Raving mad and somewhat slightly dazed

I'm sleep depped and it's been a bad brain week (of the "self harm via upsetting blog posts" variety) and last night I went through a spat of "oh hey look it's someone who thinks darkfic directly causes sexual assault let's read their blog for a half hour" and, well, that was that. Thankfully Nen was online to talk me through the inevitable anxiety attack and sick feeling in my stomach.

But it's still in the back of my mind, and I think I have some Thoughts about it.  So, here we go. Also, writing these out makes me feel better.
My first instinct this morning was to pull out a particular selection of music - alice cooper, Lordi, avenge sevenfold, that kind of thing.  Darkness and power, glory and domination, sexualized violence and violent sexuality. Fear me. Worship me. Hallowed be my name.

And then I stopped and thought - okay, so /why/ is that comforting to me? It would make moralizers clutch their pearls and gasp, sure, but that's not all. It - makes me feel better about myself, takes away some of the sickness in my throat.

And I thought - I want to feel powerful. I want to feel untouchable.  I will be the storm, the desert, the conquering darkness and the stain of blood. If I'm going to be a monster, then I want to be the /best/.

(There's a reason I identify with Kylo Ren as strongly as I do.)

It's not something I feel all the time. It's not someone I want to be in real life. But it's there when I need it.



But, the thing is....  this isn't something that girls are... supposed to feel. I know that's an awful way of phrasing it, but it's the only way I can think to say it. Girls don't want darkness, don't feel like the world only makes sense when they're at war. Girls don't feel the sick urge for violence crawling up their throat, addicted to the rush of power. Women don't identify with characters like that. Women identify with women before they identify with /monsters/.

The people who /do/ identify with monsters, who are expected to, who are Supposed to be those types -They're shitty straight white boys. I think I called him That Guy once - the Health Ledger Joker fanboy, the Tyler Durden fanboy, who collects guns and is way too interested in serial killers and nazis. Entitled boys who think they deserve the world and throw tantrums when they don't. The insecure nerd with dark eyeliner and prop weapons.

Girls don't /do/ that.

And then there's me.

It makes me feel guilty. Like I'm... failing some feminist duty or some shit, identifying with the people everyone else calls the enemy. Finding comfort in what some people call the worst parts of masculinity.

( It's - about the only thing that causes me dysmorphia, tbh. It's the one of the things convinced me that I was nb - the rush of /relief/ when I realized that I didn't have to identify with women above all else, that I didn't have to identify primarily on lines of gender. I didn't have to pretend that I had something in common with them just because we share genitals.

I honestly don't know if that's a me problem or a them problem. Is it a shitty definition of womanhood or am I not really a woman? I have no idea.) 

Feminism doesn't get it, it feels like. Social justice doesn't get it.

25 years and I still exist in a different world. No matter how much they talk about acceptance and redefining womanhood, their definitions still don't have words for me.  I'm still the thing from beyond their universe, warping things beyond recognition simply by being around them.

(If I were a monster, I wouldn't /care/.)


I - as usual, I don't have a solution. I've just named the problem. It's just so - well, frustrating on a good day, to see this total breach of experience that no one on their side seems to see.

I don't know if I've made any progress. But I've articulated myself, at least kind of. So there's that.

I think the way we (in fandom, and social justice, and trauma recovery) talk about safe spaces is.... unhelpful.


( Read more... )

I've been thinking about moral policing lately.

Well, okay. I was triggered because someone didn't fucking tag their ao3 discourse and now I kind of want to die. But I'm writing instead. or trying to.

the first argument: writing about things is as bad as doing them. writing abuse means you're an abuser. writing about things means you support them.

rebuttal: fascination is not support. fiction is not reality. while fiction does influence reality, it is difficult to measure the cause and effect. studies have gone both ways. also: fandom is not the social force that larger media is. my fic is not a blockbuster movie or a bestselling novel. measurable harm vs measurable good

second argument: children can be harmed by finding this

rebuttal:  children understand warning signs. as a child i was not harmed by finding darkfic. it was a minor part of my media consumption, and one that ultimately helped me

third argument: removing these works and preventing them from being released is the best way to improve society and protect people

rebuttal, part a: things done to protect people should be treated with suspicion. i lived through the bush era. freedom and protection are always inverses of each other

rebuttal part b: it is ultimately ineffective. these things are symptoms. repression is less effective than exploration. writing is a means of exploring the self, and that should always be allowed


....i think this actually helped. huh.

