#purity police

[hello-nichya-here]

[randomnoteforfuturereference]

Um... yeah...

Can we please not do this?

I could argue that there have been actual pro-Palestinian authors caught in this dragnet simply because they are either Israeli, not anti-Israel enough, or had the gall to condemn Hamas.

I could argue that this person used extremely sloppy* methodology that veers towards the farcical and would be hilarious if it didn't lead to my next point.

I could argue that, while this may claim to just be an appeal to boycott, it ultimately reeks of the same kind of mentalities that ultimately empowered Moms for Liberty and other fascistic anti-intellectual movements (including the obvious historical one) that love to ban/burn books... before moving on to people.

I could argue that it starts here and then leads to "Anyone whom I disagree with".

I could argue that, in this era of doxxing and death threats, that's it's not hard to see a logical violent conclusion to a list. I mean... Rushdie being on that list is a dark joke that writes itself.

I could argue that this would do jack shit to stop the Israeli government from slagging Gaza and oppressing the West Bank... while giving it and its allies rhetorical ammunition even though they absolutely despise the good chunk of these authors. Which goes back to the first argument.

I could argue all of that, but I suspect anyone who actually thinks this list is a good idea has already made up their mind.

So I'll just appeal to everyone else with my original plea.

*Oh, and when I mean sloppy, I mean really. Fucking. Sloppy:

[sjbattleangel]

Double D facts book: "It's perfectly fine to dislike something and criticize it. Just know that anti-fandom/hatedom isn't real political activism."

[geezerwench]

BLASPHEMY AGAINST THE LORD!

🤣

It appears the puriteens and puritypolice are oFfEnDEd by Deadpool and Wolverine,g and have decided that YOU shouldn't go see it.

But why are "christians" going to see an R rated film? 🤔

We're laughing AT you, fools.

#DeadpoolAndWolverine #MarvelJesus #MCU #christiansofinstagram #christians

[ginnvngagap]

honestly the only thought that gives me hope amidst the rise of christofascist anti-sex rhetoric in woke clothing with ThE yOuThS is remembering that back when I was 16-20 during the YouTube anti-SJW era I was firmly on the right and I managed to get educated out of that trashfire, so maybe the gen Z baby puritans can, too? please?

[strangedreamings]

Just saw a post stating that an actor needs to justify something their character is rumored to do in his show's upcoming season.

Are you fucking shitting me?

Since when does an actor need to be their character's defense lawyer?

This is the same fucked-up mentality that says authors need to spell out every bad thing their character does and why it's immoral.

Bridgerton fans, I know you're upset about the rumors but fucking hell, don't let the purity police fool you into thinking actors need to take responsibility for their characters' decisions.

[spacevixenmusic]

Source: Delicious In Dungeon [2024]

[estellamiraiauthor]

OK, so. I don’t even like Boba Fett. Haven’t ever since way before the prequels when people just liked him cause he looks cool, and the prequels making him the clone brother of every stormtrooper in the galaxy deepened my apathy further. He’s a boring character that I don’t care about and I really don’t care about further retconning him on general principle BUT… renaming his ship makes zero fucking sense because:

1. He’s a bad guy. Sure, you don’t want Luke Skywalker or whoever Star Wars fans are rooting for naming their ship something bad, but if the bad guy gives his ship a nasty name, doesn’t that if anything let people know “Hey this is bad”?

2. If Star Wars is going to pretend slavery is not a thing and has never been a thing, they probably shouldn’t have made the main character of an entire f-ing trilogy a slave?

3. Firespray is a stupid-ass name, and while I don’t think Boba Fett is a particularly great character, giving something a stupid-ass name is very OUT of what little character he has.

[hello-nichya-here]

Going into the tags for messy teen dramas I loved in the 2000s and 2010s is so depressing because 90% of the fandoms live in complete delusion of having the moral high-ground for disliking some characters/ships.

Genuinely, God help you if you watched Pretty Little Liars or Vampire Diaries as an adult and truly believed ANY of these characters was a good person.

You're not sounding like a sane, moral individual by being outraged that Elena sleeps with the creepy vampire that rapes and kills people, then shipping her with his creepy brother that enables him to do all that shit and ALSO kills people - but feels bad about it.

