(And anyone else who may want it, I suppose. I’m not entirely thrilled by it, but then I’m an Illustrator, not a Photoshopper – at some point I may make a damn vector out of it, or make it a proper painting. Who knows what I’ll do? Not you, certainly. I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel.)
y’know, now that homestuck is relevant again, i think we as a fandom can really take things we’ve learned in the past few years and put them to use in the context of old issues from back in the day. i think there’s a lot of important concepts and ideas that come from newer fandoms that can solve age-old debates about aspects of homestuck.
what i’m saying here is that john egbert’s voice definitely sounds like griffin mcelroy
hey @ og homestucks if you’re giving hiveswap fans advice about sealing body paint maybe don’t be aggressive about? i’ve seen a lot of posts where people are swearing at people about sealing body paint and yeah that’s important but you don’t need to be an asshole to get your point across.
on that note, sealing body paint is important, for people who don’t know the ins and outs of paint, because the worst thing that can happen is getting grey on people’s hard worked on costumes! you’ll probably feel guilty if it happens and it’s the kind of thing that is enough to dampen your experience of a convention – worse still, they’ll be stuck walking around with grey paint on that careful armor they spent fifteen hours sculpting and painting or the shirt that they had to find in the right colour, etc etc. seal your paint with lots of baby powder or translucent powder! ben nye is a good brand of paint (for my skin tone which is like, white as heck, i mix one of their white and grey together) if you can afford it because it’s waterproof and long lasting. you’ll need alcohol based remover to get it off – otherwise, snazaroo is cheap, although it’s not waterproof and will probably come off way faster. there is also kryolan which i’ve never tried but heard good things about! it pays to look around at tutorials and the like, there are a load on youtube about how to do it as safely as possible so as to avoid dampening someones con experience! some people make arm socks, but i cant sew at all so i paint my hands. i’d recommend covering them extra well, and if you think you’ve covered them enough…well, cover them a few times, juuuuuust to be sure! i also never paint the palm of my hands or underside of my fingers because i like to grab stuff to look at in cons and it’s just overall safer for me not to!
tldr; homestucks be nice, and there;s some actual help instead of a !!!Sea L Yo ur B o D y P AI nt !! rant in the big blurb. have fun i guess and i hope i get to take photos with people cosplaying hiveswap at my next con!
truly tho. I saw the post that this post here is refering to. and honestly why all the swearing? this just serves the cliché of tumblr being full of unnecessary negativity. you were a beginner once, too. nobody started out knowing all the tricks.
here ya go, instead of going like ‘seal your fucking paint’ try ‘sealing your paint is important, here’s a helpful post with brands of powders you could use/ my advice as an experienced cosplayer’ next time.
is this forreal? Look, I know Homestuck has historically been a free-for-all fandom that tends to express itself really abrasively as jokes because. we read homestuck.
but. I think as a fandom we need to reckon with the fact that Hiveswap is not that kind of experience necessarily, and a lot of its audience is not going to feel super comfortable engaging with that. there’s going to be lots of kids watching, playing, and talking about hiveswap. given the e10+ rating, lots of LITTLE kids. As a fandom comprised primarily of older teens and young adults, it is on us to be like. careful? caring? approachable i guess?
I’m not saying that swearing is like Off Limits in fandom now but like. guys. theres a time and a place. and the place to be inscrutable and dramatically aggressive is probably not when you’re trying to be helpful to newbies.
Just something to keep in mind.
Yeah, the harsher tones of longstanding fans and old school HS humor will more than likely discourage newer fans from engaging with the fandom if it’s the first thing they encounter. And given Hiveswap’s nature and audience compared to Homestuck’s it’s probably time to hang up the old “seal your damn paint” rhetoric that had been so fundamental back in 2013 when the cosplay world was suddenly swamped by grey painted aliens… We have a chance to be the supportive mentor figures sharing our experiences and preventing a new wave of chaos and drama rather than being the people angrily yelling at children who had no other way of knowing. Really, there is too much negativity and hate within fandom these days, we don’t need to contribute to it. Please, let us be a supportive and welcoming fandom for the new comers and make this resurgence something we can ALL enjoy.
