Annotated 34-2
Okay, let’s spell it out here: Gamergate was obviously fresh in Flo’s and my minds when we put this scene together. However, Shanna doesn’t mention names for a reason: this is a more general social-media-based toxicity that the intervening years have not eliminated (I still think Xan’s got a point about that topic, but he was probably optimistic about the timeline). And I think it’s notable that it’s so bad that even these two, opposite as they are, acknowledge these things exist and are despicable. That’s basically why they can work together here in spite of everything. Unlike certain pols, they respect facts too much not to find common ground.
This was an interesting frame of mind for me, since that ol’ Fans series of mine had been pretty heavy on the geek-worship, with only original-flavor Shanna and some geek villains to provide a little nuance. The series had plenty of acknowledgment that individual fans could be awful (a high percentage of protagonists broke bad in some fashion), but tended to treat the larger community as lovable, with its problems mostly endearing quirks.
I worry about that every so often, when I hear about Steven Universe “fans” abusing some poor soul for drawing the wrong artwork or whatever. “You can’t like it if you’re cishet!” Ugh. I still believe that fandom-as-I-experienced-it-in-college exists and is worth defending, but it’s clearly not the only species of fandom out there. Guilded Age‘s fan characters chiefly represent that better species, but their morality is not treated as ubiquitous within the culture.
Since when is seven letters “not even close” to six letters?
I believe she was referring to the entire sentence, or around 70 letters
Fandom kind of used to be a group of people that hyped what they liked so much you were drawn to try it and understand their passion. Nowdays fandom is usually what deters me the most from trying anything.
… man I just feel old now…
Every fandom, hobby or activity has its bad eggs.
Nowadays they just find each other better thanks to socials. And usually those bad eggs are really active on all fandom fronts.
You won’t see a person who’s kinda interested and don’t mind if your Rainbow Dash stars in fanfic where she thinks she’s a he-gryphon who’s in love with Celestia’s throne, writing too much about how silly the concept is. They’re likely to comment “Cool story, bro.” if even that.
But you can bet the “hardcore fan” who can tell you tell you how many cobblestones there are in Ponyville “can you, punk? huh? huh? didn’t think so!” has a lot to say about that and has the energy and the passion to say it too.
Thankfully there are a whole host of “Yeah, don’t mind them. They got a bit purist ideas about how to go about.” in every hobby as well.
But still the most energetic bunch will be the type that “has a lot to say” and sadly that will be what people will always meet in their fandoms.
Not to mention the people who use their fandom to drive forth their own agendas and fandom is wrong if it doesn’t fully embrace the world-view they want to have…
»Every fandom, hobby or activity has its bad eggs.«
That certainly rings very true. And thanks to the internet, those bad eggs have both more reach and are easier to spot.
But even before the internet, those people were way more likely to get to central positions within the fan community, simply because they’re way more engaged than most others. And from that position, any person’s attitudes have significant influence on the overall atmosphere and the “that’s just how it works around here”-feeling of the whole group, as well as how the group is perceived from the outside. That in turn influences which kind of characters they attract. So even if they are a small minority, they contribute much more than others to how the whole is perceived, outside and inside.
And *this* means that any community should take care to openly deal with those over-the-top purists as and when they misbehave. Not necessarily expelling them but by making clear to them and everyone else that their ideas are not representative. It’s fine (sometimes even desirable!) to have a few weirdos hanging around in the corner, but not to let (pretend to) them run the show or determine the public image of the club.
About that “You can’t like it if you’re cishet” line, I’d say first of all, I’ve seen plenty of channers spreading that sort of bullshit as part of their pathetic little attempts at psy-ops.
Secondly, even if it were someone’s legitimate attitude, it’s still not as wrong as the mainstream counterpart of “You can’t like that if you’re queer”, if only by way of the power differential: The mainstream attitudes have more power behind them, so do more harm.
More harm = more wrong, that’s the usual equation for that.
But somehow, strangely enough, that’s not the examples that get picked up and amplified and commented on with “ugh”.
Which, again, makes me think it’s most likely channer-grade fuckery.
I’m very much aware that straight cishet white male “fans” are whining at this very moment that “woke culture is ruining Disney” because of “Captain Blackmerica” or whatever, but the exclusion in Steven Universe fandom just particularly bugs me because it’s so antithetical to the message of the show. Like, there was a time when I thought fandoms would be friendlier and more laid-back if they were fandoms of newer things, especially things that are themselves more about acceptance, love, and understanding than punching baddies in the face. It’s the irony of it that makes me reach for it as an example that shows how widespread these issues are.
