#yeah I know it's because I cultivated my online experience and live in a liberal area

[opossumly-cryptic]

I feel so fucking powerless and sick

[dylanobrienisbatman]

Omg give us ur rant abt hating d*rklina as a ship.. im petty

Okay Anon, so i saw this the other day and I wasn't in the right headspace to answer but i am now!

So to start off, I am firmly in the ship and let ship category. You like a ship, i don't care. That doesn't mean i won't rag on the ship itself but I don't send hate, I don't really engage with shippers from ships I don't like, and I am liberal with the block button and the blacklist feature. Cultivate your tumblr/online experience, y'all. You don't owe anyone on this hellsite (or any other) a damn thing.

However, I REALLY do hate d*rklina as a ship, and I have a big problem with the way the shippers talk about it, so I hope you were being serious about wanting a rant because here it goes.

As for the ship itself, i feel like the reasons I dislike it are pretty obvious and standard. It's abusive. He is her abuser. He manipulates her. He spends months grooming her and gaslighting her, intentionally trying to get her under his control so that when he literally enslaves her it will go over easier. He never actually loved her, he wanted to use her for her power. It's not complicated, it's not really 'up for debate', that is the way its written, and the author has explained that that was the intended interpretation of her work. I mean he literally sexually assaults her in the second book, and straight up tells her he's going to kill everyone she loves so that she has no choice but to fall to him because she is completely alone in the world. He threatens to skin her alive in the second book when they're on the boat, he has no problem torturing her to get Mal to do what he wants. That's not love. He does not love her. It's pretty black and white, its explicitly written as an abusive relationship. The point was to show how easily powerful men can manipulate and abuse young naive women who don't know any better and try to see the best in people. Alina 'fell' for the version of Darkles Sparkles that he intentionally created to try to control her. Nothing he told her was true, from his backstory, to them both being 'the only one like [each other]' (hello, baghra), to using Genya to convince Alina that Mal had abandoned her, everything he did was manipulation so that he could get her under his control. It is not a romance, it is not 'a ship war', d*rklina is not written as romantic. He is her abuser. Full stop.

There is also the point about him being just a generally horrible person all around. He's not morally grey. He just isn't. He sold an 11 year old into sex slavery, forced her to stay in that situation so he could use her, and then mutilated her when she defied him. He also groomed and abused Zoya, because he saw that she was exceptionally powerful and wanted to use her the way he wanted to use Alina. He enslaved Alina. He blinded and mutilated his own mother. He is a genocidal maniac. He shows no remorse, he doesn't care about anyone but himself and his own power. He is not the type of character that should be romantically shipped with anyone. If you like him, that's absolutely fine! One of my fave characters ever is Kai Parker from TVD. Dude was a straight up psychopath. He tried to kill multiple pairs of toddlers. He brutally murdered his pregnant sister AT HER WEDDING. He is a HORRIBLE person. But I think he's a brilliant character. But do I think he's a good guy, do I want him anywhere near any characters in that show in a romantic way (ehem b*nkai)? Absolutely fucking not. Being a fan of a villain character is fine, but fucking own that shit. Villains can be SUCH good characters, but they're still villains. Erasing the bad they've done so you can justify putting them in situations where they WILL harm the people around them because you can't level with yourself about the bad things they've done doesn't make you 'woke', it just makes you look like you don't understand the media you're consuming.

Which leads me to why I have such a problem with the way D*rklina shippers engage with the ship. They simultaneously wanna say "oh we know it's toxic/bad/abusive/etc., that's why we like it!" and then also they try to claim that it should be endgame, they romanticize scenes where he is abusing her (and by romanticize I mean they literally try to frame his abuse as romantic, not like "oh yeah my ship is interacting!!". those are different things. You can be excited about ship interactions without trying to say that things he is doing to her are actually romantic), they try to argue that he is morally grey/misunderstood/etc., and they straight up try to lie and say he's not her abuser.

