#stop defending monsters

[metaforth]

Half the time when I find out about some famous person being a horrible monster it's because I came across some random fanpost defending them. Like "John McShanks did nothing wrong, you don't understand he wasn't all that closely associated with the Puppy Pulverizing Plant™. Don't you remember all the charity work he did? All the make a wish kids he visited? Obviously he can't be a bad person. Even if he's sorta close to the Puppy Pulverizing Plant™ that doesn't really matter." And like 6,000,000 more words but all my brain can focus on is "The fucking WHAT Plant™?".

Then I google it to see wtf they were talking about and there's pictures of the PPP™ and financial statements for the PPP™ signed by John McShanks and pictures of John McShanks at the grand opening of the PPP™ and videos of him singing the praises of the PPP™ and if that one random guy didn't defend John McShanks I would never have found out what a horrible person he is.

[thousandyearphantombunker]

"We want more morally grey/flawed female characters"

You bitches can't handle APPLE WHITE!

like people keep saying "you couldn't even handle rose quartz" but this is even more pathetic to me. How can y'all make this kid into a monster?

[isthatacalzone]

it's baffling to me the lengths to which people will try to frame anyone in iwtv as being better than anyone else. everyone who says they love each other is doing it poorly. Lestat apologised to Louis on that stage and it was real and it was also a performance. Armand feels genuine remorse for not saving Claudia, claims that he couldn't prevent it but we all know he could have. Louis loved Claudia and wanted the best for her, and she was a broken doll picked up and used to soothe his guilt. Even Claudia, who did love Louis, has a specific view of everything that happened to them, to her, that made her messy, that made her angry and awful at times. why would you flatten them? why would you take away what makes these emotions real and complicated?

[moominpopzz]

Sorry guys just got full fledge body slammed with the idea of Ashe not actually making it through the Trickster leaving her body.. an AU where there was too much unbelievable strain because of the long lasting period she was possessed, the fact it was so sudden. The way her body was thrown around. The way the Trickster split parts of her open to make room for itself.

An AU where when Mark’s holding her body, rough textured from bright red scars and the faint burned in lettering of ruins, blood seeping onto his hands from her skin, from where it was ripped open to accommodate the Trickster yet it no longer resides, she’s not breathing. Her body was pushed well too far past her limit, Mark’s holding his child, but his child’s not there. She’ll never wake up again, with her mother now. Possible been with her for months - who’s to say she was somewhere still in her body the whole time? The Trickster doesn’t need an extra soul with him, all he needed from her was the girls body.

Au where the boys were fighting for the girls corpse without even knowing it. She’s still being puppeted so how should they? Where Mark starts screaming and wailing when he realizes she’s not breathing, no heartbeat to be found, her blood staining his clothes and hands and arms. She isn’t even allowed to look peaceful, body in shreds from the takeover.

They all fought so hard. They were supposed to have their friend back, Mark was supposed to have the only thing he ever fought for back. Instead they have her body. Her body but not her, they’ll never have her again.

[creative-hanyou-girl]

PJO SPOILERS!!!

Am I the only one who thinks some people are being a little harsh on Grover for "snitching" on Percy in Episode 1? I see some people saying Grover's character has been "ruined" by having him "betray" Percy and I'm just over here thinking that gaslighting your best friend for literal MONTHS on end is just as much, if not a worse betrayal then snitching on said friend in order to get them out of the danger zone immediately. Either way you look at it, Grover betrayed Percy in both versions, and honestly I think Grover's snitching was the kinder route to take; at least Percy wasn't questioning his own sanity for months, but a few hours.

And another thing too is that I'm kind of glad their friendship seems a little tense right now in the show, since I felt like in the book, Percy just sort of brushes off being literally lied to and gaslit by Grover for months. Don't get me wrong, I adore their friendship so much but it always kind of bothered me that they never really TALKED about the gaslighting period and how alone that made Percy feel to have even his best friend say everything that happened was all in his head. I don't know, I always just wanted there to be a scene where they actually talked about it and reconcile. So I'm hoping that since the show seems to be putting tension between Percy and Grover right now, that we'll hopefully get a moment of closure and reconciliation between them.

[lightofjedi]

I wish people understood that a female character being written by a dude who objectify and sexualize her is not her fault but the writter's, and that going on about the importance of not sexualizing female characters while simultaneously using said sexualization as a reason to sprout misogynistic remarks about and dehumanising sexualized female characters just shows your hypocrisy and how little you actually care about women.

