Why Fandoms Are So Toxic

more and more I ask myself these days what the hell happened to fandom when and why did things get this bad how did we go from an era we're live in what live and don't like don't read were the Maxim's of fandom spaces to now hey you Sonny you get the news apparently we can't ship in trapped with anyone anymore because she's child coded I'm from the Voltron fandom as many of you know and as a person who shipped Keith and Shiro I was at the forefront of the war between folks who well liked the ship and those who believed we were a plague on society with a vendetta to corrupt and sexually grew all children because we shipped two unrelated adults nothing like this kind of tumblr message to really make you sit back on a rainy Tuesday and say what I used to be able to dismiss the harassment with well people are crazy but over the years this kind of toxicity has ballooned to untold proportions and I've had to face the fact that plenty of otherwise normal people can and will become cereal harassers for my own sanity I've endeavored to come up with some theories as to why the [ __ ] that would happen I'd I'd like to share some of them with you today maybe we can't stop this endless wave of harassment but at least we can begin to understand where people's unbridled rage comes from for some reason there's this idea in fandom that there can only be one correct reading of a source text I suspect some of this comes down to bad English classes in a perfect world teachers would grade students literary analysis papers on how well they support their claims with evidence from the source text however there are teachers out there who base the validity of students analyses on how well they reflect the author's tensions in such a way students are discouraged from embracing new views of a text and are rewarded for seeking out the sole correct interpretation of the source text as intoned by the author their teacher or some esteemed academic this idea that there is a wrong and a right way to interpret a text is deeply flawed stories do not exist in a vacuum every reader brings a new worldview to the stories they consume it's all too common for readers to pick up on elements that the author themselves didn't even consider as long as you can build a solid argument with real textual evidence guess what your interpretation of the text is valid but if you were to believe the old adage that there's only one right way to look at a text and of course you're gonna feel a sense of competitiveness with anyone who's reading opposes your own through that lens if sheath is the correct reading then plants can't exist and vice versa got to drag that sheath fan to protect clans right there's absolutely nothing wrong with a head Canon and those are valid by nature of being totally subjective what people fail to realize is that several objectively correct analyses of a text can also exist at one time just because your interpretation differs for if someone else's doesn't mean one of you is wrong and that princess at the point of actually being wrong if you ever wondered why we Sherlock fans were so determined not to let go of the John Locke ship after the last season aired to the point that many of us bought into a conspiracy about a secret episode where everything turned out to be gay the whole time I suspect a lot of that hysteria boiled down to a desperate desire to avoid a reality where we'd been proven wrong because in today's fandom climate wrong means stupid and crazy it shouldn't be that way we thought the signs pointed to a great LGBT reveal and they didn't so what we were wrong we should be able to move on from that but this constant giant argument over what's wrong and what's right has branded undue significance to those two sides it makes sense that people would go to such extreme unsavory ends to protect the correct status of their textual interpretation 'z when the alternative is a public execution no one wants to be forced into the crazy fan box and some fans are scared enough of that label to harass people who dare challenge the validity of their analyses because you're crazy it's common for people to refer to fandom as their escape from the real world but it's become more than that it seems to me that for many fans like myself fandom has become a coping mechanism it's a safe space the real world is [ __ ] terrible so people spend more and more time online in communities where they can find joy and safety through fantasy the trouble here lies in the fact that fandom doesn't work as a safe space the Internet as a rule is not a cozy little side room with beanbag chairs and fairy lights in hot cocoa it's a godless wasteland full of porn if you're lucky you'll find a corner where people always tag their posts you can avoid seeing things you'd rather not see but if you go looking for content you don't like you will find stuff that will upset you nude tayne this is not suitable for work are you sure okay I'm okay there's no way to tidy things up to be your perfect meditation room but people want to tame the wasteland the longer you stay in a fandom space the more risk you incur of becoming possessive of the property in question the fandom stops feeling like a community of houses and more like a single room in your house for you and your friends to relax in where you know the source material better than anyone you yours yourself understand that in order to maintain its power as a place of refuge nothing threatening can enter this safe space and as defined by the previous point any different readings of a source text can be perceived as a threat because they supposedly undermine your experience of the story you love and care about so much the people who share your interpretations are right and that makes them hip and the people who don't are wrong and that makes them crazy and stupid and you have to