#reylo neg but not anti

[aniseya]

idk who needs to hear this but people are allowed to not ship reylo but ship oshamir. you do not have “ownership” over something people have just found to enjoy while something about the previous ship they did not.

[jynjackets]

they’re not reylo because osha isn’t sidelined from the narrative to support his goals. from her perspective we see how it makes complete sense why someone like her, (a dedicated, loving yet outcasted former jedi) is questioning where she belongs. Qimir may want to use her and obviously feigning kindness to get her to trust him, but he also genuinely wants a pupil that unlocks the power of the dark side. And he sees that power in osha and it’s this obsession with her that’s undeniably tempting especially for someone who hasn’t quite been given back the loyalty and devotion that she openly offers.

its “toxic” because it’s supposed to be. and we love watching these dynamics unfold because they reflect the ugly truths of human nature. we do things to feel love even if it’s in artificial forms. we incessantly give with the illogical hopes that we might receive something back. how the dark side pulls someone such as osha therefore becomes realistic. and what is more appealing than to allow yourself recognition you never had. to let your emotions be unrestrained and even be your greatest strength. what else could you do when someone finally tells you that there’s more out there for you, and can grant you unspeakable power that’s always been just out of reach

[sonic-fairyspell]

Oshamir is basically Reylo all over again if Rey went with Ren's bullshit and joined him.

Its just as bad and also somehow worse!!!

[riothegreenwitch]

Just saw Reylo being called abusive under a YouTube video of the proposal scene I’m having war flashbacks. I was there, Master Yoda, 3,000 years ago

[thenegativitypit]

The one thing I can't agree with here is the proclamation that there is no future, there is no recovering, it's not possible that there will be a point where things are better than they are now. Mostly because that's... kind of playing into the hands of the antis, isn't it?

"[Thing/person/institution] is flawed, therefore it will never be okay," is the exact message of antis. It's not meant in the same way here, I know, but people losing hope and leaving behind what they love is what bullies (because let's be real, bullies is what antis are) want.

Aside from that, this whole analysis is spot-on and heartbreaking. But there's still hope. As long as people who are kind are out there doing fandom things (even if their heads are down and their heels are dug into the muck), there's still hope.

In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn’t limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn’t happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.

Sounds awful familiar, doesn’t it?

Isabel Fall’s case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.

More specifically, she used the phrase “I sexually identify as an attack helicopter” to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.

But… well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn’t be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.

A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn’t all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.

Only… we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don’t we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.

So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but “Isabel Fall” is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.

Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.

It’s heartbreakingly familiar, isn’t it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel’s shoes, even if the outcome wasn’t so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of “the community” as a nebulous undefined entity.

There’s a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:

The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader. This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings. “[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”

A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why “proship”, once simply a word for common sense “don’t engage with what you don’t like, and don’t harass people who create it either” philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it’s an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It’s an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side’s faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.

It’s not about joy. It’s not about resonance with plot or characters. It’s about hate. It’s about finding fault. If they can’t find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.

And that’s if they even went so far as to read the work they’re critiquing. The ones they don’t bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it’s bad, it’s fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it’s unforgivable. It’s a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who “deserve it.” Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.

Isabel Fall’s story follows this so step-by-step that it’s like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.

Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection… they zeroed in on the discomfort. “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter”- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can’t even type out the words “kill” and rape", instead substituting “unalive” and “grape.” We don’t deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.

So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn’t be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.

Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; “there is a callout thread against them” is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.

So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn’t matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.

And that’s the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It’s never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group’s vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.

And that’s what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.

And that’s… fandom, anymore. That’s just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don’t make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.

Isabel Fall’s harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, “more, please.” It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.

Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It’s a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).

It’s a deeply toxic environment and I’m sad to say that Isabel Fall’s story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I’m sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don’t think we can ever go back to peaceful “for joy” engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.

[beatrixacs]

Why the fuck do I keep getting an anti-ship tag in ‘For You’ section that specifically targets MY favourite ship? So I could see people hating on it? I see that the ‘For You’ section on Tumblr is actually getting worse than ‘For You’ section on Twitter that no one asked for. Ugh.

The ‘For You’ section should reflect the tags of the posts I reblog, post or like. Instead, I am getting pile of shit I am barely interested in.

