“You’re only shipping those two characters for fun!!!” i mean… yes?
as opposed to doing the hip new thing of picking a ship for its supposed ideological purity, and then not contributing anything to the community except shitty discourse and a toxic atmosphere, I guess?
happy 100th birthday, lena horne// june 30, 1917 – may 9, 2010 // “Don’t be afraid to feel as angry or as loving as you can, because when you feel nothing, it’s just death.”
“Lena Horne is such a delicate beauty. When she decided it was show business for her, before she became of age, she had to be accompanied by her mother when she came to work at the Cotton Club. From bandstands…she went on to movies, and always with a dignity that gained respect. When se moved into Broadway plays, she turned down hundreds of lurcrative contracts because she would not play the part of a maid, a whore, or any of the other stereotypes.” -Duke Ellington
Hello, so its recently been announced that Netflix will be coming out with a two hour series finale for Sense8 as of next year (congratulations to you all by the way). I know that fans of the Get Down have been trying for months to have the show renewed, but now that Netflix has instead given this alternative to one show, I’ve decided to ask if they can do it for another. I know how much we all loved the Get Down, and the least Netflix can do is resolve the plot. So, if you would like to join me, please signhereand share if possible. Thank you all so much for your support, I really am feeling quite optimistic about this!
every time I see more of the ‘ao3 is evil’ crap circulating I think, ‘well, tumblr is evil too and I don’t see you stop using it’
You know, the more I think about this, the more I think the real complaint isn’t that AO3 hosts “evil” content, it’s that it doesn’t allow harassment/dogpiling of “evil” creators as easily as Tumblr. Abuse won’t remove or even re-tag a work except in a handful of very specific cases, but they will suspend or ban users for harassment, including filing repeated unfounded Abuse reports. Authors also have at least some ability to screen/block comments on works, and there’s no direct messaging system outside of commenting on works through which to pursue harassment. You can follow a creator but you can’t block them (much less encourage others to do the same).
Tumblr, by contrast, generally ignores any abuse report that doesn’t involve the DMCA, and aggressive anons can and have driven bloggers off the site entirely. The fact that the same tactics are used by social justice bloggers and neo-Nazis (for instance) doesn’t matter – they’re the affordances of the site, by accident or design, and an entire fannish generation have gotten very used to performing their fannish (and moral) identity in this fashion.
(I thinks it’s relevant that AO3 was designed by fandom’s LJ generation and in some respect mirrors the affordances of LJ circa 2010. Tumblr is a very different site and that, moreso than age differences, seems to be at the root of this – though of course age intersect with site experience in a non-trivial way.)
ding ding ding ding.
Ao3 requires you to police your own consumption of content. Ao3 won’t let you destroy someone’s online presence simply because you don’t like it. Ao3 won’t let you impose your own morality on other without cause.
If you have issues with this, and the fact that Ao3 requires you to have responsibility and agency, then you seriously need to sit down and have a damned good long hard look at yourself.
The question I usually fail to see being answered when people bitch about the content on AO3 is – so who gets to decide?
You? Me? A committee of my friends? Of yours? Of those who have the most kudos? Of those who have no interest in fandom, but want to protect other people from dangerous content, whatever it may be? Who gets that power, and how long will they have it?
Who are you comfortable with giving the power of regulating all the content? What happens in grey areas? What happens when something you like isn’t liked by the Decider? Is there an appeal? Who gets to make the arguments for and against something?
The world is complex and there are no easy answers.
The impossibility of creating a censorship board that curates based on content is a great reason why those things don’t exist, and shouldn’t.
Certain people are screaming that AO3 is bad because it’s not a “safe space.” The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space – for writers. And it does a pretty good job of that. It was designed to be a place where writers are safe from arbitrary content rule changes, random and unwarned deletions, and abuse-report abuse (which is common on ff.net). The Four Big Warnings + CNTW system is beautiful in its fairness and simplicity.
Antis can’t take control of it. And because control-freakdom is at the heart of their “movement,” this drives them into frenzies. Good. It motivated me to dig a little deeper into my pocket to donate on the last drive. For all the pleasure AO3 has given me over the years, that’s money well spent.
