Kimmiesue13 - Just A Silly Blonde Geek

settle this for me once and for all

is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea

does anyone else require an advance notice of at least three (3) working days to physically and mentally prepare for any and all forms of social activity or is it just me

This nerd. God, I love him

biznasty’s instagram 7.6.17

Bunny Rose (because it was a bunny made of floral fabric) but I was adamant that HE was a BOY despite being floral and pink.This confused everyone who ever met me. 

I also had a lovey called Blue Thing. It was a potholder. 

new metric for your personality as an adult = what you named your most iconic stuffed animal as a kid

I don’t do that. If I vent about it on my own blog, it’s as infrequently as I can manage, because I do my best to avoid the content that upsets me. I don’t seek it out to get riled up about it. I don’t seek out content that upsets me, read it in its entirety, and then leave angry comments and send my friends to harass the author. I don’t choose a high-profile writer for the content I don’t like and engage in a targeted campaign of harassment against them all while claiming to be addressing a general problem. 

This, right here. Why, why, WHY do people go seeking out the things they KNOW are going to upset them? To me, it’s precisely because they want to be able to assert their moral superiority over the rest of us plebs still reading/writing/watching whatever they disapprove of. And THAT pisses me off. 

Being an active participant in fandom requires a certain level of self-regulating in order to be a healthy activity. It requires the ability to say “Not for me,” or “Not today,” and walk away.

We can have conversations about patterns we see in fanworks. We can discuss how we portray characters and relationships, how to effectively convey what we want to in writing, how to sensitively approach representations of marginalized characters. But having those conversations productively requires that we approach each other in good faith, and it requires the ability to self-regulate–including recognizing that often there is no hard line, no black and white answer, and we won’t always come to the same conclusions.

It requires an understanding up front that eliminating all fanworks we don’t care for is not the end goal of these conversations.

I’ll give a personal example. There is a ship that deeply, viscerally upsets me in like 95% of its iterations. I can explain why I don’t like it if asked. I’ve written about why I don’t think it’s handled well in canon.

And if I wanted to–if I wanted to–I could make a very convincing-sounding argument for why that ship is objectively bad and wrong and no one should ship it. Not because that’s objectively right, mind you, but because I’m good at arguing. I could slap that together in like… ten minutes, probably.

I don’t do that. If I vent about it on my own blog, it’s as infrequently as I can manage, because I do my best to avoid the content that upsets me. I don’t seek it out to get riled up about it. I don’t seek out content that upsets me, read it in its entirety, and then leave angry comments and send my friends to harass the author. I don’t choose a high-profile writer for the content I don’t like and engage in a targeted campaign of harassment against them all while claiming to be addressing a general problem.

If you are deliberately seeking out content that you know will upset you and reading it anyway and then feeling that you need to take those bad feelings out on the creator, you are not taking care of yourself. You are not engaging in healthy behavior or productive coping mechanisms. You are not keeping yourself safe, and you are not helping to make fandom safer for others. You are not engaging in good faith.

If you find that you do this and you can’t seem to stop, you may need to take some kind of further steps up to and including taking a break from fandom. I’m serious. I’ve taken breaks myself for that exact reason. There’s no shame in it. 

Please monitor your own ability to self-regulate. Please actively evaluate whether or not you are engaging in healthy and productive behavior, for yourself and for others.