freedom-of-fanfic:

shipping-isnt-morality:

freedom-of-fanfic:

shipping-isnt-morality:

I don’t want to reblog the post, but there’s a callout going around for someone who write violent, torture-centric Mob Psycho fic. and like

What kind of cognitive gymnastics do you even have to do to enjoy a series that has an entire ARC about the middle-school protag being subjected to continuous torture, but then accuse fans of being predators for enjoying….. works about the middle schooler protag being subjected to torture

All of it was properly warned for better than the series itself, even

A part of me wonders if they don’t recognize how messed up the canon material is because it’s not nicely tagged for their condemnation

I honestly think the thought process goes like this:

1. ‘everybody knows’ that mainstream popular media is problematic and shows bad things. we tell people to not imitate stuff on TV all the time.
2. but when people in fandom recreate in fanworks or talk about those bad things with anything less than absolute, complete condemnation, they’re endorsing those bad things. they’re saying those bad things are actually good. 
3. so if a show has problematic elements, it’s fan endorsement of those elements (by interacting with them) that’s actually dangerous. If fans would just ignore those canon problematic elements, nobody could be fooled into thinking they’re actually good.*
4. (bonus) that’s why a good fan strips everything potentially hurtful out of problematic canon and only focuses on the fluffy, positive parts. 

(*fan endorsement is worse because fandom is made up of marginalized people who should know better than the shitty straight cis men who dominate media. it is therefore the duty of marginalized fans to ensure everything they do is educational so that younger people in fandom don’t get confused about right and wrong. )

if you create fanworks that contain problematic canon elements/ship ‘bad’ canon ships, you must either be a bad fan or too stupid to know those things were bad in canon.

either way, it is the duty of a good fan to educate you and punish you for leading others astray. (preferably in whatever way will shame you out of fandom entirely.)

Y’know? I think you may be onto something here, with the idea that it’s become marginalized peoples’ jobs to educate, to lead by example. So a marginalized person who writes Bad fiction has done something worse than a non-oppressed person, because we teach young people to Listen To The Wise Marginalized Person rather than teaching them how to critically consider the topic themselves.

I think the process went something like:

1. Group A is the oppressor and group B is oppressed.
2. All members of group A are systemically oppressors whether they consciously contribute to reinforcing that or not
3. All members of group A are bigots because All members of group A are oppressors
4. All members of group A are bad people.
5. All members of group B personally experience oppression.
6. All members of group B want to end oppression.
7. All members of group B are good people.

I’m pretty sure that with some digging, I could actually find tumblr posts that correspond to the slow shifting and evolving of these ideas over time.

And then the end conclusion: A bad person doing a bad thing is to be expected. A good person doing a bad thing is a betrayal.

And so, through some oversimplified social justice fuckery, we’ve circled back around to holding marginalized people to a higher standard than their oppressors, thus reinforcing the system that we were originally supposed to be opposing.

Weird how that works.

^^^^ this!

I’m wary of any movement where the effect is to reinforce the existing social norms (only for ‘woke’ reasons).

I have observed that way of thinking about members of oppressed and oppressor groups in parts of the Left outside of fandom, too. Usually, though, anything apparently bad done by a member of an oppressed group is assumed to be a consequence of the oppression, because oppressed people are automatically good and innocent.

This way of thinking runs into problems at intersections of privilege and marginalization, but race is always the most important factor, probably followed by trans identity.