[darklinaforever]

It kills me that the nostalgia that makes part of the Star Wars fandom idealize the Jedi and refuse to see them as flawed and corrupt in their system is so powerful. Just look at the critical receptions from some viewers to The Last Jedi, and now The Acolyte. It's amazing that these idiots didn't learn from their mistakes and reproduced the same pattern of criticism on the show. Idealization of past figures due to nostalgia, therefore refusing a more nuanced or even negative treatment which is objectively true (with Luke, therefore the Jedi and again the Jedi in The Acolyte), misogyny (against any female characters present / with It matters even more if the main protagonist is therefore a woman) racist (against any character who is not white, and even worse when it comes this time to the two main protagonists of the story) and anti romance (against Reylo and Oshamir, while Wtf Anakin and Padme, Han & Leia, Hera & Kanan, Jyn & Cassian or even Revan & Bastilla from the Legend extended universe ?) on the program !

[olderthannetfic]

As a f/f I try to sit out of these talks bc the last thing i want is more awkwardly written f/f made solely out of guilt, but yeah I take issue with the rhetoric of "oh femsalsh fandom is sex negative and never has dead dove unlike m/m or m/f"

Like yes while f/f has its annoying anti groups, did we forget that most antis came from big m/f and m/m ship wars like the stars wars sequel trilogy and voltron? Drama and sex negativity is not something unique to femslash spaces.

Granted bc of the difference in scale I agree it can be harder to find those dead dove niches. Won't fault ppl for pointing out the obvious. But it is why I try and cherish the dead dove femslash writers I find bc they usually lack the safety of a major shipping fandom like the Reylos or Sheith's to help shield some potential backlash

--

[autumnslance]

Search, Tags, and Tumblr

Tumblr's search functions are notoriously weird, but there's a few common things to know about how it works in conjunction with Tagging. First things first:

-Tags are for searching but also personal blog organization as desired. This is why some folks have weird/funny personal use tags. Tags can use dashes and spaces, but not regular double quote marks ("), though single marks are fine (').

-Tag for what's in the post; adding other, unrelated tags "for visibility" is against Tumblr's TOS and gets you reported for Spam!

Example: if you make a post for your new Clive Rosfield screenshots, make sure you're only tagging terms relevant to Final Fantasy XVI and Clive Rosfield (and any personal organizing tags like "screenshots"); don't add tags like "Star Wars" and "SpongeBob", as Clive has nothing to do with those!

-Tag without censoring words! We use filters/blacklists here to avoid things we don't want to see. Can also work for words in the body of a post. There's no rules here against using "kill" or "death" or other terms defining common human experiences determined "too negative/dangerous" on other sites (stay civil to each other).

-If you do alt-spell things, it's only in the body of a post and usually when it's dislike of a fandom thing as a courtesy to those enjoyers. If I make a shipping post and say, for example, "I can't stand R3y|o", that's when I want to use weird spelling and symbols--and no common tags for that fandom! If you do use tags for organizing, keep it to things like "#anti (thing) or "#(thing) critical", again spelled correctly for others' blacklisting purposes and to keep it out of the Reylo Search and Tags so those fans can enjoy their ship without seeing negativity. Because...

-General Search pulls from Tags and Also terms found in the body of a post. If I just put "Thancred" in the Search bar at the top of the page, it'll show me any and all posts with "Thancred" in them, including 1) if the name is in the body of the post, 2) if the name is in a tag that's a sentence/includes other words, and 3) even if not tagged for Thancred.

This caused some wank a couple years back for certain fans when someone tagged a lascivious picture set with what they knew was a triggery NOTP for many...but they also put the characters' names in the post body, not realizing simply searching for either of those characters would pull it up (They also, IMO, should have put the images under a Read More to be doubly safe, for themselves and for others they knew might be upset stumbling onto said images, but the crux was not realizing how Tumblr Search worked).

-Tag Search specifically pulls from the tags; per Tumblr's info pages, the first 20 tags (out of 30 total allowed) now will show up in search. Common, consistent tags first are good for visibility. You can also Follow tags you want to keep track of; there's even a tab on your Dash for it.

-Reblogs do not show up in the searches, even with additions and new notes. However, a blacklist filter will catch tags put on the original post, even if the reblogger doesn't add it when it ends up on your Dash.

-You can also blacklist blog names/URLs. Think of it like Twitter's muting rather than a full block (though one can do that too, and should as needed).

Example: someone following Seanan McGuire doesn't like frogs, but she reblogs a lot of frogs. The follower blocked and blacklisted the blogs she often reblogs frogs from to minimize the number of frogs they see while still following a favorite author for her book info.

-If people ask you to tag a thing cuz it's a squick or full-on trigger, you can just do it, or you can politely say no; that's valid. It's up to that person then to decide if they want to blacklist or unfollow or block or what. Just be civil either and both ways.

