#having to argue against the most bad faith possible interpretation of what I'm actually saying inside my own head | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

olderthannetfic · 1 year

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I'm the original anon complaining about squick-inducing tags and the father/son thing. I stepped away from the discussion because frankly people's willful miscomprehension was getting exhausting. The number of people who read my take that the phrasing of tags MATTERS and responded to it with something like "So we can't tag for nsfw content??!" is baffling. I've seen multiple such discussions play out now over the months I've followed this blog and the way people consistently reach for bad faith interpretations, causing the newest round of "Wait are people really saying X?" (no they're not, but good job finding something fake to get outraged about) is exhausting. You guys really need to learn how to not take things in the worst faith possible. Or not assume everyone who complains about seeing something that upset them is an anti. Or just make fewer assumptions in general.

I will say one last thing about this, now that I've cooled off a bit, to explain my position and the logical issues I see in a lot of the counterarguments against it.

The body of a fic can contain the most filthy, explicit, most brain-bleach inducing writing you can think of, and I like that. I like that AO3 is like this. It's key to the way AO3 works. I like that if I write something like that, I can put that on AO3. I think all of us (who aren't antis) like that. Yes?

Fic tags and summaries and the stuff you click on before you get to the fic body give you an idea of what to expect. I think we can agree that this is how it works, yes? And that this is a good idea, etiquette-wise? We're on the same page here? (I dare not assume anymore TBH.)

Given that, I simply don't understand why people feel like the same lack of limitations as for fic body should apply to the tags. If potentially upsetting content should be warned for, and tags are the place to warn for upsetting content in the fic body, then where is the space to warn about upsetting content in the tags? The answer I've seen to this is to "just" use filtering, which I've explained I don't see as good enough - filtering only really works for common stuff and when your squick is roughly as broad as the filter category. The other answer is to just get a thicker skin, which I see as really callous. And I don't even have any actual clinical triggers! If you're like me, and you're hypothetically quite happy to read (for instance) a fucked-up incest darkfic, but you're not happy to see the author to just give you a hefty dose of their potentially awful writing of that straight in the summary/tags, then you have to either overfilter (and miss out on fic you'd like reading), or just... deal with it.

And yes, of course some amount of "you just have to deal with it" is always inevitable in a setting like AO3, where everyone is different, and we do just "deal with" a lot of things in order to use AO3 at all. It's not inherently unreasonable to ask people to "just deal with it". But. Given that we do have things like ratings and Archive warnings and a general etiquette around tagging certain kinds of content, then obviously "just deal with it" has limits, and a line drawn in the sand. And some of you draw the line in this specific spot - AO3 warnings are good, AO3 etiquette around tagging is good, ratings are good, but the idea that a summary or tag can be "too explicit" is not good. And you... haven't really explained why you think that to be the case. All you've done is argue that a hard definition or making it a TOS violation wouldn't be enforceable (I agree), or somewhat hysterically called it "censorship". Which isn't an argument in and of itself.

Or, to put this another way: To everyone who thinks that authors can be as explicit as they like in tags and summary (for the sake of example let's say they're free to write an entire explicit sex scene in the freeform tags) - so, to everyone who thinks like that, why do you think tag warnings and Archive warnings should exist in the first place? It's logically inconsistent. The entire concept of tags as warnings only works if they do have content and style constraints that the thing they're warning for does not.

Sidenote: "Are tags warnings or content labels" is an old discussion on OTNF. But again, I think most of us agree they tend to serve both purposes a lot of the time, and that while overwarning is bad, we are generally glad that tags can act as warnings. We can agree on that, yes?

My actual position isn't that tags shouldn't contain NSFW content, it's just that people should be mindful and use their judgement as opposed to just "NO CENSORSHIP FOR ME WHEEEE". The fic body is the space to put whatever the hell you feel like. The fic summary/tags are not. The etiquette around them will be different by virtue of the fact that they have different visibility and a different purpose. Obviously this isn't something you can incorporate into TOS, it's deeply subjective and case-by-case and depends on context and varying definitions. I don't understand why people have been calling this position indefensible, unless they were mistakenly assuming I'm advocating for some kind of actual TOS ban. Which I'm not. I'm just pushing back against the idea that you can put whatever the fuck you want in the tags/summary and it's the reader's fault for not anticipating it if they find it upsetting.

