i really don’t want to get into it. but! here i go anyway, because i’m so tired of keeping quiet, i’m so tired of suffering in silence for fear if stirring shit back up, so here the fuck goes anyway. multiple times now i’ve had all my hard work ruined by ridiculously fucking false accusations that i’m supposedly a pedophile despite NO proof of it. i’ve had my shit wrecked by “guilt by association” situations, too, where i was supposedly responsible for the mistakes of a friend, shit i wasn’t even AWARE of. all it took was a small loud group of people who decided they wanted to destroy me, and they absolutely accomplished that.
being accused of being dangerous to my fanbase, or even my baby nephew and having people believe it without question (because so many folks take callout posts at face value without fact checking), crushed my fucking soul. i lost 75% of my monthly income and had to go back to relying on my parents for financial support. i’ll be straight up honest. when i took down all my social media last winter, it was because i deadass almost killed myself. i had a plan and everything. cops showed up. it got ugly.
i’m back from that brink, i have a wonderful support system, therapy and medication, but i never fully bounced back after that.
it’s almost a blessing i got riddled with back and wrist injuries and had surgery so that i’ve been forced to take time off from content creating and just take care of myself, it may have saved my life. but that doesn’t mean i don’t have a lot of fears and hangups about what to do from here, because i just don’t know. i’m not big enough online to stay afloat if someone decides to take a big loud shit on my reputation. i’m not safe, i’ve been doxxed, people know my name and address, and the risk vs reward ratio for content making is so skewed anymore that i have lost almost all of my passion to make. just. anything, really. why bother, if anyone can destroy everything that gives my life meaning in a single day?
i’ve stopped animating entirely, drawing became a chore long ago, my creative fire was completely snuffed. i don’t know how to come back, i’m honestly just taking it one day at a time because it’s all i CAN do to function. it’s an ongoing struggle, and will continue to be as long as the status quo remains. something’s got to give, but you can’t critique callout culture on tumblr without someone accusing you of being an apologist for this or that, so i flat out stopped trying. it’s not a fight i can win. you have no idea how badly i want to fade off into obscurity and disappear, take up a different alias and start over, but i can’t. i need to make a living. i’m in too deep. i put 15 years of hard work into building the viewership i have and establishing my presence on social media.
i’m sad and scared every single day. i don’t WANT to give up, because giving up is as good as a death sentence on my happiness. i don’t plan on quitting, not anymore. but fucking hell, can you blame me for feeling like it’s all kind of pointless? my future, which once seemed all figured out, is now a huge question mark. i’ll have to wait and see now, i’ll have to re-evaluate what it means to be a creator, and rediscover why i loved making art in the first place.
all i can ask of people is to take everything you read online with a grain of salt. fact check, be a critical thinker, and make your own conclusions. most of all, realize that lives are literally at stake. falsely calling people out is not a fucking game. we have to stop scaring content creators out of creating. we have to be better.
Jesus, I had no idea, Kylee 😦
If any of ya’ll are wondering why I find callout/purity culture fucking insipid and vile, well, here’s what your “progressive action” produces. Less happiness, less content, less people following their dreams and connecting to each other online, when we need all of those things now more than ever.
I don’t know what to say. You’re in my thoughts.
@Swamp-Wizard this, by the way, is what actual mlm/wlw solidarity looks like. It’s not just a meme you use for progressive brownie points, its caring about lgbt women and wanting them to have more doors open to them.
Hiveswap accomplishes this both through having new characters to relate to (like Joey) and new respected and valued content creators/role models who’s success can be an inspiration to girls like them (like Shelby Cragg).
I’ve delete/blocked like five of these things in the last two days (lol is someone running a campaign) but this one is fucking so masterfully done, I almost want to applaud.
This is like some premium good shit concern trolling, right here. Oh, heavens to betsy, you might have to stop reading my fics if I excuse stuff like that? Setting up a little ultimatum, huh?
Except you’re anon, and you’re giving no context outside of the anti dogwhistles of PEDOS! AND INCEST! These terms that you and I both know inherently incite a negative reaction that not a single person alive wants to be associated with.