I made this STICKERED AND AUTOGRAPHED JOEY CLAIRE MEME just to declare how important and valuable this message is. Just like Joey herself. Because she’s important and she matters to me. Like this post does. Oh also to make clear that I am so writing that Joey post,,, right now. That’s still happening.
But yeah forreal guys it is not gonna kill anyone to be careful to be nice to kids! It’ll probably require more consistent tagging for things like politics and nsfw and stuff but like, that’ll make it easier for the two main “age” distributions of the fandom to coexist in a healthier way.
Tumblr is a hellsite and we would probably all be better served in a dedicated social media hub designed to encourage this sort of coexistence. But in the meantime, we should take care to welcome the youngins playing with areas that aren’t too stressful so they can process everything Hiveswap gives them.
Like. I’ve been losing sleep the last few days because of how good Hiveswap is? I haven’t been in a public venue this weekend that I didn’t cry in. I’ve made rash, hasty, DRAMATIC decisions in fits of passion. I’m just…not like I was.
If that sounds familiar, I think it’s because what growing up reading Homestuck felt like to me. Hiveswap revived my sense of wonder and mystery and beauty, and shown me wonders I’d never seen-like Joey. I guess I just fucking like homestuck way too much?
But that’s…exactly what being a kid feels like. Important and dire as it is to talk about the state of the world and vent from our battles, teens and kids have a lots to do just handling what they’re feeling. I don’t think they should grow up like I did, reading Homestuck and learning about politcs and the state of the world at the same time.
I don’t regret it. But it was bad for me. I think it was bad for a lot of us. Still, it gave me the experience, I hope, to know it didn’t make me super healthy. The only benefit of that possible is to know not to pass it on to another wave of kids.
I don’t know how we’re going to work this out. But this is something I feel really strongly about. We need a way to make adult conversations opt-in, at the very least–so that any kid who wants to dive into them is essentially peeking through a window they shouldn’t.
Try and remember how it felt to read Homestuck and talk to people if you read it when you were young. Try really hard. We can and should do better than that experience, and What Pumpkin have proven they deserve that from us. I don’t think any little girl who connects to Joey should be made to feel that the game that moved her so much is garbage for x or y reason.
I just think…I think we should choose to be gentler than that.
Something to help visualize the scope of Homestuck as a single work with four parts.
Top-left: Part 1 (Act 1 – Act 4), focusing on the Earth and characters of Universe B1, the “Beta Kids.” The trolls from Universe A are present in the background, but focus generally goes to their effects on our universe. (Image taken directly from the end of Act 5 Act 1) Bottom-left: Part 2 (Act 5), focusing on Alternia and the trolls of Universe A2, the “Beta Trolls.” Their motives, and the long-reaching influence of Alternian culture, define much of the content in the comic. (Image also taken directly from the end of Act 5 Act 1) Together, the left side of the image comprises Side 1, the maximalist/mechanical half of Homestuck which focused on the relationship between humanity and the trolls that created us. As the main characters dove into fantastical and abstract worlds to act out their conflicts, they left behind the physical planets they had overlooked, passing the buck onto their Guardians, Exiles, and late-game constructs, some of whom are manipulating a very long and dangerous game.
Top-right: Part 3 (Act 6 Act 1 – Act 6 Intermission 5), focusing on the Earth and characters of Universe B2, the “Alpha Kids.” The cherubs from Universe C are present in the background, but focus generally goes to how they’re affected by what happens in our universe. (Image taken from the start of Act 6, with the Green Sun imposed on by me.) Bottom-right: Part 4 (Act 6 Act 6), focusing on the cherubs of Earth C that will exist and the dramatic cosmic cycles necessary to decide who will inherit the Universe. The cherubs’ games, and the eternal return of juju-fuelled “Retcon” callbacks, define much of the form of the comic. (Image taken from Act 6 Intermission 5, with the Abstract Sun imposed on by me in such a way that it also kinda looks like the Yaldabaoth platform.) Together, the right side of the image comprises Side 2, the minimalist/artistic half of Homestuck which focused on the relationship between humanity and the cherubs we will create. As the Guardians (now kids), Exiles (now empowered), and late-game constructs (now awake and talking) engage in longer delicate systems for maintaining reality, the main characters get a chance to be overlooked and get lost in purgatories of thought, some of which are manufactured by nearly-forgotten hubristic specters.