put those crazy stupid people in their place because if more people buy into their interpretation than yours it makes you wrong and you're the stupid and crazy one when you've built your safe space around one ship or headcanon and other fans ship something else it doesn't feel like they're partying in the house down the lane with the door closed and the curtains drawn it feels like just by existing they've barged into your house and hung up shipping banners all over the place because there can only be one right interpretation and there can only be one cannon ship and the safe space only has one room and so it is that housecleaning takes the form of harassment and smear campaigns a sort of get out of my house battle cry it's a protection of the self and one's self care routine nothing I don't like can be in my safe space be that thing a piece of analysis a ship or porn but castle law should not apply to fandom spaces we're a community not a single house [Music] [Applause] alright let's talk about porn while widespread multi-million dollar franchises that prop up harmful stereotypes and abusive relationships can and do normalize bad behavior over time there's an argument to be made for appropriately tagged age blocked fictional porn because you have to understand that the human brain is [ __ ] weird today fandom folks want to believe that good moral people only fantasize about consensual vanilla sex the truth is so much Messier just because a person consumes problematic fictional porn does not mean they want to go outside and commit atrocities health most people who fantasize about rape picture themselves as the victim I've heard ed dug fictional porn referred to as a gateway drug to real-life abominable acts yet plenty of people read murder mysteries and thrillers and there's no fandom wide outcry to ban those on the basis that they're a gateway drug to homicide and what about video games there's still no real proof of any correlation between violent games and actual acts of violence I recommend this video by matpat for more context on that front if a triple-a video game something that requires much more engagement from the player than fanfic would from a reader can't convince the populace to go out and murder people I'm not gonna call well tagged fix on ao3 a sex offender pipeline dead dove porn serves many purposes for some problematic fanfic and fan art satisfies that general harmless desire for dark forbidden fantasy fodder for goodness sake some people read dead dev porn to process their own trauma this is a delicate topic worthy of case-by-case scrutiny not a monster blanket you get to throw over everyone who's ever dared dig through the seedy underbelly of ao3 and then there's the other popular argument thank a lot of fandom folks these days are on a moral crusade to childproof the internet they want to make sure no child will ever accidentally click on outlandish porn this endeavor is about as fruitless is trying to stop her the Hoover Dam with chicken wire the internet is not a phone play place for kids I'm not your child's mother it's not my job to make sure Timmy doesn't plow through my tags and age restriction signs Timmy needs to learn how to read and curate his own internet experience if he can't do that then he's too young to be online there's only one reasonable thing to do become better parents and look after our children in a sensible way know what matters to this video is the fact that many people take it upon themselves to Don the cap of purity policemen and attack any fictional content they deem problematic they claim this is in service of a greater moral good but again the concept of the problematic fiction is extremely subjective no matter where you land on feminist sex Wars the sequel we can all agree there's an argument to be had here about what constitutes is too far porn-wise but as we've discussed already current fandom culture doesn't take well to maybes there's always a right and a wrong answer the wrong people are always the scum of the earth so how do you decide who's wrong with no solid metric to determine the morality of problematic fictional content no solid line or a chart to proclaim a piece of fiction of harmless or dangerous purity police fans turn to the only code they can trust their own ethics and a lot of the time these people's ethics boil down to what does and doesn't make them personally uncomfortable I probably don't have to tell you that this scenario spells disaster today people base what's morally agreed just not on canonical facts or studies but on what makes them upset take sheath for example and yes I will reference this again because I had to go through it damn it and you will feel my frustration people are going to read Shiro and Keith's relationship as brotherly if they're very sold on that interpretation the notion of a Keith and Shiro ship may make them uncomfortable and uncomfortable by this emotional metric means morally wrong therefore it is an act of public service to call out any sheet shippers and chase them out of your safe space feelings over facts folks another example the warrior cats fandom recently went through a scandal dubbed ball gate where someone paused a fan animation and discovered a frame or two where a cat's balls were visible oh the horror a cat drawn with correct Anatomy for less than three milliseconds of screen time in any case some fans were upset the balls made them uncomfortable and that meant the animator must be morally wrong q harassment of the animator and a wave of twitter arguments [Music] here's the harsh truth lads sometimes things that offend you are allowed to exist these fictional artifacts aren't actually in your safe house if they're porn and they've been posted correctly then they're tagged behind an age block door in someone else's basement there will even be stuff that squeaks you out