The Thing About "there Needs To Be Space To Discuss Sexist Tropes Is..." Isn't This Just Inviting People

The thing about "there needs to be space to discuss sexist tropes is..." isn't this just inviting people to look at servers for mlm ships and go "hm, I need to go in and harass people in this server for not shipping these boys with their canon love interests" or something. I have been in so many servers ruined for me because people came in and started yelling about m/m shippers and making me feel guilty about discussing the ships, even if they weren't talking about me individually.

No, but people will invite themselves into MLM spaces to do that regardless. (Also that's homophobia, not sexism.)

Homophobes will try to enter MLM spaces spaces regardless of the intent of the space or if they're welcome or not. Having spaces that permit critical discussions have no relevance to things like homophobia beyond the fact that these people will merely see it as an easier opportunity to be a dickface and will try their luck.

But again, they'd try their luck anyway. That's what bigots do. They're like diseases, invading spaces and trying to infect and destroy them.

Its on the people who run the servers to adhere to their responsibility to keep them safe, in those instances. This is why I always try to dissuade people from establishing Discord servers open to the public if they are not 100% willing and committed to actually moderating them and taking on that responsibility of safeguarding.

I always want to wholeheartedly agree with the "create what you want, just label it" argument. I really want to. Right up until people defend unexamined bigotry. For example, I once ran into a story where Martha Jones was actually about to fail out of medical school when she met The Doctor, because she was "incapable" of learning human anatomy and medicine, and despite "bribing her teachers". I wrote in my journal that I thought the story was racist, in a public post, and people scolded me for being censorious and not letting people "have fun". (This was back when LJ was viable.) I have a pile of other experiences like that. I would never agree with the antis that Someone (aka them) should prevent people from writing whatever, but I feel like to completely agree with "create what you want, no limits, nothing matters but creating," I have to agree that a fan of color has no right to be hurt by a story that turns an intelligent Black woman into a cheat and an idiot, even in that fan's own space. What do you think?

You have every right to feel offended or hurt by a story. But your hurt and offense does not negate someone else's ability to create. Nor does it dictate that you can tell them what they can and cannot create.

How do you know the author wasn't a person of color themselves? How do you know they weren't writing the story based on their own emotions, difficulties or experiences? Is painting a person of color as 'unintelligent' a common theme in their works or was it just the plot device of this specific story? If Martha Jones was Asian or Indian or Caucasian, would you have still been offended on her behalf that an intelligent woman/intelligent woman of color was being turned into 'an idiot'?

These are questions we have to ask ourselves when trying to determine if a work was genuinely created with the intent of being harmful. Because individually not liking or being hurt by the content's of a story is not a good enough reason to advocate against it.

The 911 fandom, for example, saw a lot of it with Eddie Diaz. People were so entrenched in fandom virtue signalling that pretty much any depiction of Eddie Diaz in fanfiction was getting bitched about as 'out of character' or 'racist' including works written by actual people of color. It got to the point where for quite a while fanfiction production within the 911 fandom dropped way down because people were too annoyed with or upset by the constant accusations no matter what was being written.

And I know it probably sounds like I'm just smokescreening for racism or excusing it. but I can promise you, I've blocked and reported authors and fandom creators before for being blatantly racist in their content. But fanfiction and literature become trickier because the purpose of stories is not to be palatable or feel-good. Stories do not have to be pleasant. Fanfiction does not have to conform to the source material.

Describing someone as "incapable" is typically a turn of phrase and has nothing to do with trying to allocate unintelligence to a specific type of person. Plenty of people would be classed as "incapable" of learning medicine because its a hard fucking thing to learn. You need to dedicate more or less five-ten years of your life to studying it before you even really get anywhere with actually practising it.

If you're someone who's easily distracted or has trouble remembering things and vice versa, you're unlikely to go into a career field that especially demands these things of you.

I imagine in any case her failing out of medical school was likely the plot point that leads her to going off with The Doctor. Which is a simple narrative and not a case of "unexamined bigotry." Its just as likely that if the author had had Martha Jones simply give up her aspirations and career to follow The Doctor, someone else would've been offended by the trope of a (black) woman giving up everything for a (white) man and deemed the story sexist or racist. Possibly both.

When analysing literature you have to be critical of if something is offending you personally or if it was intended to offend people of color as a whole. If the answer is only the former, then its a situation where you just have to recognise the work is not for you and move along.

Hi. I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask, but do you think it would be justifiable to write a webcomic where the protagonists are in an incestuous relationship that’s portrayed positively? I’m not sure if I should go this route or if I should just stick to shipping the protagonists together in my mind and not actually making it canon. Incestuous relationships in fiction seem to almost always be portrayed negatively or as a tragedy, so I feel like I would end up alienating most of a potential audience and even opening myself up for harassment/scorn. I’ve written romantic incest fanfiction in the past, but writing an actual comic containing the topic seems like a whole different ballgame.

You'll be opening yourself up to harassment and scorn by depicting incest at all, so if that's one of the deciding factors, I'd chose a different topic entirely.

That said; I stand by the age old wisdom of one's fictional tastes not representing their personal menu. To use The Salmon Analogy, a chef can cook salmon while actually hating the stuff. Or being impartial to it. Or disliking it.

You will inevitably get a barrage of pushback both about depicting incest at all and depicting it romantically, but if its something you want to do, do it. Its fiction. Incestuous fiction doesn't always have to be a Romeo and Juliet story. Give the bloodline fuckers a happy ending if that's what you want. If you want to do it, its worth doing.

Positively portraying incest should have no impact on other people. Fiction is not reality and one romantic portrayal of incest is not going to lead to a sudden pandemic of people fucking their siblings.

You do not have to justify why you wrote something.

is it normal to feel guilty for being proship? like i know its honestly not that big of a deal but i suppose ive just been listening to antis too hard and now i feel like im broken for believing in what i believe in. they keep talking about how being an anti is normal and if i disagree then im weird. am i overreacting :sob:

Being an anti is not any more normal than being a proshipper and as a proshipper the sole reason you feel guilty is because of the pressure and harassment antis direct at you, which is their goal.

Be unapologetically proship. If they are entitled to their beliefs and are unapologetic in their misguidance, then you are entitled to the same claim to normalcy.

No they aren't.

Genuinely. Not every single micro-space within a fandom needs to allow you to address or think about negative or unsettling or stressing points. At all. I am part of some servers for fandoms where even critical discussion of the source material is banned because the sole point of the server is to be an exclusively positive space.

Even discussions of politics that apply to that fandom.

I am actually begging some people to just let some spaces exist untouched by real-world issues and horrors.

Like I've lost count of the amount of times peaceful game or fandom servers have been ruined by people stampeding in with political rants, bitching about world issues, demanding internal activism, demanding vent channels so they can whine about their shitty parents, ect.

Like. Respectfully. Not every single space has to be inclusive of and welcoming of outside topics. The real world sucks. We don't needed to be reminded of that absolutely everywhere.

Hi there, really enjoying reading through your posts & adding a bunch of antis to my blocklist. It's upsetting to see how old some of them are, I can't imagine any self-respecting person over the age of 20 using the term "proshitter" but I guess this is the playground we're living in now.

I too love when antis try to sound off on my posts and make my tedious chore of blocking them so much easier.

Unfortunately, access to the open world of the internet means that people are exposed to far much more than they might be without it, and it allows them to breed this lasting culture of hate and stupidity. I just take great pleasure in laughing at them and knowing that the only people who just barely respect them are the people who think the same way as them. Which is not a compliment at all.