In summary: if you're talking about bunnies cuz you took pictures at the local farm show, just write "bunnies" normally in the body and/or tags of the post, so anyone with "bunnies" blacklisted can avoid it--and folks who want to see cute pics of bunnies can find it!

Even if you use proper tags, or no tags, or only use alternate spellings in the post body to keep things out of the tags/searches, consider still using a Read More as a last line of courtesy to any followers or random folks you don't want to catch in the crossfire. Also consider hiding your blog from Search results, and/or Private posts.

Tumblr's Help Center (On Desktop browser, go to the "About" link, and then the "Resources" menu; on Mobile App, go to Account settings, General settings, scroll down to "Help" under "Account") has further info about Searches and Tagging (and everything else!), and as that info changes, it's a good idea to keep track of those page updates, as well as the @changes blog to keep track of new updates, bugs, recent fixes, and upcoming info.

[lazaefair]

I am begging white fandom to DO SOMETHING. ANYTHING.

I’ve only experienced a tiny, tiny fraction of what Stitch has experienced, and I still think about it every few days that there are malicious people out there who are still actively stalking my blog, who know where I live, and have attempted to terrorize me with that information before. And you know who gives a shit about that? No one. I still have not had anybody stand up and openly defend me in TOG fandom. Ever.

(Hell, at this point I’ll take just people doing some basic fact-checking.)

Anyway, as bad as all this feels, it’s still nothing compared to what Stitch has gone through. I tend to default to the hope that things are getting better. But it’s hard to hold on to that hope when the violent racism just keeps showing up day after day after day.

From the podcast transcript:

There are white supremacists in fandom who get away with it, because they’re, like, pretending somehow that they’re better at anti-racism than me, that they’re calling me out on behalf of, like, whatever villain stans are currently upset with me for no reason. And they get away with overt white supremacy in fandom, because they’re pro-fandom, nominally, and it’s like, I don’t want to wait around until I start doing offline events and someone decides, you know, to defend fandom they have to, like, shank me in the line at Comic-Con. People are scarily violent about it. I’ve had people suicide-bait me—I guess, that’s a terrible word, I’ve had people say I should kill myself. You know, I’ve had people wish harm on me. And it’s like, well, if anything happened to me, it’s not like you’d care. It’s not like you would go, “Oh, that sucks. They should have left Reylos alone.” There’s no point at which people will go, “Shit, I really fucked up in supporting this. I’ve made fandom such a bad place.” 

Because to them, what matters is that I would no longer be around ruining fandom for them. Forget that fans of color deserve space to be fans of color, and that means positively and negatively talking about race. Forget that we have been in fandom as long as everybody else has. Talking about racism is the real problem in fandom, and anybody who ruins fandom by bringing that to attention deserves whatever they get, you know? People are not going to listen. They’re not going to learn. 

I think that if, when I started this, people had been more aggressive in—or aggressive at all in defending me and defending my work, instead of writing it off as somebody else’s problem, or complaining about my tone, maybe things would be different. But we’re seeing just really racist radicalization in all of the different social spaces and political spaces. Like, why would queer transformative fandom be any different? 

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

uh. can confirm alligatorjesie is not a troll. she's also a furry/scalie. i um... may have previously interacted with this individual and privately disliked her 👀 really weird to see my reylo interest collide here. i'm so sorry you're arguing with her but yeah she is just one of those people who is always looking for a fight, hops on tons of posts all the time and adds garbled commentary.

i'm so sorry on behalf of all the reylos you've had to deal with this shit. "proshippers" seriously think everything is a fandom-level debate lmaoooo they're so deeply fucking unserious. prostitution actually affects women, it has nothing to do with archive of our own.

if this didn't send anon please don't publish (you can publish the text ofc if you so desire lol). thank you for your endless patience on tumblr, the things you write about matter a lot.

thank you for sharing this background information and im sorry a person like this is in your fandom that sucks. honestly i hate knowing this because for my peace of mind i had to assume it was a troll 😭 that makes it so much worse… she really went „sure jan“ (what is this, 2014?) and claimed i was making up my experience in prostitution, called me a child, and then proceeded to complain that dildo producers were negatively impacted by anti prostitution/porn legislation 😭 and that after her whole rant about how humans are sex goblins and apes prostitute themselves for food and affection 😭 sorry for all the crying emojis but im in awe that after over a decade on tumblr people still manage to shock me.

anyways who is making her pinned post into a copypasta. i cant reblog because the op of that post seems to have me blocked so i was only able to share the screenshot

[aniseya]

some of y’all need to realize that oshamir exists outside of just reylo parallels, and the arcs between the relationships are indeed different. parallels and inspiration are fine! but they are also different ships too. not “same ship different font”—because they didn’t meet the exact same way, they didn’t bond the exact same way, the characters have more uniqueness to them than just being reduced to “rey and kylo 2.0”. not everyone is saying this, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a good majority that need to take a step back and look at oshamir as characters/a pairing outside of their inspiration drawing from reylo. it gets a little tiring seeing people not understanding that while there’s compliments, there’s differences too.