You're not out-smarting the writers by "calling them out for making Arya marry the teacher that stalked and groomed her" and then immediately saying she'd be better off marrying the guy that secretly took pictures and videos of her and other teenagers (including his own sisters) undressing and having sex, and then shared it with his pedo club, but didn't have sex with her until she was over 18.

All of these characters are toxic and all of their relationships are abusive. If they were real people, they'd all be in prison. If you like any of them, you don't get to lecture other fans for liking the worst of two evils instead of the slightly less terrible one. Either embrace the toxicity or go watch something else.

[randomnoteforfuturereference]

Arguably less dangerous and insidious than the book boycott list (though still of the same purity police cloth), but no less farcical and performative.

What futhers the farce into hilarity are comments that are variations of "Actually this person is fine BUT BLOCK EVERYONE ELSE" (followed by others noting that "These people are fine as well... but block everyone else").

[nando161mando]

I’m so fucking tired of the purity politics!!

[yugoslovenka]

oh my god half of my favorite tags are full of antis and i am going to go insane like stop. just stop.

i'm sorry you grew up with an ipad instead of learning how to pretend play but these characters aren’t you. they’re not there so you can learn from them, emulate them, or identify with them. sure you can do all those things, but that's not why fiction exists. that's not its purpose. that’s not a requirement

most fiction is about funky imaginary guys who aren’t anything like you are. if you had done the prequel to reading fiction or watching fiction, which is to make your dolls have a fictional meal or a wedding or a fight, you’d understand the joy of just creating imaginary scenarios without a need to identify, relate, or even understand them

like if you didn’t put your barbie or teddy bear into a fake life or death situation you never got to learn that they are FAKE and that you can’t harm something that isn't real

and as you are developing this understanding at the same time as you’re learning that it’s not okay to hurt actual living things, this is what forms the basic foundation stones of your existence in a society

but kids of the last two decades are skipping all of that foundation, so we are ending up with 14 year-olds who call you a murderer and send you death threats for doing the literary equivalent of putting the barbie in the easy bake oven like the reason we ridicule you is because you are being ridiculous

it’s like finding teenagers that don’t understand the water is wet or how gravity works, i mean we learned that fiction isn’t reality when we were five or six and then we moved on but some of you never learned it and now sound like flat-earth adults which is too absurd to even be debated

and i’m sorry your childhood was mangled like that by capitalism and humans who were supposed to tend to you properly and teach you these basics but i’m not sorry enough to listen to your constant unrelenting absurd bullshit

like we’ve all got our own issues and the fact that you never learned to play with dolls and became an asshole because of it can’t be MY responsibility, at some point you gotta get some self awareness and start to do work on yourself

[azeutreciathewicked]

Lessons from Orwell

I'd be interested to see if there is a correlation between people who have not read 1984 and people who currently goose step to condemn people for thinking thoughts they don't like or not engaging in their preferred Two Minutes Hate activity.

[ltleflrt]

can i ask - what are you thoughts on the current anti-shipping phenomenon in fandom? I've recently gotten into SPN fandom and fallen in love with your fics, but the state of the fandom puzzles me a bit.

Anti-shipping is not a SPN fandom phenomenon, and maybe it seems to be a bigger deal to you because it's a bigger fandom? Wincest and Destiel shippers have been at war since episode 04x01 aired lol...we even have derogatory names for each other: Wincels and Hellers.

(Jokes on the Wincels, because Heller is a fucking awesome name.)

(Wincestiel shippers are fandom unicorns, and they deserve love and respect.)

I've only been involved in fandom since 2011, so most of what I know about anti-shippers comes from piles and piles of posts talking about fandom history, but the gist of it is that this is not current, it is ongoing since the dawn of fandoms, we just have names for it now. Think about Spirk back in the 60s...there were lots of rabid fangirls who saw nothing romantic between them too. We just don't hear as much about them, because they lost their fandom war lol

It's just really loud right now with the rise of conservatism, fascism, and terfs. And social media amplifies all of the above.

Anyway, my thoughts on anti-shippers is that they need to grow up and mind their own business. I am a pro-shipper, which means I believe that anyone has the right to love any ship, no matter how problematic, no matter how much it squicks me out. I believe everyone should be allowed to read whatever vile smut they want, because thought crimes are not real.

