👉 Hate and harassment make fandom a toxic place for everyone.
👉 Hate and harassment decreases overall participation in fandom; it doesn’t just chase away people you don’t like.
👉 Hate and harassment discourages everyone from sharing their fan work for fear it might make someone upset.
👉 Hate and harassment decreases engagement and commenting on fan work for fear it might make someone upset.
If you see fan work you don’t like; block and move on!
Ship and let ship!
I wish we could all go back to saying “x is implied to be a y” or “the subtext is that x is a y” instead of “x is y-coded”.
The “coded” language is all just button pushing meant to shut down argument as if the subject were not up for debate.
If you are a person who:
And you do not actually do any violent, abusive, harmful or destructive actions
You are not a bad person.
You are a good person.
Thoughts and fiction do not define morality.
Actions define morality.
Having or enjoying bad thoughts or bad fiction doesn’t mean you will act on those feelings.
Liking negative themes in fiction or having daydreams about harmful actions will not cause you to do harm.
Thoughts and fiction aren’t harmful.
I think mostly antis hear their conservative, eugenicist parents use the term and then parrot it back without considering the full implications.
Yes, they want us all dead.
But they don’t understand that they, sweet baby queers that most of them are, are the next rung up on the degeneracy ladder.
And all their attempts at purity won’t save them when they help let the wolf in by the front door.
“I never thought leopards would eat MY face!”
📢 Moral and immoral are not immutable qualities everyone agrees on.
📢 You are not obligated to listen to people who tell you that the fiction you enjoy carries moral weight.
📢 Trying to dictate what type of fiction is acceptable is authoritarian behavior.
Yet another anti who actually says out loud that they want to normalize bullying and harassment.
Stay classy.
You cannot increase the agency of one group (children) by diminishing the agency of another group (adults).
Censorship does not make children safer, because there is no safe authority to decide what is censored.
Censorship takes away the tools of children to escape from abuse and indoctrination.
Thinking about tropes, and comfort, and self care, and squicks and triggers and blocking this morning, and how different they are for everyone.
What’s comforting to one person, might be a squick or trigger to someone else, and vice versa.
Since we’ve been talking about our feelings on tropes today already, we’re going to share some of our squicks and some of our comfort tropes.
Squicks and triggers (things Sinister system has trouble reading to various degrees)
Comfort tropes (things Sinister system finds comforting or relatable to read about to various degrees)
“Do you realize that whatever we fantasize about matters to God? He is intimately aware and involved in our spiritual development. As Christians, it is critical that we censor our imaginations, because wrong thoughts can easily become wrong attitudes that give birth to sinful actions. Emotions can manifest with equal force whether incited by fantasy or reality. This fact alone fuels the pornography industry.”
– an excerpt from “Buying and Selling the Souls of our Children: A Closer Look at Pokemon” by John Paul Jackson
Please, please show this quotation the next time you see an anti arguing about how we shouldn’t compare them to conservative Christians.
I totally get feeling embarrassed about it.
A lot of our opinions about rpf formed when we were 16 in high school and one of the girls in our friend-circle wrote a lot of explicit smut about the band Good Charlotte.
TBH my personal feeling is that celebrities have a ‘media persona’ that is essentially the same as a fictional character, and it doesn’t bother me when other people ship them. But I would personally feel embarrassed about the idea of doing so.
RPF is definitely a more complex topic than fanfic that only includes fictional characters.