But you have zero qualifiers here. So, are you talking about “this person writes and posts shota/lolicon that explicitly fetishizes the massive age difference and power differential between a minor and an adult”? Or are you talking “this artist once drew explicit homestuck art and they’re popular so I want to ruin their life?”
Because guess what, I don’t trust you to be actually on the side of good here. I don’t think of anonymous greyfaces with sad concerned emojis and no identities or context in my inbox as my allies. When I think “who is going to help me with my trauma that still fucks me up today and prevent similar shit from happening to other people,” I sure as fuck don’t think of antis who are digging for dirt to ostracize fanpeople they don’t like. Who, 90% of the time, are victims themselves.
Because antis don’t care about actual people, they care about power.
So no, I’m still not going to play ball with any of these messages. You come to my blog, you come to me anonymously with no identity and no liability, and try to pressure me into this shit with your little scripts– literally every one of these messages has followed the same script! Jesus christ!
You don’t want a conversation. You want me to be shamed into silence or to capitulate. You want me to divulge my own history so you can decide whether I get to have an opinion. You’re the same fucks who start witchhunts and harrass people into the ground. You are the people poisoning the well and making people literally scared to be in fandom, and oftentimes scared to use the tool of writing/creating at to help them with their own trauma!
I think my favorite bad anti-dirkjake argument is when people go “Oh Brain Ghost Dirk/The Masterpiece happened in Another Timeline” because they genuinely seem to think it diminishes the weight it carries in the canon when actually
all they’re arguing is that Jake not only loves Dirk but loves him consistently, across multiple timelines, and demonstrates it by either:
A) choosing Dirk as his protector, which not only comes with gay romantic coding but also references a movie with philosophical undertones, reflecting both of their main interests
B) choosing to act as Dirk’s protector, which has also comes with gay romantic coding and especially connotations of jealous and protective love
or C) You know, literally decides to live with the guy and hold him close for pictures to their friends & family
Wow yeah you’re right all of this stuff happens across different timelines? Shit then I guess it makes sense to assume Jake doesn’t actually feel anything fo Dirk and it was one-sided, it’s not like the comic ever implies anything about what it means for relationships to survive timeline resets–
Oh. Oh right.
Anyway Dirkjake is canon thanks
Can we get an article on why Dirkjohn is terrible because I only discovered it yesterday and it makes me angry and upset for reasons I can’t vocalize.
‘No!’ I cry. ‘No, this is a wrong thing!’ but I can’t explain why.
I’ve been getting asks about this on and off over time and I’ve heard some suggestions that people have the wrong idea about where I stand on this, so I hope you don’t mind if I take your reblog to make my position clear.
The answer to your question is no, sorry.
I’m never going to write a big takedown of Dirkjohn, or really any other fanon ship, or fandom stuff in general, for a couple reasons. Like everything I write, those reasons got long, so I’ll put them under the cut:
Even with what I already have planned, the amount of writing and general Content I have slotted to produce is pretty much inexhaustible, and I only keep finding more interesting things to say about Homestuck along the way. So I could pretty much always be writing something better. That’s #1.
#2. I don’t like Dirkjohn, and I don’t particularly make that a secret. But it’s not like I have an axe to grind with the ship. It’s pretty ooc, which makes it uninteresting to me, and that’s pretty much it.
But not everyone ships or thinks that way and that’s…fine? Dirkjohn isn’t really hurting anyone the way your Gamrezi or Tavris or Dirkroxy ships are, and even really bad fan content doesn’t personally upset me unless it’s actually having broad cultural impact.
So even in the extremely specific and rarely considered realms of Things In Homestuck Fandom I Don’t Like, some lgbt people and minors playing around with an ooc ship is far from the top of the things that bother me.
I literally don’t talk about the stuff that TRULY pisses me off in public at all, because I have no way to not make it personal, and there’s a tiny bit of that on Tumblr, but most of it is elsewhere.
Which brings me to why I decided to write this.
Buckle up, because I’m gonna get really real. Trigger warnings for political stuff if that upsets you.
#3
Mainly, I’d never seriously write about Dirkjohn because I’m just not interested in writing anything in a spirit of negativity. It’s not enjoyable to me and I don’t particularly feel it’s where I shine.
