#metafandom wank

[dreamerinsilico]

Internet's having a very "tell me you've never been a moderator for a social community of any size without telling me" sort of day, I see.

[dreamerinsilico]

Branching off from an older addition, but as... I guess, an Intermediate Old (I didn’t start engaging with online fandom at all until Elfwood was a thing, and then DeviantArt for fic) I’ve recently been deeply annoyed about newer fandom spaces insisting one warn to hell and back for everything under the sun that takes place in the canon material. 

(Several people who will see this will now nod or snort or otherwise remember me complaining about this thing on discord recently  :P)

In Hannibal fandom, “warning” for cannibalism is more tongue-in-cheek than anything else, so that’s not what I’m talking about (though there’s a recent wave of supposed Hannibal fans who are also antis who... well, let’s just not get into that).  But lately, my other foot has been in Sandman fandom, and I’m running into all these fests and discords and what have you that have extremely strict rules about how you handle any kind of vaguely intense/heavy subject matter, and I’m just like.....

LITERALLY EVERYTHING YOU’RE INSISTING NEEDS TO BE CORDONED OFF INTO NAUGHTY JAIL IS IN THE CANON.  USUALLY (show, as of s1) OR ENTIRELY (comics) GRAPHICALLY.  

And I find it incredibly idiotic and patronizing to be like “well sure everyone here has almost certainly read and/or watched The Diner Scene (24/7 in the show, I think, can’t be arsed to find the comic name right now) and not been scarred for life (or were, but on balance they liked it), but if you even allude to murder or rape or suicide you must do it in Naughty Jail.”  When the entire fucking canon is inseparable from a fucktillion different kinds of trauma... maybe adjust your expectations accordingly?

Ugh.  Anyway.  This is really just me being extremely salty, but I’m bothering to say it publicly because I’ve run into a few people my age-ish who seem to be going along with this bullshit because it feels like the thing to do, and I want them to stop and think about it for a bit. 

Warnings in general weren’t a thing in a lot of these spaces. Sometimes, people would be mad about things that were permanent like character death, but trauma followed by a happy ending just wouldn’t have made that list a lot of the time. I don’t believe romance novels were relevant. The lack of a concept of trigger warnings was. (The actual term seems to hail from the mid 00s, for example, though obviously, warnings existed prior to that.)

The biggest change was the advent of tags existing.

Technologically, they’re not a thing on the old internet, and metadata tends to just be sparser in general. Some fic archives did start to have some filtering, but it was pretty basic and varied a lot by space.

Keep in mind that for much of the 90s, the shape of a fic archive was a hard-coded html page or maaaaybe that X-Files FTP site. They looked fundamentally different from the more recent type where you upload things yourself and you can edit in a WYSIWYG interface.

I think the main driver of internet metadata is generally porn, and I don’t mean fandom. I mean commercial porn. This is likely a big driver for being able to sort anything at all by tropes. I couldn’t point you to exact moments that moved tech forward though.

[questionablygourmet]

These fucking children who come on here and make Hannibal blogs and obsess about the show and then censor Bryan Fuller’s name and talk about how he needs to die need to get off my fucking lawn.

Like on the one hand it’s funny, in a “bitch, what were YOU doing at the devil’s sacrament??” sort of way, but on the other, much larger hand it is such a blindingly incandescent display of anti brainrot it pisses me the fuck off.

[dreamerinsilico]

(semi)-Serious proposal for Sandman fandom-specific conventions of “NSFW” vs ��SFW”: Whether or not the characters are having explicit sex is far less important than whether or not Dream’s dialogue is in bold.  :P

A casual glance at your screen when you’re reading a page covered in text is usually going to slide right off without really catching onto anything specific, unless the formatting is EXTREMELY obviously dialogue-heavy (or you get very unlucky).  But it’s a lot more obvious you’re reading fanfiction instead of scholarly articles or TPS reports or something when one character’s dialogue is visually distinct from everything else on the screen.  (It’s just extra NSFW when he’s talking about penises in bold.)

