#Ahistorical wank

[persimmonlions]

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#incredible how confidently ahistorical some people can be #1d fandom #wank for ts

[who-is-page]

BEASTPUNK: Being Unabashedly Animal

A subculture/term for anyone who identifies as partially or entirely as a nonhuman creature in an integral or intrinsic way, regardless of the origin or perceived nature of their identity, and who:

Embraces and celebrates their nonhumanity and animality, and (if applicable) the overlap and entanglement between one's human and nonhuman identity

Embraces abnormal instincts and behaviors related to their own and others' nonhumanity, so long as no active harm is done to another non-consenting individual or any real life animal

Interacts with their nonhumanity and displays it in socially unconventional or undesirable ways, and accepts and celebrates others doing so as well

Revels in the history of animal-people and beast-folk in all ways known: from the alterhuman community, from mythology, and from cultural or spiritual backgrounds relevant to the person in question

Throws respectability politics into the dumpster, lights it on fire, and dances around the burning corpse of the god "Cringe" in the moonlight

Is, unabashedly and genuinely, animal

This term is meant to be a reclamation of animalistic nonhuman identity, especially regarding individuals who may experience their nonhumanity in eccentric, "feral," or otherwise socially unacceptable or even stigmatized ways. Beastpunk is also open to endels, clinical lycanthropes, and others who experience nonhumanity in ways related to their mental health and physical bodies, although it is not open to self-identified p-shifters and p-shifter packs. Anyone who's ever been told that their animality is "too much," or that they're taking their identity as a nonhuman creature "too seriously," or who has lost previous words/groups they've used to define themself due to terminological drift, KFF appropriation and re-defining, or others gatekeeping their identity's authenticity is welcome to take up this term. Fictherians and fictional nonhuman creatures are also included in beastpunk, which is meant to be explicitly pro-fictionkin and fiction-based identities; theriomythics, folcintera, and mythkin are also included in beastpunk. Any and all nonhuman creatures, regardless of source or origin, are included.

This term is inspired by Anomalymon's original coining of kinpunk.

🚫 This term is not meant for KFF and other forms of anti-otherkin, anti-fictionkin, and similar. This term is not meant for self-identified "zootherians," "zoosexuals," "zetas," and similar. 🚫

Edit (09/28/22): Because someone asked me to clarify this: KFFers as mentioned in the above are meant to refer to individuals who redefine otherkin and related terms to just mean liking something a lot, rather than identifying as anything. They have roots in Tumblr anti-otherkin communities of the mid-2010's and in meme/fandom culture both, resulting in typically ableist and ahistorical language aimed towards otherkin: claims that otherkin are "taking it too seriously," or "just crazy," that otherkin and therians identities are "just a Tumblr thing," and that 'kins' should be based around fandom ideas of characters and morals.

Arguably, KFF are also largely responsible for the fictionkin community crash of the late 2010's due to their interactions in fictionkin community spaces, muddling of language within, and their insistences on bringing fandom wank in as a gatekeeping cudgel to ostracize others (the most common of such being the idea of what fictotypes are "moral and allowed" versus on what were "problematic and made you an evil person," which inspired no less than three separate OtherCon lectures from 2020-2022.)

#otherkin #therian #fictionkin #alterhuman #punk #beastpunk

[trekfaerie]

Honestly the GALL to write and post something so long i had to open it on desktop bc it crashed the app twice and then having such a flat opinion on morals. Going "izzy being the antagonist pirate and people liking him is Just As Bad as people liking Kylo Ren" when 1) at least 50% of Kylo's popularity is on how he was nearly the only one with ships you didnt get hate and discourse from other fans of these same ships, 2) canon trashed every single other character, 3) the internal acceptable "good guy" range of morality is completely different between sw and ofmd??, 4) the way the show handles racism and izzy in general and izzy + racism in particular already has a ton more meta than usual???? One of the reasons im an izzy enjoyer is that he's allowed to be a messy bitch in fanworks the way stede and ed often arent AND 5) STEDE IS RIGHT THERE. Right there being a white and wealthy aristocrat in 1700's Barbados and being one half of the most popular ship in the fandom but he's more palatable and he's not "evil" "on camera" i guess lol