I think you missed my points.
My points are:
1) Fake messaging abounds, and odds are there are more fake cis-exclusionary rad-trans than there are real cis-exclusionary rad-trans.
2) Why would it bother you more, even IF we were to assume a majority of SU fans were cis-exclusionary? That’s like being outraged that, say, there are places where white americans don’t feel welcome, when black americans have that everywhere else.
3) Again, it’s most likely either fake or given form and impetus by provos, but generally speaking, if pro-trans art develops a fanbase that acts like other fandoms, just in reverse, maybe pick on the other fandoms first?
It’s just enormously telling that it’s exclusion of the majority that gets your goat. You should reflect.
Pick on the other fandoms first? Well, that does sound like it might be a good idea. Maybe I could pick on, say, Gamergate at the start of this page’s annotation, or I could go back even further and pick on it through Shanna and Xan when the page originally ran! Or for that matter, I could spend a total of about fifteen years with Shanna, a character who often vented about fandom and tended to perceive it as a phenomenon dominated by white male cishet virgin culture!
I’m sorry for the sarcasm, and I promise it’s written with a good-natured smile, however it’s received. But I mean, c’mon. Even if Fans was mostly fandom-friendly, I’ve done plenty of picking on other fandoms first, and I think this is the first time in any of my writing that I’ve mentioned cis-exclusion in any way, shape, or form. And I wouldn’t be in a hurry to do it a second time, either, even if I had gotten no comment on it here, because it was mostly irony and novelty that made this example stick in my mind. So maybe weigh that a bit before you decide how telling it is.
I will concede, however, that I don’t feel being a member of a minority is carte blanche for behavior one would condemn in the majority. It makes certain acts excusable or understandable, sure. But I do not believe that simply inverting the prejudice of the majority results in anything noble or desirable.
I feel like your example is a tenuous comparison. Not feeling welcome is a problem in one’s own mind, albeit sometimes promoted by circumstance. If a white dude feels bad because he’s in a jazz club that’s 98% black people, sure, boo hoo, poor him. However, if a black person seriously argued that the white mind was incapable of appreciating jazz, that’d be a better analogy. It’d also be ridiculous… and frankly self-defeating, because even if you successfully drove the majority away from “your thing,” that’d just result in its marginalization as the majority decided it was worthless. You could call that sour grapes, but it’d be cold comfort.
Last point first. Fake messaging and bad-faith amplification are certainly things on the internet, and I am in absolutely no position to diagnose how common they might be in this instance. But my reaction was based partly on the claims of a real person. Now, it’s possible that this person was misled by fake messaging or bad-faith amplification into believing their opinion was more common than it was. But still, they were a real person with a real voice, and it’s a voice I’ve heard all too many times in various fandoms, excluding people on one basis or another. Exclusion is what gets my goat. Some majorities shift.
It is exactly when there is progress that backlash occurs.
Backlash against the improvement and how it resolves is how we know if the improvement becomes permanent or not.
I am suggesting that this is not a matter where “even-handedness” is appropriate.
This is about equality of outcomes.
If getting that means letting some people who otherwise have it bad get away with being douchy at some points, then that’s the right thing to do.
Even while insisting on the mainstream douches STFUing or GTFOing.
There’s never a good time to punch down.
Even-handedness is mostly unjust, when not all groups are treated equally to begin with.
Tit-for-tat will just reinforce the starting condition.
This is not really a difficult equation to work out.
Let’s just take your referenced situation at face value:
Let’s say there’s a pro-trans person who is being a douche.
If you apply even-handedness, you’re disproportionally reacting against pro-trans people, because for every one pro-trans bad actor there’s a thousand anti-trans bad actors being at least as bad.
So WGAF if there’s a pro-trans douche? If you pick up that one to talk about, while ignoring all the anti-trans douches, you’re effectively supporting the latter.
It’s not difficult math. All you gotta see is that you’re a part of society, and which things you react against is mainly down to which things you notice. You don’t notice most of the anti-trans douchery, so by reacting as you do, you end up projecting an anti-trans message.
And that is definitely not needed.