(This post brought to you by, you guessed it, me reading Sandman fanfiction at work.  I save the porn for the times when I’m waiting for food at the café or out walking for exactly this reason.  No shade about people who choose to use the text convention, because it is well-founded in canon, but.... xD)

[questionablygourmet]

It was definitely a thing in the Old Days of the fandom, to the point where one post about it got so much circulation (and appropriate levels of ridicule) I encountered the post well before I’d seen the show, but apparently the new wave is just... having all the old wankfights again, albeit mostly on other platforms.

i saw this tik tok where this person was talking about the age gap between will and hannibal and how it was rather large and disturbing and i just thought...really...the AGE GAP is thing thing that bothers you the most about will and hannibal's relationship...? ok.

[dreamerinsilico]

Fellas, I think shipping the serial killer with his creator, who has absolute authority and power of life-and-death over him is kinda problematic...  It’s basically incest............ 

This is “shipping Hannigram is problematic because of the age gap”-tier wank.  I’m in awe.  Amazing. 

(To be completely clear, since this is going in the main tag: this is not an argument that people shouldn’t ship Morpheus/Corinthian because it’s Problematique (TM) for other reasons; it’s just me finding the fact that THAT’s the one the antis are apparently shrieking about incredibly fucking funny.)

[questionablygourmet]

I notice you didn’t respond to the ask because you know it’s right and you’d sound horrible to try and go against it. Try walking up to any sane person in the street and telling them why it’s perfectly normal for people to imagine their favourite characters as paedophiles and minors having sex without any kind of plot or educational purpose - simply smutty fanfic they openly get off to despite recognising that it’s wrong as they comment “I’m going to hell for loving this so much”

I didn't respond to the ask because I didn't feel like I owe a rando on the internet who won't even message me off anon the time and energy of trying to give a thoughtful and constructive response to a pile of fearmongering strawman arguments. Or an accounting of my personal Trauma Cred(TM), as if anything I could possibly say would make an anti take me seriously.

I've been on the internet too damn long not to know better, thanks.

Try walking up to someone on the street and telling them that it's normal, nay, a moral imperative! to spend one's time and energy harassing real people about how, exactly, they may or may not be fantasizing about fictional people. Use those words, because that is the crux of the issue, here.

Invoking pedophilia as a bogeyman to get people to turn their brains off and break out the pitchforks is a classic because it's effective, and because anything other than full support of whoever's doing the invoking can be turned into a new target for harassment. I didn't ignore your previous ask because it was right, I ignored it because there wasn't any indication whatsoever it was sent in good faith, and frankly, it was such a cliche it was boring.

[questionablygourmet]

Will Graham contains multitudes (and that’s a good thing)

Okay, I’ve been seeing a lot of edgelord meta takes on Will, lately*, and it’s bugging me enough as a phenomenon that I want to briefly address some common themes I’m seeing in them, and hopefully provide some food for thought as people continue to rewatch and write about the show. 

Will has indeed made a career out of his understanding of, and fascination with, violence.  He does explicitly admit to enjoying violence that he’s enacted (and sometimes the thought of violence he might enact), and a lot of his onscreen connection with Hannibal is centered on this mutual fascination and appreciation.  

However.

We are also explicitly told and shown, repeatedly, that not all violence is created equal, to Will.  That he has to juggle substantial, sometimes severe, amounts of fear along with that fascination and that understanding.  That he clearly sympathizes with the victims of violence that he considers unjust (even when they are also, themselves, perpetrators - Christopher, Abigail, Georgia, and to a lesser extent Peter).

