mistressofmuses (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mistressofmuses) wrote2022-08-06 06:50 pm
mistressofmuses) wrote2022-08-06 06:50 pm
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Boy it sure is something to hear about what seems like garden-variety fandom BNF flounce-drama, passing distantly... and then to actually find out that ah, this shit is way wilder than I thought.
How many BNFs turn out to be abusive wannabe cult leaders who are also convinced of something that makes them better and more spiritually and uniquely special than everyone else out there in the world?
Like... I'm sure the real answer would shock me, but I feel like any number greater than 0 is a problem.
Fucking yikes.
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We are about to head out to our friend's album release show. Fingers crossed it all goes well. Alex seems... like he doesn't really want to go, but I'm hoping he has a good time once we do. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone, but I'm also still pretty anxious about it. Haven't tried to get together with people like this since before Covid.
How many BNFs turn out to be abusive wannabe cult leaders who are also convinced of something that makes them better and more spiritually and uniquely special than everyone else out there in the world?
Like... I'm sure the real answer would shock me, but I feel like any number greater than 0 is a problem.
Fucking yikes.
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We are about to head out to our friend's album release show. Fingers crossed it all goes well. Alex seems... like he doesn't really want to go, but I'm hoping he has a good time once we do. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone, but I'm also still pretty anxious about it. Haven't tried to get together with people like this since before Covid.
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I hope it all goes/went well!
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EDIT: Also, please don't reply to this in-depth because it throws gasoline on the fire and the subject matter triggers me enough still I don't like talking about it.
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Yeah, that's definitely one for the Thanfiction-esque manipulations pile. Ugh.
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Sorry about the drama. Fandom is terrible at boundaries and taking out the trash sometimes, especially when the trash writes good they find satisfying.
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I'm glad that at least in regards to the fandom drama it's not something where I've got a personal stake. The person in question's name is familiar to me, and I'm fairly sure I may have reblogged a tumblr-popular post or few of hers, but I never read any of her fic, much less felt attached to it.
But yeah, there are a lot of people who are firmly on the "BNF IS 100% RIGHT" camp, despite the fact she was flagrantly breaking AO3 rules, and is basically just throwing a tantrum about facing consequences.
(And then it just brought up MORE information about sketchy and abusive behavior on said BNF's part, and. Welp. Nobody dramas like fandom dramas.)
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I hope you had a good time!!
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I did have a great time! It was very nice to see some of these people - it's been probably close to four years (definitely more than three, considering) since we'd seen each other.
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I have seen big-name fan drama many, many times, and there's usually one person at the epicenter adding fuel to the fire. Sometimes it's clear to me that this person is acting maliciously, other times it's not clear who's at fault for whatever issue. In a lot of cases it reads like one BNF is getting too much attention and someone else wants to take it from them because they feel like they deserve it more. In almost all cases it reads to me as someone having a sense of moral superiority and wanting crowd recognition. Callout posts feel this way a lot of the time. Someone may be trying to spread the word about a person they genuinely believe to be a predator, but often they also really want the flood of replies saying "oh my god, thank you for telling me, that's awful."
It feels like someone wanting to be The Hero Of The Story by denouncing The Villain(s). Any time I'm investigating this sort of thing I try to look at who is being named as The Villain. Much of the time The Villains are queer or trans artists, and almost every time I've seen, they are obviously neurodivergent. So I try to understand the actual issue they are being villainized for. A lot of the time it boils down to "The Villain is writing/drawing something that I, The Hero, consider to be Weird." But still other times it's "someone asked me to stop treating them badly, and I, The Hero, am taking that as a death threat. Go harass this Villain to protect me!"
I think a lot of BNFs are only big names because they actively seek out attention, which anecdotally seems to make them more likely to pull this kind of shit. The drama gets them more attention, so they create more drama to fill the need. And if they get enough followers who don't investigate or interrogate what they're told, it ends up being a single loud leader with a gaggle of unquestioning followers they can weaponize at their will.
I've mostly stopped engaging with fandom because seeing drama like this is exhausting, and trying to understand what's actually happening is draining as fuck. You don't just see it in fandom, either. I'm so glad I stopped using Twitter. There was an ever-growing list of words I was afraid to tweet in case the Elon Musk fanboys came after me.
This got real tl;dr, and was probably WAY MORE THAN YOU WANTED TO KNOW, but now I wrote it, so.