Anything else, I leave for you to interpret. It may take me a while to get to the point, but Homestuck taught me it’s okay to take it slow if you need to.
Jude had a lot of humorous little lines referencing running away, retreating, balancing caution with bravery, or just generally sending mixed signals about how brave he was or considered himself.
Suddenly occurred to me that this is a BIG ISSUE with his dad–who appears to make running away from his problems (or addressing a sub component of his problems by running away) his primary coping strategy.
And then we have Jude’s pigeons who: 1) charge in bravely and immediately die 2) run away and leave problems unsolved 3) do whatever Byers’ best effort counts as.
Thematic? Especially when we consider one of Jude’s parents apparently did something that got her dead or vanished? And the other took off questing on related issues immediately after?
For a given value of “intelligence”, anyway. I don’t hold that much truck with the concept in general–there are different kinds of intelligence that run the gamut of human skills, and reducing that to a single concept is reductive, to say the least.
However, it’s hard to deny that there are real cultural forces in our society that do treat intelligence as a monolithic descriptor of skill and worth, and it’s a cultural idea as pervasive in reality as it is in Jake’s character arc. For that reason alone, I’ll be using “intelligence” as a term referring to Jake’s awareness of and competence at identifying and solving problems throughout this sequence. The term as I am using it here is only relevant in the context of the themes and language Homestuck sets up.
Intelligence, competence, and awareness are key parts of Jake’s relationship with the people around him, and particularly with the way he is dehumanized, taken for granted, and abused.
In fact, almost every character Jake is close to in canon questions his intelligence at some point:
And this dynamic isn’t just present in the characters. It’s in the fandom as well. Fandom perception of Jake English often considers him comically unaware of his surroundings and reality, dense and slow or even straight up unable to pick up on ideas that come naturally to many of the other characters.
This is true across the board of opinions of his character: Some consider Jake a self-absorbed, thoughtless asshole, others still consider him a helpless victim who isn’t quite quick enough on the uptake to keep up with how he’s manipulated by others.
It’s hard for us–the fandom, I mean–to be sure of just how much Jake understood about how badly Lil Hal treated him (and by association, Dirk, in much of the fandom’s eyes). Or that Jane liked him. Among other things. It’s part of the general air of helplessness and incompetence that surrounds Pages, I guess, and air set up around Jake for quite a lot of his narrative:
(Note: This is Brain Ghost Dirk specifically questioning Jake’s intelligence. I hope you’ve got some good note taking pens, because this is going to be important later.)
It’s pretty much accepted that the degree and reach of Jake’s intelligence is, at the very least, a matter of debate. I am here to say that it is not. At all. And I can prove it. By allowing ourselves to doubt Jake’s intelligence, we–the fandom– have performed the equivalent of deciding Dave’s cool guy act is the real deal.
We have fallen for Jake’s bluff. I’ll explain.
Plenty of people are aware that Knights, as a class, tend to act out personas that reflect ideas about how they think they should act. For Dave, that’s the stoic Cool Guy archetype, which he eventually grows out of:
For Karkat, it’s his ideas of being a Ruthless Big Shot Leader, which he also outgrows by the end:
And Latula has the thing about being a R4D SK4T3R G4M3G1RL!!! I don’t really think we need a quote to establish that–Dave and Karkat prove my point well enough, and this is pretty much common fandom knowledge.
What I don’t think is common fandom knowledge is that Pages do the same thing, but for a different purpose. Pages and Knights both set up Personas that they project into the outside world. And both of them do it to control how other people perceive them. But for different reasons.
Knights do it because they want to be perceived as capable, in control, and unflappable, basically. Karkat wants everyone to rely on his executive ability as a Leader. Dave wants to be admired and validated by his friends, or. Well. Anyone. In essence, Knights want to be relied on by others.