In the pilot episode they’d barely begun to scratch the surface of what the show would become (given that Bryan Fuller literally started re-writing season 1 on the fly after seeing the pilot cuts), but this line of Hannibal’s is relevant and stays relevant: Your values and decency are present, yet shocked by your associations, appalled at your dreams

And the thing that keeps Will in the field, despite knowing it’s bad for him, that it is actively harming him, is the chance that he can save lives by doing so.  This stays true even in the Red Dragon arc: Molly is shown persuading him in exactly this way, and that’s shown for a reason.  Saving lives is still an important motivation for him.  (And yes, it is terribly romantic to watch him read Hannibal’s letter by firelight and imagine him pining, but let’s be honest - if an excuse to go see Hannibal had been enough of a motivating factor in its own right, he could have had one a hell of a lot sooner.)

The operative point, here, is that not only can Will possess and enact both honest compassion and murderous violence, without that tension between the two, what even is the plot?  The primary emotional arc of the entire show is rooted in that conflict!  

The other thing that grinds my gears as much in an ableism sense as a literary one is the attempted casting of all Will’s interactions with other humans as manipulative/false and/or callous and/or cruel, in light of his demonstrated capacity to do/be all of those things at certain times (often but not exclusively toward Hannibal).  

Mild social awkwardness and occasional standoffishness, which Will does demonstrate toward many other characters in the show, are not fundamentally sinister.  We are told and shown repeatedly that his preference is, for the most part, to be left alone.  When people disregard that, his reaction is roughly proportional to the degree of violation - think of it, perhaps, on a scale of Beverly to Freddie.  He’s a bit awkward with Beverly early on, but he recognizes that despite a few invasions of his personal space, she’s basically friendly, kind, and without much in the way of ulterior motives, and their relationship proceeds accordingly.  Freddie, meanwhile, begins their association by gaining access to a crime scene under false pretenses and then publicly calling him insane, and things predictably go downhill from there!    

Will isn’t obligated to be nice to people who are treating him poorly any more than a woman is obligated to smile for a catcaller, and on the one hand I’m always a bit boggled that a white cis dude is getting this kind of treatment from (part of) fandom, but on the other, the expectation that autistic people constantly perform social normativity Or Else sure is familiar.  

I do thoroughly appreciate the irony that my very first gripe in this fandom was with having run into a few too many depictions of Will as a poor helpless softboy uwu(TM), and now here we are at the opposite pole of the disk horse.  But seriously - nuance is a thing.  Will Graham contains multitudes, and that’s a good thing, because we wouldn’t have much of a show if he didn’t.  

*I am not intending to complain about “Dark!Will” fanfiction.  That’s its own, often very creative kettle of fish.  This post is specifically about interpretations of Will as he appears in the canon material.  

[questionablygourmet]

Hey.  Hey anon.

Here’s something autistic people have to deal with all the time: “guess what, you were rude anyway.”  You.  You were rude anyway.  Your original ask was fucking rude as fuck.

And you literally never made any point???  Just implied a question about Will being autistic and also implied that No One Should Be Saying Will’s A Stand-Up Dude, which, in fact, no one was. 

No one with any realistic understanding of the show is going to contend that Will Graham is a Good Person(TM).  He is, however 1. an autistic CHARACTER 2. an interesting CHARACTER 3. a CHARACTER with agency that autistic people (and anyone else) is allowed to fucking like.   

(I’m sorry, I couldn’t not jump onto this one.  I’m Big Mad.  I don’t care if anon “didn’t mean to be rude” no one gives me that much benefit of the doubt so why should I.)

I didn't mean to be rude so I don't get the fuck off tone. That you had a surgery is not an excuse to act like an asshole. Anyway bye.

I generally interpret it as rude when people dismiss an oppressed group I am a part of, I’m sorry if you didn’t realize you were doing that? It’s a lot harder to police ones own tone when one is in v bad physical shape, which is why I mentioned the surgery. Also as an autistic person I am often much harsher than I mean to be, which is p different from just being an asshole, something I attempt not to do as much as possible

I’m always happy to discuss things with people but you just sent me an ask that basically said “stop talking about Will being rep he’s a bad person” and that sort of upset me since I’d just been talking about how great he is as rep??? If that wasn’t what you meant I’m v sorry

[questionablygourmet]

Ahahaha RIP my inbox.

