENAMORED with him. Like, what a beautiful boy!! And his dub voice just does things to me. And his attitude is spectacular. How could anyone hate him? And as the show went on, I love him even more. He was a pretty boy with a lot of baggage, and who doesn’t love that?

I never understood the hate about him, because come on, I’m pretty sure most of us have been worse than him, and honestly, people need to grow up, but THAT’S FOR ANOTHER TIME.

So, after watching Haikyuu, I did the typical fan things: rewatched the show, rewatched the show, made other people watch and love the show, got others into the Yagami Yato because of the show, although for me it was the other way around oops.

I managed to reach Haikyuu Tok, which was fantastic! The edits, the funny skits, the fanart, everything was MWAH CHEF’S KISS.

And at first I thought a few of the Oikawa jokes were funny -- the flat ass (which now he’s thicc so shut up about that lol, fucking Tendou’s ass caves in, I don’t want to hear it), the “Iwa-chan” obsession (which I mean, yeah, but hold this thought).

Then I got slightly annoyed by other things that were attached to Oikawa. And then my friends kind of hopped on to these, because they don’t like Oikawa, even though I have tried oh so hard to convince them that he’s not that bad of a person, like his personality and words are OBVIOUSLY -- no, no, that’s for another time. @oikawa-obvs​ also has a great analysis on why you should grow up and not hate Oikawa so there.

No, what really bothered me is what the fandom did to Oikawa. Fanon Oikawa started to bug me, for several reasons. And I will list and explain some of the things that bug me that people seem to take seriously about fanon Oikawa and apply it to canon Oikawa.

1. Oikawa the Crybaby

So like, the fandom makes Oikawa out to be a big whiny crybaby who can’t do anything without Iwaizumi. I’ll be addressing the first half here, because I want to save my Iwaizumi topic for a little later. 

So, we see Oikawa cry several times in the show, and we see him have his most heartbreaking cry in the 3rd movie, one that makes me cry everytime.

But I don’t see why this makes him a crybaby. Like, other characters have cried, yet we don’t think of them as crybabies. 

His emotions were too much for him, as it can be for a lot of us. I wish people would realize that him expressing his emotions in a physical way is not a bad thing. 

And this leads to my next point...

2. Oikawa’s Weak (kind of hard to explain, keep reading)

I don’t mean physically weak (I mean his fucking serves are so hot--I MEAN HARD *cough*).

This is also kind of hard to explain. People pick on his character for his personality.

When we first meet Oikawa, his personality is loud, smug, a bit childish, etc. (Honestly, I kind of liked that, for some reason it was super interesting to me)

But I just want to draw your attention to the fact that a weak person would not:

- be able to lead a team so cohesively as he does

- be a strong presence on the team 

- take responsibility for the team

- stay true to his goals

- be able to be loyal to his friends

I could go on. 

3. Oikawa is clingy (to Iwaizumi)

 Iwaizumi and Oikawa are really close best friends, and have been since elementary school. Naturally, the two are pretty much in sync and know each other really well.

However, Oikawa is not solely dependent on Iwaizumi. I have seen posts where people would joke and say “Oh, Oikawa would have gone to Shiratorizawa if Iwaizumi went.” One of my friends sent me a meme like that and said “SO TRUE” and I was like “MMMMMM BUT NO YOU’RE WRONG.”

I don’t know if it is just me and my absolute need to be independent being projected onto my favorite characters, but Oikawa is not tied to Iwaizumi. Oikawa is definitely loyal, and so is Iwaizumi. They do see each other as partners, but even they realize that their paths are not meant to be joined forever. 

I am really close with my best friend/s, and they mean the world to me. We joke and talk and we have each others’ backs, even when separated doing our own thing. We will be pretend clingy, but that’s just what friends do.

I guess this is a subset to the Oikawa is weak, but I feel like this needed its own explanation and analysis (sorry, it kind of sucks so far).

4. Oikawa is a playboy

Ok, so my main source for Oikawa’s character is the anime. I haven’t gotten far in the manga to know more.

But honestly, from my multiple viewings of the anime, Oikawa is very kind and considerate to his fangirls, but he doesn’t seem flirty.

Oikawa had a girlfriend (who somehow broke up with him because of volleyball. I sympathize and don’t at the same time, but that’s for a different topic?).

I know that there is a story where he kind of tries to flirt with some girls when he gets his glasses, but he kind of goofed on that. And yes, he knows he’s good looking, but he hasn’t really used his good looks to take advantage of people, especially his fangirls. 

I also find it hard to believe that Oikawa, who has a much older sister, would dare to toy with women’s hearts without getting his shit rocked by said older sister. Also, I feel like Oikawa cares about setting a good example to his nephew Takeru, and being a playboy isn’t what Oikawa would want to project on his nephew.

I think Oikawa gets judged to be a playboy because he is attractive (which how can anyone not find him attractive. Furudate made a powerful character when even the Oikawa haters find him attractive.)

I just want people to recognize that canon Oikawa is actually a deeply loyal, nuanced character, and he’s not what fanon Oikawa appears to be. He is one of, if not, the most hard-working individuals. He is driven, ambitious, independent, focused, and extremely insightful. 

He was a kid who loved volleyball, then became absolutely in love with the sport when he sees his idol, Jose Blanco, and decided that he wanted to be the best setter. That comes with an immense pressure from within, which can cause a lot of stress on a young individual. He practiced and perfected the craft, doing what he can to measure up to the talented and the genius players of his age. He just happened to be given “The Curse of the Ordinary.”

It’s amazing that he has managed to become one of the best players that is feared and revered by peers. He is special, not due to his talent, but due to his perseverance and dedication. 

And I don’t think people should lose that in the fanon. I get it as a joke, but some people seem to confused the fanon with the canon.

Thanks for reading this crappy analysis, I’m so sorry I subjected you all to this. I really love and appreciate you all. <3

Credit to @volleygifs​ for the gifs

[sasoriapologist]

sorry for being mad and starting discourse on Sasori’s birthday but holy shit the Sasori liker side of this fandom is making me fucking insane. As a preface, I’m a huge advocate for letting people have fun and crack shipping. I’m also not a hardcore anti- I find myself thinking a lot of times anymore that antis have a tendency to take things too far and over police without leaving any room for interpretation, unfairly generalizing and often times seeing things too black and white and failing to realize nuance in some situations. That being said, I also think that shipping things that are outright and inarguably pe///dophilic, abu////sive and preda////tory is bad and should be condemned.

The issue I’m noticing is fucking rampant among the Sasori side of this fandom is y’all are doing anything and everything to avoid having ships for him that aren’t inarguably pe//doph/ilic and pred///atory. It’s like y’all will ship him with fucking ANYONE except people where the relationship would be at least to a degree okay.