Knights use their aspect to benefit others. Pages use it to benefit themselves.
Horrus develops a strangely blank persona, so conspicuously fake it is hard to tell if he even reacts to input–so it’s easy for him to just pretend he didn’t hear it when Rufioh tells him he wants to break up–again, I don’t really feel like going through all of Openbound to get all the screencaps and I don’t think they warrant that much space on this post.
Tavros does the same thing, enveloping himself in his games and fantasy so much that he veers away from almost any responsibility in the session, and does only what he wants to…unless Vriska is stealing that ability from him. However, even through her abuse, Tavros manages through sheer presentation of his person to encourage the other trolls to help take care of him.
Specifically, by giving him increased mobility–mobility and freedom of movement being concepts closely related to Breath. It’s worth mentioning Tavros is able to inspire this care not just in Kanaya, but in Equius, who looks down upon lowbloods and whose culture would have encouraged him to KILL Tavros for his weakness rather than help him.
But because of Vriska’s exploitative and cruel influence on him, I’m not sure to what extent he really lives up to his full potential. That said, he DOES manage to completely live out his own personal fantasy, coming to embody both his childhood image of Peter Pan…
BUT ALSO being the only one of the Alternian trolls to accomplish his original childhood goal: Becoming a Cavalreaper.
Get it? He’s literally cavalry.Ha ha. Is this kind of a fucked up victory? Maybe, yeah. But it’s fitting that the character obsessed with the Peter Pan fantasy of leading a troupe of “Lost Boys” never really grows up with the goals he sets for himself. Maybe it says something about Tavros, or about the nature of Ghosts–either way, it definitely seems intentional.
Anyway, the Ghosts are another essay for another time. Time to talk about the kid I actually want to talk about:
Jake English has a fabricated persona, too. For Horuss, it’s nothingness. For Tavros, it’s endless childhood and Peter Pan. But Jake’s persona is a contrast to Dirk’s (and Dave’s) Cool Guy persona. Personas that, for each of them, sit at the dead opposite end of the spectrum from who all three characters actually are.
And for Jake’s constructed persona is that of the Hot-Headed Hero.
And like Horrus and Tavros, Jake indulges this fantasy version of himself even when he actively knows it makes no sense to do so, simply because it’s the fantasy about his life he wants to live out.
But like Dave and Dirk’s presentation of themselves as cool guys unphased by anything, this persona is a complete lie.
And also intelligent, curious, and good at evaluating the potential consequences of his actions–traits he literally willfuly holds himself back from.
His Modus is by far the most complex of all the kids. He uses a Puzzle Modus that allows him to fit any amount of items he wants in it’s storage space…so long as he can successfully spatially fit every single object within a finite space.
And Jake captchalogues a LOT of shit. Meaning he has to keep all of this inventory and know how to spatially navigate it to fit everything he wants at all times. And he does this casually, as a part of his daily interactions with the world around him.
But perhaps more telling than that is how Brain Ghost Dirk describes his own creation:
Brain Ghost Dirk implies that he is a Dirk splinter, but specifically a Dirk splinter that exists entirely through the ideas Jake has about Dirk.
In other words, Jake knows and understands Dirk so well that he can pretty much perfectly remember his body, movements and mannerisms on command. Again, not even actively, it’s just kind of how Jake English rolls-thinking about Dirk all the time is the status quo.
And Brain Ghost Dirk claims to be Jake’s literal brain, talking back to him.
Which means when Brain Ghost Dirk calls Jake out on something, he is forcibly communicating important information to Jake that Jake is actively choosing to ignore. It’s Jake talking to himself, not Dirk giving Jake information he doesn’t have by talking to him through Brain Ghost Dirk.
We have reason to believe the Ghost about this, since Dirk never expresses having any awareness of Brain Ghost Dirk’s existence.
