something I'm curious about

[esmenet]

I do believe in the transformative power of fan works as much as anyone else, but I see page after page of fics and art dedicated to $Thing About White Dudes, and I think -- yes, transformative works are all very well, but does it really matter how transformative the fanworks are when we're still giving these things attention?

I mean, you can racebend and genderfuck till the cows come home, but I feel like at some point it's just not worth it to keep investing so much love and effort and time in $whitedudethings.

That's the question I'm asking here, I guess. At what point, to you, is it no longer worth it?

Comments

I accidentally an essay

[aris_tgd]

I guess... it depends on what you're expecting to get out of it?

I mean, I guess I'm not really engaged with fandom in the way a lot of people are. My schedule and my lack of... I dunno, I don't find myself in fan community the way it seems like a lot of people do, so I feel like maybe I'm missing something. I write what I want to write and I read, mostly from recs, what I want to read, but I don't actually go through the experience of seeing pages after pages of Stuff I Am Not Into. I don't fannish tumblr, for instance, because the last time I tried I burned out, but when I had an active general fannish tumblr I curated it very heavily.

I think for people who really crave an active fannish community it's harder than it is for me to say "fuck it, that's a show entirely about white dude feelings, I'm not interested." So when I don't want to check out SuperWhoLockHanniWolf or whatever the latest tumblr thing is, I don't feel like I'm missing a lot of fannish engagement in my life. I stopped watching New Who and didn't really feel any negative consequences, you know? But I know that's not the case for a lot of people, and I don't want to say "Well, then, go be fannish about something else" as if it's that easy.

... I have this theory, that is somewhat related, that I bring out when talking about the overwhelming amount of slash/LJ/DW/tumblr fandom attachment to white dudes, and that's the stacking power of privilege/prejudice. The prejudices and -isms and privilege of the showrunners/writers/corporate environment that TV shows and movies are being made in stack with the prejudices and -isms and privilege of the fans watching the show and creating fanworks about it. I usually use this to attack laziness in argument--yes, it's true that there are fewer black characters on TV and they're generally framed differently than white characters and get less screentime, but that doesn't keep fangirls from writing elaborate backstories for minor white dude characters and very little for major black characters of any gender. Et cetera. I guess my point is that fandom as a group of human beings is always going to carry that set of prejudices, and the people making our media are reinforcing, creating, and soaking in that set of prejudices as well, so it's a lot harder to find and enjoy and get a fandom going around stuff that isn't, well, white dude stuff.

And to be honest, sometimes I like writing about a protagonist who's a Labeled Generic. It's a result of years of media programming, but it's also less effort. Sometimes I want less effort. I'm doing this for fun.

*hands* I don't really have any solutions; I don't think there are any, except to democratize content creation to the point where we get many, many, many more different voices available as easily as white male voices.

Anyway. I'm low blood sugar and not even sure if I'm properly addressing your point, so I'm going to close essay and leave that there.

[tropicsbear]

To be honest, I've never had a fandom where I reached the point where I just went, "SO MANY WHITE DUDES" and left. I dunno if this is because majority of my fandoms are animanga (though I've been getting into more and more Western fandoms too) or because I've maybe got a relatively high tolerance or because I'm lucky in my fandom choices.

Lately, I've been expecting more and more from fandoms nowadays. In this day and age, people are more aware of issues like proper representation in media, so I expect to get shows that have greater and greater diversity.

On a slightly related note, I'm not a Doctor Who fan, your post reminded me of this thing on Tumblr.

[esmenet]

Oh, gosh. yes, that tumblr post is exactly it.

Yeah, I think being mostly in animanga fandoms helps -- most of those at least try to not be Two Dudes Staring At Each Other While Women Get Murdered In The Background, while a lot of USian and British tv seem to take that as a template rather than a strawman example.

[foxfinial]

I mean, you can racebend and genderfuck till the cows come home, but I feel like at some point it's just not worth it to keep investing so much love and effort and time in $whitedudethings.

I certainly feel this way, especially about the way gender is discussed in my corner of the writing world. I just want more ambition, you know?

[esmenet]

Yeah, agreed.

from network-ish, hi

[recessional]

At what point, to you, is it no longer worth it?

What's "it"? Matter to what? Believe in the transformative power of fan works to do what? The mention of racebend and genderfucking seems to imply the answer has something to do with "centralize woman-focused and POC-focused things", but there's no really clear statement? Because, like, fan works have "transformative power" in like eighty different directions (including disability and sexuality axes, but also ownership of folklore, narratives on trauma and culture, etc, etc), so . . . ?

