Policing and woobiefication: two sides of the same coin

[ljwrites]

TL; DR: It's fine to enjoy "immoral" fiction and you're both being assholes

Fandom policing and villain woobiefication/apologia seem to be polar opposites, but at heart they agree on one thing: That your morality is defined by the wholesomeness of the content you make and consume.

They just go from that premise to different conclusions, with the fandom police (1) saying that some content is immoral and must be censored, and possibly its creators bullied as well, while the woobiefiers and apologists defend by saying shit like negging is true love actually and war crimes are fine.

Below I'm focusing on the woobiefiers/apologists because hopefully it's already clear how wrong the fandom police are.

So maybe I can be a smidge sympathetic toward the woobiefiers because theirs may be a defensive reaction, not to mention an internalization of the harmful ideas that the fandom police hold. That doesn't make the woobiefiers' arguments any less harmful, however. The fandom police are wrong in equating depiction with endorsement, but that's no reason to jump into actual, like literal, non-fictional endorsement of shitty and even criminal behavior.

If you truly disagree with the fandom police's premise, then actually disagree, and don't validate the flawed and harmful premise by spinelessly seeking a loophole for yourself like "Yeah people who like immoral shit and deserve to be mistreated/shamed, but I'm nothing like those immoral people because [horrible validation of real-life immorality]."

Also don't kid yourself that everything you like is moral because you're a moral person and therefore everything you like must be pure and faultless. Maybe space Nazis do turn you on and that's... fine? You don't have to write millions of words of meta on why your fave could never be a Nazi because your genitals are as ideologically pure as the rest of you and could never react favorably to Nazis?

Maybe the character who turns you on is an abuser and war criminal, and you don't have to make torturous logic pretzels trying to justify everything from negging to mass murder? Like, it's fine to acknowledge your messes and how problematic you can be. It is perfectly all right to like problematic things, but in trying to explain away how problematic something is in an attempt to remain unproblematic in your own eyes, you are justifying things that hurt real people in real life and speaking over a hell lot of people's pain.

1. Just to be clear what I'm talking about, by fandom policing I mean the idea that content dealing with immoral actions normalizes immorality on real life, and that such immoral content should not be created or put out in public. This can lead to bullying and harassment of the creators of such content as well, in which case I'll call people who engage in such actions "fandom policing bullies." The people who engage in this behavior are more popularly known as "antis," but I agree it's a good idea to move away from that term for a number of reasons (Tumblr link, long).

Comments

[redrikki]

You know, since you made some thinly-veiled Star Wars references, I'm going to go full on Star Wars. The entire premise of Luke's arc in RotJ is that it is okay to have Darkness inside of you, so long as you don't act on it. The Jedi ideal of denying every bad thought and emotion lest it make you Dark was what created Vader at least as much as Palpatine's grooming. Luke learns to accept that part of himself while simultaneously deciding to do and be better than his worst impulses. Current fandom thought/desire policing is just as toxic as Jedi philosophy in part because of it's reactionary, bullying bullshit, but also because it's essentially created fandom Sith with the apologists.

[ljwrites]

Holy shit that is an EXCELLENT analogy and so elegant, too!

[redrikki]

Thanks.