We’re not going to see entirely eye to eye on this, I think, and I’m sorry about that. I’m willing to be patient and understanding, just as I hope people will understand that some of Shanna’s exclusionary language comes from a place more of pain than of privilege. But complete carte blanche to be a douche seems like a bad idea, and one that I’m very doubtful a minority community would even collectively want.
I’ve already said most of what I care to say about the larger context of my work. I could spend more time, maybe, calling out anti-trans messaging and saying it’s bad, but I feel like… most of the people who read my work don’t need me to? I mean, we didn’t get any negative pushback when we brought in Chrissie. There’s always gonna be some “telling people what they already believe” in writing, but I feel like my time’s better spent trying to develop trans characters and other representatives of the broad scope of humanity… and trying to walk a balancing line between doing that and “writing what you know,” so there’s at least some authenticity to it.
Still, if I had this to write over again, I’d probably go with the Captain America example in the name of clearer communication of the main point. The only reason I’m not changing it now is that it’d feel dishonest to decontextualize this thread after the fact and deny the issues it raises. I hope that, at least, can be a source of some satisfaction.
It’s simple maths.
In the example above, you mentioned Gamergate and this unnamed presumably pro-trans person.
Gamergate was caused by thousands of anti-women assholes comitting literal crimes for months on end, with the aim of making the world a worse place for women (again).
How would you justify mentioning a single pro-trans douche saying something somewhat absurd in the same context as literally thousands of people comitting criminal acts?
That’s not fair in any moral calculus I am aware of.
It (at least symbolically) equates these two things, by placing them in the same context.
I hate to say it, but compare to Previous Dude saying “there are fine people on both sides”.
Hopefully you can appreciate how absurd and revealing that was.
Instead you’re saying “there are terrible people on both sides”, which is a gross distortion in all but the most anally-retentive over-literal “logical” sense of “There is at least one terrible person in each of these groups”.
But if you look at it with any other glasses than those particularly useless ones, you’ll see that one group is 100% terrible people, and that even the most terrible outlier of the other group isn’t terrible by comparison to the least terrible person in the first group.
If something pales in comparison to another thing, you will come across as dishonest if you compare them without reaching the conclusion that the something isn’t all that bad.
And what you did instead was compare them and saying “ugh” about the thing that arguably isn’t at all comparable to gamergate.
As I understand this argument, you’re putting words in his mouth.
He isn’t saying that there is some sort of moral equivalency between the words one douche said to the violent acts performed by a different, ideologically opposed group. He’s saying that you don’t get a pass for being a douche just because you are part of a sub-group that is institutionally oppressed. He is in no way saying someone being a douche is somehow morally equivalent to people performing IRL violent acts.
Yeah, no.
I was translating back to him what he actually said, in the hope that he’d realize he’d fucked up fairly badly, and maybe learn something.
It’s clear he didn’t understand that he made a comparison between gamergate and some Steven Universe fan being a bit of a douche.
The mere inclusion of both in to one comment episode embodies the comparison – the comparison is factual.
And of the two, the only one with an overt marker of disapproval was the Steven Universe fan being a bit of a douche.
It matters.
Not to take away from your point, but IIRC the Steven Universe incident you’re referring to was a race thing and not a gender thing. Unless there’s another one I didn’t hear about
It was actually a weight thing, unless it happened multiple times. Someone had drawn Rose thinner than in canon and things went nuts.
Oh yeah, I remember the one with Rose. But for some reason I think I was remembering a controversy about Amethyst art.
I understand completely your portrayal, within Fans, of fandoms collectively in a positive and uniformly optimistic light. Back in 1999 when you and Jason first launched it, the Internet was a different animal to what it’s become today. While there already were protocols — Usenet, IRC — which allowed fans to communicate with each other in real or near-real time without ever having to meet in person, it wasn’t until the advent of “Internet 2.0” commenting and forum technology that anyone anywhere could put in their online two cents about a work of entertainment and/or its consumers, using just the browser which came pre-installed on one’s device, no additional downloads necessary. This quickly increased the sheer volume of comments and online fan (or creator-fan) interactions. As with any new technology, this had its advantages — such as a potentially, globally broader range of opinions, feedback, fanart, fanfics and such — and its disadvantages, such as the ability to bully and harass creators and other fans under the cloak of anonymity and thereby (usually) avoid any consequences other than simply getting banned.
