Are you familiar with fujoshi wank? If not, rottenboysclub provides insight. This time, tumblr is attacking shippers who are not gay men for shipping male characters together regardless of anything else. I can almost swear this is a 4chan trolling or Russian propaganda. Fetishization something (you keep using this word, I do not think it means what you think it does).

That’s not even particularly uncommon, is it? I’ve actually seen people I know and otherwise respect reblog “critiques” of M/M shipping by people who are not “mlm” on the grounds of fetishization (in fact, I usually only see the expression “mlm” in this kind of context, which is why I put it in scare quotes; it might be a perfectly perspicuous term, but I’m not sure I trust the people who use it, so I’d prefer to say “gay/bi/pan men” if I need to refer to the same set). Indeed, I’ve seen it enough that I occasionally question my own M/M shipping habits. If I ship two men together because I think they’re both hot, am I fetishizing gay sexuality in the same way as straight men who are turned on by watching two women kiss? Are they, in any meaningful sense, fetishizing lesbians? (I’m sure they don’t care whether the kissing women are, in fact, lesbians.) Does it make a difference that women who ship M/M care about the feelings and personalities of the men they ship in a way that straight men watching F/F porn generally do not? Would I tell my gay friends that I read and write M/M smut? (The issue has never arisen, but I think if I got drunk enough there are a few I would tell – same as with my female friends, really.)

Anyway, yes, I am familiar with this kind of wank. I gather it is a branch of ‘anti’ culture, often expressed by the same people who oppose kinks and Problematic™ ships, and likes to ostentatiously wave the social justice banner around, just like pretty much every other subculture on Tumblr.

I find purity politics especially disturbing when they reject canonical redemption arcs. It is rare, but I have seen posts about how Finn/Bodhi Rook/Prince Zuko/Draco Malfoy/The Maximov family etc. should still be treated as villians and punished; fans who find Bodhi’s death satisfying rather than heartbreaking. I find it disturbing. As if those people did not believe in forgiveness upon active change of sides in a conflict.

WTF?? Who finds Bodhi’s death satisfying? I loved that guy! I loved the entire Rogue One crew, but he was an especially interesting character because he figured out that what he had been doing was wrong. It takes much more strength to change your mind about something, to admit that you were wrong, than to keep going in a path you were always on. That doesn’t mean that previous wrongdoing should be forgotten, of course, but it has to be viewed in the context of the arc as a whole. And penance through death is a lot less valuable than penance through difficult right action, through saving lives and undermining evil. That’s what atones; that’s what tips the balance. Death does jack shit.

People who want Finn to die have just got to be stupid. He was pretty clearly brainwashed from an early age; we see his first deployment in Episode VII, right? When would he even have had a chance to defect before? Do people think he enlisted? He didn’t even have a name, FFS. He was bred to be a soldier.

Pietro Maximoff did die; isn’t that penance enough? Anyway, their story is presented as complicated and morally gray; we’re not supposed to completely blame them even while they’re still allied with Ultron. Of course, I get that a lot of people don’t see moral gray. I’m really not sure what to say to them; it’s useless describing colors to the colorblind.

I attribute the sparcity of Ragnarok criticism to tumblr’s obsession with identity politics. You simply cannot criticize a film directed by POC, staring 2 POCs in main roles, with female final boss and implications of queerness of 2-3 characters without overzealous teens too young to have seen Thor and Avengers back when they premiered yelling accusations of racism, sexism and homophobia (and fetishization of abusive relationships if you ship Loki with anyone).

I agree that that’s probably a large part of it, especially in light of my experience of being called a racist for my criticisms of Ragnarok.

I think now is a good time to trot out a term I’ve been using in private to describe this aversion to criticizing any work of art made by a POC: benevolent racism. I coined it (or maybe reinvented it) modeled on the existing term benevolent sexism, which refers to the attitude that women are delicate and fragile and morally pure and must be protected. Benevolent sexism is what leads some academic advisors to go easy on female students and not push them to improve their work as much as they could, because they think they’re too fragile and can’t handle tough criticism (and maybe aren’t capable of getting their work as good as a man’s). Similarly, benevolent racism treats creators of color as something less than full agents who can take responsibility for their work and its flaws. (There’s a start to answering your question, @touterd, though there’s a lot more where that came from…)

I have stuff to say about the “fetishizing abuse” thing, but I have somewhere I need to be… I’ll get back to it later.