Callout culture is a fucking BANE on fandom (always has been, though it seems like it's weaponized a bit more lately.) There are a LOT of people who are perfectly happy to throw the weight of their personal fandom behind their own statements to attack people they have falling outs with, or just don't like, or perceive as a rival. The rise of anti-ism in fandom as a whole and the normalizing of the "purity police" mindset also adds a convenient moral component. "Anything we do to Them is acceptable, because they're Bad, and wrote a Bad Ship/Bad Fic/Bad Trope." The fact that openly queer artists are the ones most often called out and punished the most harshly for anything less than unassailable perfection is... certainly a thing.
This specific situation is a bit different, maybe only because the BNF in question started it. She very blatantly and deliberately, over a LONG stretch of time, broke AO3's rules about commercial activity. She solicited donations, asking people to go to her tumblr to donate to her, and would post new chapters when she hit fundraising goals, and would say as much in the notes on chapters (along the lines of "thank [username] for buying a chapter").
She got reported, and she got suspended, so she started railing against AO3 for attacking her, and is flouncing very dramatically. The one maybe valid complaint she has - frustration that while suspended she can't edit the fics, even in order to bring them into compliance - is buried under assertions that she is PERSONALLY being singled out, that AO3 is stealing her work by not letting her use her account for the duration of the suspension, that the fact she was told failure to remove the rule-breaking notes could result in future suspensions should the violations be reported again means AO3 staff is threatening her.
Then an ex-friend/ex-roommate of BNF's - who DID go through that kind of callout nastiness you mentioned above years ago, when she had a falling out with BNF - started talking about some really nasty abusive stuff that happened when they were living together. I can't say for sure whether all of those things are true, but having seen a couple of pseudo-cult type fandom situations play out (Thanfiction/Andy Blake, the Final Fantasy cult house, etc.), it doesn't sound implausible.
BUT ALL THAT TO SAY. Fandom drama is fucking exhausting. I'm frequently torn between wishing I had more of a fandom connection, and being so damn glad I don't. I'll drop my little fics when I write them, and take my eventually-double-digit kudos, and be thrilled to never deal with THIS kind of nonsense.
And genuinely, I CAN'T with twitter. I'm kind of glad I've never been able to get into it, because I can very much see what a toxic space it is... somewhat by design. It punishes nuance and favors outrage.
apparently AO3 slander really grinds my gears
Anyway, yeah, it doesn't shock me when abuse allegations come out about people who talk that way, because shifting blame and claiming to be the real victim is a tactic often used by abusers. And cults are abuse on a massive scale, in my opinion - such a massive scale that it can be hard for victims to realize they're being abused, because everyone around them says it's normal. Being that insular isn't good for the brain.
Re: apparently AO3 slander really grinds my gears
There are SO MANY people who don't realize how unique a space AO3 is, and that it maintains that by being both permissive and unbiased when it comes to content and users. It isn't PERFECT, but AO3 and the OTW as a whole has done SO MUCH for fandom in terms of allowing it to exist the way that it does now. The idea that content should be restricted (based on whatever the individual doesn't like) is so frustrating to deal with, because no one is willing to admit that those policies existing means that they can and will be used against other subject matter. There's shit I would never ever want to read in a million years... so I don't.
They have relatively few rules - AND ONE OF THEM IS NOT TO TALK ABOUT COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY WTF IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE WHO CAN'T DEAL WITH THAT.
I remember strikethrough on LJ, though I wasn't directly impacted the way a lot of people were. I didn't lose my journal or my work or communities I was in, but it definitely made the space feel far less safe than it had before, because there was the knowledge that if your content was ever deemed sufficiently "bad" you could be thrown out with no notice or recourse. The tumblr porn ban felt deeply like the 2.0 version of that. Suddenly, such huge swaths of community were gone.
Dreamwidth absolutely appeals to me for the same reasons that AO3 does - I'm not worried about anything I post or share being grounds for termination, and I don't feel like I'm at risk of losing years (more than a decade now!) of personal connection and emotional investment because some anti-queer group launched an attack on my content or whatever.
Yeah, it's very classic DARVO. Cults are absolutely abusive relationships writ large, and all the things that make exiting an abusive relationship hard are magnified as well.
Re: apparently AO3 slander really grinds my gears
Looking at the AO3 TOS, their commercial activity policy is quite permissive. They aren't saying you can't host commissioned works on AO3, only that you can't promote commercial endeavors or solicit donations on the Archive itself. This user wouldn't have gotten in trouble for soliciting donations for chapters if the solicitation was off-platform. So it seems absurd that someone would dig their heels in so hard when there were easier ways to accomplish what they wanted and when the rules are so few and so clear.
