#not to say this problem is inherent to fanfic spaces (<- watched a movie last night that was also unable to make anything not About Sex)

[bandtrees]

sorry for more aceposting but. maybe this is just me coming from the perspective of “autistic, asexual, and sex-repulsed”, but i really really don’t… understand why sex drives fan content as much as it does? whether it be “the overabundance of porn on ao3” or “seeing sexual violence injected into stories seemingly just to fill Obligatory Sex Quota Because This Is A Fanfiction And We Need To Have At Least One Sex Reference Or We Will Die” like… if characters have any kind of relationship it has to turn sexual, if there’s threat of violence it has to be sexual, and i just don’t… get it?

is this how people see the world and think of things? is sex genuinely that important to most people or do fandom people just tend to be really horny and want to inject it into everything? the overwhelming amount of sex stuff in fandom spaces just… confuses me more than anything - and i can give passes to people who just write smut because even if i don’t necessarily relate i get that people just wanna get their rocks off and write porn, and of course sex is a very big thing for people and it makes sense unmoderated storytelling will want to write about it but… the injection of it constantly into stories and making conflicts always About Sex In Some Way baffles me to no end. if characters engage in violence towards eachother expect a rape/non-con tag because that seems to be the only way some people can process conflict.

like, i don’t wanna sound like The Pretentious Ace Person Who Thinks They’re So Much Better Than The Horny Allosexuals™️ of course i understand that sex is important to people even if i personally Don’t Get It and i obviously don’t think i’m inherently superior or smarter or whatever than the average allo ficwriter, but like… why is sexual violence seemingly disproportionate in fanfiction compared to every other type of media. why is shipping considered the default state of fanfiction. why are most tags used on ao3 sexual in nature. why is sex so ingrained in fandom culture. why are most of the fandom glossary terms on sites like fanlore about kinks or smut tropes. Is This Weird To Anyone Else

it gets to the point where it feels almost alienating to participate in fandom as an ace person because i just don’t… understand? between the crazy amount of porn in fandom and the seeming constant of sex in fanfiction spaces (this post inspired by reading an in-universe political essay fic and finding a random graphic sexual violence reference in there???) it sometimes feels like the rest of fandom lives in a different world and will always prioritize something that’s completely meaningless and uncomfortable to me.

or maybe i just happen to find some strange Types Of Guys, idk

#babbles #ace is the place #asexuality #actually asexual #sa mention #rape mention #not to say this problem is inherent to fanfic spaces (<- watched a movie last night that was also unable to make anything not About Sex) #(which is a technically not wrong but really funny way to describe where the dead go to die) #but like idk point is treating sex as some important human constant is sooo weird to me. all my love and respect to sex havers out there #taking any form of character relationship and being like 'hmm what if they boned. this is integral to experiencing media to me' is so ??? #especially when it comes to completely innocent nonsexual source materials and topics it just BAFFLES me #like not to rag on the fic i was reading but there was a bit where it was describing the mistreatment a certain class of people faced #and it was all like standard cruelty and then just thrown in like nothing 'our sex organs are damaged from being used as sex slaves'??? #like uh... huh...?? am i being weird about this or is it strange to anyone else

[starlit-mansion]

I'm not fully sure how to articulate this but part of my ongoing consternation about the state of fandom is that everything becomes a filmy slime of personal projection and memes and half-formed thoughts when it's all just loose on social media, which is fine for incredibly consumable product-ass products but becomes very bizarre with complex texts with meaningful themes

like sometimes it does feel like an emperor's no clothes situation, of like "why are we only drawing these guy's dicks instead of appreciating the whole story?" but also this is a really specific hobby with a lot of social conventions and any given person you talk to is usually pretty happy to expound on the meaningful parts of the text and is just having fun making memes and ship art because for them, there's just not that much left unsaid about the quality of the text

like in many ways, i'm glad that my actual first experience with the book dracula was just straight up listening to an unironic free podcasted audiobook a few years before it became memetic, because there's something about making it an activity that changes the state of matter of the entire story, starts to break it down and dissolve the intention

when I was very young, i only engaged with fanfic that was set out into the world as a complete thought (even if the fic itself wasn't complete, there was a sort of inherent concreteness of presenting a piece of art with something to say), but i don't even really like fanfic and the endless distending and warping of text that much anymore. not a lot would be added to my life from hanging around ao3 instead of here, because I would only start to articulate more of the things that make me angry.

this is all a personal problem. i'm like... constantly clenching my teeth about the fact that there's no news event or disaster that won't become a meme, but also. i'm on the meme website. I should probably just leave. but also. i've taken so many sanity breaks from tumblr over the last year. at one point, i changed my password to autogenerated gibberish and didn't save it so that i couldn't log in anymore, and i would be forced to sit with myself for the time it would take to reset it and remind myself that i was getting so angry and scared every single day and for WHAT

it didn't really work

because without it, now that i'm working from home and don't talk to people much and don't have an irl social circle due to not being very social on my own and moving across the entire fucking country in first year of the pandemic to spend a year and a half exclusively sitting inside a different set of rooms, not having the casual interpersonal connection of mentally hanging out in a shared space is also very bad for my brain, and leads to a lot of bitter rumination once the novelty of breaking yourself of the phone loop and reading a book in a non-public way wears off. we all know this. we've all experienced it on some level or another due to the collective experience of the last 3+ years.

not sure how to wrap this up in a non bleak way and go back to my regular scheduled posting and avoiding too many spoilers about a movie trailer that i WANT to watch and CAN'T MAKE MYSELF DO IT because of MY ABBY NORMAL BRAIN. generally i do enjoy the stuff i engage with and try to keep my haterade guzzling to occasional dabbling in criticizing things i don't like.

this is how my depression way goes though. i don't necessarily spend all day hating and despising myself and ruminating on how all my actions are simultaneously valueless and harmful to others. The endless slog through a lukewarm knee-deep ocean of salt water is that my ability to sincerely and happily engage with things diminishes, anhedonia sets in, caring about things starts to feel like inflammation. the light hurts, because it brings too much with it. i want to take the edge off of things, and joy is an edge too.

it's not that i don't understand the sanding away of nuance, it just reminds me of my worst self, angry and overwhelmed, more interested in chewing on bones than eating.