Month: June 2017

saxifraga-x-urbium:

welcomedmachine:

blazingjaya:

vampirekilmer:

bpdcecilpalmer:

the-real-seebs:

roachpatrol:

televisiontelepath:

This post was triggered by something that @roachpatrol​ said over here about the expectation for girls to be sweet and clean and harmless:

Holy shit, if I was eight years younger and wandering into fandom for the first time, I can guarantee that the culture right now would’ve fucked me up and ground me down and taken away all my healthy outlets.

Picture: you are a girl at the tender young age of mumbledyteen. Up until this point you have been taught that all dark thoughts are literally hand-delivered into your head by the devil, and that the only correct method of dealing with negativity is to ignore them and pray harder. Concentrate on what is good and righteous and pure to the exclusion of all else, this is how you be a good person.

You are also a fully-functioning human being, one who can feel stressed or lonely or angry or any number of bad things. Mostly, with emotions that are still working themselves out, you feel this rumbling, white-hot white noise under everything, all the time. Sometimes it rolls in like a thunderstorm and everything else gets drowned out, and sometimes it’s only quietly muttering in the distance. Either way it’s always there, and the sound shreds uncomfortably at the inside of your brain.

When you were younger, before you were in charge of your own media consumption, your brain would shred up a myriad of saccharine stories to try and match the noise of the shredder in your head. Bad things happening, people getting hurt, characters trapped in unhealthy relationships of all kinds.

Fanfiction, the product of a hundred thousand other mumbledyteens whose brains are all screaming the same way, makes something in your brain go ping. 

Unfortunately, if the planet had ever been united on any single message, it was probably that no matter how you feel: 1) your feelings weren’t unique 2) they didn’t matter 3) they didn’t matter because they weren’t unique, they were shared among millions of hysterical, worthless teenaged girls just like you.

Fandom was confirmation of the first, but (with some hiccups along the way) outright rejection of the last two. Fuck you, our feelings do matter, and this is a story just for us.

A disclaimer: these aren’t good stories, otherwise they wouldn’t have to be defended. Their flavor of topic is not within societally acceptable bounds. Fictional characters have sex and get tortured and raped and abused, but their screaming harmonizes with the pitch of the shredder when it’s burrowing deepest.

As a teenager I never thought that my feelings were important enough to deal with, but these stories let me look at them sideways. Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.

And hell, these days I’m a happy, healthy adult who barely even has the urge to go looking for whump fic when I’ve had a bad week. I’m not going to forget just how much bad stuff that fic helped me air out, though, not ever. (Not to mention that thanks to all of those abuse!fics, I can recognize an unhealthy relationship at 500 paces, even if the fictional abuse was depicted as something loving and romantic. Abusers in real life don’t go around with helpful warning tags on their sleeves anyway.)

But holy shit, can you imagine if I’d found fandom as it is today.

Yes, your church is right, your family is right. Horrible things in stories are only there because they were written by horrible people, and they’re only popular because horrible people read them. The very concepts they address corrupt everything they touch.

That shredder in your head, the one that takes innocent cartoons but then shits out sadness and mayhem? That’s disgusting, you’re disgusting. How dare you think about minors having underaged sex, you minor? How dare you consider another person getting hurt? Your feelings don’t matter, they aren’t unique, they’re shared with all kinds of worthless shitbags just like you.

Every ounce of what you read and write and enjoy is going to be weighed for sin and tested for purity. You know, just like the rest of your life, except this time there’s no deity who’s handing out second chances.

Maybe that’s what bothers me most about all of this. It’s the same petty fandom bullshit as always, but “you’re wrong for liking a ship because IT WILL NEVER BE CANON” is a hell of a lot easier to laugh off when you’re young than “you’re wrong for liking a ship because YOU’RE AN ABUSIVE PEDOPHILE AND IF SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS IT’S YOUR FAULT FOR PERPETUATING IT.”

My fault, my bad thoughts, no outlet for any of them. The message to repress all the bad things so I can look like a good person, but my brain is so full of unprocessed shit that it’s solidified. Nobody actually saved any real children, but my brain sure is getting a second dose of fucked-up.

Are the people getting attacked going to be okay, will they be able to go and address their braingremlins somewhere else? I’d also ask if the people doing the attacking are okay, with all of the denial and repression they must deal with, but it seems like they’ve got venting pretty well handled by taking it out on strangers. 

Hey, c’mon, calm down friends. I bet I’ve read a story that’s got a character screaming at just the same pitch you are.

It helps to read one of those and harmonize your voices, I promise.

holy shit, dude, this is powerful. i’ll delete this reblog if you don’t want the extra attention, but thank you for your thoughts.  

Roachpatrol speaks my mind on this matter.

Posting because I know so many traumatized people, and so many of them just really need to see this, right now, for so many reasons.

“Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.” 

