#yall shit on the very fandoms and writers that you rb from and expect it to be okay | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thedogsled · 5 years

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Hi anonymous gencest person in my inbox! First of all, I wanted to reply to you thoroughly, I just happened to not be online at the time that you sent your first message, and as a result it’s taken a little time to write this reply. You seem to be really hurt by this, but the tone of your message is understanding and kind, and you deserve to be spoken to with the same respect that you did in your messages to me. I’ve put your message under the cut to protect you a little bit (I hope that you find it).

For the folks on my dash, please don’t think this is me jumping back into it. Mostly that’s because, as you mentioned in your message, I feel like everything has gotten very out of hand. The tone of the original conversation changed underneath me, because while my issues were only with tagging, I feel like some people perceived it to be something else. I’d like to clear that up. Ad hominem attacks are always unnecessary, and they derail reasonable conversation. I also think that a lot of this jumped off the back of already raised tensions and preconceptions, and the divisions in fandom are wholly responsible for that. So that’s mostly why I haven’t mentioned it on my blog since the scuffle happened, and why I’m happier putting the rest of this under a cut. I don’t agree with what this turned into (kink shaming, and making genfic people into some sort of commodity to be shot across the battlefield like human cannons), and it’s left a bad taste in my mouth how the whole thing was handled, much as it seems to have done with anonymous.

This post is about that.

Anonymous said:The gencest wank is reaching new levels. Now people on twitter are claiming that participants "support child abuse" (which child?) and are "grooming" other people. There is disagreeing with the ambiguity the term gencest imply and there is straight up calling content creators who just want to write on their favorite characters predators. Now I feel even worse about writing Winchester Gen fic and I'm not even a participant! Are yall even going to care about that?

Anonymous said:(same g*ncest wank anon) Look, nevermind. I dont really expect anything. I was hurt by both sides when I'm at a low point and just wanted to write some S&D gen fic to cheer me up. I came to vent but it wasn't called for. I'm sorry. Have a nice day.

I’m going to start right back at the beginning. This wank started on Twitter, and it’s still continuing over there. I think a lot of the reason why things are never let go of on Twitter is because the format has a toppling effect. With things only loosely dated, and Twitter sending you notifications for things you might have been interested in, it tends to keep fires burning a lot longer. The viciousness of the conversations is one of the reasons why I’m not a very big presence of Twitter myself, not to mention block and let block isn’t considered to be a social default. People just engage with material no matter the consequences, forgetting that other people on the internet are living breathing emoting human beings.

Part of it, too, is Supernatural fandom’s divisions in general. If you look just at the wank that crossed my dash just in the last week - one week! - there’s the gencest wank, wank from old meta writers about new meta writers, wank at people who wish Cas had been in this episode, wank about Danneel--it never ends. And instead of those wanks being considered as separate incidents, they instead build one on top of another, so people come into conversations with a lot of baggage, which they aim at each other in quickfire succession.

It’s not okay. That’s part of the reason why I try and avoid engaging in ‘antis do this, antis do that’ drama, fandom dividing into sides etc. because it’s draining, it’s tiring, and it stops you from doing things you want to be doing. Trust me, I know all about the pain of just wanting to write/draw/reblog so and so, and feeling like you can’t because the fandom is a trash heap. Other multishippers feel the same way, like they can’t reblog content from certain bloggers because it’s only going to cause drama. I haven’t written or drawn anything but Destiel (apart from that one Sabriel fic for the RB last year) since I started this blog, despite being a multishipper at heart myself, because I don’t feel like that content is welcome or will be engaged with.

This fandom cultivates that kind of unwelcomeness, in my opinion, to almost everyone in it. It also prevents people from blogging on their own blog, because again people feel they need to seek out and engage with content (even untagged content) that they disagree with, or they’re not interested with, instead of just blocking it. I like talking about ships, and I like discussing how problematic some of them are. I like discussing dark fic. I like discussing tagging practices, and how to keep people safe from being triggered in a fandom which is full of people carrying their traumas with them. While I like engaging with the dark potential of characters, I do my best not to do so at the expense or harm of others. All of those things lead to conflict, and conflict I avoid so much I don’t end up using my blog as I want to. For example, just last year I got involved in a Megstiel conversation which ended in people saying rude things about me and wearing it as a badge of honor that I blocked them. I like Megstiel. I have RPed it and I like the potential the two characters have with each other. It’s not my OTP, and I’m not a relentless wave of positivity about it, but that’s okay. That’s my opinion, and not an opinion I should have to defend, and it’s okay to block people rather than argue needlessly and spread ill feeling around even more.