You want to ship him with a woman? Cool, I think he’s a woman liker bisexual too. But why do y’all flock to the ship between him and a 15 year old girl who he addresses explicitly as a child instead of, I don’t know, Konan? Who is arguably even calls beautiful and worthy of being preserved as art? And is his own age? Something similar applies to the very specific subset of sasodei shippers who portray Deidara as young as possible and Sasori being attracted to Deidara while Deidara is as young as possible beyond what’s realistic for canon- you could easily portray Sasori being attracted to adult Deidara and you choose to make content sexualizing a very very young Deidara with him... why? If not for thinking pe///doph//ilia is cute and sexy? This is coming from an avid sasodei shipper.

And people who want him to be a pretty “smol boy” with a big hunky boyfriend- first of all, I encourage you to examine this, because a lot of the content I see for this is perpetuating harmful fetishized, yaoi-adjacent stereotypes and stereotypes based on appearance such as him being short or and “pretty”, and those are things that are harmful and perpetuating that has negative effects for real life communities, particularly LGBT men. Not only that, but a worrying majority of people in this category seem to want to s3xualize him while making him look as young as possible. Which is concerning for reasons I hope I don’t have to explain. However, if you’re set in this- why do you jump to shipping him with someone he only knew as a child save for the instance of killing him? Why can’t we ship him with Kakuzu or something? Or just have your own headcanons about him and Deidara? And sure, arguments can be made about how Kakuzu and Deidara are also bad to ship with him, but those ships are where I tend to think that there’s more nuance and it’s not necessarily bad to ship even if I understand why someone would personally be uncomfortable.

And for both of these- making OCs is an option. I get he doesn’t interact with a lot of people in canon, but OC x Canon ships aren’t harmful and in my opinion, there’s a lot of unfair bias against them for absolutely no good reason. Make OCs to ship with him. That’s what I did. Or get creative with canon characters to ship with him- nothing wrong with shipping him with someone he has no interaction with but could have a potentially good dynamic with.

It’s literally like you guys will ship him with anyone else to avoid having, for lack of a more civil term, non-freak ships for him. I’m not sure what it is about Sasori specifically that attracts this extreme on both sides, I guess he just has a lot of traits that make him bait for both extremes or something, but this is getting so worrying and I know a lot of people who agree but are too afraid to say it because some of y’all will be so vicious about it. I’m trying to keep this as civil as possible. It’s getting to the point I’m coming across Naruto fans who are instantly weary of people who have Sasori as a favorite because a lot of us either romanticize and s3xualize these really horrible things, perpetuate harmful stereotypes, or are straight up mean and elitist for no reason.

Alright, that’s my Sasori birthday rant. No, I’m not going to turn anon options on for my ask box- if you want to argue about this, do it with your name attached to it if you really stand by what you have to say about it. If you aren’t going to be civil, have the balls to do it with your own name. I doubt this is even going to reach a lot of people in opposition to this though granted I’m pretty sure I have a good majority of the people this is targeted at blocked, but still. This has been bugging me for a while and it’s been bugging a lot of the people I’m friends with for a while and I feel like someone needs to say something about it.

EDIT: adding on to this instead of making a new post so I don’t clog the Sasori tag with discourse, and because it’s related. You guys... know you don’t have to make Sasori as young as possible, right? You don’t have to portray him as physically 15. He can realistically be 18-19 physically, and he can be up into his mid to late twenties physically- his timeline is heavily up to interpretation granted how painfully inconsistent and contradictory Kishimoto was with writing it. Portraying him as a 15 year old in l3wd situations is you choosing to portray him as a 15 year old in l3wd situations when you do not have to. That’s weird and gross to go out of your way to headcanon him at the youngest possible physical age for him and then portray him in n///s//fw situations. If you subscribe to the timeline of him being physically 25 and portray him in those situations- knock yourself out, make him have his dick out and in shit all you want, but if you subscribe to him being 15 physically and do that shit.... please fucking stop it.

[radiantseraphina]

what if there's a subset of people who write elsie bashing fics where she dies?

Of course, those people exist. Susie Haltmann is probably one of them. She probably has Elise die, so Bikaia can hook up with a business-savvy merchant lady, who probably enslaves him or removes him from power. And it’s all, like, an Author Tract of Susie’s capitalist philosophy. And a lot of people read the fic as being pro-women, but if you really look into it, there’s some horrifying implications? 

Top Fanfiction Tropes in the Forbidden Fantasy/Bikaia Fandom

1. Dark and edgy AU where Elise only wants to marry Bikaia to increase her social status...like...most other women during the time period (but obviously, Elise is exceptionally evil for this). She probably does lots of Edgy things to become Bikaia’s wife. She, then, either dies or makes Bikaia her brainwashed puppet; either way, Bikaia must be saved either by an OC, Nova, or Brent.

2. Probably a disturbing and very uncomfortable AU where Galacta Knight abducts Bikaia and tries to make him a sex slave or something. Bikaia probably gets saved by Brent. Accompanied by long author’s notes trying to explain how this fic with its billion lovingly inscribed sex scenes isn’t glorifying sexual violence or playing into racist tropes.

3. AU where Bikaia is in love with the ~exotic~ witch-queen of Traumwald written by an author who doesn’t understand nuance and who just really wants to bang ~exotic~ sorceress-women. She probably uses a love potion on Bikaia, but instead of this being treated very seriously and horrifically, it’s played for laughs. Isn’t it hilarious that a foreign queen forced the king of another nation to fall in love with her and abandon all his responsibilities in a quest to bang her?

4. Brentkaia. Because nothing says romance like a quick-tempered, edgelord knight constantly degrading an abuse victim and taking all the credit for said victim’s good deeds.

5. AU where Bikaia dies and Elise (and possibly Nova) is enslaved by King Adstellam. She probably gets tortured for several chapters before being saved by Brent. Because...Mace? Who is that? Elise, then, becomes Queen of Dreamland through some convoluted scheme involving lots of unresolved sexual tension.

6. AU where people create OC knights to go on quests for Bikaia because he’s busy governing and doesn’t have as much time to slay dragons as he used to. (Let’s be real; Kirby and Fluff would write these.)

7. AU where Dude-Bro Man-Guy Bikaia is a hyper masculine hero with testosterone poisoning who swoops in, saves everyone, and has a harem composed of Elise, Mace, Nova, the witch-queen, Queen Indigo (Patch Land’s queen), and possibly an ultra feminine version of Galacta Knight. He’s really obnoxious, but all the ladies love him (for some reason).

8. AU where Adstellam was actually the misunderstood hero who didn’t want to attempt genocide, lead his country to the brink of civil war, and torture people who disagreed with him, but he had no choice. Bikaia is just some snowflake who didn’t understand.