[alligatorjesie]

Well that's a take.

wha- @watchingtheearthrise

Are you… defending Antis, as the name implies people who are negatively against a thing, because they’re ‘not as privileged’ as... reylos?

For fucking real?

Do you think reylos are born with silver spoons in their mouths? Do you think we have some kind of societal leg up because we like a fucking ship?

It's not because we're overwhelmingly white that's for fucking sure, because I already covered that conversation

Twice now

with charts and everything

since some people here can't fucking read.

How, God fucking bless us all, do you type all that out with zero awareness?

Can you not put 2 and 2 together to figure out why people who passionately love things have more love in their lives as a whole? Is that wisdom lost to you?

Fortune and privilege have Absofuckinglutly Nothing to do with fandom and how passionately you as a individual interact with it.

You're so fucking close, I swear to fucking God. If I had a soul you'd be crushing it.

Here you are, taking Your sweet precious time, time You'll never get back in your life, time You'll look back on unfondly because you're about to get your ass chewed straight fucking through, time out of Your day to make this post defending people who passionately hate things and how they might have it worse than someone else, unaware the reason that group might have things worse is because they Actively Choose To Hate Things And Make It Other People's Problem.

Well I don't fucking know brah, maybe when you're not a fucking needless cockwaffle to people good things are more likely to happen to you?

And you know what? Yeah. Bad things do happen to good people. But shitty things happen to shitty people more. You can live your life being a fucking asshole because you'd mad about X or Y or whatever the fuck, or you can take all that energy you were going to spend on hating something and instead pick literally anything else to put it into. You seem like you like Finnrey? Have you perhaps considered taking all that time you spent being an anti reyo and instead putting it back into your own fandom? I assure you with every ounce of blood running through my slow beating reptilian heart,

The reylos will not fucking stop you.

If you’re disadvantaged because you hate a fucking ship, that’s on you mate.

Last time I checked it takes zero effort to not be a prick to people minding their own goddamn shit in their own fucking spaces and it’s you taking time out of your day to be mindless cunt to those people who had the misfortune of noticing a canon ship as loudly broadcasted as REYLO was in the new Star Wars movies as if The Last Jedi which might as well be called ‘Reylo, the goddamn movie’ isn't a whole ass movie in this trilogy.

Rey and Ben sit in a hut and talk about their feelings in front of each other then hold hands. Did she do that with Finn? No?

Well that sucks. Go draw some fanart and fix it. Go write some fanfiction where Kylo Ren's asshole explodes through his mouth and Rey and Finn fuck on his bloodied corpse. Whatever makes you fucking happy man. Why the fuck are you in the anti reylo tag about it? The antis ain't gonna help you with this problem that's for fucking sure. We get it. You don't like Ben, but you know something? If I had any anti-Finn content- Not that I do because I'm not a fucking asshole and actually like Finn as a character quite a bit, most reylos do or else he wouldn't so regularly be featured as a predominate character in most reylo fanfictions -I wouldn't post it to the anti-Finnrey tag. You know... I'll be honest I don't see reylos posting in anti-finnrey spaces, isn't that fucking weird to you? Is that even a thing? Gimme a second.

Uhh no in fact all of the top posts are in fact anti reylos, the few reylos who do show up in the listing is me talking about how finnreys sure like to harass reylos and one other person who posted twice to the tag to comment on how they get harassed by finnreys a lot. Guys I'm fuckin' buggin' here.

No. I’m not going to consider the feelings of the group of people who this this kind of harassment is allfuckingright:

All of these posts were gathered in only 2 days after that ghost guy dropped that bombshell that he *gasps!* liked reylo.

Not to mention that absolute plethora of antis who have been harassing members of this fandom constantly and consistently for the past 7 years.

I don't know much but I feel like that takes a lot of time and effort.

Like this one who has been at it since 2016.

Or this one who has been harassing members of this fandom since 2018.