Staying out of other people’s opinions didn’t happen, this time. Blocking didn’t happen (the gencest mod did use her block later on, which I wholly support, when I was still following the drama, but the block wasn’t respected. When people log out to get around blocks, it isn’t respectful, and it’s part of what fans the drama higher). Not to mention all this drama came in at peak level because all this fandom is is Us Vs. Them until everyone is in a frenzied final battle situation during every incident. Sometimes the drama is being exacerbated and misrepresented, and there are absolutely trolls trying to stir the other thing to being much worse than it is “for fun”. Fandomwank and the anon comms on Dreamwidth (formerly LJ) and to a certain extent Reddit, love making Tumblr and Twitter fans go at each other, and even if we’re pretty shitty with each other already, that’s being driven and exacerbated constantly by forces unseen.

(Note: People may accuse me of making this up, I suppose, but we’re a powderkeg and people love to start fires. The fake Cas stan on Twitter from this summer is a GREAT example of this, they had Misha’s name in their URL and dropped shit on the writers and cast for a long time just to make people froth at the mouth “How could they say that to Jared” etc. I think people really underestimate how much rubberneckers love drama, and if there isn’t any they will happily start it. That said, a fair amount of drama starts organically, and I’ll concede as much, but if you think cackling supervillains are crazytalk let me introduce you to MS Scribe...)

Rambling about drama aside, because I’m quite passionate about how stupid this fandom gets, I want to get back to your ask. I haven’t touched your actual comments yet, and that does a disservice to them because this drama has genuinely hurt you. Fandom should know that. Their words hurt real people. The bickering hurts real people. It drives people away. It drives people I know away, and it’s hurting this anon as well. It’s like anon says: are we going to care about that? Because we should. We should be making this fandom a better place. We should be mending bridges, not distancing people and telling them their pain doesn’t matter. It matters. At least it matters to me. I want you to know that, anon.

That it matters, that’s why I got so passionate about the tagging issue. We should care for everyone’s comfort in this fandom, and that matters to me too. We shouldn’t shout names at each other. And maybe if people hadn’t been at a default level of at each other’s throats, we could have had a conversation about this. I honestly believe the gencest mod came at this from a reasonable position originally, with no ill intent. I may not have made that clear in my previous posts, but I was determined to give them the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think their definition was even that wrong, given that they weren’t trying to redefine the brodependency, imo. My issues only came from a need for fandom itself to invoke the terms Wincest and incest where necessary to protect the people who seek protection from those terms, who are harmed by it, and blacklist it. So that their blacklists work, and continue to protect them. That’s okay, I think, to ask for that, not at the exclusion of the gencest tag, but alongside it where it’s necessary. Incest isn’t what the exchange is about, as I understand it, but obviously the inclusion of ‘wincest’ in the portmanteau does make the real intent cloudy, and excludes people who might otherwise have been interested in it. You mentioned in your ask that the term was ambiguous, and that was my only issue with it, not whatever it’s gotten turned into, especially if that negativity is explicitly anti-Wincest. If the mod wants to use a term that invokes incest for her non romantic gen fest, then that’s the mod’s prerogative. Re. tagging, I think it matters, but tagging is different to the challenge. I’ve tried to be clear on the difference I feel about it since the beginning.

I think that when you are inside the bubble of a ship, it becomes difficult to see the issues with that ship. Let’s take it outside of the fandom and look at Buffy, for example. The fair and honest truth is that Spuffy is an abusive ship. It was literally abusive, then framed as love, Joss Whedon’s gross projection of being able to creepily stalk women and do whatever he wants to them because ~love~ and the woman will ultimately forgive him for being a ruthless monster and they’ll get together. (coughMarvelcough). It’s my OTP for Buffy, but it is what it is. In SPN fandom, Wincest has a similar problem, because it’s been around right since the beginning of the show, and there’s some people I feel who have forgotten that it’s an incest ship, you know, and forget that other people don’t say “It’s just incest” in real life. Only on the internet. (The response to poor Jason Fisher’s defense of Superwiki from the GA made that disconnect really clear to me. The GA literally have no idea why this show would defend incest, because how we speak about incest within fandom is wholly different to how it’s discussed in the real world.)

That said, boy oh boy. I’m about to open a whole other can of worms here.