Unless a real person is being hurt, have fun.

Antis claim that problematic ships and kinks hurt people, but I think it's important to understand that there's a big difference between accidental and deliberate harm. And harm mitigation is highly important in a world with 7+ billion people and 7+ billion different lived experiences.

If an anti-shipper is hurt by a ship they don't like, they need to learn how to block and filter content so they don't see it, and on the opposite side of that, the vile shippers/kinksters need to tag their nonsense so that they're not accidentally burning someone's eyes out. Which most people ARE kind enough to do. They sit around in their little ficcing circles and cackle over the evil things they're putting their blorbos through, and they put up warning signs, but the antis come barging in to bug them anyway.

In my opinion, many antis are big fucking bullies and do a lot more harm than they claim to try and prevent, and they can all go fuck themselves with something hard and sandpapery.

So uh... yeah, that's how I feel about it 😁

(okay actually I'm not done, there's a lot of anti-shipping discourse about age gaps and what counts as incest that are just... really fucking stupid, and I honestly believe that shit started out because people were grasping for straws to justify why their ship is better than the ship they don't like. unfortunately, the youngins have been soaking up that moral purity language as Objective Truth because they're little sponges. i hope they outgrow that bullshit eventually. i will forgive and forget if they leave behind their purity police badges.)

[bisexualseraphim]

Just saw someone try to cancel The Time Traveller’s Wife for being “problematic” because he meets his wife as a child sometimes.

Think that’s my sign to log off and go to bed

[nashidakyouko]

No, I do not think that liking a problematic or even evil character means you're a bad person.

I'm not condoning the character's actions—often not even in the context of the show. And certainly, I'm not approving those actions in the real world.

But it's a story. The world won't end if someone likes a character. Sometimes they are just well-written characters (obviously not all are well-written, but that's not the point of this mini-essay). Even if they are pure evil, if that is the purpose, then good! Achieved! (i.e. Lion King's Scar, Fullmetal Alchemist's King Bradley, Buffy's Glory, Avatar's Ozai, and many more) (then some characters who are not pure evil, but treated as irredeemable or just scum, i.e. She-Ra's Catra, Princess Mononoke's Eboshi, Buffy's Faith Lehane, etc.)

I can appreciate them for what they are while still not touching them with a 39-and-a-half-foot pole if they were real.

This goes double for characters that could reasonably have redemption arcs (or who have redemption [with varying degrees of success], but for half the fans it isn't ever good enough [sometimes even for me, I admit]—because apparently bad actions make a bad, unchangeable person, forever. But that's another post).

Evil exists in every world. Only shaming it when it's convenient (such as attacking fans of a thing), does very little to help any real victims.

Instead of screaming about an evil character, consider putting that energy into helping real people, real victims, and trying to stop problems (i.e. assault, genocide, misogyny, war, official/unofficial slave labor, hate groups, etc.) in whatever little ways you can. Find a good charity and donate. Give food and money to shelters and victims. Listen to their stories. Some of them might even tell you that the fiction you are so opposed to actually helped them feel less alone. Or any number of things that might have made the story cathartic for them, making it so they like the bad guy as a bad guy. Or, hey, just ignore the people who are bugging you and enjoy whatever media you want. Put your energy there instead unless the truth isn't that you don't care about victims, and you're just virtue-signalling.

*This is not about actual victims who are being upset or triggered. The only thing I have to say there is that you can go to a different media. Be safe, but don't tell OTHER POSSIBLE VICTIMS that the way they cope is inherently bad.

**ABSOLUTELY you can dislike characters or whatever. You can entirely judge them as evil and immoral. I am not saying you have to go along with every single thing. ABSOLUTELY you should not have to engage with things that you hate or make you uncomfortable or even triggered! None of this was meant to undermine any of that. I mostly just mean that everyone has their own experience AND fiction follows different rules, usually for the sake of telling a story. You do NOT have to engage or fake being comfortable. You CAN say you have issues with something. You should say! But your experience is not EVERYONE'S experience, so everyone—on both sides of this—needs to be more mindful of that.

***writing essays about the evils of characters and even how they may reflect or affect the real world is totally a different thing than screaming endlessly about it online. No problem there.