9. AU where Galacta Knight and Bikaia are forced into an arranged marriage to bring their kingdoms together. Begins with them hating one another and slowly falling in love. Elise and/or Nova probably try to tear them apart because, like, the fanfic needs a villain, right?

10. Real Person Fanfic where Alera goes back in time to meet Bikaia and receives a scathing lecture on what a poor job she’s doing. (Magolor would probably write this one)

[goodluckdetective]

Iz Explains Stuff So You Don’t Have to: The Nightwing Debacle.

Hey guys! As promised, here’s a write up of what’s currently making waves in the DC/comic fandom today. Given that this subject somewhat related to the Hydra-cap nonsense, I thought it should be something I cover as well, just to sorta give non-comics fans/DC comics readers who might see this and want some context.

1. Who is Nightwing?

You guys know Robin, Batman’s sidekick who they almost always leave out of movies? This is the first (yes there’s more than one, but that’s a topic for another day) and possibly most iconic one to pop-culture. Named Richard “Dick” Grayson, Dick is the son of the flying Grayson’s , two circus acrobats who died due to mob interference during a show (he also has Romani heritage (which the comics often ignore) This will be important later). Bruce took Dick in and the rest is well history.

Dick probably has the most screen time over any Robin in film/tv adaptations, including Teen Titans, Young Justice, The Lego Batman movie, the original Adam West series, and Batman Forever. He’s arguably the best known Robin to non-comic’s readers.

Because time does pass in comics occasionally, Dick grew up and after a series of events that have been retconned so many times it’s not worth getting into, ditched the Robin mantle. He would later take up the title of Nightwing.

2. Why the name Nightwing?

Dick is a HUGE fan of Superman (no really, Superman is pretty much his uncle) and after he ditched the Robin title, Superman and him had a talk where Superman told him of two legendary kryptonian heroes Nightwing and Flamebird. Inspired by the story, Dick would take on the name of the former (the latter name has a much more varied history).

3. Okay, so what’s the big deal besides the Robin thing?

To compress a lot of history into a paragraph, Nightwing is the one DC hero that like almost every other DC hero trusts and likes. Most of the Justice League has known Dick since he was a little kid and trust him implicitly for both his general good nature and reputation of being like, a really fucking good guy. Like a really good guy. A good enough guy that when Batman was told to let his own world die to let a better more “ideal” world survive, he asked if Richard Grayson was in it to make his choice on if it actually was a better world. (Dick was not in this world, which made Batman hard pass on that shit. Really. This is a thing that happened.)

Dick has also led multiple successful superhero teams, worked on the league himself, and donned the Batman title for awhile.

4. Okay, got it. So what’s going on?

Today DC announced a new six issue limited series in an elseworld (which is a world that takes place outside of canon. Think an AU.) This is the summary:

NIGHTWING: THE NEW ORDER is the story of a future world without “weapons”—where superpowers have been eliminated and outlawed. The man responsible? None other than Dick Grayson, a.k.a. Nightwing, now leader of a government task force called the Crusaders who are charged with hunting the remaining Supers. But when events transpire which turn the Crusaders’ aim toward Grayson’s own family, the former Boy Wonder must turn against the very system he helped create, with help from the very people he’s been hunting for years—the last metahumans of the DC Universe.

5. OH NO IS THIS HYDRA CAP ALL OVER AGAIN?

Yes and no. So far, it’s safe to say that this series does echo Hydra Cap in a paragon for good and justice becoming the figurehead of a fascist regime. However, everything else is kind of more murky.

For one, this series is an elseworld, which means unlike Hydra Cap, it doesn’t take place in the regular DC universe. This is not the fate of the Dick Grayson we know and love, nor is it him; it’s a version of him in a different universe. It’s also a limited run, so we got an enddate on this sucker off the bat.

Second, this is more general fascism instead of nazi brand fascism. The first cover echoes other fascist/oppressive regimes but it applies to multiple besides the Nazi party. In the DC universe, metahumans aren’t coded as a minority group (though smaller subsets are, like the Superfamily being coded Jewish), so it’s more sci-fi than an allegory for real life oppression (though if depending on the details of this event, that remains to be seen. The writer took to Twitter to state there is absolutely no genocide here in this book but the first few pages imply otherwise and long story short, I’m not convinced). The group Dick works with is also entirely new and unlike Hydra has no link in history to the Nazi party, making the claim that they’re a general “evil fascist villain” hold water.

Third, unlike Hydra Cap, this book is branded as Dick learning the error of his choices rather than a long saga to try to convince us he has a point. I doubt we’ll see the same extent of “we should feel bad for Dick oppressing all these people” that we see in Hydra cap. However, this also remains to be seen. Long story short, it’s never gonna try to get us to root for the bad guy.

6. So it’s fine?

Now I wouldn’t say that. Making an iconic character a fascist is still something to side eye, and a lot of my above caveats can change if the story itself decides to make those connections (i.e if there are prison camps for example). It’s also important to note, that making a Romani character a fascist, and one under the label of “crusader” is in terrible taste, considering the Romani people’s history with both.

The writer is also someone I don’t have a ton of faith in when it comes to nuance. (though to his credit, he is assuring and validating concerns on twitter rather than laughing us all off as SJWs).

What I’m saying is that it’s gonna be hard to figure out exactly this is going to play out until I see the first issue. I think the storyline and the advertising is something we should be critical of, but a lot still depends on how the book approaches it. This isn’t to say you should “give it a chance” only that we might want to hold off from saying DC is promoting fascism until we see if they’re gonna take this from a “feel bad for Dick angle, not all fascists are bad” or a “Dick fucked up hard” angle. We can just say this storyline is at the very least insensitive given current events and Dick’s ethnic roots.

Plus, Dick turning on Superman is just weird, and the preview pages are not helping my concerns.

So be critical of the concept but be careful not to declare what the narrative is trying to say until we know what the narrative is.

7. And if it does come out to be “feel bad for Dick, not all fascists, narrative supports the fascist regime for just wanting the best for us” angle?

Then go crazy guys. Though even if it does go that way, it still won’t be as Hydra cap. Because at least it’s still only a elseworld.  Which is like the worst consolation prize ever.

[rumpelsnorcack]

Fandoms and characters

First, I need to say that I know what I’m about to write is simplistic.  It’s already so long (ugh, so many words, sorry) that it seems ridiculous to say that, but I know I’m leaving out a lot of depth and nuance.  Second, I don’t mean to demonise any characters or fandoms in doing this.  It’s just something I noticed and anything I say about other characters is just there to show the differences in how they’re treated by comparison to the three I’m examining.  I have my opinions on them, sure, but those aren’t actually relevant to this.  What’s relevant is the comparison in treatment.  Third, if you haven’t watched or read these texts and don’t want spoilers for them, then … I wouldn’t read this (though I tried to keep spoilers to a minimum, there are inevitably some).  Okay, having said that, let’s look at some characters and their fandoms shall we?

