I agree completely. Anti kink blogs run by minors always really skeeve me out.
Yeah, they’re creeping me out as well. But one can, luckily, always tell them that they’re a child and if they want to talk about sex, they should go to their parents and leave strangers alone/not post about sex online, since they’re behaving inappropriately for their age – after all, they themselves claim ‘children’ their age shouldn’t be involved in anything to do with sex 😉 Sure, they’ll screech and foam at the mouth, insult you and of course not listen, but it’s a viable third option.
Tag: this
- As long as people are treating real people the right way and know that fiction is not real, there is no reason to be concerned about what they’re doing with fictional characters.
- The only people who don’t seem to know that fiction isn’t real are the ones who make people’s treatment of fictional characters into a social justice concern, sometimes treating the fictional charcters more like real people than the actual real people they interact with–not the anti-antis or people with “bad ships.”
- Shipping/lolicon discourse was started by REGs to discredit a trans woman and anyone who dared to be friends with her (as a way to more broadly discredit ace inclusionists; it wasn’t even about pedophilia, just emotional manipulation), and it recycles homophobic propaganda about gay pedophiles.
- If your primary concern is protecting minors, protest school dress codes or call
your senators or make a petition about whatever Betsy Devos did this
week. This will help real children; Pidge from Voltron isn’t real and you don’t have any control over what happens to her.- Literally any other social justice issue–of which there are infinitely many–would be more useful to focus on right now. There are Nazis in the White House.
The different fanfic eras explained as lunch
Pre-internet era: You walk into a room and sit down at a table. Someone brings you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Perhaps you are a vegetarian, or gluten-free. Doesn’t matter; you get a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda.
Usenet era: You walk into a room and sit down to your turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Someone tells you that over at the University they are also serving BLTs, pizza, coffee, and beer.
Web 1.0 (aka The Great Schism): You walk into a room. The room is lined with 50 unmarked doors. Someone tells you, “We have enough food to feed you and a hundred more…but we’ve scattered it behind these fifty doors. Good luck!”
Web 2.0 (present): You walk into a room. Someone points at the buffet and says, “Enjoy!” You turn to see a 100-foot-long buffet table, piled high with every kind of food imaginable. To be fair, some of the food is durian, head cheese, and chilled monkey brains, but that’s cool, some people are into those…and trust me, they are even more psyched to be here than you are.
Tumblr (a hell pit): You try to serve yourself a baked potato. An angry child runs up and slaps the plate out of your hand. “NIGHTSHADE PLANTS ARE POISONOUS,” the child yells. You are hungry. The child gives you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a kick on the shin.
therearecertainshadesoflimelight:
“why are you in fandom when you’re 20+”
because we built this kingdom, motherfuckers, with the trekkie zine housewives before us.
So here’s a story. One Fourth of July I was walking down the street and ran into a BNF who I’d met a couple of times at a slash-centric con. It turned out she lived in the same building as one of my boyfriends at the time, which was nearby, so she invited me to stop by. She had a small group of friends there, and one of them was an older woman with short, white hair.
“How old are you?” she asked.
I told her my age, probably about 28 at the time.
“I’ve been reading fanfiction longer than you’ve been alive,” she said.
Here’s another story. A couple of years ago at GeekGirlCon they had an “elders speak” panel. It included some women who had organized Star Trek cons in the 70s and 80s. So, first off, we really have always been here, this is a kind of geekiness that has always belonged to women. And they talked about women doing fandom back then secretly, about having to ask their husbands for money so they could travel to meet other fans. And two of the women on this panel were a couple who’d met each other in fandom.
One of the main reasons I go to slash cons is to connect with my foremothers in fandom. A lot of them aren’t on Tumblr or Twitter, some never even really got into LiveJournal. But they’re still here, doing their thing, having Fourth of July parties and emailing with their friends about fandom. Our elders are our history, our proof that we have always been here, that “media fandom” (fandom of Western TV and movies) is our house that we built with our hands.
respect your fandom mothers and grandmothers you ungrateful little buggers
It’s just hilarious to me that kids on here think that your interests fundamentally change as you get older. Your responsibilities change and, hopefully, you start looking at things and evaluating with more life experience….which, btw, is why a lot of the over 30 people here side eye the shit out of you guys many days. Because lived experience and life experience makes you see things in a different light…even fictional stuff. But you don’t just all of a sudden turn 30 and become this boring person who has no interest anymore in all the nerd things and fandom you liked at 15 or 20 or 25. You are the same person. You still need an outlet for your interests and you still crave those safe spaces to geek out the same way you do as a kid. We’ve always been here. Other women came before us.
FYI In 1993, the most popular Superman website was run by a woman named Zoomway. She was a life long Superman fan who started the site after Lois and Clark hit the air and she had thousands of women (many of whom were older btw) who followed her site. She wasn’t some 20 year old kid. She was a grown woman with life experience decades older than most of you who was writing feminist commentary about Superman and attending fan expos before any of you were born. I was only a kid when I first starting reading her writing and she was the one who introduced me to Superman fandom. She died of cancer a few years ago and her loss was deeply felt.
Women older than you built literally every iconic fandom you post about on here.
I need the community I’ve found within my fandom more now at 43 than I ever needed it at ages 18 or 20.
