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goseawardSo the latest brouhaha in Idol fandom centers around a request on the kink meme for a fic where one member of the pairing is a Nazi and around a complaint against that prompt. As with all discussions of this nature, some of the people arguing against the complaint made statements such as "just scroll" or "don't like it? don't read it", and, well, who am I to refuse a chance to explain why I don't think those comments apply to this situation? Slight trigger warning for some of the examples, by the way. (And I'm not really going to address whether the point should have been made where it was, by the way.)
Here's the thing: when I don't like something? You're damn right I don't read it. And if it's a kink I simply don't care for, I scroll on by. In a private discussion, a friend asked me about this issue and its relationship to, say, what we say about watersports fic, or why we don't always have the same complaints against fic portraying rape that we do against fic portraying the Holocaust. For the first one: writing a fic about the Holocaust steps on a lot of issues that actively (and negatively) affect the lives of actual people in the world today, and watersports? Not so much. For the second: well, people do have issues about rape portrayed in fiction as it relates to such assaults in the real world, both from an anti-violence/feminism/etc perspective and from a personal perspective. (The personal isn't something I'm going to touch on here, because it's outside the scope of what I'm talking about, but let me say that there's a reason we warn in fandom, and please be sure you always do, thanks.) The thing that's shared between the Holocaust fics I find problematic (all of them I've ever read, to be honest) and the noncon fics that I find problematic is that they take a really horrible thing and they make it a background for a romance. The act of doing that--relegating a really horrible thing to the background--necessarily glosses over a lot of what made the thing so horrible, because you're focusing your details and your attention on the relationship you've foregrounded. There can also be an insidious kind of thing where making it a background means its presence in the world is unquestioned, like of course that kind of thing just happens. Basically, if I'm going to read a fic that takes place during the Holocaust, I want it to be about the Holocaust, and that's not the kind of emotional space that fanfic likes to explore. I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm saying that most people don't want to do it.
To go back to the first analogy, to a sexual kink I don't like...let me say something else. Watersports aren't my thing, I don't understand in any kind of real way why you'd want to do it, but I don't have any problem with whatever motives you may have. Wanting Holocaust fic...well, you've sort of got two options there: either you don't have a full understanding of what that entails, or you do understand and that's what you really want to see. I am not cool with either of those things. I'm not sure that everyone knowing as much as they can about the Holocaust is a way to prevent another one (in fact I'm rather sure it's not), but it seems to be the best option we have. And if you do understand...I hope that one's self-explanatory.
And, hey! As long as I'm talking about this! We had a debate a while back about the number of kink meme prompts, non-kink meme pieces of fanfic, etc. that had Adam being hurt in some way as compared to the number of such things where Kris got hurt, and whether that was a result of homophobia or not. And when some of us said it was, we got told the same thing: just scroll; don't like, don't read. Which was hilarious to me, because, like...it implies that somewhere out there is this vast pool of fiction (fanfic or otherwise) that has no homophobia, racism, classism, misogyny, ableism, ageism... Of course, such a thing doesn't exist. And it also assumes that once I find a shred of homophobia or another -ism, that fic is dead to me, because there can be nothing valuable about it. If that was true, I'd never read anything at all. Instead, I find the things that have an acceptable-to-me ratio of stuff I like to stuff I can't stand. When we have discussions about how prevalent this kind of problem is, it's not a condemnation of the works (generally speaking--it might be a condemnation of the worst cases); instead we're trying to get people to be aware of these topics so there's less fic that slaps us upside the head when we try to read it, and instead just pokes us irritatingly in the arm.
Or, a shorter version of the last paragraph: You're assuming that, since I pointed out a problem, I didn't like the fic. I probably did like it. I just wanted to like it more than I actually could.
Finally...the bit about how we got told to just scroll in both discussions? That's actually a reasonable thing, in the sense that just scroll is useful advice when the person you're talking to is blasting a fic for merely not being to their taste (as opposed to what we were doing, pointing out that certain fics support subconscious assumptions that actively hurt real people, which I feel I need to mention again). But in fact most of the arguments in discussions like this are the same; there's a reason we have derailing for dummies and bingo cards. After the version of the homophobia debate on anidolmeta fic disussion post, some people who disagreed with me expressed surprise at the vehemence of the argument and I thought, really? Because it wasn't that bad, in the grand scheme of these things. But most of the people who disagreed with me had never had a debate like that before, and most of the people who agreed with me have had many. We knew exactly what we were getting into, and we did it anyway. That's how important we think these debates are.