I have noticed, in and around my most recent fandoms, that fandoms seem to have a tendency to hold a particular set of characters to standards that seem far higher than those applied to other characters in the same texts.  I’m at a point where it seems like it’s more than coincidental now.  I doubt that people are doing this maliciously, or are even necessarily aware that’s what they’re doing, but in my last three fandoms I’ve noticed this happening to a specific subset of characters, namely (probably) bisexual mentally ill male characters who are involved (or become involved over the course of the text) with gay characters in canon relationships.  I say ‘probably’ because two of them have never said they are bisexual but their canon relationships with more than one gender suggest that they are, and I do read them as such (though I’m aware that other people read them differently).  In the context of these comments, it’s not important what their sexualities actually are -- what’s important is that fandom responds to them in a way that suggests they read them as bisexual.  The specifics are slightly different for each one, but each has enough similarities that it’s interesting to look at.  So I’m going to examine the characters individually and then look at them in a wider context, because I don’t think it’s at all a coincidence that this particular type of character is treated the way he is.

I’ll start with the oldest character in my timeline: Peter ‘Pedro’ Donaldson (Nothing Much To Do and Lovely Little Losers -- I’m henceforth calling them ‘season one’ and ‘season two’ because typing those titles out over and over is too time consuming).  Unlike the other two characters, Peter wasn’t treated as badly by his fandom (heavy qualifier on the ‘as’ badly because he wasn’t treated well).  I feel like this is a combination of two things - first, the fandom is/was very small so there was less scope for the type of reactions I’ve seen, and second because his fandom had a stand-in in-text and so there was less ‘need’ for the fandom to police him in the same way, though they still did.  Both seasons Peter was in are based off other texts but one is a much looser translation than the other and it’s in the interpretation of that text that the issues arise.

In my opinion, Peter was explicitly made to be the the reason why a rigid set of rules was ‘needed’ in the second series (his actions are shown in so much detail and shown to be so disruptive that the flat feels the need to regulate itself; this is not true of the other characters in the same way).  Peter ‘fucked up’ (his words) so badly in the first season that the text reveled in making him atone for his ‘sins’ through all of the second.  One of his flatmates, Ben, is shown to be the ‘heart’ of the show in both seasons, and Ben is the one who makes judgements about Peter in both seasons.  In season one, he’s absolutely correct to do so (and in fact the original text this one is based on makes this clear too) - he did screw up and he deserved to be called on it.  However, the second season makes the assumption that because Ben was correct in the first season, he is automatically correct in the second, from knowing what Peter needs to be happy and reaching right down to knowing which name is best for Peter to use for himself.  This is actually a deviation from the plot of the second text’s original, and so is much more glaring as an indicator of how Peter is viewed by his canon.  Thus, Peter is shown to need protecting from himself; he needs the rules because he is incapable of regulating himself and is unhappy and in a depressive spiral because of this.  Therefore, Ben is required to look after Peter via the rules.  I won’t go into detail about the rules themselves, but it’s reasonably clear that many of them are biphobic and buy into harmful stereotypes of bisexuals (eg that they sleep around and are destructive to those around them as well as themselves).  That the rules were aimed at Peter is made explicit in the text.  One character says ‘Peter doesn’t need them anymore’ (and none of the other characters are referenced in the same way) which buys into Ben’s idea that Peter ‘needed’ them in the first place, and at the end Peter himself suggests that he’s happier now that his flatmates intervened with restrictive rules designed to make him conform.  His text, therefore, confirms that Peter is the flatmate who most needed to be fixed, and he is the one who is shown to be engaging in stereotypically ‘destructive bisexual’ behaviour.

Of the three characters in these fandoms, Peter is the only explicitly bisexual character and he is also the only one whose show ties his sexuality to his ‘problems’ and tries to fix them for him while fairly explicitly ‘taming’ him into a monogamous relationship.  Unlike the others, he isn’t explicitly mentally ill, but it is strongly suggested that he’s suffering from depression and possibly anxiety throughout much of season two.  Fandom spent a lot of time explaining why the rules were okay and not just aimed at Peter, and/or why he actually did ‘need’ them, so fandom really bought into this idea that this specific character needed to be policed, and/or justified the presence of the rules and the actions of Ben, who was centered in the show as the one who knew what he was doing and had the right idea (at least with regard to Peter; he is shown not to be as in control of his own life).  Most meta about Peter revolved around a) hoping he would not hurt his potential romantic partner (an assumption that he would because he was promiscuous was fairly endemic to the fandom) and b) policing his actions to justify why the show ‘had’ to be the way it was with regard to keeping him in line.  Some meta was targeted at the other characters, but for the most part Peter was the one who was singled out for this attention.

Second is Jack Zimmermann (omgcheckplease).  Jack is shown in his canon to have had a difficult life, putting a huge amount of pressure on himself and having had a breakdown when he was younger which came close to killing him.  He is presumed bisexual, given that he talks about ex-girlfriends as well as ex-boyfriends (and in the same way) when he discusses his past with his current boyfriend, and he canonically has anxiety severe enough to give him panic attacks and leave him shaking when pushed into stressful situations.  In contrast to Peter, Jack is treated very well by his text.  He is shown to be a complex character who has had to work hard to overcome issues he’s had with connecting to people.  He’s not shown to be an angel, but he is shown to be someone who learns from his mistakes and tries to do better, and has learned how to deal with his mental illness and live a happy and fulfilled life.  Over the course of the three years so far, Jack has come from being a ‘hockey robot’ who is a little scary to his team mates, to being someone who is much more open and connected to people.  All this is great, and he gets the boy and they live (so far) happily ever after.  

The problem, then, isn’t in the text.  There is a rich detail to his characterisation which makes him a fascinating character to read about and to discuss and explore.  And fandom loves to explore him.  This is great, as far as it goes.  However, fandom also loves to try to hold him to arbitrary standards of behaviour which it doesn’t require of the other characters.  Jack hurt Bitty at the start of year one?  According to fandom, Jack must then be a terrible person who was, and possibly still is, abusive.  However, a character who hurt Jack and is canonically ‘not good for’ him deserves ‘closure’ and understanding.  Jack almost died when he was younger and backed away from associated people while he recovered?  According to fandom, that makes Jack a terrible friend who cut off a romantic interest for no good reason.  However, when that romantic interest returns years later and leaves Jack shaking with anxiety, he deserves understanding because of his (not canon as yet) terrible past.  Jack is a hockey robot who finds it difficult to interact with people but learns and grows?  According to fandom, Jack obviously should have been a better person right from the start and deserves no recognition that he has changed for the better (and in fact is often assumed to still be that person).  However, other characters who do and say awful things and then learn from them are praised for their development and growth.