If you wanna ship an abusive ship, own it. Be straight up about why you like it. It's okay to be into dark shit, y'all. It does NOT make you a bad person to be into dark shit. But this idea that fiction doesn't impact real life, and that people can't call the ship out for what it is is a problem is a very troubling trend in fandom. Nobody is saying you can't ship it, do what you want. But this idea that these people are 'oppressed' because fans of the show/book continue to point out the facts about the way the story was written and how the relationship is actually presented is fucking insane. Someone saying that D*rklina is abusive is not calling you out, they are stating a fact. It's the story as it was presented. You trying to say it's not makes it look like you have no reading comprehension. And this idea that 'well i'll be on the lookout for evil shadow wizards in real life lol' is such horse shit too. His shadow wizard powers aren't the issue. He is a powerful man who grooms and abuses young women. You're telling me you lived through the Me Too movement and you wanna act like thats not a real threat that young women face every day? You're telling me that you can't see that the actual real life connection you're supposed to be making here? Okay, well you should maybe deal with that and come back to me, because that's an issue.

Fiction is meant to teach us lessons. Darkles is meant to teach us something. He is meant to show us that sometimes, powerful men lie to, manipulate, groom, and abuse young women, and we should be aware of that. The story is about a young woman who is sucked into an abusive situation, and then she breaks free and in the end she is able to defeat her abuser. That is a really powerful story, and one that millions of real life women can relate too. To pretend that that story doesn't have real life connections makes you look insensitive and frankly, kind of cruel.

So basically, in the end, my biggest issue is that D*rklina shippers love to spout this nonsense about 'knowing' it's bad and that he's a villain, and 'that's why they like him', and then turn around and try to say that he's not actually the villain, he's not actually bad, and the things he does to Alina that are abuse are actually romantic and sweet. You wanna ship an abusive ship, you do you, but lets not pretend it's anything other than what it is, but romanticizing and normalizing abuse tactics so you can feel, what? morally superior? Cool? edgy and different? That has real life impacts. You are normalizing abuse. Real people will engage with that rhetoric, and it will make it difficult for them to see abuse when it happens to them or the people around them because they believe its romantic or normal to be treated that way.

You wanna be a villain stan? You wanna ship dark ships? Good on ya, but fucking own your shit, y'all.

[cuntess-carmilla]

I'm sorry, but as someone who belongs to and participates in an actual subculture, I can't take (Western?) fandom seriously.

I'm not saying alt subcultures are perfect by any means. I'm a goth and I could write and maybe have written whole essays on the bullshit within it, but even with all the racism, misogyny, performative liberalism and such (which are also present in fandom lol), there's just no comparison.

Alternative subcultures, as Problematic as they can be, are ALL about creating something new. I mean, not NEW new, we all come from somewhere, take inspiration, goth came directly from British punk, and pretty much none of the alt subcultures that were started since the 20th century would exist without Black culture, BUT... Guys, the goth subculture equivalent of fanfiction is a song cover.

Sure, lots of goth bands have released covers in order to get popular. Bauhaus themselves did it and they're one of the OG bands, but unless you're a tribute band (which literally only get as famous as they're able to be exact copies of the band they're imitating), no band considers themselves a real band if they haven't at least written original songs, most don't feel like a real one until they release studio recordings or play some live shows. Even those covers they make to get their names around get the eye roll if they don't add anything new and genuinely theirs to it.

Goths who're not musicians ourselves, first of all, don't think we're on Monica Richards' or Peter Murphy's level just because we sing THEIR songs half decently in the shower, like fanfic freaks (normal people who do fanfic excempt) who think their poorly written multichapter slowburn copycat romance is on the same level as Dante's Inferno or Paradise Lost.

Second, even if we're not musicians, we expect of each other to do something. Something original. I mean, people whose LOOKS are carbon copies of some other goth, famous or not, get eye rolled too, you know? This past decade things were a little different in that regard thanks to posers and Capitalism™, but other than that, we actually take offense when someone else copies the individual elements OF OUR FUCKING LOOKS that we cultivated to differentiate ourselves from other goths.

That's why DIY is so big in our subculture, why most of us practice SOME sort of creative hobby (music, writing, painting, clothes making, DJing, design, sculpting, etc) even if we suck at them. At least we try to do something that is completely ours rather than just redrawing a Victoria Francés illustration, changing the color of a dress, and publishing it as ours.

Shit, even our "elders" have no comparison. Fandom "elders" are rarely older than in their 40s, and most of the time they're fucking creeps who dedicate their lives to fictional characters decades younger than them and interact with younger fans in very inappropriate ways. There's asshole elder goths too, but our subculture generates so much genuine personal passion and sense of community, that we don't even consider it a YOUTH subculture anymore.