The spiteful urge to go find out exactly how many, if any, fics of the sort the people spewing cliches at me are talking about actually exist in this fandom versus the fact that I have better things to do with my time, and also don’t particularly want to skim-read a bunch of stuff I actively dislike so I can get an accurate number. 

This is what I mean by turning brains off.  At exactly no point have I indicated I have any interest whatsoever in reading smut where one or both characters are written as kids, but failing to performatively pearl-clutch when someone’s waving around the bogeyman means you are the bogeyman!

My actual smut proclivities are not exactly a state secret; I write it sometimes and I don’t bother with private bookmarks.  :P

[questionablygourmet]

Browsing through the main tag, as I sometimes do when my dashboard is being slow, I encountered a question from someone new to the show - as the question had an interesting (and actually semi-objective) answer, I spent a while mentally composing a response.  Clicked on their blog just to see if anyone else had already picked it up in the meantime, and they had a note at the top about how pro-shippers (Bryan Fuller included) should go away.

Well, I don’t tend to call myself that, and I sure as fuck don’t mess with the Twitter wank, but I’m definitely one of those incredibly nasty, unreasonable folks who think real people shouldn’t be harassed for what they write about fictional people, so alright, then.  Away I go.  No answer for you.

I at least theoretically get the idea of being a fan of a thing (especially TV shows) while thinking the showrunner(s) can go to hell, but with Hannibal it’s like... how did you even watch this all the way through, let alone like it enough to become a fan of it, and think “ah yes, I can make something Good and Pure and Unproblematic out of the Messy Murder Queers Squick Show”?????

(I mean, the answer is probably a complete lack of media literacy combined with a similar lack of self-awareness.  Still, it’s a hard thing to internalize.)

Anyway, I’m cranky that I wasted time and energy on a post I didn’t end up making, and also just... honestly a bit sad thinking about all the really interesting shit the purity wankers are cutting themselves off from.  The people who are this fandom’s institutional memory and the people who are okay with you trying to cancel Bryan Fuller over purity wank are a non-overlapping Venn Diagram.

[questionablygourmet]

Thank god someone said it. Fortunately Tumblr seems to be the least toxic platform in which people like us can express their opinion without the risk of being blocked/insulted/threatened and so on. I used to think to be in the wrong when I saw all this hate spreading around the Twitter and Tik Tok Hannibal Fandom, specifically. Which is something I can’t, for the love of me, understand. Like... can you write and draw about cannibalism and murder and manipulation only to draw the line at other problematic themes such as rape and bestiality? Don’t get me wrong. I don’t actually watch/read about these themes because... it’s not for me. And Bryan himself told in an interview that he wouldn’t bring rape into the show for a personal choice. But I agree with what he says: we can’t condemn someone only because of what they decide to talk about in fiction.

Yeah, I don’t know anything about Tiktok except from what finds its way to Tumblr, but Twitter is pretty much optimized for maximum toxicity.  I used to at least attempt to stay active there (though I’ve never particularly liked the format), but nowadays... just, no.  Wisdom may be my dump stat, but even still, I know better.

What it really comes down, to, though (as @tiggymalvern pointed out yesterday), is that there’s always going to be people looking for “acceptable” targets, and those targets are generally going to be people producing content that a critical mass of people agree is Icky.  That used to primarily be slash (and still was, when I was first getting into fandom); now that slash has broad acceptance in fandom, the focus has shifted.  