Is there meta which pushes back against this?  Sure.  But it’s worth noting that there is a need to push back.  For a comic that’s a basically happy fairy story dealing with character at its heart, this has generated a lot of disapproval of arguably its second most important character.  It’s frustrating that the (probably) bisexual, definitely mentally ill character is the one who is constantly pulled out for this attention.  More attention is called to this phenomenon when we see a presumed-gay-by-fandom character given a troubled childhood and mental illness that are not (yet?) confirmed by canon, in order to excuse any and all of his canon misbehaviours.  This character has yet to show growth and a journey, still being stuck in a situation which has stunted his growth and made him a toxic influence on the main characters’ lives, and yet this character is afforded more sympathy and understanding than the actually canonically mentally ill character who genuinely has learned and grown.  This double standard calls attention to itself.  Do I think the fandom is purposefully doing this to be dismissive and/or biphobic?  No, not at all.  But it’s there and it’s pretty glaring.

Finally there’s Even Bech Nӕsheim (Skam).  This one is freshest in my mind, because this one hit very recently (but not for the first time; this has been an ongoing issue with this character).  Even is a presumably bisexual, canonically bipolar character who is smothered in biphobic rhetoric by the fandom.  Even has made mistakes in-text, many of them appearing to do with his feelings around his mental illness and how he thinks that will affect people’s reactions to him.  He appears vulnerable and fearful when he deals with issues that arise around his illness.  While the show has never been from his PoV, we have been able to decipher a lot of his motivations both from what he’s said and done and from seeing him through the main characters’ eyes.  The text has never excused his actions; they have been shown to be hurtful to other characters and he has had to live with that and the repercussions of that.  There is some mystery as yet about all his actions, but they are being addressed in the show as it goes on, and going by past experience it seems likely that whatever consequences they have had, he will be made to feel them.  This has been true of all the characters of the show.  They have all screwed up, hurt other people and been forced to recognise their fault and make recompense in one way or another.  However, there’s only one character who is still held to impossible standards by fandom.  Yep, you guessed it - the canonically mentally ill, presumably bisexual one.

Unlike those of the other characters, this fandom is fairly explicit about its disapproval of ‘using his mental illness to excuse his actions’ and how he’s a ‘cheater’ who will always be a cheater.  The theory seems to be that explaining Even’s motivations through a prism of his illness means that all his actions are ‘justified’ (by the text and his supporters) and he’s given a ‘free pass’ when in fact, just like every other character on the show, his actions are shown to have impact and effect and he has to deal with the fallout from them (very painfully, as we are becoming aware of now).  This is never a criticism thrown at any of the other characters (except one who is also held to an impossible standard despite apologising twice for his actions, but about whom the fandom as a whole is less aggressive).  The fandom is also dismissive of Even’s illness as if it doesn’t have a huge bearing on who he is and why he acts the way he does (in some cases, headcanons and fanfiction literally erase it altogether because it’s ‘too hard’ to deal with).  

One of the mistakes Even made was that he started a new relationship while still in another one.  This is used, over and over again, as proof that he a) had affairs with multiple other people during that previous relationship and b) that he will cheat on his current partner.  I hardly need to explain why this is biphobic, because it feeds into stereotypical ideas of bisexuals as incapable of being monogamous.  However, Even breaks it off with his previous girlfriend the minute he leaves the side of his about-to-be-current boyfriend; he doesn’t hide it from her once it’s happened and he knows he’s not been exactly perfect.  This is translated by fandom to an expectation that whatever happened in his past must involve infidelity, and that he isn’t to be trusted into the future.  Other characters who are shown to be actual serial cheaters and/or womanisers who treat their sexual partners as trophies are actually lauded and loved by the fandom.  They are given a pass and smiled at as if this behaviour is expected and innocent.  The contrast is strong between how they are treated and how Even is.  Expectations for his behaviour are much higher and he ‘fails’ these arbitrary expectations so much that he is considered ‘shady’ by a significant number of the meta posts about the series.  I wasn’t around during the last season, but apparently the reaction was the same.  Then, it was possibly more understandable as his motivations didn’t become clear until near the end of the series; however now, despite knowing where his insecurities come from, Even is expected by fandom to behave in a way that would be unrealistic given what we know of his characterisation, and he’s vilified whenever he fails to meet those standards.  Like Jack, there is pushback against this, but again it has to be acknowledged that the push back is there because it’s needed, because a large part of the fandom has decided that Even is somehow terrible for acting the way he does.

This, then, is where I’m at: none of these characters is treated in exactly the same way by his text and/or fandom, and yet it’s always these characters who are chosen to bear the brunt of fandom expectations and double standards.  Why?  Biphobia is pretty endemic to our society, so it’s not that surprising that all these characters are, or can be read as, bisexual.  The narratives around all of them draw heavily on biphobic stereotypes and these are used as ‘proof’ or justification for why the character is seen the way he is by fandom. Do I approve?  Hell no, but it’s easy to see where this part is coming from.  What is more worrying is the way their mental illnesses are folded into the narratives as well.  Whether it’s used to revel in the character’s misfortunes and delight in his spiral while soaking in his tragic mental state, or used to vilify and condemn his actions, it’s alarming that these characters are not afforded much care or sympathy by their fandoms (or in some cases, texts).  It’s more alarming when other characters are given non-canon mental illnesses by fandom in order to excuse their actions or make them more appealing, but the actual canon characters with mental illnesses are scorned and often reviled.  Worse, in some cases this is spilling over into a disdain for real mentally ill people in the fandoms.  Many criticisms of Even, for example, are applied to real people if they dare to question those criticisms.

Am I reaching with this?  Yeah, I probably could be.  For starters, all of these characters also have the misfortune to be paired with a fandom darling character and so is judged more harshly if they ‘hurt’ that darling.  Poor Jack is paired up with two of these darlings (by different fandom factions), making his attacks even more sustained and aggressive.  However, it’s interesting that all of these characters have others within their texts who behave at least as badly as they do, and yet always it’s these characters who are the ones who are judged harshly by their fandoms, and sometimes even their texts.  It’s a little ... well, conveniently coincidental.  The fact that all of them are treated the way they are for very different in-text reasons just makes it more obvious.  It’s not their plots or storylines that are doing this; it’s something in the characters themselves.  And what traits do they all share?  They are all (probably) bisexual and mentally ill, and the attacks on them are always focused on at least one, and usually both, of the stereotypes around these things.  I don’t have experience with other fandoms with similar characters, but at this point I’m not sure I want to.  I feel almost certain that they would be treated similarly, and then I’d need to adopt even more characters to protect.  They tend to be what attracts me to these texts, and I’m always saddened by the way they are treated.  They, and the people who see themselves represented by them, deserve better than this

[tractionmagazine]

142. Nadim Abbas

Nadim Abbas, Chamber 664 "Kubrick”, 2014-2015. Mixed media. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist. 