Or this one who has an alarming 260 posts dedicated to being an anti reylo, someone who I can only assume has way more fucking time on their hands than I or you or anyone else in this fandom does that's for fucking sure and has been doing this horseshit since 20motherfucking17.

Or this sock filled with crusted jizz who has been at it since 2018 and thinks it's alright to mock artist and likes to send death threats.

Real fuckin' classy.

Speaking of death threats!

I've never told anyone to go fucking die because they like a fictional ship.

That's very fucked up.

If anyone here has more time than they know what to fucking do it with it's antis who not only think it's perfectly normal to spend this amount of time and effort on something they hate but can't fucking help but insert themselves into a space they don't fucking belong in to start with.

And were the fuck do you get off?

Bitch, do you fucking think I sit on my ass 24/7 and dedicate all my increasingly little spare time to a fucking fandom? Do you think I have literally nothing better to do in my day than to dedicate it fandom shit? Goddamn do I fucking wish. Honestly in the making of this post I came to realize how little time I’m actually able to set aside for this one guilty pleasure but I can’t scroll through my own fucking tag for one single day without seeing one or two of you chucklefucks posting in a tag you don’t belong or even want to be in to ‘own the libs’ or whatever the fuck your aim here is.

Reylos come in all shapes and sizes and ages, most of us being around 20 which means the vast majority are in school AND working jobs WHILE ALSO writing fanfiction so fucking steamy it’d make a sailor blush on top of working their asses off to stay afloat in this capitalistic hellscape we all live in.

Antis who go to school and work jobs ain't fucking special mate. Do you think reylos don't do anything else all day but daydream about Ben Solo banging Rey? Bitch, we go to school just like everyone else. We got jobs like everyone else. We have families we spend our time with. We live our lives as completely and happily as we can just enjoying a ship/fandom and astoundingly we do it without being a hateful fuck to people in other fandoms, ain't that fuckin' wild?

All it takes is not interacting with the fandom you don't like.

It ain't that fucking hard.

My heart don’t fucking bleed over the anti who’s on hard times. You don’t have my fucking sympathy when you made the decision to be an asshole.

I know a lot of real people who have it a lot worse then the antis who are just mad their ship isn't fucking canon and those real people bitch a lot less.

Do you think the reylos were immune to the pandemic? Do you think we live on a fucking island far away from all the regular troubles of a normal world? We were affected by this shit too. Antis ain’t singularly suffering do to pandemic issues, we all are you daffy fuck.

Aww, you had to work during the pandemic? Well bitch, so did I. I've been working since I was 16. Some jobs I fucking hated and I left them for jobs I didn't hate so much.

Motherfucker, I work for a Dildo Company. Do you even fully understand just how busy shit got for us when lockdown started? All these horny people who were banging lots of people every week were suddenly Not and I can tell you right now they filled that void with dildos.

You've been busy the past 2 years? Congrats.

So has everyone else. The world is melting around us. Eggs cost 10 dollars a dozen. Rent in most places in the US is 1,000 dollars a month. Everything sucks and, you know, we try to make it suck a little less by not actively being assholes to strangers on the internet.

I know at least five reylos in my personal bubble who are married with children. How much goddamn time do you think they have to set aside for the hobby they love between raising kids during a pandemic while also working a full time job because we live in a world where a single person working can't afford rent, much less a house?

And wouldn't you fucking know it? They manage all of that without being absolute douche canoes to people in fandom because instead of hating shit they choose to love things.

Reylos out here doing God’s fucking work and dedicating what I can only assume is also minimal time into what is probably only one of their many hobbies while also managing to put their whole fucking pussies into the fandom they choose. These artists out here making fanfiction, fanart, metas, being betas for fic writers, commenting on fics they like, affirming fellow content creators, podcasts, merch, or doing as little as just talking about the fandom they love here on dumblr dot com in the fucking tag they belong in.

You don't need to spend money to enjoy fandom, you do understand that right? There is a plethora of way to enjoy fandom without spending a dime. You know what?

I'll show you real quick just how easy it is to be a active member of a fandom with minimal time and zero money.

This is a reylo fic by the writer secretreylotrash called 'The Trail Bride' It's a western/Oregon trail AU and the smut in it is just Top Fucking Tier.

God Fucking Bless This Author.

It's actually on my re-read list after I clear out a few other fics with shorter chapter counts.

There. Took me 2 minutes, didn't cost a fucking thing, and I've already done more good for my fandom than you being an anti has ever fucking accomplished in the past 7 years of your life.