Im glad that meta didnt track with a lot of people, it's very transparent that they dont like izzy being popular and they're bringing in the "you're lowkey racist if you like him" tactic and ignoring everything that doesnt fit that narrative bc it gets a kneejerk reaction out of people by now. It's the same as that article going "well they didnt make this ahistorical pirate romcom face slavery head on for nine whole episodes out of ten so obviously it's racist to like it. We're not going to mention the ways it did deal with racism and slavery or the amount of people involved on all levels of production that arent white"

EXACTLY

it's predictable at this point. there's wank about ed being dom in fics, too, just like the whole "if finn is a top, you're racist. if poe is a top, you're racist" shit that made finnpoe a goddamn minefield. luckily, as you said, it's really not gained too much traction.

but, I decided to search and see if this person is That Kind of Person, and lo and behold! THEY SUPER ARE!

i refuse to let people with cotton candy brains ruin another goddamn fandom for me.

[hyperions-fate]

I have plenty of awful opinions, but at least I'm not a Jungian.

#Carl Jung #Shitposting #Ahistorical wank

[callmearcturus]

it’s sort of wild to me that people don’t know things like Racefail or the J2 Haiti thing or other.... wanks.

THAT’S THE THING, i still mentally call them wanks.

I have a lot of reasons I hate tumblr, but one of the big ones is that it’s utterly ahistorical and seems custom built to demolish any ability to learn about the community. You just have to jump in and follow the stream forward with no way to learn context around you.

But back before tumblr, we had.... shit like FW. And I’m certain FW was a busted imperfect system, given how much of it was based on the mockery and voyeurism of drama going on in other fandoms. (I fully admit i was too young and immature to recognize this at the time.) But the one thing it did provide was a wider view of wtf was going on in capital-F Fandom.

Like, I believe if you are in a specific fandom, you tend to know all of the drama within that fandom........... but essentially fucking nothing beyond the garden walls. Like, you have no context, its not coming to you, and Tumblr makes it very hard to get any sense of the wider space. The number of times I’ve explained intricate, minute details of some drama in one of my fandoms to people who had no fucking idea shit was happening! is a lot!

like, for ppl out there who know that.... for example, that Voltron fandom was super wanky..... can you detail any of it? how much do you know about what was happening? because I know nothing! and given the nature of tumblr it’s hard to lend too much weight to someone’s explanations bc how the culture of this site has evolved into this power game.

point being, I know about aja being garbage and about the j2 haiti thing and about the post-katrina racism and about fucking cultish charlatans in LotR fandom who embezzled a fucking convention not because i was in any of those fandoms..... but because of FW. and to my knowledge there is no modern replacement. we’ve become much more stratified and sectioned off from anything but the biggest and most dramatic troubles because, imo, the structure of this fucking terrible blue hellsite. 

hm “the structures and systems we are locked into are antithetical to maintaining a sense of community history” sure is a microcosm of the societal rot, isn’t it. i bet someone who has studied social media could explain “oh well that’s intentional because these metrics” or something.

fucking sigh. my shoulder hurts.

#don't take this as a deification of FW #i literally don't have clear enough recollections of it to say good or ill of it #only that it provided context and made the events in one fandom actually matter to the whole

[sersi]

This is a controversial take, but Ike Perlmutter didn't spend 2008-2015 making the press subsist on a single coke and kicking Maya Hansen out of the IM3 villain's seat for you to erase him from your bad and ahistorical MCU wank posts 😤.

