#well fuck i guess we need a system fanart tag now

[r0zeclawz]

:3

HOLY SHIT REALLY???? THANK YOU THATS SO CUTE. SHE LIKES IT A LOT

shes existed for like 2 days and already has fanart thats so funny

[scuttleboat]

There’s no cursing in The Good Place... (spoilers for season 1)

This post may contain graphic and sexual language. Most of my blog does. Sorry this is way too fucking long.

I had a thought a few weeks ago about how the “no cursing” rule is used on The Good Place, and how a benign act of “appropriateness” is actually an early sign that the characters are living in a dystopian scenario.  And how--bear with me here--this reads to me as a clear analogy for dramatic flailing of fandom groups this last two years. Now, I may not make this point in the most thorough or elegant way possible, as I feel vaguely intimidated talking about a show that has such thoughtful philosophical consideration behind it, but I’m going to give it a shot. If I flub, blame the messenger not the essence of the idea.

In season 1, Eleanor and the audience are presented with a world that is supposed heaven, specifically a “neighborhood” of the good place that is specifically curated to fit its residences (in this case, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, Jianyu, and others). Of course, we learn right away that Eleanor believes she’s there by mistake, and one of the first rules that demonstrates her “wrongness” is that she wants to curse, and can’t.

Eleanor: “Why can't I say ‘fork’?” Chidi: “If you're trying to curse, you can't here. I guess a lot of people in this neighborhood don't like it, so it's prohibited.” Eleanor: “That's bullshirt.”

The show glosses over this pretty quickly, and it’s played for laughs for the rest of the season. It very cleverly supports the show’s season 1 misdirect: any awkward or unsettling aspect of The Good Place is excused away by the audience (and by the characters) as simply being a side-effect of Eleanor’s misplacement. Of course you can’t swear in heaven!  Swearing is for bad people, and good people wouldn’t even want to hear it. So, therefore, it doesn’t exist here.

And yet, this is not just a subtle form of personal torture for Eleanor (as she is, of course, really in The Bad Place), it’s actually a pretty grotesque form of censorship on all of the characters. Notice that Chidi doesn’t say he is particularly averse to swearing. He says “I guess a lot of people in this neighborhood don’t like it.” Although not nearly as much as others, Chidi does curse a couple times in the show, himself. So, clearly, it’s not a thing he feels particular discomfort about---so why is it censored when they’re alone?  If this were truly a heavenly place customized for each soul, then Eleanor would be able to express herself and Chidi would be able to hear it, but other people who didn’t want to hear it would simply not be subjected to the cursing. 

Instead, the neighborhood completely outlaws cursing anywhere, at any time. In the s1 premise, it’s not enough for the other citizens simply to not hear the swearing, it matters if it’s even happening anywhere in their environment, whether they themselves are witness or not.  So why am I focusing on that idea, when we know the whole thing is manufactured, and the people who made up this rule did so as a lie, just to be cruel?

Because that line of thinking is so endemic to certain parts of fandom right now. Whether it’s making a story or fanart that contains content someone morally disapproves of, or whether it’s only a simple text post or meme going around, there’s thing now where people feel like content boundaries and warnings aren’t enough. It’s not enough to acknowledge that public platforms like Tumblr are unmoderated and that venturing forth to search or browse is accepting a certain amount of risk that one might run into something that makes one uncomfortable.  

[read more below the cut]

When people are campaigning that content they disapprove of--sexually, romantically, politically, morally, paternalistically--shouldn’t exist, they’re doing what the demons of The Bad Place have done to Eleanor and Chidi. They’re saying “This offends me, so it should not exist anywhere that I can know about or ever possibly visit.” Yes, that’s fic about characters who are underage having sex. Yes, that’s fic about characters having sex in a way that doesn’t fit their canon sexuality. Yes, that’s fic about violence and torture being done to characters for brutal and bigoted reasons. Yes, that’s fic about rape, assault, and abuse. Yes, that’s fic about uncomfortable, even disgusting things. Yes, it’s fic about noncon, dubcon, bad bdsm, ABO, slavery, fetishism, power differences, incest, and unrealistic depictions of drugs or sex. It’s fanart and headcanons about those things too.