I am hardly fucking privileged. I work hard at my job to afford the thing I have and what I have is by no fucking means ‘nice and new’. Making dicks is fulfilling work (huehue) but not the highest paying work.

I am not a stranger to flee markets and secondhand stores.

I’ve never owned a new couch.

I grow a garden in the summer to keep food costs down. I forage around my neighborhood for free food (chickweed is fucking delicious. Last year we found a puffball growing in a neighbor’s yard and made puffball parmesan with it. Ate off that for 3 days.) and free shit in people’s trashcans.

The flooring in my house is currently wood particle board because we haven't been able to afford new flooring since we moved in 2 years ago. When shit breaks around here, I fucking fix it because I can’t afford to pay someone else to do it that’s for goddamn sure. I learned from youtube how to do plumbing because when we first moved into our house there was a horrible leak the last owner just never fucking bothered to fix so now I’m also going to have to learn a little carpentry to fix the damage it did. I have 2 cars and both of them are over 20 years old and I’m the person who keeps them running because I’ve been ripped off by different mechanics in this town one too many times and now I just don’t trust anyone but myself to work on them.

I work a full time job five days a week.

Not even 9 to 5, more often 9 to 6:30/7 if your time management is shit (mine is) as once you get a pour going you’re at the whims of the Silicone Gods because fun fact about silicone; The moment you add part B into liquid silicone you got about an hour to get that shit mixed, degassed, and poured into whatever dick shaped object you got planned or else you’re going to end up with 230 ounces of quickly hardening product that will soon become so unworkable you’ll have no choice but to throw it out, and platinum grade silicone ain’t fucking cheap. Once silicone is cured, that’s it. You can’t uncure it and start again. It can get nerve racking and it takes months to figure out how to pour it right, years to learn how to pour it well.

Some of the toys we offer, just the one dildo, is 8 pounds of material or more. Wet silicone has the consistency of room temp honey, it's not easy to mix and you have to mix it fully or it won't cure correctly.

And don't get me started on that math! We offer 3 types of firmness and all three requires a different math formula, not to mention the pigment math which is entirely different and very small and precise.

You need to understand at least basic color theory to do the pigments correctly in this job. It is a physically and mentally demanding job.

Another fun fact about silicone, it will destroy your clothes. If you get so much as a drop on clothing you can just enjoy your forever stain now because that shit ain’t ever coming out. You don’t know how many shirts and pants I’ve lost to the Silicone Gods.

Clothing I have to pay for.

But despite all that, I am very dedicated to my job. If I removed all my other numerous hobbies and just focused on the job that pays for my food, house, and transportation you would be fucking shocked by how much XP I’ve banked into it.

Here, lemme show you something I’m really proud of. Now I did have to crop it because I’m not going to lie, it’s a dick, but this is my job and this is what I do. And I’m fucking good at it.

This was a commission by a customer based on this piece of delftware:

This motherfucker took me Two Whole Goddamn Days to finish. And not regular 9 to 6:30 days either, I had to stay late to finish this beautiful little fuck so in reality those two days were more like 9 to 8.

Another fun fact, the mold I was painting into was almost this same exact shade of blue. This was a very hard project but goddamnit if the work don’t speak for itself. And this toy wouldn’t look this fucking good if it wasn’t for the incredible amount of time and effort I’ve put into learning how to do this shit.

Painting silicone is hard, so hard there isn’t many other creators out there who do it because your odds of fuckups (air bubbles, delamination, whatever you painted simply not curing, etc) is astronomically high Unless you know what you’re doing.

I’ve painted so many toys. One time I painted a double ended horse dick up with galaxies all over it, it was fucking stunning. I’ve done the Arizona tea can a few times now. Some years ago I did a ‘fruit set’ where I hand painted a bunch of different toys up like pineapples, kiwi, dragon fruit, watermelons, stawberries, just a whole bunch of them and they sold out instantly. These days every orca coming out of our shop is hand painted by me personally.

And that isn’t even to fucking say shit about my other hobbies.

My first love; art. I love to draw. I’ll draw anything that involves an alligator, memes, or reylo. I’ve been drawing since I was a child and while I’m by no means the best at it, I ain’t half bad. You can tell what I’m drawing is and that’s all we can ask for. Honestly being in the reylo community has helped my art out a ton. I mean look at this improvement from just 2018 to 2022!

I know you don’t give a single fuck about reylo but this is a marked improvement over such a short period of time and I have this fandom to thank for that.

I will carry this improvement to other arts. Everything I learn at this cornerstone informs every single other skill I learn. If I didn't care about it so much I wouldn't work so hard to do better at it. Who the fuck are you to judge the media I choose to get there?