Susie Pentelow interviews Hong-Kong based artist Nadim Abbas about his upcoming solo exhibition ‘Camoufleur’ at VITRINE, London. For ‘Camoufleur’, Abbas will produce a new, site-specific installation which will use camouflage to explore how urban living conditions can dictate our relationship with, and in some cases submission to, the spaces we inhabit. The installation will be accompanied by a series of scheduled performances in the space.

  You currently have a solo show at Antenna Space in Shanghai, ‘Chimera’. Could you talk a little about this work?

The starting point was the image of the human rhinovirus (serotype 14), AKA the common cold, which I constructed using various kinds of open source molecular and 3D modelling software. The title connotes both phantasmal and biological origins. The elaborate way that I have chosen to present, or project these viral images into the gallery space, using air blowers and beach balls is an attempt to maintain the ambiguous quality of an image which wavers between real and imaginary, fact and fabrication. 

Nadim Abbas, Human Rhinovirus 14, 2016. Mixed media installation. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.

The choice of the common cold virus was deliberate - as something familiar to all, to the point of banality, yet appearing at the same time completely alien. Everything else in the show is an extension of this viral metaphor. This is most blatantly played out in the two isolation chambers (with echoes of my piece at the 2015 New Museum Triennial), which contain a series of modular geometric forms that act as a playground for renegade toilet rolls.

The work ‘Blancmange, n ways’ acts as a separate counterpart with similar thematics. Here, white forms become specific manifestations of the first four iterations of the fractal Blancmange function, which derives its name from its resemblance to the famous dessert. In England of course, ‘blancmange’ also connotes a boring or uninteresting person. The photograph on the wall depicts an actual blancmange pudding, as does the pattern design on the wallpaper - setting up a visual pun of sorts.

Nadim Abbas, Blancmange, n ways, 2016. Mixed media installation. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.

Works like ‘Chamber 667’ and ‘Chamber 664 "Kubrick”’ could almost be sets from a science fiction film. Is sci-fi an influence?

Regarding the sci-fi influence - the short answer is yes! I am a big science fiction nut. I wrote a short text on this connection (between sci-fi and my work) many years ago. It was around that time that I discovered these molecular renderings of viruses, which were later to become the central motif of 'Chimera'. The text was never published, and I'm not even sure that it makes any sense. Basically, 'Chimera' was my way of materially resolving some of the concerns that were started in writing.

There are many visual parallels between my work and cinema, simply because much of what I do involves the notion of converting (lived) space into an image (memory), which is something that comes almost second nature to the cinematic process. Given the popularity of sci-fi blockbusters today, I should clarify here that I'm less interested in constructing seamless, illusory images like you might see in the latest Star Wars spin-off. Rather, I'm fascinated with finding ways of letting the inconsistencies show through, like in a low budget B-movie. In other words, there is always an element of theatre present in my approach.

Nadim Abbas, The Last Vehicle, 2016. Mixed media installation with durational performance. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist .

You are working with camouflage for this installation/body of work. How do you think this idea reflects broader themes in society?

A lot of my recent work tries to unravel how certain conditions of urban domesticity have produced specific types of sociability and subcultures. I am also fascinated by what at first glance seems like an unlikely correlation between domesticity and warfare; how technologies developed on the battlefield have found applications in quotidian contexts and vice versa. More chilling perhaps is the notion, suggested by theorists such as Paul Virilio and Beatrice Colomina, that the dream of domestic bliss is but a dormant extension of an ongoing militarised state of emergency, where the household finds its mirror in the bunker/fortress. 

It is no coincidence, for instance, that iRobot, a manufacturer of automatic vacuum cleaners, displays on its website products dedicated for the “home” side-by-side with similar technologies repurposed for “defence and security”.  Taglines such as “Welcome home. Your house is clean” are made in the same breath as “Placing a safer distance between people and danger”. Since the machinations of modern warfare destroy the very condition of human habitats, military constructions have become increasingly geared towards the possibility of inhabiting such artificial climates (e.g. the underground bunker as a refuge from nuclear fallout).  The modern household simply adapts this formula by providing increasingly artificial climates optimised for human habitation (e.g. the fully automated, air-conditioned high-rise service apartment).

Nadim Abbas, Zone I, 2014. Lightweight concrete casts, robotic vacuum cleaner, rug, skirting board, house paint. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist. 

The title “camoufleur” is borrowed from the name that was given to people who designed and implemented military camouflage during WWI/WWII.  Many of these camoufleurs were artists but there were also zoologists and naturalists such as Hugh Cott, whose book, Adaptive Coloration in Animals became a seminal text for the study and development of camouflage techniques in the military.  For the setup at VITRINE, I will design a wallpaper pattern that becomes the backdrop and point of reference for everything that is subsequently placed in the space. 

For this body of work, your focus is on the figure of the “otaku” or “hikikomori”, terms which originated in Japan. Can you explain these?

Otaku and hikikomori are (Japanese) terms that have come to represent stereotypes of socially ill-equipped, middle-aged males who wall themselves up at home in an escapist world of manga and anime consumption. Otaku generally refers to participants of a subset of cultural practices that revolve around manga and anime fandom. Hikikomori refers to the specific phenomenon of acute social withdrawal. In Chinese, otaku is often translated as “jaaknam” or “zhainan”, which literally means “resident male” (as in resident of a housing complex or tenement block), thus conflating the connotations of otaku and hikikomori. It would take a lot more explanation to unpack the respective nuances of these terms and their ongoing mutations, so I will just focus on the fact that otaku culture arose, or at least thrives, within a uniquely urban, post-industrial context. 

Nadim Abbas, The Last Vehicle, 2016. Mixed media installation with durational performance. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.

My concern then is not why otaku do what they do, but rather, what kind of space allows this to happen?  It is as if the extremely dense accumulation of cramped interior spaces that characterise so many cities today encourages a turning inward, or a vacuum of mental space itself; a vacuum that disturbs the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, or subject and object. This logic is made visible in the practice of mimicry:  picture a masked body, driven to disappear into its surroundings, to be engulfed by objects whose animation increases in proportion to its own lack of animation.

How will you respond to the position of the space on the public sphere?

