Read on Twitter
Anyway... One thing I& #39;ve taken away from fandom discourse over the years is that we tend to eat our own and hold each other to standards of perfection, burning out our energy on self-immolation instead of taking this energy and applying it to those with more power.
Not saying you can& #39;t dislike a thing or call someone out for being shitty. But anyone whose ever worked in IRL activist circles will tell you that this kind of infighting is common and often leads nowhere. We can talk about how reality and fiction intertwine and affect one
another, because they certainly do. But generally, yelling at some person on AO3 who writes problematic shit isn& #39;t going to do as much as you want it to. Most of the cultural effects are top-down; seeing rape culture portrayed on Law and Order has done miles more damage to
our ideas of women and sexuality than someone who writes that thing as a kink and gets 200 hits.
And it& #39;s frustrating, right? Because often it feels like the only people we can influence are those in our own communities. Peer pressure is powerful, so oftentimes, a fandom becomes
And it& #39;s frustrating, right? Because often it feels like the only people we can influence are those in our own communities. Peer pressure is powerful, so oftentimes, a fandom becomes
an echo chamber of specific ideas and rules and moral imperatives, and anyone who breaks them, whether intentionally or unintentionally, becomes a pariah. I know personally that I didn& #39;t know about the "Richie is gay" stuff until... Like 3 months ago? Because before Twitter,
Most of my Reddie fandom interaction was on Tumblr and a private Discord, and information doesn& #39;t always trickle into those spaces in the same way it does here. Fandom isn& #39;t just closed LJ groups anymore (not that it ever really was). It& #39;s a whole wide ecosystem of interconnected
spaces, and some spaces prioritize certain information and certain types of fandom interaction. So while on ye Olde Twitter, "Richie is Gay" is fairly common knowledge, you don& #39;t often know if that one person posting a bi Richie fic on AO3 even knows about this discourse!
Anyway, I guess this is all to say, think about how much energy you& #39;re expending on these kinds of conversations, especially during a time like this, when the world is going through a literal pandemic. Social media is the perfect medium for drama and gossip because it disallows
nuanced, face-to-face conversations and allows us to ignore the humanity of the people we disagree with, and also homogenizes the importance we place on different discussion topics. Like, we talk about the president encouraging people to drink bleach on the same platform we use
to talk about whether someone is allowed to write a character as bi. Like, this kind of conflation is really, really bad for our mental health. So... If you find yourself so far into the rabbit hole that you& #39;re refreshing Twitter every 3 seconds so you can get that sweet, sweet
dopamine hit from seeing what all the people you follow have to say about a topic, so you can mentally organize them into categories of "morally pure" and "morally bankrupt"... Maybe take a break.