So what important information does Jake willingly ignore? Well, earlier we saw him justify beating up a random alien girl even though a part of his brain knew she wasn’t actually Sea Hitler, and he kind of just wanted to play the part. But surely we can do better than that. How about everything about his friends’ feelings about him that makes him uncomfortable? Callmearcturus wrote this brilliant thesis outlining why she thinks Jake deliberately manipulated Jane into failing to confess to him, but I’m gonna run over it real quick to ground it in this context and sell you on the idea that this is, in fact, not a theory and explicit canon.
Because we don’t need to guess at this by reverse-engineering Jake’s well-established feelings for Dirk. Roxy literally tells him Jane has these feelings before Jane herself does:
Jake recognizes what Roxy is saying, and guesses what she was alluding to on her own. Roxy doesn’t deny it by any measure, and when she asks Jake to drop the issue, Jake says he understands the dilemma this puts her in with Jane.
To stress: He received this information in confidence and knows it for a fact. And he trusts the information he receives so much that he then ACTS on it. After talking to Roxy, Jake messages Jane himself, OPENING by mentioning Roxy told him Jane was going to be contacting him.
And then he himself broaches the subject of their romantic feelings for each other:
But when Jane outright asks him if he has something he wants to say to her, Jake expertly dodges the question, keeping his options open while putting the onus of taking the first step and revealing her feelings on Jane again.
And then, once he’s got her trying to answer…
He KEEPS asking her, interrupting her several times while she starts to try sorting out her thoughts. He puts Jane under a LOT of pressure here, which…considering Jake literally KNOWS the answer, is a pretty shitty thing to do! Even if Roxy hadn’t LITERALLY TOLD HIM mere minutes ago, Jane’s reactions here would have confirmed Jake’s suspicions beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt.
Unless, of course, one has a reputation for not thinking things through or being aware of their surroundings.
Once Jake has his answer, he doubles back, making sure to ask her AGAIN while she’s off balance….
And he then shuts her down when she tries to take the initiative on taking it back and being honest, quickly following up by IMMEDIATELY letting her know he’s relieved about this–signaling his disinterest BEFORE she has a chance to reveal she actually does have a stake in the matter.
He then uses his goofy, unaware, trusting persona to set up a status quo where Jane continually helps him by acting as a sounding board for all his thoughts about Dirk–essentially, putting Jane inside a gender-flipped version of the laughable stereotype of The Friend Zone.
But wait a minute. Jane is one thing. But if Jake is actually this smart, aware, and capable–then it kind of has ramifications across all of his character interactions. What else changes if we read Jake this way? I know I said my next post would be on Roxy, but, uh…yeah. This one kind of got away from me.
In our next entry, we’re going to talk about Why Jake does what he does, and Why he seems so genuinely confused about it later into his narrative. We’re also going to look at some of the other consequences his Jake’s approach to his friendships has for his friends.
We’ll also make a case for Why exactly Jake ultimately falls in love with Dirk Strider, how and when Jake demonstrates and acts on that love, and if I can manage to squeeze it in–maybe even uncover the way the Heart aspects’ two different themes of Souls and Romance/Shipping are conceptually connected.
And on that note, it’s worth pointing out that there’s one notable exception to the list of people fooled by Jake’s presented persona. One character who not only never talks Jake’s intelligence down…
But instead talks Jake’s intelligence UP when he talks badly about himself.
Dirk Strider.
See you again soon, everyone.
Until then, Keep Rising.
now that my platform has like spiked considerably can i like please beg people to stop reblogging this particular post? please please i hate it so much.
EVERYTHING ELSE ive written about Jake is better ok, literally everything else this post is MOSTLY garbage except for the quality dirkjake at the end, pleaaaaase just read my other shit i’ll write up a masterpost linking all of it if it gets this one consigned to obscurity holy hell how do i make it stop spreading :((((
hey @ og homestucks if you’re giving hiveswap fans advice about sealing body paint maybe don’t be aggressive about? i’ve seen a lot of posts where people are swearing at people about sealing body paint and yeah that’s important but you don’t need to be an asshole to get your point across.