A thousand times yes. This, some scholars believe, WAS the point of Greek tragedy. It wasn’t for teaching specific lessons (don’t do this or that will happen), it was for creating pity and fear. Pity is, of course, feeling badly for the characters you’re watching/reading. Fear is the understanding that these things can happen to you, or things like them, and that you may not necessarily be able to protect yourself from it. You may never accidentally kill your father and marry your mother, but you can watch Oedipus do it, see his downfall, and empathize with the kind of human frailty that caused him to try to outrun fate in the first place. Empathizing with him doesn’t mean you want to off your dad, it means you have made and will make mistakes too, that were based on consequences you hadn’t foreseen, and his distress resonates with yours. This pity and fear is what causes the emotional purging we know as catharsis.

Furthermore, Nietzsche (yes we’re citing Nietzsche too) basically considered tragedy a dress rehearsal for real-life suffering; if we see, say, a fictional character in great pain, when we are faced with great pain it’s easier to see that we can survive it too, that we have survived bad things and we are capable of surviving more of them. Even if it doesn’t end well. Because suffering is human, and we are humans, and human life can go on in the face of great suffering.

So yes, I read and created dark horrible fic, that is not directly related to the horrible things I have experienced (I have never been abducted by strexcorp or forcibly reeducated or kept in a lab with abusive creators), and I feel pity and fear for the characters and I recognize that I have seen some shit, and that they have too, and that all people have. Was Sophocles a sick incest creeper for writing Oedipus Rex? Or was he just giving us a chance to purge intense, and intensely human, emotions?

(source: my primary partner, who has been teaching Greek drama at NYU for more years than he’d care to admit; any remaining mistakes are my own but if you come at me with “hubris is just pride” i will fight you.)

(ETA fixed spelling of Nietzsche; autocorrect why are you like this)

This.
This.
A quintilian times this.

THIS

THIS 10000 TIMES

I AM A QUEER OLD FANDOM GRANDMA AND THIS POST IS 10,000% RIGHT.

(Tagging @jennypen who is also a queer old fandom grandma)

@kyanve @saxifraga-x-urbium

I tried to edit a massive comment into this but tumblr mobile reset which blog I was editing halfway through and then ate my comment so you’re spared

I’m happy that I haven’t seen posts like yours (about liking “problematic” stuff in fandom) when I was younger, because I’d probably keep reading gross stuff like it’s just a fic. Do you really think young people reading, for example, pedophilia ffs aren’t influenced and won’t project anything to real life or you just lie to yourself to feel better about readng about gross things yourself? Yeah let’s let 14 years old read romantic stories about teens and teachers, it’s okay …but anyways :)

jennytrout:

cyanwrites:

shrineart:

micaxiii:

whosagoodshipyouareyesyouare:

uniwolfwerecorn:

Oh, nonnie, you’re barking up the wrong tree here. 

First of all, most fanfiction comes with an appropriate age rating, and if there are fourteen year olds visiting a fanfiction archive like AO3 – which, by the way, comes with a general disclaimer in the TOS that informs reader that they are likely to encounter upsetting, offensive, or morally questionable content – or if there are fourteen year olds on tumblr, which is an unmoderated, semi-private blogging platform – it’s not my responsibility to “keep them safe” from anything that isn’t age-appropriate.

Second, I’m really very sorry that you didn’t read my post earlier, so it would have given you a bit of perspective, and made you realize that it’s perfectly okay to read all kinds of fucked-up fiction, as long as you are mature enough and capable of discerning between fiction and reality. And usually, even fourteen year olds are old enough to make that distinction. Or if they aren’t, it’s their parents’ responsibility to make sure they don’t encounter content that isn’t suited for them.

But seriously, nonnie, do you have any idea what kind of stuff I read when I was fourteen years old? Stuff that I could get in every book shop, unsupervised, uncensored, and without content warnings attached to it? Do you realize that published books come without any kind of age restriction? I’m inclined to laugh at you. I was a fourteen year old myself, and back then, no one even tried to put restrictions on me and my reading preferences. Goodness, our house was full of books of every genre and flavor, and no one bothered to even look at what kind of stuff I pulled from the shelf.

But, hey, if you want to start banning fiction, how about you start with the things that have a much bigger audience than niche fanfiction which is posted in fannish spaces like tumblr or at the AO3 (which, by the way, was made with the explicit purpose of hosting all kinds of fanfiction, especially the stuff that was banned elesewhere)? 

If you are really so concerned about the influence that fiction has on younger people, I’d start here. That’s a literary classic romanticizing rape and incest among other disgusting things. Also this one, it’s full of violence, propagates rape culture and really toxic masculinity! 

And let’s not even talk about contemporary novels! From Nabokov’s Lolita to Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire to Effinger’s Marîd Audran series, published fiction is full of problematic stuff, and it’s all easily available for young people!! Shouldn’t you make it your quest to go out there and prevent that from happening? 

But not, instead you’re in my askbox, wasting your time. 

[…] or you just lie to yourself to feel better about readng about gross things yourself?