These ideas, posts, fanworks, and concepts are part of fiction and literature. They’re part of fandom too, and are in fact one of the ways that fandom has pushed the edge of creative development for decades. As they said in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, “We do the weird stuff.”  Now most people in fandom don’t want to be a dick and just shove things in the face of someone who isn’t interested in consuming it--the artists and writers usually want their work to be found by people who want to consume it. So various media platforms have tools or informal conventions for negotiating shared spaces: tags and ratings on AO3, for example, serve a primary service of sorting the archive and secondary service of warning people of undesired content. On tumblr, it’s most an honor thing where people typically don’t follow blogs that post stuff they know they don’t like, and if someone is going to post something controversial they usually throw up an “FYI” at the top, or put it behind a read-more tag. Those decisions are voluntary, however, and everyone who uses a site like Tumblr is doing so with the express acknowledgement that they cannot control what others post, and may in fact browse a post with content they don’t like. For emotional, personal, or political reasons. ((Note: I’m not referring to personal targeted bullying  and harassment, which may violate the TOS of particular social media sites, and is off-topic for this discussion.))

What happens when you see that post that offends you? Well, you have three primary choices. You can engage with the OP, you can ignore it, or you can hit the “block user” or “report” options. At any given time, those various options may be what you decide to do, and that’s fine. That is, pretty much, the system working. It’s not a perfect system for sure, but it’s a reasonably functioning one on sites like Tumblr that try to accommodate the needs of millions of users. (don’t worry, fandom wont stay on tumblr and twitter forever.) AO3 has similar protections in place, with the difference being that AO3 is a far more opt-in user process: there is no personal “dashboard” or “my feed” on AO3. A person has to seek out content and utilize filters, and doing that only gets the user to the basics like title, summary, and tags. To actually SEE content, the user has to willfully click into the story.

I’m describing these processes (which most of you reading this will already know) because it’s important to keep in mind scope when we’re talking about content exposure and potential resulting damage. When you use these sites (and for the most part, the whole internet), the onus is on the user to curate their experience. On Tumblr that means blocking or blacklisting what you see, and on AO3 that means not clicking the link to a story unless you’ve read and accepted the warnings and description. On Google, it means don’t search “HS History teacher Dean takes teen Castiel in the locker room” if you don’t want to read something fitting that description. Yeah, it may offend you that it exists, but that doesn’t mean that you have to engage with it to prove that it’s harmful to you.

I’ve seen a lot of discussion this last 18 months about what people “can” or “cannot” write, draw, post, or squee about. I’ve seen it in The 100 fandom, I’ve seen it in Teen Wolf fandom, I’ve seen it in Star Wars fandom, I’ve heard about it in anime/cartoon fandom, and I’ve even seen it crop up in, OF ALL THINGS, Game of Thrones fandom.  (side note: if you complain about sexual content in fic while also posting gifs of GoT or Sense8 then I personally would like to throw a pie in your stupid face.) For some people, the answer to “I don’t like that this thing exists” seems to be to aggressively rail against it, to the point of targeting the creator, harassing them, or campaigning for websites or forums to change their rules so that XYZ offensive content does not exist. They say “I don’t care if you write it, just don’t post it where I might find it.”  The idea here is that the world around us is better without XYZ being part of our creative works or discussions, and that shunning that content and those creators makes the world (the internet) a kinder, softer, more welcoming place. 

A good place. 

A place where only good things can be. Where no one is made sad, and nothing that happens here can bring discomfort to anyone. And if you want something that’s not allowed in the good place, the righteous place, then it’s you who doesn’t belong. 

To circle back, the show The Good Place has gotten more popular this season, and I couldn’t be happier. I think it’s a fascinating examination of the ambiguity of people, as well as how mental stress can be used to torture. It’s a funny show with a lot of heart, but it’s a dark show too. And one of the darkest, subtlest things the show has ever done was reach into Eleanor’s mouth and change the words she is speaking. Not to prevent actual harm, but to make sure that other people could live in a world where things they abstractly disapproved of didn’t exist at all. For that, Eleanor was denied her basic concept of self and expression. The elimination of communication like that is such a profound violation of individuality and self that it’s almost incomprehensible that any world in which that happens could be ever perceived as a “good” place. That’s not a nice neighborhood where everyone gets along and is sheltered. That’s mind control. That’s gaslighting. That’s Hell.

There are a lot of ways to handle the struggle of content filtering, and hopefully we’ll figure out new and better ways in the future to balance the needs of artists with the needs of consumers, but one way that doesn’t work is censorship. AO3 isn’t going to change its rules to prevent content you don’t like. They know where that road ends. Tumblr might someday, but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it. And if they do, this whole network of fan culture will migrate to another site without those constraints. It’s already happened twice since I’ve been around. Purity wank is an old problem for fandom, but it used to be an attack from the outside. Now it’s coming from the inside too, probably because the community is so much bigger. So it’s time to really examine the discussions we hear, and sort out if silencing each other is really going to fix anything.