Gather round the campfire children, and old mother bibs will tell you a tale…
It’s always been this batshit.
No, really. It just comes and goes in cycles, and it’s no coincidence that as we enter into a new conservative age of hell, that purity politics has reared its ugly head once more, picking on some old targets and some new ones too. Because so long as society is always evolving, so too does the levels of mental gymnastics people are willing to do to justify their bigotry. Sometimes it’s fear too. You don’t want your precious thing taken away from you, so lets throw someone else under the bus first.
I think a large part of why it is so much worse in certain online circles is because we have a whole new generation of fans who don’t remember a time when fanfic was underground and heavily censored to “protect the children”, which was actually code for “ban everything gay or move it onto an adult porn site regardless of whether it contains explicit content or not because children are too innocent to understand what gay is and what if it corrupts them an what if, what if, what if…” which is how young me ended up being exposed to a lot of horrific shit at the tender age of 12 because I wanted to read about Princess Leia holding hands with a girl.
So not only do you have a generation of people who don’t understand why mass censorship and witch hunts are going to actively destroy all of fandom, including the bits they like, but they also don’t know how to curate their own fandom spaces, and expect others to do it for them. Which is… yea that’s not how that actually works. Ao3 was never the norm. We used to have to host this shit ourselves, and hope like hell we didn’t get reported, taken down or even sued. And contrary to you sweetly calling me an elder, I am but a toddler at the feet of the true elders of fandom who have been fighting against this kind of thing for longer than I’ve been alive.
And some of it I get, I understand the visceral knee-jerk reaction. Like there’s some fics that the mere concepts of alone turn my stomach, like even if I see the ship name, I feel physically sick. So you know what I do? I blacklist that shit and go back to what doesn’t make me feel awful, and focus on creating content I want to see in the world.
And this concept is absolutely wild to some people because no, if something makes you feel that strongly, surely it must be evil???
Sure! Maybe. But where does that kind of thing end? Who gets to draw the line in the sand, you? me? Someone who will use their power to silence anyone who doesn’t conform to their high standards? What if those standards shift to something you don’t align with, what then? Well too late. Better start building your own fandom space and hope no one reports you and you get taken down and lose all your content. Again. And again. And Again.
So while I agree with you that things of late seem bonkers, it’s not all that unexpected. Annoying and exasperating as it is. And before anyone asks me how we fix it. I have no idea. Would that I could, but I suspect in 30 years someone will be asking someone else the exact same question.
you can at least try to masturbate the depression away
Me, a humble fic farmer, tending her plot of land: neighbor john said there was a shipwar starting just over the hills. what do you think Ma, do you think we’ll ever see a shipwar?
Ma, clutching her apron to her chest: oh dear, I hope not!
Pa, sitting in his rocking chair and smoking his pipe: hmph! there’s always been shipwars and there will always be shipwars. you just keep your nose out of it and mind your own business. we ain’t got no business messing around in shipwars. now step to it! i want that field of headcanons and plot twists plowed by morning! and keep those plot bunnies from getting at the smut, we can’t afford anymore WIPs!
like the bonus of having adhd is when you get into hyper focus mode and you get a bunch of shit done but the downside is that most time your brain is like bees. just hundreds of bees.
my professor spent our entire seminar whining about how there’s too many girls in our group and not enough boys. he was like “i’m not saying women can’t be good surgeons but we need more men” no, we don’t. men suck. deal with it.
CRY ALL YOU FUCKING WANT YOUR TEARS DON’T MEAN SHIT TO ME. YOUR TEARS MEAN DICK TO ME JUST SO YOU KNOW
Okay so not to be that person who adds on to a post with their own story but my mom is a doctor and when I was eleven she took me to these all-female seminar led by a woman who was the head of a hospital because my mom is an empowered and independent woman who wanted her daughter to be the same way and so there’s like thirty females surgeons in the room, all sitting around his huge circlular confrenece table and talking about their experiences in becoming surgeons
most of them were like “everyone told me I should become a nurse or a pediatrician” and “people assume that I don’t know what I’m doing” you know, your average sexist bs
one of the women’s last name was starboard (yeah I know great name) and she was talking about how even though now she was one of the most accomplished surgeons at the hospital, the male scrub techs (read: guys who didn’t go to fucking medical school) and some of the male doctors call her starbitch in the OR because they (scrub techs mostly, strangely enough) try to suggest different ways to care for the patient and she always tells them no you didn’t go to med school and I did and so they would go out of their way to get the male doctors to treat the patient differently and then she would have to argue with him to prove what she was doing es right but sometimes the male doctor would come and take over the case anyway and this went on for a while
but then the hospital statistics changed bc this woman was literally being prevented from treating her patients bc the men were interfering and so the administrative head heard about this (she was female) and she was like y’all better stop or y’all better start looking for new jobs and then starboard was allowed to work on her patients and got the scrub techs replaced and all of the sudden, the patients were suddenly doing much better during and after surgery.
when she told this story she was like “people still call me a bitch, and maybe I am because I won’t let them walk all over me, but when you’ve got something to do, when you’ve got a life to save, you have to ignore their bullshit so that you can save someone’s fuckin life. Sexism should never stop you from accomplishing that”
and little eleven-year-old me still remembers that bc I was insecure and awkward and here was this woman who just did what she had to do and ignored all the people trying to stop here and she really was better than all the male doctors (like her patient stats were better) and I thought I should share with you this inspiring woman with the cool last name
Ardwynna's Place 