Oh, nonnie, I’m sorry, but this is pitiful. You’re talking to an adult, a sane, mentally stable and self-assured person, and your moral condemnation is pretty much meaningless to me. I’m not in any danger of conflating fiction and reality, and my conscience is perfectly clear when it comes to my support of fannish creativity and freedom or expression. 🙂

I for one am glad that I wasn’t exposed to much hand-wringing about fiction giving teens bad ideas when I was younger. I can only imagine, for example, what kind of confusion this constant refrain of “if you enjoy it in fiction you must also want it in real life, don’t kid yourself” would have caused. Or the negativity and suspicion towards kinks and sexuality. The pressure to only like things that are “pure and good”.

And yeah. I think I had read most of what Stephen King wrote by the time I was 14. Then I read every Anne Rice novel I could get my hands on. My parents knew and I’m thankful that they gave me this freedom. While I (like everyone else, I suspect) had and have my childhood issues to work through, none of them stem from the fiction I read.

my family has had dark comedy graphic novels about death, violence, sex and drugs in the bathroom since I was like 9

and I know it would have fucked me up so badly if I as a young 12-14yr old had been told that I supported the weird shit I read in real life and that I was disgusting and dangerous.

I was told by my authoritarian father that I shouldn’t read books with sex in them but he never actually screened the books I read.

I experienced queer people like myself through books far before I experienced them in real life. I experienced horrible things in the books I read, murder, necromancy, the desecration of corpses, people literally being pulled apart, etc.

But the most freeing thing about books for me was this:

I could always put it down.

There was one book with very intense description of children who were reanimated as skeletons that would roam this area and cry and that freaked me out so much that I stopped reading the book. And just like that poof! I didn’t have to imagine it anymore!

Another book had a graphic scene of a guy jerking off. (one of the hannibal books as I recall) I was grossed out by it and just sorta never picked the book back up. Years later I’ve watched all the Hannibal films and enjoyed their fucked up story but like, the book was still too much? It’s interesting how the brain works in that regard. We imagine things very vividly.

One of my favorite book series to this day has the forced pregnancy of like 12-14 year olds as part of the plot. It’s clear this isn’t okay and it’s pretty horrifying in the story. It was also required reading in school.

Did you know that a lot of required reading in school has problematic things in it?

The Jungle, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, The Giver, The Diary of Anne Frank, just to name a few.

If we shelter people from the worst of the world they don’t have context for the best of the world. And sometimes people can appreciate those dark stories because they see something of themselves in them.

The Giver meant a lot to me because I also very like I was in a position where I was very controlled and incapable of doing things. I felt like I saw the world differently from those around me. (And I did, my household was pretty conservative and old fashioned)

I think the important thing that people are forgetting is “You can always put it down” that also applies to the internet! You can always blacklist the tag, unfollow people that reblog it, etc. You can always put it down and walk away and go pick up a story you enjoy better to entertain yourself.

That’s the most powerful thing about media, honestly. We have a choice to partake.

Fanfiction authors don’t “let” 14-year-olds read problematic fics. Have you ever met a 14-year-old? They’ll google porn videos and click on every “I’m 18+ years old” button they find just to see what’s behind it, and before the internet was invented they’d peek through the windows to each other’s locker rooms and steal adult magazines from gas stations.

Antis got the causal relationship wrong. Rape doesn’t happen because of rapefics; rapefics happen because of rape. Most rapefics are written by rape survivors; I have yet to hear of a single rapefic written by an actual rapist. Not. One.

If anything, reading problematic fics has made the average teenager more aware of consent issues in their own lives.

A properly-tagged darkfic is the antidote to mainstream rape culture, not the cause of it. ‘Twilight’ says stalking is sexy; the Edward/Bella darkfic tagged  ‘noncon’ and ‘gaslighting’ portrays their relationship as it really is. A million-dollar music video with a sexy student seducing her teacher is rape culture; a teacher/student fic tagged ‘underage’ clearly makes a statement that the relationship portrayed is not normal.

Stop saying fanfiction authors are the cause of all bad things happening in the world. I promise you: we’re not.

Fanfic tags are the equivalent of mainstream media marketing. Except fanfic tags are more likely to be truthful.

Day in the life of a scientist

Me, at an art store: I need a paint marker with low toxicity and a delicate tip.
Employee: What kind of project are you working on?
Me: It’s for a research project. I just need bright colors.
Employee: What medium are you using? Canvas or paper?
Me: uh….spiders.
Employee: Plastic or felt?
Me: ….live spiders. Like, from the forest.
Employee: ….
Employee: I have to get back to the counter.

bigmouthlass:

the-life-of-trash-aka-adrian:

gothmollyweasley:

appetitusinvictus:

if you’re a baby gay and this is your first pride, watch your drinks! men are trash across all sexualities

I know boys don’t get these talks so let me clarify:

This doesn’t just mean alcohol

Don’t accept any open drinks

After you get your unopened drink, you keep it in your site

You have to go to the bathroom so you leave your drink on a table? That drink is now dead to you.

You’ve been holding your drink way low out of your eyesight and people are crowding? That drink is now suspect.

Stay safe, babies

Also: Rohypnol (a date rape drug) tastes VERY SALTY. If your drink is suddenly salty, STOP DRINKING IMMEDIATELY. 

Buddy system, y’all. If your friend is acting *way* drunker than they should, take them to an Urgent Care or ER. Date rape drugs can kill you.