on that note, sealing body paint is important, for people who don’t know the ins and outs of paint, because the worst thing that can happen is getting grey on people’s hard worked on costumes! you’ll probably feel guilty if it happens and it’s the kind of thing that is enough to dampen your experience of a convention – worse still, they’ll be stuck walking around with grey paint on that careful armor they spent fifteen hours sculpting and painting or the shirt that they had to find in the right colour, etc etc. seal your paint with lots of baby powder or translucent powder! ben nye is a good brand of paint (for my skin tone which is like, white as heck, i mix one of their white and grey together) if you can afford it because it’s waterproof and long lasting. you’ll need alcohol based remover to get it off – otherwise, snazaroo is cheap, although it’s not waterproof and will probably come off way faster. there is also kryolan which i’ve never tried but heard good things about! it pays to look around at tutorials and the like, there are a load on youtube about how to do it as safely as possible so as to avoid dampening someones con experience! some people make arm socks, but i cant sew at all so i paint my hands. i’d recommend covering them extra well, and if you think you’ve covered them enough…well, cover them a few times, juuuuuust to be sure! i also never paint the palm of my hands or underside of my fingers because i like to grab stuff to look at in cons and it’s just overall safer for me not to!
tldr; homestucks be nice, and there;s some actual help instead of a !!!Sea L Yo ur B o D y P AI nt !! rant in the big blurb. have fun i guess and i hope i get to take photos with people cosplaying hiveswap at my next con!
truly tho. I saw the post that this post here is refering to. and honestly why all the swearing? this just serves the cliché of tumblr being full of unnecessary negativity. you were a beginner once, too. nobody started out knowing all the tricks.
here ya go, instead of going like ‘seal your fucking paint’ try ‘sealing your paint is important, here’s a helpful post with brands of powders you could use/ my advice as an experienced cosplayer’ next time.
is this forreal? Look, I know Homestuck has historically been a free-for-all fandom that tends to express itself really abrasively as jokes because. we read homestuck.
but. I think as a fandom we need to reckon with the fact that Hiveswap is not that kind of experience necessarily, and a lot of its audience is not going to feel super comfortable engaging with that. there’s going to be lots of kids watching, playing, and talking about hiveswap. given the e10+ rating, lots of LITTLE kids. As a fandom comprised primarily of older teens and young adults, it is on us to be like. careful? caring? approachable i guess?
I’m not saying that swearing is like Off Limits in fandom now but like. guys. theres a time and a place. and the place to be inscrutable and dramatically aggressive is probably not when you’re trying to be helpful to newbies.
It’s so god damn easy to tear people down. People do it every day. It’s simple, it’s satisfying, it’s cathartic, it feels like balm to people who have been wronged, to people who have suffered, to people who have to live their lives outside this virtual space in fear and in real danger, in abusive households and abusive communities and situations that do not foster kindness, empathy, or the extension of good faith toward strangers. Being able to lash out safely from behind a screen at people that are safe to lash out at and who feel like a source of your continuing oppression – that’s novel, at first. It’s invigorating. It’s freeing. The ability to be angry, to say angry things, to express your hurt and rage at any number of nameless or unnamable things is so fucking seductive it’s no wonder so many lgbt+ people have spent time in that place, have had periods of their lives where they engaged in this behavior and said what they wanted and lashed out without thought and allowed others so similar to them to enable their behavior.
It’s so easy to find lgbt+ people who are in pain. To take these people who are in pain and to give them targets. To mold young people and your peers and take advantage of their trauma (so like your own!) and whip it up, normalize it within your group, foster it on any number of available platforms. Focus it on whoever you deem deserving at any given time. Actions speak louder than words. Context is irrelevant. Dialogue is weak. Abusers are abusers are abusers, except when you’re the abuser, because the abuse you have suffered justifies your actions. Your abuse makes you relatable. Your abuse is more important, more valid, more meaningful, more deserving of the care and empathy of others regardless of your coping mechanisms.
It’s so damn fucking easy to just say whatever you want on the internet. It’s so easy to paint a group with whatever paintbrush you like, because no one fact checks, no one cares about context, no one concerns themselves with nuance, no one views the words on the screen in front of them as coming from another human being with an entirely separate lived history full of its own tragedy and triumph and biases and triggers and needs and understanding and hard fucking learned lessons.