The unique positioning of the VITRINE space, which stays open and visible at all hours of the day, creates an interesting set of possibilities for the public display of domesticity.  The window display, which can more easily facilitate instances of repeated daily viewing, structures an encounter that varies according to the state of each visit.  It is this durational quality that pushed me to find different ways of inhabiting the space at different points of the day/week/month.  States of habitation that when considered together start to overlap, and become harder to distinguish from one other: a performer who behaves like a machine, or a machine that is performing? 

Nadim Abbas, #4, 2016. Cosplay helmet mounted on green screen / cyclorama. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Luke Casey. 

There will also be a performance aspect to the exhibition - can you talk about your ideas for this?

The performer will be presented with a set of instructions, or perhaps a distilled script of some sort.  We will work together in advance to develop a specific body language.  I’m looking for someone with the type of movement training that would facilitate the emptying of gestures, or gestures that do not call attention to themselves, the gesture of stones.  If the objective is to perform a disappearing act, it would seem that the magician has already disappeared before the act has begun. Likely candidates might include people who are trained in physical theatre, mime, Butoh; or even life models, who like stick insects are inclined to assume the same pose for extended periods of time.

Interview by Susie Pentelow.

‘Camoufleur’ will run between 1 March and 15 April 2017 at VITRINE, London SE1 3UN, with a preview on Tuesday 28 February 2017, 6.30 – 9 pm. For more information, visit http://www.vitrinegallery.com/exhibitions/camoufleur/.

‘Chimera’ continues until 22 January 2017 at Antenna Space, Shanghai. Visit http://www.antenna-space.com/en/exhibitions/chimera for more information.

Find out more about Nadim Abbas’ work at http://www.nadimabbas.com.

[shirlleycoyle]

Taylor Swift Super Fans Are Furious About a Good Review

Taylor Swift's new album, Folklore, was released to universal acclaim from fans, non-fans, and music critics alike. But some parts of Swift's fandom are upset that music critics don't like it enough.

Pitchfork has had a long, hard road towards legitimacy as a music criticism website. I am old enough to remember a time when we clowned on them for being too earnest. Their effusive praise for Radiohead's Kid A is still hard to read without cringing, even 20 years after the fact. Over the years, Pitchfork's reputation has swung the other way, in line with its image as a "hipster" website. Artists like pop musician Halsey have bemoaned getting low scores from the outlet (a 6.5 out of 10, which caused the artist to unknowingly call for One World Trade Center to collapse), and the perception is that their taste is pretentious, generally favoring white, male, guitar-based music over everything else.

Despite all of that, Pitchfork senior editor Jillian Mapes gave Folklore a glowing review. Mapes compares Swift to the likes of Jane Eyre, and says that the album highlights her talent for storytelling in songs. 

"You can tell that this is what drives Swift by the way she molds her songs: cramming specific details into curious cadences, bending the lines to her will," Mapes wrote. Even with that praise, Pitchfork and Mapes in particular are now targets of Swift's most ardent stans. You see, she gave the album an 8.0, and fans think that this positive review was not high enough.

Although it's been a few days and the furor has died down, the replies to Pitchfork's tweet about the review are littered with demands that the website either take down the review or re-score it. 

"Folklore deserved a 10. Also personally offended by the suggestion she should have 'pruned' seven & hoax. That speaks volumes about the taste of the person writing this review, yikes," one fan wrote. 

Not every Taylor Swift fan feels this way, and some stan accounts have tried to call in their fellow fans, saying that harassing a critic is out of line. Unfortunately, the angrier fans have not calmed down, and if you search Mapes' name on Twitter, or if you search "Pitchfork Taylor Swift," you'll still find Swifties tweeting about how unfair her review was. Mapes has confirmed that her address and phone number were doxed and she has been receiving calls from upset fans, as well as death threats on Twitter and via email. Mapes locked her Twitter account right as the review went live and at time of writing has not unlocked it.

For Swifties, part of the issue is that Pitchfork's 8.0 rating lowered Folklore's score on the review aggregator website Metacritic, taking the album from a 90 to an 89. The way that Metacritic calculates their scores is an opaque science. In their FAQ, they say that it's a "weighted average" but don't provide much clarity on what that means and how different scores are weighed. The intense scrutiny of this critical consensus is similar to the fan response towards any criticism of the video game The Last of Us Part II, which saw the game's director and one of its voice actors lay into critics who had issues with the game.

Right now, this subset of Taylor Swift's fandom are acting out the worst behaviors we've come to accept as routine in video game fandom, which also has an unhealthy obsession with Metacritic scores. In their case, video game fans know that sometimes bonuses for developers are tied to Metacritic scores. In 2012, a developer from the acclaimed studio Obsidian revealed that because one of its games did not reach an 85 on Metacritic, the developers who worked on it did not receive royalties. Marketing teams at big game publishers obsess over a game's final Metacritic score. They'll invite people to play big budget games before release and "mock review" them in order to estimate a Metacritic score before release, and make final adjustments in order to increase it. 

Taylor Swift's continued success does not rely on a high Metacritic ranking. Swift is already a critically acclaimed, popular artist, and multi-millionaire whose work has dominated the charts every time she releases a new album. She is arguably one of the last standing pop stars in the way we understand the term when it was coined, the last one who can dominate our culture with brand deals and sold out stadium tours in an age where fewer people actually buy music. You don't get to that position on hype alone—Swift is a talented songwriter and singer, and music critics have acknowledged her talent even on albums that don't showcase her best work. Pitchfork gave one of her previous albums a 9.0, writing, "In a counterpoint to the musical wanderlust on display, there’s a newfound patience to Swift’s observations, a knowledge that narratives form out of brokenness and frustrated communication more often than they do out of ease or any emotional clarity." They compare her to Joni Mitchell and Pablo Neruda, describing her work with a deep sense of respect.

The issue with this behavior is less the quality of Taylor's work—which is, again, broadly good—but fans stifling any kind of conversation about art unless it is unbridled praise. We should always condemn harassment and doxing, of course, but even the threat of harassment is enough to make both critics and regular ass people pull their punches instead of being fully honest. One particular criticism of Folklore that fans have taken issue with is Mapes saying that she felt that the songs "hoax" and "seven" were filler. I think "seven" is a great song, but not everyone in the world is going to like every song. Hell, I once went to a party where someone turned off "Ride" by Ciara to put on Arcade Fire, and while I'll never understand that it's not illegal to dislike Ciara.

