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morgandawnrhodanum posted: of fandoms and complete shitshows"....one of the most baffling and actively enraging developments in recent times has been the sharp rise of content-policing from within rather than something caused by the intervention of an fundamentalist Christian group whose caterwauling kicked off Strikethrough)...
In the case of antis, they specifically congregate in their own tags and have formed their own social community, where it's a shunning offense to express even a modicum of agreement with any ideas that run counter to anti thought. Hell, I've seen people being made-an-example-of purely because they remained friends with individuals who did not subscribe to anti views. The goal is to isolate the (usually young and inexperienced) individuals and make them socially and emotionally dependent on the anti community, to the point where they don't dare question anything, for fear of ostracism or outright targeted harassment. This combines nastily with the wider Tumblr social environment's habit of locking people in a death-spiral of more and more extreme versions of initially sensible ideas.....
Current fandom consensus is that you're supposed to tag and warn the shit out of your content, if it contains anything that could be objectionable, so people who don't want to deal with that can just avoid it or vamoose it entirely via blacklisting. How does that square with antis howling even louder than before against 'bad content?' Simple. They don't want tools to curate their own fandom experience -- you could spoon-feed them everything and they'd still scream. Their goal is the total elimination of whatever content they've fixated on (age-gap ships, incest ships, content with sexual violence, BDSM content, etc) because even the mere knowledge that this content exists (and is being actively and freely enjoyed by 'gross people') is enough to put them into a bona-fide emotional meltdown.....
.. In Tumblr fannish spaces, largely dominated by women and other marginalized groups, such as LGBTQ+ people? We bought into their shit for a while, because we were earnestly trying not to do harm to others and were taught obsessively that if someone said we were harming them, we needed to listen and take their criticism on-board. That's how a ton of anti nonsense is, nowadays, being used as a front for ship-wars -- 'my ship is progressive and not-straight and interracial and healthy and supportive, your ship is [insert the opposite here... even when it doesn't correspond as a description for the ship!]' This is also why there's a veritable rat-race going on to 'problematize' even the most anodyne ship and fictional content, because that's the most surefire way to use it as a bludgeon against someone else.
The most chilling aspect of this whole thing is that this fuckery has bled out of fandom and affected people's real lives. And the reason for this is precisely the unholy mix of Extreme Tumblr SJ and fandom, one that puts people in a filter-bubble which teaches them that they are RIGHTEOUS in their goals and their methods and they mustn't question themselves or the legitimacy of their targets. The Righteous never question, the Righteous are always correct and if they're told someone is a Suppressive Person* Bad Person, then they must cut all ties with them, publicly denounce them and, if they continue in their Badness, punish them appropriately."
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-01 06:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-06 02:50 am (UTC)You know, it's amazing how much wank I've avoided hearing about due to my inability to ever figure out how to use tumblr effectively. And very depressing to see the Purity Police are thriving. This sort of demonization of other pairings & ships has always been a part of fandom, but the way tumblr works seems to have thrown gasoline on this sort of behavior.