Our elders are ACTUALLY old. I'm talking people who were there since it started in the late 70s/early 80s as teens or early 20-somethings and are STILL goths. There's goths in their 60s nearing their 70s. And the reason we look up to them isn't just that they're weirdo predatory adults who intimidate or groom us into worshipping them. We look up to them because they've gathered knowledge through up to 4 decades of experience. They saw Bauhaus live before they broke up, they were in a tiny local band that opened for a bigger iconic one so they met them PERSONALLY, they keep relics from decades past, they witnessed our history.

Most importantly, they fought tooth and nail for our subculture to keep thriving not by being self-entitled weirdos pressuring others into validating their everything online, but by archiving ancient zines, keeping recordings of obscure bands who only played one live show before disbanding, passing on their knowledge to younger goths in person or online. They put their own money not into the pockets of big media corporations that don't need to make more billions than they already make, but into the pockets of struggling artists, bars, nightclubs, independent fashion designers, and their communities as a whole. That's why we respect them.

And ykw? I think that's the reason most fandom weirdos don't stick to fandoms for a long time, except for a few who cling to one or two but keep the rest rotating, and why most fandom "elders" aren't older than 40.

A show or movie series ends at some point and most creatives don't stretch them for decades on. Obviously they try to milk them as much as they can but if a story ended then it's over and there's only so much of the same repetitive fanfiction you can consume before you burn out and have nothing left to get your hands on. There's no community, yet you identify with a piece of media at the same level as you do your idk, college majors, star sign and shit.

You don't see me identifying as a Requiem in White fan on my description, I identify as a goth because I'm identifying with a history, a community I've interacted with in person, an ever growing body of new and old art and music, and wear my personal version of the uniform which I didn't buy ready to wear, but is the result of an effort of slowly building a wardrobe since 2007, that I've had to experiment with, play with, and each have their own personal stories attached to it. I mean, I remember EXACTLY what I was wearing when some Evangelical ladies sprinkled holy water on me in early 2008 and I still own those clothes, jewelry and shoes lol.

Fandom identity is, to me, only based on capitalist consumerism as identity and yeah, capitalism has clawed at my subculture especially during the 2010s, but it exists outside of that and it's so much more than buying shit, over-streaming songs to inflate an artist's performance, or taking something someone else created, slapping one sticker on it and calling it ours. My subculture can ACTUALLY politically organize, as can others (punk most notably), you know? Including organizing in rejection to the capitalist fast fashion that almost wrecked us this past decade.

All subcultures have some level of ideology attached to them (for better or for worse, sadly), and it's ideology most of us are passionate about. Goths have always been notorious for androgyny, and all forms of gender defiance are normalized and encouraged. A lot of us pay our respects to our punk roots of anti-capitalism. We don't believe in forced unhealthy positivity, we're less afraid of taboos, we appreciate eccentricity and oddity many times as an active choice against established norms, we find solace and home in what general society finds creepy or threatening...

What similar thing does fandom have beyond campaigning for Johnlock to hold hands or going to pride with some creepy yaoi sign? You guys aren't even good at fighting real bigotry within your spaces unless you're personally affected by them.

It's laughable tbh. I can't take fandom seriously at all, and I don't get how so many people can treat something so empty as if it was sacred.

[kinosternon]

(CW: abstract discussions of abuse, several heaping spoonfuls of new-adult angst. Also, length—this is like 2,000 words lol)

This particular story, such as it is, starts with me chatting with a very close friend of mine over Skype, and looking through my email at the same time. (Me and this friend are the type of close where we Skype once a week and they play video games or code while I browse the Internet and watch whatever they’re up to, so a certain amount of multitasking is par for the course.) I’m a big fan of StoryBundle and related stuff, so when I came across their Write Stuff 2017 bundle (https://storybundle.com/writing), I remember that I’d bought a similar bundle of theirs last year, and went to check it out.