We separate into teams and look for ways to score points against the other side. We make ourselves willfully ignorant so we don’t have to switch sides, or even better, remove ourselves from the game entirely. We busy ourselves with tearing our enemies down with unattainable standards, ignore our own hypocrisy, and look to our side to tell us we’re right, we’re right, this time we are right and we will not be silenced and we will not be bullied and we will not let them win.
Our actual abusers don’t see any of it. They don’t care. They go on living their lives. We take our rage and our pain and our frustration out in arenas we understand, in the places we feel safe, and the people we lash out at are the people who should be our friends, our allies, our brothers and sisters and nonbinary siblings who have suffered so much in a world that denies our sexuality, denies our gender, denies our expression, denies our right to exist.
We know our abusers won’t listen. We know our pain is nothing to them, a drop in a bucket. So we hurt the people that can’t help but listen, because our stories are so alike.
I went through an angry phase. I spent a few years screaming at people I felt deserved it, too. Some of them did and some of them didn’t, and doing so brought me short term satisfaction and a deep sense of power that I had not experienced anywhere else. A deep resonance with my own identity that I was powerless to exhibit anywhere in my real life, because family is complicated, friends are the choir and speaking up about microaggressions at work gets queer people fucking fired every fucking day, and you need that god damn money to eat. to live. to pay for your fucking brain pills.
So.
When you have a platform and a fandom and you feel that thrill of being heard, finally – I get it.
But here’s the thing.
Your abuse never justifies levying abuse on others, strangers, people whose context you do not know and whose stories you have not heard.
Your emotions are valid. You are free to feel however you like. If you need to vent in private, among friends and colleagues and people you feel safe with, by all means.
Your favorite characters and your favorite ships and your favorite relationships and your fanfiction and your fanart may be how you express yourself or vent or cope. Your Shit means different things to different people, and to some, it means nothing at all. Let it fucking go. Your shit is not the bar of lived experience other people in fandom must meet to be considered sufficiently oppressed to spare them your bullying.
Your trigger and your context and your trauma is your own. It does not belong to anyone else. It is your responsibility to understand your limits and respect the rights of other creators, just as it is the responsibility of creators to properly tag and label their work to spare those whom it might upset the indignity of reliving their trauma within a space that is supposed to be safe for them. A space that for some may be the only safe space they have. A space that for some may be the only escape available to them. A space that, for some, may be the only way they can begin to express themselves, furtively, in stolen moments in an oppressive environment.
Fandom is where so many of us found ourselves. It’s full of us, lgbt+ people in various life stages, expressing ourselves in communities dedicated to content that made us feel enough to find ourselves here in the first place. It’s where children currently are discovering labels for feelings they have never had the words to talk about before. It’s where adults go in the midst of their busy lives to contribute to a body of work motivated by nothing but emotion for the source, for the community, and/or for the hope of encouraging feedback from their peers, their fans, their heroes, all three. It’s where everyone goes and discovers there are people out there just like them, after all.
It’s where people are picking their teams and suiting up and getting in line and hurting people just like them, every day.
It’s where people are putting the feelings and wellbeing and sanctity and rights of fictional characters over those of actual human beings who committed the grave sin of enjoying a thing a different way, or for different reasons.