Here's the thing: when I don't like something? You're damn right I don't read it. And if it's a kink I simply don't care for, I scroll on by. In a private discussion, a friend asked me about this issue and its relationship to, say, what we say about watersports fic, or why we don't always have the same complaints against fic portraying rape that we do against fic portraying the Holocaust. For the first one: writing a fic about the Holocaust steps on a lot of issues that actively (and negatively) affect the lives of actual people in the world today, and watersports? Not so much. For the second: well, people do have issues about rape portrayed in fiction as it relates to such assaults in the real world, both from an anti-violence/feminism/etc perspective and from a personal perspective. (The personal isn't something I'm going to touch on here, because it's outside the scope of what I'm talking about, but let me say that there's a reason we warn in fandom, and please be sure you always do, thanks.) The thing that's shared between the Holocaust fics I find problematic (all of them I've ever read, to be honest) and the noncon fics that I find problematic is that they take a really horrible thing and they make it a background for a romance. The act of doing that--relegating a really horrible thing to the background--necessarily glosses over a lot of what made the thing so horrible, because you're focusing your details and your attention on the relationship you've foregrounded. There can also be an insidious kind of thing where making it a background means its presence in the world is unquestioned, like of course that kind of thing just happens. Basically, if I'm going to read a fic that takes place during the Holocaust, I want it to be about the Holocaust, and that's not the kind of emotional space that fanfic likes to explore. I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm saying that most people don't want to do it.
To go back to the first analogy, to a sexual kink I don't like...let me say something else. Watersports aren't my thing, I don't understand in any kind of real way why you'd want to do it, but I don't have any problem with whatever motives you may have. Wanting Holocaust fic...well, you've sort of got two options there: either you don't have a full understanding of what that entails, or you do understand and that's what you really want to see. I am not cool with either of those things. I'm not sure that everyone knowing as much as they can about the Holocaust is a way to prevent another one (in fact I'm rather sure it's not), but it seems to be the best option we have. And if you do understand...I hope that one's self-explanatory.
And, hey! As long as I'm talking about this! We had a debate a while back about the number of kink meme prompts, non-kink meme pieces of fanfic, etc. that had Adam being hurt in some way as compared to the number of such things where Kris got hurt, and whether that was a result of homophobia or not. And when some of us said it was, we got told the same thing: just scroll; don't like, don't read. Which was hilarious to me, because, like...it implies that somewhere out there is this vast pool of fiction (fanfic or otherwise) that has no homophobia, racism, classism, misogyny, ableism, ageism... Of course, such a thing doesn't exist. And it also assumes that once I find a shred of homophobia or another -ism, that fic is dead to me, because there can be nothing valuable about it. If that was true, I'd never read anything at all. Instead, I find the things that have an acceptable-to-me ratio of stuff I like to stuff I can't stand. When we have discussions about how prevalent this kind of problem is, it's not a condemnation of the works (generally speaking--it might be a condemnation of the worst cases); instead we're trying to get people to be aware of these topics so there's less fic that slaps us upside the head when we try to read it, and instead just pokes us irritatingly in the arm.
Or, a shorter version of the last paragraph: You're assuming that, since I pointed out a problem, I didn't like the fic. I probably did like it. I just wanted to like it more than I actually could.
Finally...the bit about how we got told to just scroll in both discussions? That's actually a reasonable thing, in the sense that just scroll is useful advice when the person you're talking to is blasting a fic for merely not being to their taste (as opposed to what we were doing, pointing out that certain fics support subconscious assumptions that actively hurt real people, which I feel I need to mention again). But in fact most of the arguments in discussions like this are the same; there's a reason we have derailing for dummies and bingo cards. After the version of the homophobia debate on an
idolmeta fic disussion post, some people who disagreed with me expressed surprise at the vehemence of the argument and I thought, really? Because it wasn't that bad, in the grand scheme of these things. But most of the people who disagreed with me had never had a debate like that before, and most of the people who agreed with me have had many. We knew exactly what we were getting into, and we did it anyway. That's how important we think these debates are.