It's important to remember that fandom is a place of love, a community where people can lift each other up and support each other. It feels good to belong, and tweeting at randoms that Taylor Swift is good, actually, can help melancholy teens find that place of belonging. We also can't pretend that it's only young women who act this way. Toxic sports fans get into physical fights in stadium parking lots over their team, living out fandom rivalries in a violent, dangerous way. It's not hard to understand why people do this, though. Yeah, I do think it was really funny that Dodgers pitcher Joe Kelly said "nice swing, bitch," to an Astros player that he almost hit with a ball. The feeling of allegiance with Kelly, who lost to the Astros twice when they were cheating, is intoxicating. But that's also why it's so dangerous. I mean, Kelly is truly just being an asshole. Why should I cheer that on?

Maybe it's inevitable that fans will get overly invested in their fandoms. The moniker stan comes from Eminem's song "Stan," released in 2000, about his own experiences of being the subject of a toxic fandom. Little has changed in 20 years. That said, we should all be more introspective about what this obsession is serving. All I can see is a stifling of creativity, of placing an artist's popularity and commercial success far above the actual work that they do. 

That the focus is on the numerical score of Mapes' review and not her thoughtful writing is the most disheartening. Even though Mapes clearly loved Folklore, the number is the only thing the fans can see. These numerical scores breed such toxicity, and have become such a distraction from constructive and interesting criticism, many critics are stepping away from them. Here at VICE Games, for example, we don't put numerical scores on game reviews. The same is true for Kotaku, where I previously wrote reviews. Polygon stopped using numerical scores in 2018, explaining that "focusing on criticism and curation, will better serve our readers than the serviceable but ultimately limited reviews rubric that, for decades, has functioned as a load-bearing pillar of most game publications."

The value of Swift's work will only truly be known once time has passed, when people feel more free to take it seriously and discover its nuances, to highlight her strengths, and yes, to recognize her weaknesses. Stopping that conversation from happening is all but a guarantee that she will only ever be seen as a teenage craze, a flash in the pan, a pop artist with no value.

Taylor Swift Super Fans Are Furious About a Good Review syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[sasoriapologist]

Since Tumblr wanted to nerf this post from tags: I’m reposting it with the icky words all separated and stuff. :)

sorry for being mad and starting discourse on Sasori’s birthday but holy shit the Sasori liker side of this fandom is making me fucking insane. As a preface, I’m a huge advocate for letting people have fun and crack shipping. I’m also not a hardcore anti- I find myself thinking a lot of times anymore that antis have a tendency to take things too far and over police without leaving any room for interpretation, unfairly generalizing and often times seeing things too black and white and failing to realize nuance in some situations. That being said, I also think that shipping things that are outright and inarguably p3///dophi/lic, abu////sive and preda////tory is bad and should be condemned.

The issue I’m noticing is fucking rampant among the Sasori side of this fandom is y’all are doing anything and everything to avoid having ships for him that aren’t inarguably pe//doph/ilic and pr3d///atory. It’s like y’all will ship him with fucking ANYONE except people where the relationship would be at least to a degree okay.

You want to ship him with a woman? Cool, I think he’s a woman liker bisexual too. But why do y’all flock to the ship between him and a 15 year old girl who he addresses explicitly as a child instead of, I don’t know, Konan? Who is arguably even calls beautiful and worthy of being preserved as art? And is his own age? Something similar applies to the very specific subset of sasodei shippers who portray Deidara as young as possible and Sasori being attracted to Deidara while Deidara is as young as possible beyond what’s realistic for canon- you could easily portray Sasori being attracted to adult Deidara and you choose to make content s3//xualizing a very very young Deidara with him... why? If not for thinking p3//doph//ilia is cute and sexy? This is coming from an avid sasodei shipper.

And people who want him to be a pretty “smol boy” with a big hunky boyfriend- first of all, I encourage you to examine this, because a lot of the content I see for this is perpetuating harmful f3ti/sh1zed, yaoi-adjacent stereotypes and stereotypes based on appearance such as him being short or and “pretty”, and those are things that are harmful and perpetuating that has negative effects for real life communities, particularly LGBT men. Not only that, but a worrying majority of people in this category seem to want to s3/xualize him while making him look as young as possible. Which is concerning for reasons I hope I don’t have to explain. However, if you’re set in this- why do you jump to shipping him with someone he only knew as a child save for the instance of killing him? Why can’t we ship him with Kakuzu or something? Or just have your own headcanons about him and Deidara? And sure, arguments can be made about how Kakuzu and Deidara are also bad to ship with him, but those ships are where I tend to think that there’s more nuance and it’s not necessarily bad to ship even if I understand why someone would personally be uncomfortable.

And for both of these- making OCs is an option. I get he doesn’t interact with a lot of people in canon, but OC x Canon ships aren’t harmful and in my opinion, there’s a lot of unfair bias against them for absolutely no good reason. Make OCs to ship with him. That’s what I did. Or get creative with canon characters to ship with him- nothing wrong with shipping him with someone he has no interaction with but could have a potentially good dynamic with.

It’s literally like you guys will ship him with anyone else to avoid having, for lack of a more civil term, non-freak ships for him. I’m not sure what it is about Sasori specifically that attracts this extreme on both sides, I guess he just has a lot of traits that make him bait for both extremes or something, but this is getting so worrying and I know a lot of people who agree but are too afraid to say it because some of y’all will be so vicious about it. I’m trying to keep this as civil as possible. It’s getting to the point I’m coming across Naruto fans who are instantly weary of people who have Sasori as a favorite because a lot of us either romanticize and s//3xualize these really horrible things, perpetuate harmful stereotypes, or are straight up mean and elitist for no reason.

Alright, that’s my Sasori birthday rant. No, I’m not going to turn anon options on for my ask box- if you want to argue about this, do it with your name attached to it if you really stand by what you have to say about it. If you aren’t going to be civil, have the balls to do it with your own name. I doubt this is even going to reach a lot of people in opposition to this though granted I’m pretty sure I have a good majority of the people this is targeted at blocked, but still. This has been bugging me for a while and it’s been bugging a lot of the people I’m friends with for a while and I feel like someone needs to say something about it.

EDIT: adding on to this instead of making a new post so I don’t clog the Sasori tag with discourse, and because it’s related. You guys... know you don’t have to make Sasori as young as possible, right? You don’t have to portray him as physically 15. He can realistically be 18-19 physically, and he can be up into his mid to late twenties physically- his timeline is heavily up to interpretation granted how painfully inconsistent and contradictory Kishimoto was with writing it. Portraying him as a 15 year old in l3/wd situations is you choosing to portray him as a 15 year old in l3/wd situations when you do not have to. That’s weird and gross to go out of your way to headcanon him at the youngest possible physical age for him and then portray him in n///5//fw situations. If you subscribe to the timeline of him being physically 25 and portray him in those situations- knock yourself out, make him have his d1/ck out and in shit all you want, but if you subscribe to him being 15 physically and do that shit.... please fucking stop it.