but doesn't pose a general threat to the community take me for example pom Poko makes me really uncomfortable and you know why yep the balls so you know what I do and I watch this film if I don't want to see references to pom Poko on my tumblr - I can ask people to tag their posts or block and users who refuse I'm also repulsed by sex on TV always have been it doesn't matter whether it's consensual or not if there's a sex scene on screen I'll hide behind a pillow or leave the room but I'm not going to claim that sex scenes are somehow harmful or dangerous to the masses the sooner the wider fandom community realizes that each viewer has different squeaks and triggers and that there's no objective way to determine when something fictional becomes dangerous be that thing cat balls or hardcore fanfic porn the better off we'll be where you draw the line in terms of bad content will always be different from my line or from your mom's or your next-door neighbor's fandom is a community filled with unique people with different comfort levels I believe a lot of the upheaval we endure today comes down to each viewers obligation to wrangle fandom into a shape that suits their personal moral compass or again their desire to only populate their safe space with the that make them comfortable okay so you'll notice that there's a common thread between all these theories and that's comfort people want to be comfortable because the world is [ __ ] [ __ ] right now and probably why I think this has gotten so bad because like the world's always been [ __ ] but it's especially [ __ ] right now and the more [ __ ] the world is I think the more people seek refuge in fandom in fantasy and people are totally surrounded by fandom all day all night when are you ever away from your phone you always have access to discord and Tumblr and Twitter and Netflix and wherever else do you watch your favorite show you have the option to be constantly embedded in that fictional world so people say well don't confuse fiction with reality that becomes your reality this is your world we ask why do people have such volatile reactions because this means everything to them really like people like myself we get into fandom we pour our whole souls into that space our love and our time ourselves and so you know you see a threat to you know there's comfort you want to preserve that comfort for your safe space for your ships however you might read the text you don't want to see anything that might make you uncomfortable I talked a lot about porn but honestly this can you know it's gonna work for anything you see like something you think is a lie you see someone attacking a creator or somesuch that's gonna make you uncomfortable and probably gonna make you think must be morally wrong got a harpoon them really at the end of the day I think everything comes down to preservation of comfort because we have you know totally latched ourselves onto these properties we define ourselves by these properties and so when someone attacks that property or attacks your perception of that property or attacks so I don't know floods your dashboard with things that make you feel uncomfortable that doesn't feel like some peripheral thing that feels like an attack against yourself this is you I'm gonna say this as many times as I need to this is about you now and your safe space this is your fandom the people have [ __ ] all over it so course you're gonna react of course you're gonna be upset you are this property so what can you do honestly other than step back from your computer who's gonna do that like the best thing we can do is try to enforce within ourselves that balance you can make a change just can't it won't chop all you really can do because this behavior that I've listed up till now has been horribly normalized the more so many young kids are coming into these spaces and being taught this is how you react when things go wrong or you think that something is wrong so you can't undo I think years worth of damage in that regard all at once like we can slowly but surely take care of ourselves and you know where we can maybe do a little bit of damage control you know be positive to ourselves and each other don't start fights all you can really do sorry world [ __ ] fandom spaces are echo chambers and as long as we keep enforcing you know the kind of being here that you know leads to daxing and people telling each other to kill themselves because they perceive any like you know uncomfortable thing as a threat to their person [ __ ] all really I'm gonna lose so many followers for this video alright [Music] Oh

Channel: The Sin Squad

Views: 427,260

Rating: 4.8867755 out of 5

Keywords: toxic fandom, why fandoms are so toxic, cushfuddled, cushfuddled reviews, fandom, cartoons, voltron: legendary defender, voltron, steven universe, gumball, the amazing world of gumball, gravity falls, she-ra

Id: VaLrpU5yilA

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 25 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/The_F0OI]

I like Zeke.

[u/WolfSage75]

Honestly, I still don't understand why the majority of the subreddit started crucifying Sera like she was the anti christ when there are shit heads in the series that deserve it a million times more than her (Zeke). But it will hopefully pass.

[u/MutedBlackberry3]

It's kinda scary where people actually mad at Seraphina for calling out John and says John is the real victim, Truth, he is a victim but also he is an abuser which we've seen him yell, manipulating and verbally and physically assaulting his friends, it's like saying a guy beats his wife is the one needs attention and care cause he was abused himself while the wife here is the one suffering, they are literally victim-blaming Seraphin because John was a victim first, which doesn't mean it's okay to act violently towards other who care about you