I was rambling in the comments of someone's post on tumblr about fandom, and I think it's relevant to some of the things i've said here as well, so, pseudo cross post.


imo, fandom is one of those fundamental human needs - well, Stories are. Responding to stories and making them our own - claiming them in a way.

fandom, in one form or another, has been around for as long as we can look back. It's one of those basic /human/ things - defining ourselves through the Stories that we love.


(Pratchett, may his soul be held by any god who could find it, called it Narritivum, that building block of reality that says "this is how things go.")


stories are how we learn how to be people, and how to be a person.

and fandom, I think, is a means of taking control of that - of saying, "No, this is how things /should/ go." Of taking the stories that define you and reclaiming them for yourself - making them a part of you, rather than just something /around/ you

.....tl;dr I have a lot of emotions about fandom

ya know, the thing that annoys me the most about fandom pitting Finn and Kylo against each other in the Discourse (either in shipping or identification, you can only have one or the other) isn't just that it makes the fandom a less pleasant place to be, or that I (as someone who relates to and adores both of them) feel uncomfortable and vaguely guilty whenever the discourse crosses my dash.

it's that if I want to see any compare and contrast analysis for them, talking about mental illness or indoctrination or emotional abuse, that /doesn't/ end with one of them being the Correct resposne - if I want to see a fic that sets them against each other and forces them to learn and understand each other, shouting at each other about choice and destiny and freedom -

- I'm gonna have to write it my damn self.

 

Okay, this is gonna be one of those posts where I rant about things on tumblr but don't post about it there because I don't feel like opening up that can of snakes. (For those of you who are on both: as always, if I have the opportunity, this is something I would address personally. I do not vaugeblog. This is about social trends, not individuals.)

This is about a very specific trend in SW: TFA discourse, one that annoys the hell out of me.

( cut )

It's just.

A lot of the whole "why do you care about (character x) you should identify with (character y) instead" is just. It hits me in just the /wrong/ spot.

I have spent half of my life trying to make myself feel something other than what I feel. To try and make myself have the "right" emotional reactions, to care about the "right" things. To feel the way people around me think I should automatically, because the only reason I wouldn't feel that way is because I was broken.  (Or Sinful. Or Unenlightened. Or because of some sort of social force. Same thing from different directions.)  Or better yet, I don't actually feel that way, I've just been convinced that I do because of Corruption.

My emotional reactions are not valid. My feelings are wrong. If I were Normal, I wouldn't be feeling the way I do. I wouldn't care about the things I do, wouldn't identify with who I do.

And I'm fucking sick of it. I have the emotional reactions I have. And yes, those reactions should be analyzed and inspected. Trust me, I do that /anyway/. But there is a /very large difference/ between analyzing and shaming - between looking at the reasons for reactions and saying that people shouldn't be allowed to have them.

(Should all emotions be expressed publicly? No. Should everyone analyze their emotions and themselves? Yes. Should we shame people for the feelings they have? No, fuck off.)

Finally, the second piece of this series is done. Took me a while to edit, but I think it works, now. Kairi is difficult and Namine more so. If I messed them up, let me know.

First piece is here: splinteredstar.dreamwidth.org/106264.html

Post KH2
Kairi had always been different, but this was even stranger.

 

Line art belongs to Hirano, coloring is mine.

I was struck with the urge to color Alucard's hat and do it all in noir lighting and shit. So I printed off a bit of a page and colored it fairly quickly, in the span of about four hours (rather than my normal time of a couple of days to a week). Though it is a fairly simple construction. Turned out fairly well, though I swore at the skin tone for about an hour and eventually just smeared black all over it.

The glasses turned out the best, I think.

( Cut for pic )