fearthefuzzybear

[fearthefuzzybear]

Me and my nostalgia.... There he is... Dame Samurai....

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reblog if you love women

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the smallest artist i listen to? probably the bird outside my window

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We need to talk about the Watcher "fans".

These are the top comments on Shane’s IG post. Just look at the number of likes.

“Steven Lim is a greedy, manipulative evil CEO that twists his white co-founder's hands and forces the said co-founder into his will!!!” – this narrative is being prevalent in this fandom since April 19. People harassed him all across social media on every platform. People wrote nasty comments not only to his social media accounts but also to his wife and friends.

People made a Change.org hilariously dumb petitions to have him leave the CEO post.

People gleefully demonize and tear down his reputation. Twist his words out of context in to something vile. Weaponize the years old inside jokes his friends made on camera.

“This is not racism!!!” they say. “These are just the facts!!!”

No they aren’t. And here’s why:

because this

is the same as this:

Covert racism in language, or coded racism, is the deployment of common stereotypes or tropes to elucidate a racially charged idea. Rather than expressly perpetuating racist tropes, covert linguistic racism is seen as rational or "common sense", and many are not aware of its impact.

Racial stereotypes. Racial or cultural stereotyping refers to generalizing a group based on a simplified set of norms, behaviors, or characteristics.

The Yellow Peril (also the Yellow Terror, the Yellow Menace and the Yellow Specter) is a racist color metaphor that depicts the peoples of East and Southeast Asia[a] as an existential danger to the Western world.

Fu Manchu is a fictional character created by Arthur Ward, a music hall writer and journalist in London in the early 1900s. Writing under the pseudonym Sax Rohmer, Ward had absolutely no knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese people – but his invention of a Chinese supervillain struck a chord in Victorian Britain and became a smash hit.

Fu Manchu was the original fictional Asian villain, a trope which became embedded in popular culture and Western psyche spawning spin-offs, spoofs, pop songs, video games and even consumer goods. But how damaging is Fu Manchu and how much can he tell us about modern Asian racism?

Ward wrote Fu Manchu as the personification of the so-called Yellow Peril threat: exotic, alien and inhuman, a mastermind boasting degrees from top universities. Using sinister powers to control minds, he aimed to undermine Western civilisation.

"This led to the idea that the Chinese were deceiving – they weren't being honest, they weren't revealing who they really are as people. This spawned into stories of Chinese as cheats and liars and deceitful – never giving you the truth, always fabricating."

Seven Lim being labeled as “greedy” “evil” and “manipulative” (of his white co-founder) is rooted in Anti-Asian racism. Whether people admit it or not.

Racism is not always derogatory slurs or white hoods. Racism is also casual micro-aggressions and putting people of color in the metaphorical boxes of harmful stereotypes. Racism is twisting the narrative and shaping it into a vile stereotype straight from the 19th century.

Also, let's not forget that people are happy to jump on Ryan in the similar way for the same reasons.

[fearthefuzzybear]

I've started writing this post like, four times already, and I keep discarding the drafts instead of continuing because it's too close, still. But i know i need to unpack this instead of just letting it live inside of me to fester and rot and make me bitter, which will just mean that the haters won, because it's their fault the joy is gone.

Something happened this weekend here on tumblr and elsewhere in other fanspaces and across the wider internet. Something horrible. I've been through fandom implosions before, I was in the trenches with VLD, I walked through the end of Bleach, but this was orders of magnitude worse.

The meanness. The cruelty. The way so many people forgot that the people on their TV, laptop and phone screens are people. That the words they're gleefully typing into their little comment boxes and their posts are being seen by real people, and not just the people at which they are directed.

This fandom has long had a problem with passive, and also less passive, racism. This fandom has long had a problem with boundaries between ourselves and the people we are fans of. I think these two things combined into a horrid creature that was beyond the imagining of anyone.

I slept very little this weekend. I have been more anxious the last three days than I have ever been in my life. I worried every time I opened the tumblr app what thing I might find in my inbox or as a reply on one of my posts. I worried about friends in the fandom, who were dealing not only with the barrage of vitriol not directed at them, but also who were receiving it themselves for daring to be supportive of the general plan.

I am lucky. I have spaces to retreat to. I have friends who are both in and not in this fandom, who have checked in with me to make sure I'm doing okay. My partner has shouldered the bulk of managing the house this weekend because I couldn't. It was too much to think about how to deal with that when all this was going on inside my phone and my laptop. I am also lucky because I am not a person of colour.

Watching folks in this fandom who I know to be folks of colour wade into the fray and knowing that they are seeing the same takes that I was seeing about Steven and about Ryan, makes my heart want to shrivel up in my chest. It hurt me to watch people turn on Watcher this weekend, but I cannot imagine how much it hurt my friends, who might have been watching people they used to trust or enjoy or feel like they knew, spew racist and hateful rhetoric over a business decision they didn't agree with.

I'm not going to litigate whether things could have been done differently, because it really doesn't matter to me, but I am going to say that a level of trust has been shattered here in this fandom space. I can't have fun with people about Watcher content when I have to check and make sure they weren't among the people who were calling for violence against a man whose crime was poorly communicating a business decision to a fandom they used to extoll as kind and generous. If my trust in the wider fandom has been broken then I have to assume our fandom friends of colour's trust has also been shredded.

This has fundamentally changed how I want to engage with and in fandom, and not for the better. I don't have an answer for what this means for me going forward, but I am just so sad. I am so sad that a place of great joy has been sapped of that feeling and I don't know how I'm going to get it back.

I don't know if I want to.

[fearthefuzzybear]

I think the most fun part of monsters inc is boo calling sulley “kitty” and mike wazowski by full government name

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this frame from the fallout tv show is so funny i nearly puked watching it

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#i dont go here but zhis fucjing ROCKS!!!!!!!!!!!

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the stupidest panels

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grian gets died

#cubitos getting murked #save #mcyt #grian

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MIKUU!! + some other vocaloid doodles :) excited and mad for miku expo.. (enjoy the meme i made earlier lol)

Edit to say the april 14th show was so great!!! Though i waited in the merch line for 6 hours... that was.. bad lol but me and my friends had an awesome time :)!

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dandelions are Not weeds they are literally yellow...

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Please Miku Miku Beam responsibly

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The idea of ghost obsessions is so funny id be so pissed if I died and it just made me somehow more autistic

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there’s something wrong with him

#valid tiktok #dunmeshi

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i'm actually really upset at the watcher "fandom"

y'all seem like a lot of fair-weather fans to a group of guys who have consistently put out shows that you love, you've gone to their live shows, you've bought their merch, you've followed them over the years as they've grown and built their own brand

and then when they come out to say "hey, we're proud to announce the next big step for us as creators, producers, talent, and directors," you fucking scream and rail and throw a fit because they are launching a paid service that allows them MUCH more creative control and freedom while also supporting their staff in a more sustainable way???

that's sick and pathological, and i wonder how many of y'all were blogging in support of the wga/sag-aftra strike, because if you were and you're pitching a fit now? check yourself. not fucking cute to say you support those folks and then bitch and moan when your so-called favorite creators take the initiative to support themselves in a way that they feel more confident in.

"but we liked the old content that looked like it was made in a basement and the blue and yellow text and--" okay, did you ever think that maybe?? MAYBE???? the guys wanted to do something better??? if you really supported them, you'd be in support of their creative ambitions, too.

[fearthefuzzybear]