Re: from network-ish, hi

[esmenet]

The above post was written while mostly asleep, so I apologize for the lack of clarity! This reply may also lack clarity, but that is merely natural talent.

I like the idea of writing ourselves in to popular stories, but I feel as though there's a point where there is just so much wrong with the basic premise of the stories in question -- where they become 'microaggressions with some story' rather than 'story with a forgivable amount of microaggressions' -- that it's a better idea to just drop them and save yourself the pain than it is to try and patch over the holes.

Adding on that until 'White Dudes Staring At Each Other While Background People Die' shows/books/films/etc stop being cash cows, their various industries are going to keep focusing on those stories, rather than others, so heavy involvement in those fandoms is to some degree supporting the status quo.

Obviously this point is going to be different for different people, generalized-you can like whatever generalized-you want, but I myself am starting to get to the point where there are a lot of source texts I'm not willing to touch with a ten-foot pole, no matter the fixit-fic I could write.

Re: from network-ish, hi

[recessional]

Ah-k. My response is long. >.>

Obviously this point is going to be different for different people

Well, that and I think this point gets complicated depending on different people.

My usual example is myself: I am . . .weirdly socialized, for a woman. I was raised by an intellectually aggressive lawyer around a bunch of male cousins in an argumentative family and I'm ASD, which means in my case all combined to mean I missed all of the subtle cues that apparently near every other woman ever catches that tells them not to argue with men or whatever. (When I first heard the "I get shouted down/my ideas get stolen in academic settings" thing from friends at 18, for example, it literally made no sense to me - it was literally outside my experience - not because people have never tried to talk over me but because the idea of letting them is anathema and incomprehensible). I also suffer from PTSD, and I'm a personality with a huge anger baseline.

You know that whole #yesallwomen tag? No: not this woman.* That's never been my life.

That means basically next to nobody writes women I can strongly identify with, including other women, including women who are dedicated to increasing the number of women in fiction, etc, etc. I can think of exactly three, and I was startled when they happened, in all cases: I stood there going "really? really someone wrote a female character like that?"

(I write myself into my original fiction all the time, but that's a different matter).

So the fact of the matter is nobody's writing me into shit except me - except as a guy. Because Simon Tam? I'm there. Frodo Baggins? Right at you. Aaron Hotchner? Completely. Vanyel Ashkevron? All up in it.

There's also the issue that for me, "woman" is not necessarily the most important part of my identity, the most important thing that makes a character "me". There was a kerfluffle on Captain Awkward a while back over her treatment of a male anxiety sufferer; I was one of the people she made feel unbelievably unsafe in her forum because for me, the effects of my anxiety disorder(s) and their intersection with my other neuroatypicalities/mental illnesses is actually a much, much bigger deal than my gender-identity. My gender identity subtly shapes my experience in complicated ways and doesn't necessarily match up with anyone else who likes fem pronouns and calls herself a woman; my brain-shit is a matter of life-and-death, everyday function, every day discrimination.

So frankly the male character with PTSD is likely to be more important to me than the badass female executive. I mean, she's great and I love that she exists, but that's not me and it's never going to be me; the guy struggling with how to go out into the world wracked by irrational terror unpredictably triggered? That's important. The guy spending himself every day to look after a disabled, dependent sibling? So much more important and at the same time written differently than people write women in that same role.

(Literally you could swap me and Simon Tam and you would not have to rewrite anything. The gender change would not matter.)

So I think there are also different parts of "writing ourselves into" that matter more to different people - queerness, disability, life-experience, trauma, that kind of thing, all of which are not necessarily affected or removed by not sharing a race or a gender with the people they're working with.

Now, I mean the flipside is there is so, so much shit I don't even touch. I literally noped out of The LEGO Movie after checking up on the plotline because I am so bored of that shit I can't even; I noped out of Supernatural preemptively; so on and so forth. I even noped out of BBC Sherlock, which is funny because the RDJ/Law Sherlock Holmes is also SO IMPORTANT TO ME based entirely on their relationship (and Mary and how she deals with it) that again, the part where they're two guys and I'm a girl doesn't matter to me.

And also on the flipside there is Vampire Academy the movie which is probably objectively a bad movie but I don't care because someone finally wrote me in, gender and all; there were finally girls, a femmeslash couple even, that I could see myself in and that never, ever happens.

So for me, and I think for at least some other people, it's not even that the point is in different places, but the entire nature of how we reach what point with what source-text is different and complicated.

*to be super clear: I have been menaced by men, but no more and in no different ways than I've been menaced by other women, and anyone who tries to tell me that women can't be sexually predatory is going to get laughed at. /digression

[alexseanchai]

I don't know but I think I passed it a while back.