#rant brought to you by watching someone decend into slurs about Mel from Arcane

[caparrucia]

I think a line where people get confused in the euphoria of "it's just fiction! So it doesn't matter!" Is where bigotry is still bigotry.

Like, I'm not talking about fan works, per se.

Policing fan works is the dumbest, most ineffective thing in the world. And to pretend that when people talk about fandom being racist or deeply misogynistic, people immediately scapegoat into a discussion about how policing fan works is censorship and bad and awful!

But it's not fan works, really.

It's the community spaces. The words you use.

Listen, that female character you hate? She's not real. She doesn't have feelings. But every femme person in your periphery is, so everytime you go on a ran about what a "rancid bitch" she is? The misogyny is real. The character is fake but the people around you are real. Your insistence to couch your dislike in bigotry is what is suspect. You're 100% allowed to dislike things and have personal preferences! That is not up for debate! But the words you use to communicate that matter, and they betray things you've internalized.

The conversation (and frustration!) about brown and Black characters being sidelined in fandom, even in the rare cases when they're pivotal in the source material are not about any one individual person, but rather the racist undertone that permeates the space.

Fictional characters aren't real, their feelings aren't real. You can hate them or love them or sexualize them to your heart content. They're dolls!

But if you bring in your own bigotry into the game of dolls and people call you for it, don't pretend people are saying playing with dolls is itself the problem. They want to play with the dolls too! They'd just want to do so without the slurs. And the ambient bigotry implying they're neither wanted nor welcome in the space.