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

[lb_lee]

it's post-9/11 valuing of safety over freedom

That too, though... I dunno, it also feels like a slight stretch to equate "fictional characters kissing" with safety. Though I do agree that the "if you're not with us, you're against us!" rhetoric that became common in the wake of 9/11 seems more acceptable now among the young folks, perhaps because they don't remember life before it.

I didn't mean to say that left-wing folks can't be just as douchey. (I mean, I have run into quite a few people who I'm pretty sure would be happy Nazis, should Nazi-dom be associated with queerness, kink, and polyamory.)

[ljwrites]

It's a pretty U.S.-centric take, but then I'm told fandom policing is a pretty U.S.-centric phenomenon.

Oh God, nobody show them Nazi porn... XD

(Pictured in my icon: A couple who in the original history would be pedophilic by some fandom policers' metric because he was 20 and she was 28 with two children when they married “¯\_(ツ)_/¯“)

[lb_lee]

Yeah, the sentiment is very USA. And at least one artist I know left English language fandom because apparently the grump police were easier to avoid.