Now onto my second love; carving. I can carve anything. Bone, horn, wood, stone, glass, terricatta, ceramic, fuckit man you name it I can carve it. I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager using just the most absolute shit quality 50 dollar harbor freight flexshaft dremel that would get so fucking hot after an hour of use I had to wear mechanic gloves just to hold the hand bit. And that’s what I learned on, sitting out in a freezing garage in the dead of winter while my toes froze off and my hand burns to numb because I just wanted to put a few more hours into that fucking sweet raccoon skull I’ve been working on for the past 3 years.

And my third passion; plants.

I have so many fucking plants that most of my evenings after work are spent dealing with all these verdant assholes. Allow me to show you just the very few I have in my collection:

And this ain’t all of them. I have more outside and yet still more at work. My summer is so full of just taking care of plants that honestly it’s shocking I even find time for fandom. These adorable little fucks bring me so much joy though and the effort shows. They’re all so productive I’ve been able to make a little side money by buying cheapo bowls and pots from Goodwill, popping a few weep holes into them with the dremel, and selling them at the local farmer’s market. They’re cute as fuck yo.

I’m an avid knitter. I regularly knit on the way to and from work and give the hats and gloves away to family and friends as I finish them.

I love to braid these little glass vases that you can put a plant into and hang from your window, they’re a ton of fun to make, they reuse jars that would otherwise get thrown away, and they’re beautiful to boot.

I can sew and regularly mend mine and other people’s clothing on my machine which was a hand-me-down from my mother. She kept the nice one.

I love to cook and bake treats for everyone at work to enjoy.

I can do embroidery, needle felting, woodworking, car maintenance, house maintenance, sculpting, fictional writing, and wouldn't you fucking know it?

I can do all of these things without being a heartless fuck to other people in fandoms.

And on top of all this shit that keeps my life so full, I have a loving partner who cares about all of these interests to the point he happily feeds into them. He genuinely loves me and I genuinely love him. I spend probably the most time out of my day with him since we work and live together. Either we’re hanging out at work or on the couch after we’ve finished dinner to watch a movie or youtube or chilling in the bedroom while he reads to me as I draw on him or we have sex sex.

Mmm, the sex.

He is patient and kind and I couldn’t ask for a better person to spend my days with and I hope beyond hope I'm able to spend many more with him.

And after that, only after all of that other shit along with a few extra hobbies I just didn't feel the need to add to this already lengthy post, does reylo take a priority in my life. So little of my time and effort is even spent on this one thing that brings me such intense joy that it makes me kinda sad I don’t have more free time to dedicate to it.

I am going to judge antis and do so very openly because if you feel like antis, people who harass and threaten other people for just being in a fucking fandom, have it tough?

I fucking hope they do.

I hope their lives are long and filled to the fucking brim with distress and heartache. I have so many hobbies and interests and loves in my life that someone dedicating the fleeting time they have in this wonderful world filled with things begging to be explored and loved chooses instead to make people feel bad for enjoying romance and community and art can just go live the worst fucking lives for all the fucks I don’t give.

Maybe if they spent a little less time being hateful fucks they wouldn’t have it so tough.

Karma is a bitch you know.

Cheers.

Now get the fuck outta the tag.

[franki-lew-yo]

Is it okay if I think this can apply just as often to "critical" fandom as well?

If I may, I don't think the problem is that people who dislike stuff are always seeking it out. Like regular fandom, ppl stumble upon a take that gets them peeved and they are allowed to be peeved and angry, you know? They deserve to mingle w likeminded people, sometimes within the same fandom no less as the one they are 'hating on' (i.e. in, but mad at sometimes because the fandom's Monster High and goddamnit Monster High why do you do this to me?). As with regular fandom, people have a tendency to get carried away in their passion+ subscribe to a "works for me not for thee" mentality.

What I mean is if you hate Reylo for valid reasons and don't want Reylo near you; don't search through the Reylo tag and maybe also mute the word and block the tag like op says. I know some people don't want to call it this, but it's a trigger. Especially for emotional people, it's a simple thing that sets you off and gets you heated. You're allowed to be human once in awhile though when the time gets to you and you just have to rant about how Reylo ruined everything cuz it did. Just maybe tag it #Reylocritical instead. I agree, fandom is about enjoying things, but healthy criticism is a part of fandom too - it should be shared by fans as well as 'detractors. Making a tag for people to just vent I think is fine and away from the good-faith actors who you know did nothing wrong but you can still dislike the thing they like.