The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space – for writers.
Preach it loud and hard!
I’m a member of the LJ generation, and when I first came to Tumblr (grudgingly and out of desperation, I might add, since it tragically seems to be the only place to really connect with other fandom peeps) I was horrified at how people here had established this sort of fucked up bully culture, where nobody is responsible for monitoring their own consumption, and rather they expect everyone else to custom tailor content to the whims and desires of the Shrieking Banshee Masses. And woe be to the person who doesn’t bend and break! “I’m going to bully you while accusing you and your Big Mean Poopie Content of being the actual bully, so I can hopefully distract you and others from realizing I’m being a royal intrusive asshat who failed Astronomy 101 b/c I clearly believe the world revolves around me.”
The irony here is that this in itself is an abuse tactic – victim blaming with a side of gaslighting. Pot, meet kettle.
And it’s the exact same mentality that drives right-wing lunatics to kick up a fuss about the existence of icky cootie gay people in media because we need to “protect family values”, or who take to screeching at Starbucks because their particular religious symbolism isn’t portrayed on the winter holiday cups and OMG WAR ON CHRISTMAS, STARBUCKS STOP OPPRESSING ME BY NOT CATERING TO MY PERSONAL TASTE.
The mentality is one and the same – “Cater to ME ME ME or FACE MY DIVINE WRATH even if it means taking away other people’s freedom!” while hiding behind a flimsy-ass shield of faux righteous anger.
And when these bozos find an environment or situation where they’re unable or not allowed to bully people into silence and submission, they stomp their feet and pitch a tantrum and claim that they’re the ones being oppressed. Identical shit, different pile, and it’s the exact same infantile, schoolyard rubbish no matter which side it’s coming from.
This was a really interesting read. The last poster in particular but all of it.
This New York Magazine article is so full of incisive analysis that it was very difficult to pick a “meaty goodness to quote” paragraph, so I urge you to GO READ IT FOR YOURSELF.
From the article:
Maybe more importantly, Tumblr and Vine and the like never had data-mining operations as sophisticated as, say, Facebook. That’s why most of the advertising money in the industry has drained toward Facebook, which has 2 billion users, mounds of data, and can better assure advertisers of content cleanliness. Facebook is instructive: It’s less a place for creation or debate than it is for hosting all of the nitty-gritty, more boring data about your life. For much of its life, Facebook aggressively trafficked not in collecting rage comics and funny video clips, but in collecting bland lists of favorite movies and where you went to college — personal information that it can use to target ads with alarming specificity. And by selling ads against people’s identities, rather than their creative content, the company has churned out impressive profits, and given a wider impression that an ad-supported content platform is viable. (One of the great ironies of Twitter’s and Tumblr’s inability to make sustained profits is that Instagram and Facebook are both full of videos and posts screenshotted and stolen from their more productive, less wealthy rival platforms.)
(And people wonder why I got the hell off of Facebook when I saw just what a J.-Edgar-Hoover wet dream that site is for data mining and social network mapping.)
I just figured out why all this BP hate gets to me.
They’re literally trying to turn Black Panther into a symbol of the Kyriarchy.
White Feminists go, “The Dora Milajae are ruled by a patriarchy” to make it look like the most misogynistic superhero film.
White anti-capitalists are all “T’Challa is a monarch who hoards wealth!” to make it seem like the most capitalist film.
White LGBT individuals go “they erased Ayo and Aneka’s relationship” to make it seem like the most homophobic film.
White sjws in general go “He doesn’t share his resources” to make it seem like the most problematic film ever.
And each of these critiques aren’t inherently bad and are pretty valid. But the way they’re being used is bullshit. They’re out here literally saying Black Panther is an Alt-Right superhero. They’re removing context from all of these critiques to make them seem worse than they are. Because they’re trying to make the movie seem worse than it actually is.
And they do all of this while stanning for Captain Propaganda, Privileged Man, and Charles Xavier’s school of Respectability politics.
if you’re an active follower of mine, i do recognize your username and/or icon. i smile when i see it in my activity. i get excited when you add funny tags to things. i get really happy when you reblog my op posts. so thank you, i appreciate you massively.
Tumblr Exodus 