The more life wears on me, the more I live and love and lose, the more I treasure this space of flails and joy and analysis over episode ephemera, shared with a chorus of voices flung far and wide around the world, small sections of which have become friends, shining lights who I look for whenever I log on.I joined fandoms when I was 18 and I’ve never looked back.
Been in fandom 20+ years and counting ❤
(also, omg ZOOMWAY)
First fandom 40 years ago. Still here. Squee is for life, not just for kids.
Fandom for 23 years, and I still smile at the memory of Zoomway and her absolute awesomeness.
Stumbled on my first Star Wars fanzine about 36-37 years ago.
I wrote Star Trek fanfic for the first time in 1978.
We’ve been here all along and we’re not going anywhere.
I wrote my first Trek fanfic just after ST:TOS premiered. I didn’t even know that fanfic was what I was doing: didn’t even know the genre had a name. Later on, when I was in nursing school, I came to know the women in New York who were in the process of organizing those first Trek conventions of the 70s. I worked some of those cons and made friendships there that last to this day. The people who ran private presses dedicated to K/S slashzines and presided over dealers’ tables piled high with them are now pro writers and editors with worldwide reputations… and they are still fans.
Which is as it should be. Fandom isn’t something you need to grow out of to prove your adulthood (or justify it to others). And it’s their own insecurities that people trying to push that position on others are running from. So fuck that noise. Long-term fannish lives are the original Slow Burn story… and it’s one we’ll still be writing for years to come.
“all nazis are bad” should be literally the easiest safest most unanimous political statement you could make what is happening
Also like…what do antis think will happen with regards to the grooming argument? Someone isn’t going to Google XYZ abusive ship, come up empty and say to themselves “oh, I guess I won’t abuse my partner after all!” No, they’re going to look for another way to do it!
And that’s why you, as a content creator, cannot be responsible for someone misusing your content to hurt someone else. Any more than Cadbury can be held accountable for someone bribing their victims with chocolate. Because that was their decision. They decided they wanted to hurt someone long, long before they came across your Reylo fanart.
Stop scapegoating anything and everything and start blaming abusers for, y’know, abusing people.
Kids. Teenagers. As someone staring 40 in the face lemme tell you a thing.
You are going to be horrified and embarrassed at some point by the shit you are doing now.
And you are going to wish with all your might you’d done more of it.
You’re gonna wish you had more selfies, more photos, more videos being dumb with your friends. You’re going to wish you’d had your hair even higher or your shoes even sparklier.
Go. Document the shit out of your ridiculous life. Fuck trends but if you wanna be trendy, go all in. Fuck in-groups and subcultures but if one sings to you, do it all. Be exactly as cool or punk rock or goth or fandom or country or hardcore or hip hop or whatever, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.
Just don’t hurt people. That’s the only thing you’ll ever genuinely live to regret.
This.
Looking back at my 20ish years in fandom I regret none of the songfic I wrote, Mary Sues I had, so anti-sue edgelord it hurts OCs I made, or ‘cerulean orbs’ containing poetry I wrote. I do regret the times I was cruel.
This is why we stress that you should be kind to your fellow fans. Not because we don’t believe that you truly and desperately feel that they’re Doing Fandom Wrong by having the wrong ship, the wrong fave, the wrong headcanon, but because it hurts knowing that in 10-20 years you’ll have the same regrets about being cruel. And if we can do anything to prevent some of those then we have to try.
This, so much.
Even though the memories are cringey, I don’t regret being uncool. I do regret the times I was cruel.
why is there such a stigma against wearing pads? like why is it that people who wear tampons are seen as ‘strong’ and ‘cool’? y’all know that someone people can’t wear them bc it hurts them or that they just don’t like them? stop making it seem like people who wear pads are childish and weak compared to those who wear tampons
What are my obligations as a writer on Tumblr:
Tag my stories appropriately.
Write and contribute content
(Drink coffee and bitch/moan about my writing)What are not my obligations but I do anyway:
Give warnings for potentially problematic content.
What am I not required to do:
Not write material you deem problematic or that you do not like.
There seems to be this massive chasm opening up, and I think tumblr is a lot to blame for the ridiculous amount of abuse writers have been taking as of late. As a writer, my obligations are very simple: to tell a story and to tag that story with the appropriate fandom and characters.
But writing warnings? No, I am not required to give you warnings. I am required to give you a summary of the content of my story, but I am not required to give warnings. I do, because it is a common curtesy. I don’t want to make my readers uncomfortable, so I warn for violence, sex, abuse, etc.
And it sure as fuck isn’t my responsibility to hold your hand and police the content you read. If I have marked a story as explicit, it means that you are aware of what the content is when you accept and proceed.
I am not your fucking mommy. I am not, as a writer, obligated to protect you from yourself.
In the same vein, I am not obligated to write what you deem appropriate or to not write what may be seen as problematic.
I have informed you of the content, given you a correct rating, and then as a curtesy have given you a list of warnings for what potentially may cause distress within the story.
You don’t like the premise? Don’t fucking read it.
You don’t like the pairing? Don’t fucking read it.
You don’t like the things in the warnings? Don’t fucking read it.
If you find yourself reading something you know you don’t like? Stop and don’t fucking read it.
I cannot protect you from your own incompetence or stupidity.
My job is to write.
I am not obligated to do anything beyond that.
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