Fic summaries and tags exist on a delicate knife's edge between giving you enough hints on the fic inside but not too much, it's inherently impossible to please everyone or even make everyone comfortable. I get that. But that still doesn't mean we should just do whatever in them - that's the perfect solution fallacy. For what it's worth, most people don't just do whatever, if only for the reason that summaries/tags are meant to intrigue, not be a substitute of actually reading the thing. I think fics that have the wrong balance in that regard are actually quite rare, so to some extent this entire wank is over a mostly-hypothetical "what if everyone did this", which they don't. Which I'm sure all of us who've discussed this feel just great about. What is more common is some people using tags to share headcanons the way they would on a blog post, which can skirt over that "Eep I'd have preferred not to read that without warning" line and I don't think it's actually wild or radical or pro-censorship to say "Maybe... don't do that in the tags? At least when it's rape/incest/underage/super graphic violence etc.? Just a thought." I mean, it's the same reason people on Tumblr can have entire NSFW blogs but still choose to put some things under a readmore and warn for it at the top. Sometimes the difference between getting squicked and not squicked can literally just be "I had a five second warning to mentally prepare myself for this, and now that I have, I'm cool to read it". You can't have that five-second warning if you're scrolling through fic, however well-filtered your search results may be, and can encounter whatever.

(@elendraug Sorry I told you to fuck yourself but you did kinda respond to an anon mildly venting about wanting brain bleach over a tag they saw with "Tough shit, the author doesn't owe you a comfy summary". I get the kneejerk response against anything even vaguely censorship-adjacent but you were insensitive and unnecessarily combative about it. Peace out, sorry I blew up at you.)

Tl;dr: Censorship is about what content is allowed in fic hosted on AO3. Discussions about the most user-friendly way to communicate that content to other users have nothing to do with censorship. Everything about that is etiquette-based and vibes-based, that doesn't mean we should give up on having any (soft) etiquette-driven guidelines, especially since we already have some, such as tags-doubling-as-warnings. Authors should exercise some judgement as to how much detail/vivid descriptions in tags/summaries are too much, especially since avoiding over-vividness is often a good idea for other reasons anyway (it can be tacky and give things away in a sorta unfun way) so it's not like it's a lot of skin off the author's nose to avoid that.

The reason people are reacting this way (aside from it being tumblr as usual) is that they read your specific example, and they find it a weaksauce instance of this.

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gayleviticus · 5 months

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I think anytime people want to talk about how [group] isn't really [religion]' its quite difficult bc there are at least four different possible levels this conversation could be happening on: (this can probably apply more broadly but I'm most familiar w Christian ones so I use those examples)

Linguistic - "I believe in Christ so I'm a Christian". basic and to the point, you can argue w it by pointing out Muslims also believe in Jesus (and then counterargue he's not the cornerstone of Islam)

Sociological - "even if it diverges from Christian orthodoxy, LDS self identifies as Christian and emerged from the Christian tradition so it is Christian"

Normative theological: "JWs aren't real Christians because they reject the Trinity and believe in falsehood' (or, for that matter "JWs are the only true Christians because we're the only ones who accept the truth")

Community: I don't think people tend to explicitly verbalise this one as much, but it sortve like "we just don't believe the same thing as that group and don't have anything in common."

And I think where it gets especially tricky is the way that 3 and 4 can become quite difficult to unentangle.

let's say there was some kind of gnostic Christian church that believed the God of the Old Testament is a sadistic monster (this might exist but i dont know of any; i pick this as a pure hypothetical). when they self identify as Christian, I would concede 1 and 2, disagree on 3 but accept everyone thinks they're right in life so what are you gonna do about it, but where I would feel uncomfortable is when we get to 4.