#if kate and i actually follow through and make a fucking mcu masterpost series #it is gonna be 90% so we can explain to the corporate structure of marvel studios #(to the 2 to 3 people who are not us who actually read said posts) #😩😩😩😩 #elysia says stuff #wank for ts #i'm sorry i just had to get this out

[probablyintraffic]

fandom, profit & 50 shades

To follow up on this post, I’ve found the main primary source that I was working off of when I wrote that part about 50 Shades. A year and a half ago this reddit comment was making the rounds through fandom, from a member of the Twilight fan community. It alleges that E. L. James (“Erika”) "ripped off” already very popular fandom tropes and stories, and identifiable stories in the fandom at that. The redditor wrote (emphasis mine):

Erika never looked back. She actually has blocked every single person I still know from fandom on her twitter account. She used the community to get her book (most ideas created by the community itself) to #1 then essentially shut the door on them all.

Pretty brilliant, really.

But then, that's why she's not putting out any new content, and why she probably never will. She is likely incapable of producing fiction without the use of existing characters and a collaborative community. Erika Leonard is not a creator, she is a marketer.

This is an interesting piece of history, which makes the ahistorical claim that the inability to “produce fiction without the use of existing characters and a collaborative community” is somehow a flaw and not the default mode of fic writing. Needless to say I don’t agree with a lot of what hurricangst wrote, so I quote this history not as wholehearted endorsement but because of what it records, which is partly sequence of events, and partly the language which fans did not yet have to express anger and sadness at the incursion capitalism into fandom.

In broad outlines the post (& many follow-ups) described a dysfunctional fandom community in which too much attention accrues to a few BNFs, who took financial advantage of the situation. Savvier writers devised ways to rack up high reviews counts and gain reputation, or wrote only stories formed with tropes they already knew would be a success. Eventually many writers published and pulled down their stories, inspiring much wank and unpleasantness. As I argued the last time, I think this was the case of authors claiming individual ownership on communal property (which all fanfics are), and bringing in capitalism where it didn’t belong.

These discussions, however, tend to devolve into referendums on the individual authors or fandoms--Is the Twilight fandom especially no-good-terrible because it’s Twilight? Was E. L. James an uncommonly successful scam artist who stole ideas from other fans? (If so I admire the hustle.) Sometimes the discussion turned to some historical precedent or another, and some folks here did manage to touch on the issue of fandom and profit, which is the actual, real, perennially open wound at the heart of, scientifically, 50% of all fandom angst. Repeat after me, hate the game, don’t hate the players.

The game is fandom and profit. Good lord, these fucking meta essays on fandom and profit have endlessly prattled on about what Being a Good Fan meant or to what exact degree the fan authors should bend their heads to beg for money, which is all comedies of manners, all of it. The language they used is one of admonishment for the people who dared to set a toe out of the unspoken bounds of fandom manners. Take this quote from an essay about that Buffy controversy, where an author asked fans to pay for WIP updates:

The biggest problem with cousinjean's post, to my mind, is the arrogance of it.

L. O. L.

But despite the massive, collective angst, fandom remains vulnerable as ever to corporate takeover. Sure, fandom has repelled several attempts to commercialize fanfics, and revulsion to profit making runs deep, but it is mostly out of survival instinct. The language and reasoning used is never explicitly anticapitalist, never, because we don’t think of this problem as a systemic one, but a specifically fannish one. Do we really think that our anxiety about commodification has not been felt and replicated thousands of times over by writers and artists? 

The ultimate fantasy of fandom is that we live in a separate world, that we can protect it, and tend it day by day, vigilant of the mainstream/market/corporate attempts to intrude. But that’s not quite true. We will keep having to fend off these attacks until we are no longer able, because we don’t engage with the world which produced them.

I really have not used the words “socialism” or “Marxism” here when I’m talking about fandom, partly because I didn’t think it was necessary to name the mode of analysis and partly because it would sound a little bit pretentious, but it is necessary here. We need more of this language and this mode of analysis in fandom so that we may understand the difference between compensation and profit, between the capitalist and the worker, so that we can name our enemies and not just kill ourselves. When people appeal to readers for rent and healthcare, we should be able to say, they deserve rent and healthcare, but not because they wrote a story I liked, but because they are human.