Meanwhile, if someone comes up to you in the #critical tag and berates you about how you're abusing them for hating their thing even though you're doing so away from them and giving them their space...that's on them. Just like you -potential I guess 'anti'?? fan or whatever who's reading this- if you aren't going up and being a controlling abusive jerk abt your opinion as the one true take, you shouldn't be judged as that kind of person either or accused of 'abuse' w you meerly didn't like a thing they liked.

Sorry op and the people in the comments+ if this reblog itself was argumentative. I can always just repost this as a separate thing, not a reblog. I do subscribe to this belief I just also think it works in both ways. As a very emotional person, knowing and avoiding tags matters so goddamn much to me. I try to use it as much as I can. Also why I try to tag everything that's more of a negative review with 'critical','discourse', ect.

Modern fandom went awry when people stopped learning how to avoid content that upsets them and instead starting actively seeking it out.

I mean this in the kindest, most loving way possible, but babes you'll be so much happy when you stop focusing on what other people are doing and instead focus on what you like.

You'll never be able to stop people from liking what you hate, and the best way you'll find any peace of mind is properly utilizing blocking, blacklisting, and muting tools. Take it from someone who used to run a shipping discourse blog, fandom is supposed to be what you enjoy, stop focusing on things that upset you.

[nova-rogue]

has this website matured enough yet to acknowledge that most anti-reylo posts were just blatant ageist misogyny toward a largely made-up demographic of "cishet white women in their 30s"

bc every vitriolic post that circulated ridiculing reylo shippers was like "ew these 30 year old women who like this m/f ship need to get out of fandom"

and also that you can't claim to have shed purity culture if you still have a negative reaction along the lines of "reylo is bad ):" and how hypocritical it is to say that if you've reblogged posts about how you love it when fictional ships genuinely try to kill each other. bc your reylo criticism is still steeped in puritanical thought

and that "most" reylos being "30 something year old white cishet women" is something people made up in order to make shippers sound bad when in reality the ship had a massively diverse community of many queer and poc folks of multiple ages

or are we just gonna pretend you can still behave/think that way while acting progressive and anti-purity culture about every other topic

[darklinaforever]

Okay friends, little announcement.

I think I need a break from tumblr for a little while. Maybe a week or two at least. Maybe even more. Who knows maybe even until the beginning of June, being busy with a move and lots of other things in mind.

I will continue to like and reblog certain posts, obviously. But I will no longer publish anything of my own containing opinions or analyzes during this period. And I will not respond to any comments under my posts during this period either, even if I will continue to maintain conversations that I have here on this application in private messages.

I need to learn to distance myself a little from all this negativity in order to learn to resist this toxic impulse to engage in discussions that lead nowhere with antis, whether it's Dameyra, Team Blacks, Darklina, Elriel (anti Elriel are really unbearable for some), Zutara, Kylo Ren / Ben Solo, Reylo, Sessrin, Sylki, and many more !

I know I need to stop responding to things like this, as many have already told me. The worst part is that I don't even respond to everything. I've lost count of the number of times I've used the block button. But the fact is that it's obviously not enough and I'm not doing it enough. I'm obviously responding to too many negative things already. By the way, thank you for your messages on this subject, even if I did not respond to them. It is imperative, even if only for the space of my community.

It became so unbearable that a subscriber told me to leave and I finally realize that I have reached a stage that requires change.

Again for the community, but also for my own mental health. Especially because I already have a complicated life outside of tumblr and adding more to it wouldn't be good. This place is supposed to allow me to escape, not cause me more anxiety.

But I think that for this, to succeed in finally stopping needlessly engaging in pointless debates that hurt some of my subscribers who like my basic content, and for my own person, I have to do it. I need to distance myself from this app for a while ; In order to come back more stronger and finally hope to be able to ignore these kinds of horrible people who pollute our fandom.

Because by giving them importance, I myself am polluting our fandom and our beloved space, and that is not a good thing.

I want to reassure and repeat that I am not leaving tumblr, I am just stopping personal posts for the moment and will resume them when I am ready.

No need to worry about that, the antis won't get the better of me with all their demands that I leave tumblr. It will not arrive.

Please note that this decision will officially take effect from tomorrow.

I love you all very much, you who have supported me all this time behind your screens. And thank you again for your messages of encouragement.

We'll see each other again soon, and I hope with a better perspective.

@aleksanderscult @kittenfangirl20 @nrilliree @lizzie-queenofmeigas @forevermore05 @darkcrowprincess