It actually wasn’t the first time I’d looked it over. I’ve been trying to give up writing for the past several months, and been through a similar cycle several times: get fed up with the pressure of writing, decide to give up on writing altogether, feel a lot better, start thinking about writing again—without so much as opening a document or a notebook. Reading the descriptions for the bundle got me thinking about the whole pattern, and I said out loud to my friend, “Reading about writing feels like looking through an ex’s Facebook.”

Then I stopped and thought about what I’d said, because it did. That was exactly what it felt like. So I started to wonder why.

~

As a white, male, able-bodied 20-something in the United States who attended a liberal arts college and tries to be at least politically aware, if not politically active, I find the narrative of abuse survival to be one that’s ineffectual to apply to myself. Have I been in some shitty situations with people? 

…Yeah. I have. 

Have I caused some shitty situations? Without a shadow of a doubt, though I’m pretty hopeful about the idea that I’ve never been outright abusive. Certainly I’ve never been so intentionally, but intention can only get a person so far.  

I struggled for a long time with the idea that I may have experienced abusive situations in my childhood and beyond, and now I’m more or less at peace with the idea that abuse is a narrative that I don’t feel comfortable applying to my life experiences so far. I heard a lot about abuse growing up—which is good, it’s absolutely vital to spread that knowledge—but not a lot about what to do and how to go forward when a relationship is just shit, and that left me stuck for a while. It really wasn’t fun.

Still, eventually, I figured out an answer to the latter question I’m comfortable with. I don’t need to be able to prove, to myself or anyone else, that a relationship is abusive for me to want to leave it. I think more people out there need to remember that, especially because the myth of needing proof is often used by abusers themselves.

To believe and be properly sympathetic to people who had undergone abuse, I had to understand that their concerns were not my concerns—that I am not, in my head, part of the “survivors of abuse” identity group. Anything else was harmful to me, and both disrespectful and detrimental to the people I might encounter during my attempts to be a good ally.

Abuse, at the moment, isn’t a helpful way for me to frame my relationships. Negativity and toxicity, on the other hand, absolutely are. I started feeling a lot less anxious when I started applying more shades of subtlety to my emotions and experiences.

~

Time and circumstance can change relationship dynamics a lot. Lately, I’ve reconnected with a friend whom I’d labeled “toxic” pretty vibrantly in my head, and whom I’ve got a complicated history with. I turned the idea over in my head for months, dismissing it as a bad idea with more and more reluctance each time. In the end, fairly sure of the reasonableness of the idea, I followed through on the impulse to contact them online. Turns out the friend was not only still happy to hear from me, they were in a much better place than they’d been back when I cut off contact. And I’m in a better place now, too. They don’t test my boundaries anymore, and even if they did, I’d feel much more sure about enforcing them.

Having this friend back in my life has been enjoyable and enriching. Another source of support in life is always welcome.

I’ve made some new friends, too, and both reconnecting with sour friendships and making new ones that I’m okay with require a certain amount of emotional resilience. I’ve been trying to cultivate a strong sense of self-worth, agency, and self-reliability independent of those friendships, and it’s been helping.  

I’m not quite sure what to call the more welcoming side of those efforts, though. Tolerance, forgiveness, and patience all have different undertones. I think it’s somewhere between the three, and I’m still testing out the way those nuances shift depending on the specific circumstance. And they all start with an awareness of my own limits, and the feeling that I’m always allowed to stop and walk away.

~

Anyway, this was a story about writing. Setting boundaries for yourself is important, I thought, as I considered where the thought of “writing as shitty ex” had come from. If I kept shying away from writing all this time, then maybe it really was a toxic relationship.

The problem is, writing isn’t a person. I don’t ascribe very hard to any one particular class of thought or pedagogy when it comes to writing, either, so as far as I can tell that isn’t the difficulty. It’s still possible that outside influences are building up and forming an unpleasant imagined persona, like an unwelcoming audience. But for a little while now, I’ve been trying to curtail instances of random exposure to the displeasure of strangers, and by now that influence has noticeably lessened. So what was going on?

When I thought about it in those terms, it wasn’t too hard to reach a perplexing conclusion: I’m in a bad relationship with writing, and I’m the only person in that relationship.

I’m all the moving parts. Just me. Which led me to wonder, what am I doing to myself that I haven’t consciously realized?