I can accept someone might have an interpretation of Christianity that thinks my God is an evil demiurge - but I'm going to feel like we really don't have a shared faith in common. We may both use the language of Christian, but what we mean by that is very different and doesn't necessarily imply unity. That doesn't need to be a bad thing at all, unless you think being of the same religion is necessarily to truly respect others as human beings; if I can respect Islam and Judaism, I can respect Gnostic Christianity as a different faith from mine. and so a lot of people think 'hmm, well my faith is so different from X that it feels wrong for both of us to call ourselves Christians.'

but 4) is more than just a binary of exclusion/inclusion; it's about what actually marks a community in common, and I think that's more, not less pertinent in a society where we understand other people don't have to be your coreligionist to be someone you can respect and love and be in community and solidarity with in other ways.

and its also difficult because people can feel like they have different parts of their faith that are fundamental from others and not understand why there seems to be this one way gap (which can include the liberal not understanding why the conservative cares so much about biblical inerrancy, but it can also include, say, the evangelical not understanding why Jewish people won't accept Messianics). and so debate over who is a true [believer] often just becomes a proxy for 'is this someone with whom my faith is a unifier or a differentiator'. which is then quite unhelpful when someone tries to argue against someone operating on this level with a sociological argument.

#religion #christian #christianity

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dabistits · 3 years

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Maybe it's because I'm not really interacting with fans of other manga besides bnha. But why are there so many weird social justice type takes that don't even make sense? Is this just a bnha thing are a manga fan thing? I mean like the star and stripe asks you got for example and I've seen similar things to that out in the tags. I don't really see that sort of takes in let's say the elder scrolls fandom (which is pretty bad for other reasons). At first I thought people where trolling but most seem to be dead serious. Have been living under a rock (very possible) or is this a pretty recent development?

it's definitely not solely a bnha fandom thing, i think it's common across most, if not all, popular fandoms where interpretation and analyzation have SOME kind of appeal, especially on twitter and tumblr, where progressively-minded opinions tend to be better-received. i've seen this kind of twisting of social justice rhetoric in relation to, for example, the star wars fandom, where fans would make up 39581 reasons why kylo ren and his actor are actually marginalized, but finn and john boyega are problematic or even privileged in comparison because they're misogynists.

i think most of these cases happen because the CRITICS are the ones who bring up social justice first. we didn't get 48371 headcanons about marginalized kylo ren until black people started pointing out fans' antiblackness toward finn. i doubt we would have so many people arguing how bnha's pro heroes are actually the real victims of misogyny, abuse, coercion, etc. if villain fans hadn't first been talking about how closely this futuristic hero society resembles our current carceral society. which brings me to my point:

again, i personally think this happens because more people have learned the language of social justice without understanding what social justice criticisms actually entail. they see fans of color talking about racism or women talking about misogynistic narratives, and they don't see the CONTENT of those discussions as neutral towards the existence and enjoyment of certain media; they see it as an attack, they see it as a tactic to win some kind of argument that will result in their favorite media being somehow vanquished forever.

in the imaginations of many people in progressively-minded spaces, being labeled a bigot of some sort is a black mark that no one can ever recover from, so your only option is to deny that you could possibly ever be bigoted in the first place; therefore, labeling something as bigoted is the strongest possible argument a person can make against the existence of some media. if critics are already accusing your fave media of being bigoted, the best and only thing you can do is to accuse them in turn of being the real bigots or the worse bigots, and possibly to deny any wrongdoing at all from your fave media.

that's how many people learn to latch on to certain terms as something to win an argument with; to them the term denotes something generally "bad" or "worse than bad," rather than learning how that term developed to describe a specific phenomenon within an oppressive structure. i'm sure you've already seen this happen with "gatekeeping" and "gaslighting" and other words. so now shigaraki isn't only fighting or killing s&s, he's grabbing her "non-consensually." now dabi isn't only murdering people, he's somehow committing abuse.

of course there are many caveats that could be made (like, sure, not all criticism is made in good faith) but it'd be way too much to get into. but this is the broad trend i've seen myself as social justice leaked more and more into fandom, but as a way to criticize rather than to uplift fandom, resulting in a pushback from largely white and liberal fanbases that echo the language of social justice, so as not to forsake their image of progressivism while still being able to celebrate their faves as underdogs.

#long post /#ask

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