Something I’ve talked about before on other blogs (maybe here, too?  not sure) is that I would really like to re-normalize the use of Ye Olde Fandom terms “squick” and “kink tomato” (YKINMKATOK - Your Kink Is Not My Kink And That’s OK), because to me they contain/embody useful language for discussing preferences while maintaining awareness that your personal boundaries for what you enjoy or don’t enjoy in fiction don’t and shouldn’t reflect some kind of crowdsourced moral standard du jour.  And that absolutely goes in every direction - I got accused of being judgmental and “kink unfriendly” at one point because I said one specific kink wasn’t my cup of tea, and was briefly flummoxed about it because to me, it’s obvious that when I say, “this isn’t my thing,” that’s all I mean.  I certainly don’t mean “... and anyone who likes this thing is gross and bad.”  But when I thought about it for a moment, it was like, no, I totally see how, especially in the present fandom environment, someone thought I was being judgy.  (I still thought said accusation was silly and a bit rude, but having an idea of where something like that’s coming from makes it much easier to productively address.)

Re-normalizing that kind of terminology is hardly something I think would be a cure-all, but I optimistically think it might at least calm down some of the knee-jerk reactions that swimming in Twitterified fandom waters tends to encourage.

[questionablygourmet]

Not a fan over here, either.  As anyone who’s been following me for a while should know, I really enjoy the show’s nuance in terms of how it relates to and/or subverts gendered expectations and stereotypes.  The whole “male wife” fandom fad doesn’t seem to relate to that, though, so much as uncritically rolling around in attempted humor that draws on stereotypes that were worn out as early as when I was a kid.  

Actually, I think the most succinct way I can sum up my dislike of the phrase is that, much like garden variety misogynistic jokes, if you asked someone to actually, seriously explain and lay out what’s funny and relevant about it...  good luck coming up with something that doesn’t sound really fucking sexist.  

so I hesitate to say anything but I imagine I'm not the only one that has a hard time with the 'male wife' stuff? I'm married, afab nonbinary and being labeled a wife already grates my nerves so I surely have some personal baggage on the term. it's funny because the stereotypes of what wives do that intersects with hannibal?

I dunno. I don't get it. and it makes me a little queasy. I added a filter for it and I imagine like other stuff, it'll fade away but. I guess I just wanted to say my piece, air my grievance, etc.

[questionablygourmet]

I was wondering if privately you could answer what's the fic that started the discussion on Hanni's dehumanization.understand if you don't wanna answer but got me all curious.

Sorry, Anon, I’m not comfortable calling out specific fics I noped out of publicly.  That one fic I had been reading wasn’t in itself the reason I made the post; it was just the most recent example of something I’d seen a lot of.  (Any time I talk about, or reblog other people talking about, trends in fic here, it’s because the subject of discussion is something I’ve personally seen often.)

And for the record, since people frequently get upset when those discussions are critical: the problem with the “don’t like, don’t read” principle is that the things that spark such critical discussions aren’t the kind of things people typically tag for because they don’t think of them as OOC or potentially upsetting to read.  So while I can certainly understand not wanting to engage in those discussions for whatever reason, I think they have an important place in this and every fandom.

Edit:  Oh you said privately.  Ehhh I’d still rather not, sorry.  I sometimes discuss specific fics with people I already know, but even that’s almost always fic I like, and an open door policy re: dumping on specific works via PM isn’t a thing I think it’s a good idea to have either.

[dreamerinsilico]

I saw a Corintheus shipper post a long treatise against Dreamling as part of these ship wars. It was the height of comedy. Obviously, both ships are fine, as are reader inserts and whatever else people are doing, including Endless-on-Endless pseudo-incest. The block button has been my friend lately, both here and in the IWTV fandom. People would faint if they read the comics.

They REALLY would, ahahaha.

The knots people tie themselves into to try to justify telling other people they're not allowed to fantasize about specific fictional people fucking are... truly wild, especially in fandoms for darker media.

I usually find this sort of thing too funny to actually block people over, but I also don't end up seeing it much unless I go looking for it, since the people I actually follow are all fairly reasonable adults. xP

[questionablygourmet]

whats wrong with the male wife meme?

Instead of trying to paraphrase what is honestly a very simple post, I’ll just link you to the one I already reblogged/added to, here.

And it seems to have picked up steam since then.  Please note that this is something I find mildly annoying and eyeroll-inducing, not a crusade against people being hashtag problematic.