[cryptidlark]

being on the outskirts of tolkien fandom is kinda fascinating because every other week someone in my orbit is reblogging a post titled “[insert female character] was NOT a selfish evil bitch and here’s why” and I’m like it literally would’ve never occurred to me to think that but okay

[catgirlxox]

I’m convinced the 280k people on r/ben10 are braindead

[wheelercurse]

"El is violent not gentle” She’s both, hope that helps!!!

[random0lover]

I hate men and their need to act like any emotional reactions you have while you’re on your period is just you being “hormonal” and “not yourself”

(Rant in tags)

[nomsfaultau]

Another mini-arc of Fault is being released. Fault is an SCP SBI AU that deals with themes of dealing with the trauma and guilt of surviving, The SCP Foundation’s system of oppression, and naturally found family. The first arc is Tommy and Tubbo-centric, focusing on the sacrifices needed to survive, and then broadens to fully introduce the rest of the Sleepy Bois, alternative morality systems, and new terrible mental health strategies. While the story does get dark, it makes the moments of love shine all the brighter. Even if humanity hates them, these monsters have each other’s backs.

Mind the tags, and enjoy.

[themyscirah]

Just saw a bunch of atrocious wonder woman takes and I hate everything

Someone google nearest bridge to jump off of im so done w this

[virginmiri99]

Local News Report - Prime Energy

I just wrote a really long investigative article on Prime

Looked into Prime energy caffeine scandal with my coworker today to try and clear up our misinformation and TLDR Canada recalled Prime energy in a group but in America the story is only being discussed. So lets discuss.

This video was a quick summary and a very good In A Nutshell; I especially liked how the expert--Leah Groppo--states how 12 and under should NOT be consuming caffeine as it's dangerous for them, which is exactly the age I teach. This article gives out a graphic that shows that Prime energy has the same caffeine levels as Monster energy (yikes!) But, there's a distinction to be made. Prime Energy is NOT Prime Hydration, AKA the drink MOST popular with kids 12 and under. What's started this witch hunt against Prime is the parents issue with not being able to distinguish the two (despite Prime Energy coming in a CAN and Prime Hydration coming in a BOTTLE). For my school, Prime Hydration is the most popular drink, and for the middle school/high school students I've seen them around with the cans (I don't teach middle/high school though, so...). As an unbiased news source I genuinely don't think the concerns are necessarily KSI or Logan's fault, they sell two different products that market themselves differently. Quote from this article--"There is a disclaimer on the back of the energy drink, in a small font size under the list of ingredients, that states the beverage is “not recommended for children under 18 years of age.” Dr. Joe Aracri, chair of pediatrics at Allegheny Health Network, said that’s not enough of a deterrent." While I do agree the warnings could be clearer, I also think it's still on the costumer to make the clear distinction between ENERGY DRINK and HYDRATION DRINK which are clearly labeled on the front of the can/bottle. This news article talks about that "lack" of distinction. It's frustrating to see these articles talk about "lack" of distinction between the two drinks, and then go and use Prime HYDRATIONS image as the front runner for their article.

Does the claimed lack of distinction in marketing cause parents to accidently buy Prime ENERGY? I can't source that claim, but I would like to think parents would see the words ENERGY DRINK and think twice before picking that one. Do these article click baiting and using the wrong image also play into misinformation? Absolutely. I learned about this because my coworker pointed it out and assumed the articles meant Prime HYDRATION--not Prime energy until we looked into it.

[pictured, two drinks in entirely different cans with different labels]

Anyway, do I think kids should consume Prime Hydration? No. I still don't believable it actually hydrates you, and I also refuse to believe its zero sugar. I always make the boys who bring it have an extra bottle of REAL WATER to drink as well.

Interestingly, Prime seems to be rare in the UK (with the amount Tommy and Molly have I didn't expect that) This article (which the above two images are from) talks about it. As an American, Prime Hydration and Prime Energy are very easily accessible here, so this is not an issue for us here.

Did I go into this report expecting to defend Logan Paul and KSI? Also no. I'm not here to revere them, but also I don't think they're trying to feed the children caffeine as some of these article are suggesting.

[spock-smokes-weed]

Idk why so many ppl want to skin Kishimoto with a rusty spoon when he has the most “just some guy energy” I’ve ever seen.

I’m all for criticizing his work but I really don’t think he’s a bad guy. I think we all take for granted the mangaka who are incredibly private people and who don’t have a Twitter.

You are grateful and thankful every day Kishimoto minds his damn business and isn’t on Twitter.

[saltpotion]

the zelda ii backstory idea had morphed once again into a LU fanfic idea bc i cannot stop brainrotting aurora and dawn’s relationship, esp in light of everything that happens with aurora pre-sleep curse

might also give lu hyrule daddy issues. stay tuned

[autistichalsin]

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.