It’s draining and depressing, because I just…don’t want to be engaging contentiously or judgmentally with groups largely made up of minors and other lgbt people.
I say this every so often but: there’s Nazis, guys. Like, actual fascists bigots that want to kill anyone who ships Dirkjohn or Dirkjake or Vrisrezi or Rosemary or Davekat, etc etc etc are in the white house.
Fandom shipping divisions feel pretty petty when you keep that in mind.
Some days the negativity and fear and despair and sheer sense of hopelessness I feel when I look at the state of the world pounds on me to the point I can’t make myself get out of bed.
Soon after November I saw a tweet from someone talking about how their every running thought now included the constant underlying Mantra: We’re doomed.
That’s upsettingly relatable to me. I haven’t stopped feeling that way yet, and I lost my job and pretty much my relationship in the process of figuring out how to live with it. I’m still figuring out–I’m sort of stable now, but my mental health is hanging at “Functionally Self-Sustaining” by pretty much the barest thread I have.
And this Homestuck stuff? All my writing and video making and arguing in favor of the comic? This is my way of fighting all of that. Both as a way of relieving that awful sense of doom and pressure, and, if I’m incredibly lucky, as a way of doing the same for others.
I want Homestuck–Progressive media in general, but Homestuck specifically–to be recognized as the cultural touchstone it deserves to be. Not just for LGBT people–though primarily for us, yes– but for progressives in general.
Homestuck brings something genuinely new to the table, and it’s still growing and evolving as an IP, and I want to bring that stuff to light and nurture the excitement that all of us still, on some level, feel for it. Because I think it deserves it. And because I want to see what comes next.
And like, I’m sure that’ll sound silly to some people, but it’s all I’ve got. I don’t particularly believe in God, and I certainly don’t believe in the system that put us here. I only really believe in art, and in people.
So I have to believe that if I try hard enough and I’m kind enough, something in this twisted culture where we’ve all been conditioned to hurt and judge each other and prize, above all else, the ability to Care The Least and be the Least Affected–a culture that absolutely rears it’s head in progressive circles even as we denounce it as an approach to politcs–will give.
Maybe we’ll learn how to actually be friends with each other. How to be kind.
The story of these kids rising out of impossible limitations and escaping an inherently authoritarian system that destroys them reminds me a lot about my own life and future prospects right now, and it gives me hope.
I want to pass that hope on, as much as possible. And if I can manage it, I want this silly comic that we all love to be something that binds us and brings us together, as a community. As a people.
And if we can do that, if we can stop tearing each other apart over mistakes and miswordings in the pursuit of an impossible degree of ideological purity, maybe we can make things better. Maybe we can ascend.
That’s impossible, maybe, and it might very well make me a fool to engage with this community with that motivation. But it’s who I am and why I’m here, and I’d rather be mocked for being hopeful than praised for being cynical.
As such, tearing into some ship I don’t like is never going to do nearly as much for my desires as talking about the near-infinite things about Homestuck that I DO like. Given the choice I will always, always opt for the latter.
So my genuine advice–and I really hope this doesn’t feel condescending–is if seeing any fandom content affects you negatively to the degree you wrote about there, well: I can relate, because yeah, same.
But I just blacklist it and talk about stuff I like instead. And that has done wonders for my mental health. I heartily suggest doing the same, and then devoting your energy to boosting and praising the stuff in the fandom that you DO like.
Again, I hope that doesn’t sound condescending. I wrote all this so that I’d stand a chance at coming off as sincere when I say that I don’t think my approach makes me better than anyone. It’s just the only way I, personally, manage to survive.
But I also think it’s the path to a healthier, more vibrant fandom. Whether or not people are shipping Dirkjohn doesn’t matter to me. What matters is making sure to speak up positively and kindly and with a sense of fun so that the fandom can develop a better understanding of Dirk, Jake, and the comic itself overall.
And what double matters is creating a culture interested in celebrating and creating more than criticizing, although there is definitely value to both.
some thoughts from twitter. i know so many other queer and poc content creators were just as scared as i was and i wanna give you my voice to reflect off of
Flying through Storytelling 