~

I recently started tutoring a couple of kids in creative writing through Skype call. (Someone thought it was a good idea to put an advertisement on a freelancing website, instead of a tutoring-specific one, but that’s another story, and one that I know very little about.) The first couple of lessons were a little bit awkward, until one of the parents clued me in to the idea of working through prompts in class, instead of assigning things and providing feedback. Then a couple of online resources mentioned the idea of working along with the kids on exercises, so I tried that, too.

I would’ve figured it was a bad idea, putting them on the spot or accidentally showing off, but so far both strategies seem to be working. It’s been good to show that even a teacher can’t think of everything on a tight schedule, that what I come up with is imperfect or incomplete. And better still, I’ve gotten into the habit of waiting a little longer for answers, continuing to ask prompt past the first, dubious or hesitant response. I’ve been asking a lot of “Why?”, and making games out of brainstorming. It’s been fun, and I’d like to think I’m not the only one learning.

I think I’ve forgotten how important patience is in writing, as in many other things.

~

One summer, between semesters of college, I tried living with friends. It was a lot of fun, but there were parts that were very stressful—specifically, the coming-up-with-rent part. I managed to land a decent ghostwriting job, but it wasn’t enough to keep up with bills, not by a long shot. (I was extremely privileged to have parents that were willing to come up with some of the difference, without which I would have been very ill-advised even to try.) So I tried to balance an internship or two alongside it, which ultimately led to me keeping abreast of chores and stressing instead of working on everything else.

Near the end of the summer, desperately trying to make up a huge word deficit on a ghostwriting project, I set myself a goal: 24,000 words in 24 hours. A quota of 1,000 words an hour, with permission to do whatever I wanted each hour, after hitting that point.

I managed it, almost getting to the end of the piece. I don’t think I so much as opened the document for eight weeks afterward. I blew far past the intended deadline, and in the meantime, my client moved on to greener writing pastures. I was never paid for that project.

I didn’t realize until years later that ever since then, something related to the writing part of me has felt injured—that it feels like something got sprained inside.

~

People talk about their inner editors. Whatever that particular force in my head is, I’m not sure it counts as just an editor anymore.

My editorial sense is just fine when it comes to other people. I like providing developmental edits. I’m good at line-editing and formatting. I’ve interned at a literary agency, and, as mentioned above, worked as a ghostwriter before that. I occasionally beta-read fanfic and/or critique friends’ work for fun. I like fixing other people’s writing, and I like meeting them where they are in their efforts to improve their technique.

Moreover, I’m pretty confident of my technical writing ability. I know how to put together a sentence. I’m as susceptible to typos as the next person, but otherwise my error rate is pretty low. I’ve got a working sense of structure, pacing, and style. I actually know how to format dialogue correctly, how to use a long dash and a semicolon, and the difference between a too-long sentence and a run-on.

That doesn’t mean I don’t still have a long way to go—that’s the nature of writing. (See: I write long sentences even when I shouldn’t, and I’m far too fond of italics.) But I’m not all that self-conscious about any of that, really. It doesn’t bug me.

No, I’m just completely certain of my inability to have ideas. Or, having miraculously had an idea that I didn’t immediately tear to pieces, to actually sit down and start. Or, having started, to muddle through the middle, let alone finish. Or, having somehow finished, to have the self-discipline to do any revision whatsoever.

I “know” these things just won’t ever happen—that I “can,” but that I won’t. And I “know” that I shouldn’t give up on one of my most-developed skills. But when I finally gave myself permission to give up—to move on to something I haven’t built up to be so utterly wraught—I felt a lot better. And thus the cycle began.

Even getting to that point—feeling like I deserved a chance to walk away—was in itself a kind of growth. But I think I’m ready to try moving beyond it. I’m just not sure what direction “beyond” will be in.

~

I’m slowly circling around a choice. Like water spiraling around a drain, or one of those pennies in a black-hole model at the mall. (Anyone else remember those?) I could try to break free—I’m fairly certain that I can, to whatever degree I want, though there would be parts of it that would hurt. But I don’t think I want to.

I’m not going to let writer-me take over my life again anytime soon. I don’t want to give him any power, because or the past few years he’s done the opposite of earn it. But I might be willing to get back together with him, for a bit of a trial run. The equivalent of a re-friending on Facebook and maybe catching up over coffee.

I find myself curious as to how it might go.