Wincest folks get constantly attacked. Like I said, it’s an incest ship, and between the GA and people who are triggered by it and purity culture, you’ve got these people who just wanna write their ship and they’re constantly on the toe of everyone’s boot getting a right kicking. I’m not going to argue about the moral rights and wrongs of writing incest, because it’s none of anyone’s business. Writing incest isn’t a gateway drug to performing it any more than if you write stories about murder that’s what you’re setting up to do next yourself. No matter why someone writes it, generally speaking that’s between them and their catharsis. People get uppity about other people’s ships and kinks when they should stay in their own lanes, really.

Tagging is the key to that. Acknowledging your ship has issues and then making sure you tag those issues responsibly. That’s important. It protects us. It protects me when I write darkfic. It protects people who write darkfic because they’re survivors, and helps people to deal with those things when it’s tagged properly, when it’s given the name of what it is, rather than sanitized. That’s my issue with gencest as a tag (not as a fest), because it felt like sanitized incest. You need to call that what it is. You need to identify it. Your older brother climbing into bed with you naked and without permission isn’t gen. To some people within the ship, the identification of it is half the battle. When we tag considerately, we are being kind to people we don’t know, as well as protecting ourselves. Tags make fandom better and safer.

With the way things have unrolled, it’s made it so engaging in either fest seems like picking sides. That’s not okay. That’s not just this battle; this is just another casualty of the whole ship war, something which has sucked the fun out of many things people enjoy doing, and driven many many people out of fandom. I’m sorry that this one hit when you were already feeling so low, not least because we all deserve to have nice things. Fandom is supposed to be the place to go to when life is shitty, to give you fun and relief. It’s not meant to feel like getting sent back to the trenches. Not for anyone.

We need to mend our bridges. We need to keep making our content, and stop seeing it as ride or die. We need to keep our nasty opinions to our own blogs and stop calling each other names when we don’t agree. We need to stop seeing blocking as unreasonable behavior and not proper curation. We need to stop raiding ship tags for wank, or dumping our crap on other ship’s tags in the first place. We need to give more people the benefit of the doubt, and engage on conversational levels about out fandom and our ships. We need to call out issues from within our own fandom, so when drama is getting splashed around we need to say “hey, they have a bit of a point, here, maybe we can talk reasonably about it”. We need to stop shadowboxing with an enemy we think is the boogeyman, when in reality we’re punching real people in the face. We need to tag proactively, and kindly, and keep our fandom corners clean so that when people come to visit we can say “hey, we take our tagging really seriously, you can’t call us out on it.” That’s the fandom I want to be a part of.

Most of all we need to be kind to each other. Be better. For this anon and for everyone else who’s ever been hurt by fandom. Enough shittiness is enough.

To anon. I’m sorry you’re hurting. It fucking sucks, and I’m so sorry things got driven to the point they have now. I’m sorry you got stuck in the middle of it. That said, I want you to write. I want to read your content. Shippy or not, I love the relationship that Sam and Dean have, and seeing all parts of it, fluffy and dark and codependent and cute and playful and snarky. I love G rated fic as much as I love dark NC-17 fic, and I don’t care for people who gen shame, like fic isn’t interesting if it doesn’t have sex in it. Screw that noise. I hope you write. I want you to write. As part of a challenge or not. I hope you will. Everyone I’ve spoken to about this tells me they want more gen S&D content.

You, and anyone else, are welcome to send me any content you want, any time you like. I don’t reblog NC-17 content that isn’t under a cut, or content that attacks other fans, but you can send me any ship, anytime - anyone who loves any ship in this crazy fandom, regardless of what circle of affiliation you usually sit with - and I’ll share your content. With the right tags, of course! We don’t have to be this dysfunctional with each other. We can cooperate and coexist.

To anon: write it. Write it just for you. Write it to make yourself feel better, and write it to stick it in the eye of everyone who’s made you feel bad about it. When you feel powerless, doing it anyway is the power that you have, and you don’t need anyone to give it to you; it’s yours entirely.

I’m sorry this took me so long to post back to you. As you can see I wrote a little more than I initially expected to, and it took a while. If it makes you feel even a little bit better to read it, then it was worth it.

Thanks so much for your ask, for your patience, and for your respect. I hope next time you want to drop me an ask, it’s in happier times.

#dogsled replies #wank for ts #incest mention for ts #this is a multiship blog #ship and let ship #purity culture can eat my whole entire ass #but tagging is important

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