Fandom is full of amazing connection and moments I wouldn’t trade for the world. I wouldn’t be married to my amazing wife right now without it. But it’s also a battlefield in a bubble where I watch oppressed people tear each other apart every single day, while of course, in the meantime, outside the filmy fucking boundary between this world and the real one, the same privileged sorts continue to dominate every aspect of mainstream media, the white house is full of incompetent, hateful people, some of whom are literal nazis, white nationalists feel safe enough to wear swastikas on public transit in liberal epicenters, gay men in russia are being sent to death camps, the police are murdering people of color indiscriminately without fear of personal or professional consequence, the supreme court is one death or retirement away from setting back civil rights in the united states a century, trans people have to watch a nation of frightened pissbabies scream about the sanctity of public bathrooms while they themselves suffer from an increased rate of being literally fucking murdered simply for existing, gay teenagers ostracized from conservative families sleep homeless in the street with winter fast approaching, hurricanes devastate a dozen nations because this century has paved a political landscape where corporate profits prevail over basic human rights – and you know what, fuck it, let’s make it a little personal –
half my family has never acknowledged the fact that I have been married for a year because they don’t believe it is a legitimate marriage because I and my wife are both women, my wife and I went to the hairdresser the other day and when we checked in with the same last name we were asked if we were sisters (and upon clarifying, the woman who was to cut our hair loudly and incredulously gasped, “is that legal here?”), one of my best friends, a woman I have known since high school (that’s 17 years ago, for those keeping count) was told she would have to undergo a thorough and lengthy process via working with HR, her boss and the owner of her company before she could represent herself as her correct gender at work – and even after she jumped through all those hoops, she was told she was absolutely not allowed to use the women’s restroom under any circumstances – When I told my father about my engagement, he tearfully turned to me and said “but you’re supposed to marry a guy, and have babies” – and because this was my father, who I have always had a good relationship with despite remaining closeted most of my life, who I have always and still deeply love despite the shit that comes out of his mouth sometimes, who worked 12 hour days in construction to support me after divorcing my mother when he was nineteen years old – I actually fucking felt guilty.
The memory of how I felt in that moment will follow me until I fucking die, and when I log on to this website at the end of the day and just want to fucking relax and spend time yammering about things I like with people who like those same things, when I just want to spend time in this space that makes me feel good, when I just want to create content for the joy of creating it and the joy of seeing others enjoy the thing I created – the fucking last thing I want is to see myself, my wife, my close friends and fandom friends alike being put on blast by petty people leveraging a nebulous, ever-changing definition of purity, backed by a group of people I know have suffered and hurt and feel justified hurting others because of it.
Fandom is where we go to escape the hellish fucking bullshit that is reality, for fuck’s sake.
I don’t fucking care who hurt you. Visiting pain upon others in the aftermath is your choice. Bullying others because a group of impressionable, hurting people looking for a leader will follow you into the trenches here on a battlefield where we should all fucking know better is your choice.
Your feelings aren’t always your choice. That’s fair.
The way you choose to express and react to and process and deal with those feelings IS your choice.
Your actions are your choice.
So try to be kind. Try to be empathetic. Understand your feelings and understand when you are being manipulated and for god’s sake, when other queer people come out in droves to tell their stories, try to think critically, even if they are on the other “team.” Block content that upsets you. Use tools available to you to keep yourself safe! Blacklist tags. Blacklist URLs. Block people. Be frank about your triggers if you are able and try to give people the benefit of the doubt – and if you can’t, put space between you and them, and then use the myriad of tools available to you to put a wall in that space.
I know all about the kind of catharsis that comes from being a “mean gay.” I know all about constructing a set of rules within a group and then judging others outside that group by that context and punishing them when they fail purity tests they knew nothing about. I know all about fighting disrespect with disrespect and anger with anger and logging out at the end of the day to go cry – not because I was sad, but because I was so fucking angry I couldn’t process the emotion any other way.
I also know all about walking away from that life, that toxicity. I know about taking a break. I know about reading, a lot, for months and years, about experiences both like and very much unlike my own. I know about resolving to be better. I know about cutting out the people who made me worse, and keeping the people who encouraged me to be better.
I know how much my life improved when I endeavored to keep my venting and negativity among friends who could actually support me, in places where I couldn’t hurt anyone, and present a positive force to the public, instead. To lift up the things I like and to block and move on with the things I don’t. To let creators have their space and their platform here in this one place where we can each carve out some small part for ourselves and feel like we are in control for once in our fucking lives. I know I stopped crying so much. I know my hobbies stopped making me so angry, all the time. I know that the only times I have been truly, deeply upset in my time in this fandom have been when I have been targeted or those I care about have been targeted.
I know how fucking hard it is to tear yourself away.
Flying through Storytelling 