Since DW policies lean hands-off in the same way AO3 does, and since both sites make it really easy to back up my data, I feel very comfortable here. Sites with unclear content restrictions remind me that everything I say or do can be interpreted with malicious intent. I get the same reminder when reading about queer history, honestly. Someone can and will claim that writing a certain trope or expressing my gender a certain way inherently proves I'm a predator; then they can use that claim to try to leverage me out of public space. It's another way to make certain varieties of queer people unacceptable.
Re: apparently AO3 slander really grinds my gears
("If it sucks... hit da bricks!!" skeleton is honestly such a good life philosophy.)
Exactly! They don't even ban posting commercial fic - just discussing the commercial aspects on AO3 itself. I know an author I follow takes fic commissions, and she will mark them as having been written for that person, but never ever mentions that the fics were commissions or that she takes commissions at all.
And there's no rule against linking to a site, as long as it isn't primarily intended for commercial activity (so no patreon/ko-fi/amazon author page/etc.), but a tumblr account is fine, even if she talks about commissions and fundraising there. But no, she was blatantly talking about the commercial activity, and then threw a fit about being told she needed to remove those notes from *all* her fic.
But yes, I feel much more secure using sites that don't have content rules to be weaponized. Because that's exactly it - even sites with only a few content rules (beyond legality, which is AO3 and DW's policy), even ones that on a surface level seem reasonable, are subject to malicious interpretations and grudge reporting and all those sorts of things. And that has absolutely been an issue with things like queer history, queer expression, any of it.
And gosh, people probably shouldn't even use that word, it's so unpalatable! [I'm being sarcastic. To be clear, I am happily queer, but that in and of itself is something people will attack. "This site doesn't allow slurs, and *I* say queer is a slur, so you self-IDing as queer means you should be banned!"]
There is a common demand that queer people in particular be paragons of perfect virtue. Any "problematic" aspects of a person's interests, expression, writing, identity, etc. is sufficient to throw them out of the community. And of course, perfection will never happen, so it's only a matter of time before SOMETHING you say/do/ARE/etc. is enough for someone to maliciously attack over, if they feel like they can.
Re: apparently AO3 slander really grinds my gears
Yesyesyesyes. The "perfect queer" thing is a huge problem. It's metastasized into the idea that queer people can't write stories that involve any kind of trauma - that writing someone who experiences abuse makes the author inherently abusive. Or, sometimes, that writing trauma poorly makes the author an abuser, even though writing is fucking hard. It suuuuuucks.
I think cancel culture at large grew out of a good motive, originally. There are people who abuse others to gain more power, so when people point out abuse, we can help the people who were targeted. But trying to pre-empt abuse by labeling traits or interests that "predict" abusive behavior is gonna net a lot of people who are really just doing their goddamn best out here. It can be a fine line to tread, but man, a lot of people saw the line and decided to walk perpendicular.
Re: apparently AO3 slander really grinds my gears
I think you're right - deplatforming hateful, awful people can be one of the best things to stop what they're doing, as is calling out their harmful behaviors and helping to show patterns of abuse that certain people have engaged in. (And sometimes it's needed because the perpetrators DO have a good public face.)
Unfortunately, it sees like it's just kind of turned into its own form of clout-chasing. Of being the most performatively angry, because *that* is its own form of social currency. And if that means attacking a fellow queer creator, or some poor kid on twitter, or some artist you don't like, welp... gotta get that engagement!
There is this utterly mistaken belief (which some people seem to genuinely believe, and others just try to feed into) that you can somehow "tell" a bad person from a good one based on their thoughts/traits/interests/art/etc. That's nonsense - none of those are actually *behaviors* that are going to harm another person. It also lets *actually* harmful people slide under the radar, because they know the right things to say or interests to talk about to make themselves seem "safe".
It's back to a really frustrating new incarnation of purity culture and misguided ideas of what actually makes people safe or not. An obsession with weeding out the "sinners" of a community, and performatively attacking them to distance yourself from the "bad" is disturbingly religious-culty, even if the people involved rarely think of it that way.
Re: apparently AO3 slander really grinds my gears
Yes to all this. Once again I am glad to have more or less abandoned Twitter. The policy of Twitter staff is almost explicitly "reward what gets clicks," and the stuff that gets clicks is performative outrage. It's not exclusive to Twitter, obviously, but it's very apparent to me that the site is actively designed to bury nuance and polarize opinions.
^^^ This, this, this. People can and do take advantage of this kind of moralizing in order to find easier targets. Calling it "weeding out sinners" feels spot-on, because you see this exact same shit in lots of church congregations. (Specifically thinking about evangelical Christians here, because that's where my experience comes from)