Such analyses force us to think beyond fandom. I know many of you probably already do reblog social justice stuff, but it’s not working, and this poverty of our analyses remains. Why do we so often stop short at critiquing commodification in the larger world but comfortably condemn it in within our own? Because we cannot imagine a different reality other than the one we have, and besides which we’re not quite ready to devise a resource distribution system which does not predicate on a “free” market. 

I read this Jacobin article last year and I couldn’t put my finger on what troubled me about it, when I sympathized with so much of its sentiments. In it, Kate Robinson wrote that she was so disillusioned with the politics of fandom that she abandoned it altogether (”ditched the Snape wars”), in favor of socialist politics. The article suggested that socialism and fandom are somehow incompatible, or that if one wanted sound socialist politics one should look elsewhere, and I admit I’ve seen fewer socialists here than I would have expected of a place so overrun by academia, but that is not really the case. We can apply the Marxist lens anywhere (how? very carefully) and fandom seems in sore need of it. (Aca-fandom is a different matter.)

For precedence, we can look at the very substantial body of literature on the social history of art. They looked at art as an artifact of history, influenced by and influencing politics. They looked at what the artwork responded to, and how people responded to it, and they ask, how was the artwork produced, and how was it distributed, and in which ways did the meaning of it change when we understand more about the context for which it was meant? This kind of work doesn’t want to condemn, it wants to understand, and isn’t it the precise kind of approach that we as fans so often ask of outside journalists and commentators when they write about fandom? 

#fandom history #fandom meta #fandom and profit

[anghraine]

omg the other borgia wank, count me in! i can't when they claim that their show was better acted and more accurate and the showtime one was just flashy costumes. it personally pains me when they say that the other lucrezia was better and that holliday was a flat/bad actress that didn't fit the role.

YOU ARE WELCOME IN THESE PARTS, ANON.

It really seems like ... they’re just sort of assigned to “artsy European series” and “big-budget American cable.” And everything else just follows from that—of course The Borgias has better cinematography, it has more money! Of course Borgia has better acting, it’s Art! Even though the leads alone are like ... F&F!Rodrigo is painful enough on his own, and then by contrast to Jeremy Irons, yikes. 

The idea of Holliday as a bad actress who didn’t fill the role is so absurd. There are a LOT of valid criticisms to be made of Lucrezia’s writing, esp in S2&3. It’s Holliday’s acting that manages to infuse Lucrezia with charm and steely resolve, even when the writing is bizarre.

I’m obviously not impartial, but one of the reasons that I didn’t care for F&F was that I was particularly unimpressed with Lucrezia. Holliday in the pilot and Holliday in 2x01 quite genuinely seemed years apart in personality, experience, and appearance. F&F!Lucrezia also had a batshit (and ahistorical) storyline, but to me it seemed like she always had the same general demeanour, and remained creepily childlike throughout. 

I always think that the portrayals of the historical Giulia-Lucrezia friendship kind of epitomize the shows’ different approaches to accuracy. On the one hand, The Borgias manufactures Giulia’s background out of whole cloth, as well as the details of how she meets Lucrezia and how their quick friendship springs up. F&F starts them out with a lot more of the historical details about Giulia’s background and connections ... and no friendship at all, they’re bitter, violent enemies! Accuracy~!

Bleh.

#anon replies #respuestas #borgia fanwank #political shenanigans and codependent siblings #borgia: the other one #this is a f&f hateblog forever and ever amen #but god is f&f!lucrezia's dainty child thing creepy #and holliday was a joy #it always took a bit after i watched an episode to think about her part critically because it was just LUCREZIAAAAA #she carries /so much/ #flat??? HOW DARE #Anonymous