What made such phenomena as Gamergate, the Sad Puppies and Comicsgate even more possible was the advent of social media. These(in addition to their more positive and neutral uses) allowed individuals to mobilize and organize like-minded incels, MRAs, white supremacists etc., so that such bullying and harassment could become a massive group effort and thus (they think) even more effective at getting all those uppity non-male, non-white, non-hetero, non-cis, disabled etc. creators to give up and leave the entertainment medium to the “real” creators and fans. (Bonus points for attempting to conceal their bigoted agenda by claiming higher-minded motives like “ethics in gaming journalism.”)
To be sure, as Velgar says, such bigots don’t account for all fans, nor for anything close to a majority of them. But they’re certainly vocal enough to make it seem that way at times and thus scare off some people from participating in, or even identifying with, the fandom. And yeah, T’s right: despite Xan’s optimism here, they’re not likely to go away anytime soon. The best those of us in the saner majority of fandom can do (with the help of online discussion moderators, con organizers, entertainment providers and social media corporations) is monitor for such toxic fandom campaigners — and get them swiftly deplatformed so they’ll have fewer and fewer options for spreading their poison.
I’m actually skeptical if pre-internet fandom was that much healthier. I think the unhealthy bits just weren’t that visible.
My example isn’t about fandom but a sports organization, and not about exclusion, but about sexual violence/discrimination (and indifference of the community to those things) which are arguably worse.
I recently read about a female former competitive judoka doing some research and finding out that it wasn’t just her own coaches who sexually assaulted (as in: drugged and raped) her, but that they did the same to others and probably others acted similarly, and definitely the higher-ups in the organization looked away very hard, for years. And that’s just some regional association of a less-popular sport.
That sort of culture could have existed in many communities, because back in the 1990s or before nobody with anything to say really thought about such issues at all. Today, the public attitude is certainly shifting, and thanks to the internet such things make the rounds much quicker. Which simultaneously makes them seem more prevalent but also makes it much easier to detect and stop them.
So although it may feel as if the world was getting worse, I don’t actually believe that. It’s the fever which lets us know that our social immune system has found something wrong and is reacting.
A few points I’d like to note:
a) If this Sepia Shanna has a similar background as her Fans counterpart, then her hatred of fandom/gaming started way back in her teenage years, and since this Sepia Shanna never met Sepia Kat (or any other Sepia Fans) she never tempered her pathological hatred towards any geek related entertainment. Having said that, I think there’s a difference between dislike and hatred, and Sepia Shanna does not seem to merely dislike fandom – she outright loathes it, as far as I can tell. I wonder if there’s a reason for that (other than “all I’ve heard about fandom is negative, therefore I react with hostility when I meet a fan”)
b) A normal fan is not just a fan. It’s OK to be all about She-Hulk or whatever, but if there’s absolutely nothing else in your life but She-Hulk stories/merchandise, then any real or perceived change to that character will probably shoot your blood pressure sky high. Life already comes pre-packaged with real hypertension-inducing situations. There’s no need to create even more over something that’s supposed to be an enjoyable distraction. There’s even less need to aggravate someone else’s blood pressure just because they don’t make your favorite entertainment the way you like it.
I definitely missed the boat on this comments section, but I do kind of want to chime in, because from where I sit, fandom has historically blurred the boundary between a lasting interest and that interest becoming central to an extreme fan’s identity.
It happened in the so-called Gold and Silver ages of comics, it happened with Saturday morning cartoons, movies, soap operas, reality shows, and it happens with video games and YouTube personalities, too.
It’s something in the neighborhood of parasocial relationships, I think – but on the scale of engaging with an entire cast or body of fiction, rather than just a single public personality or character, and not necessarily in the creepy stalker way so much as tending towards moral emulation of and magical thinking about the subject of the fandom.
I would assert, actually, that having “heroes” or “role models” you’ve never met in person lives in the borderline between normal fandom and fan cultism, often leaning towards the latter, the more such an obsession or idealization displaces the rest of a fan’s persona.
The reason I mention this is because personality cults are a documented phenomenon, and frankly… it’s harder to classify or square off with if there’s not some willful, actively-involved scam artist puppeting a victim of fan cultism. Which there rarely is, if it’s not a likeminded friends group, because rabidly consuming media is at minimum a one-person task and it’s actually easier to do it alone.
I may come back to these thoughts later, because they’re not well-formed, but I think I may be on to something. Guess I’ll read some clinical research and see if anyone has made similar guesses, or something.