I really fucking wish hate blogs like mary-sues and ew-fnaf-ocs and startrek-marysues would STOP showing up in my recommended blogs.
Or just stop existing as blogs altogether.
Because I am sick and tired of these pissbaby bullies and their perpetuation of an out-of-date fad that represents what’s worst in fandom.
You sound like a fun person. 🙂 Please explain how we are a hate blog.
(Counterproductive because the only way to get you to disappear from my dash is to stop talking about Mary Sue shaming, which is something I feel strongly about)
But oh my goodness I beg your pardon! Me calling you a “hate blog” when all you do is highlight the works of vulnerable and immature creators as part of a decades-long fandom culture of mockery, ridicule and bullying. That would be like calling you a misogynist for engaging you in a practice that mainly serves to silence and discourage girls and women from writing about girls of women because they’re afraid of the social backlash from exceeding your definition of “acceptable” character-building. And would I ever do that?
No wait, I would. You’re a hate blog, a bully, a misogynist, and a blight on the face of fandom. I hope you figure it out sooner rather than later and cut it the fuck out.
Adding:
The thing is, most of the time these days, while there’s the bit of me that is angry for the kids and baby-writers who are being mocked and attacked at their vulnerable places (and yes, that can in fact include “the really egregious cases” where it’s “really deserved”), the rest of me is just … embarrassed.
Embarrassed at the mean-spiritedness, embarrassed at the arrogance behind setting oneself up as the arbiter of what’s good-vs-bad, embarrassed at the sheer pettiness of hunting out stories to point and laugh at.
And no, it’s not innocently helpful. Yes, it is mean spirited and petty. Mocking fandom stuff put up for free is no better than mocking someone’s clothes and then defending yourself by saying “but we’re helping them and giving them advice. If you weren’t asked, it’s not your business: you didn’t pay that author, you didn’t pay to read it (or look at it), it’s not really your business, any more than their clothing is. Even if they’re really, really annoying.
The reality is, of course, that nobody engaged in doing it is going to give a damn about what I say. Much like they did fifteen years ago, they are going to find excellent (to them) reasons why their work is not only harmless fun, but even good for fandom! No really! Because that’s what people who like to tease and belittle other people do. It’s what they’ve always done, and always will, and surprisingly otherwise decent people will come up with astonishing reasons why, in this case, meanness and pettiness is totally okay. (Those writers put their stuff on the internet, after all! That’s totally asking for it!)
Which is in turn to say: this isn’t really about an argument. This post, as with any other reblogs and so on, is because I know I’ve got followers that those kinds of sites and blogs and tumblrs upset and intimidate, and back when they were messing me up I never had anyone to say “hey: ignore’em. Their opinions are meaningless and they’re kind of being jerks, and everything they complain about applies to Batman. Write what you want; if writing what you want isn’t getting the response you want, then go looking for some advice or some help, but do it from people who seem kind and thoughtful. But if what you’re writing is making you and your bffs happy, please, write more, practice more, have fun, and ignore the mean girls.”
And you never know: your thirteen year old semi-misfit aggressive Latina girl who does parkour, lost her father at a young age, and then became one of the recovering Winter Soldier’s first human contacts and the one to give him a kitten might turn out to be close to your most popular character. (I’m still pleased but utterly weirded out by this. Mostly because of the Mary Sue blogs of my adolescence.)
Tag: take care of other people’s feelings
PTSD and Trigger Warnings
PTSD is bad, but I doubt that telling students that an old novel has some form of graphic description is anything bit coddling. Most victims of PTSD probably feel horrified that anybody would think so low of them as to force university professors to add trigger warnings on books like The Great Gatsby!
When I was in school, which was several years ago, my high school teachers had us read stories like Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum and
Huxley’s Brave New World. Nobody ran out of the classroom, nobody ever got sick. The only time a student ever got sick in class due to the material is during health class when they showed an open-heart operation on a human.
About 8% of Americans have PTSD, and before now, required literature has never been a severely triggering effect for ANYONE as far as my knowledge goes. I have read and researched on how schools deal with PTSD in the classroom, and never was “warn your student if there is any scene in a book where their issue is even remotely related to their trauma” mentioned.
It’s infantilizing to people to have severe mental illnesses.We are supposed to help them, not coddle them. And this is coming from someone who suffers from anxiety, depression, and recurring thoughts. I think we need to help those who suffer from PTSD, but Trigger Warnings are not the way to do it. It just makes a mockery of the sufferers of PTSD.
If you don’t have PTSD- Don’t talk over us?
Who do you think is pushing for trigger warnings /if not the people with the disorder/
and no not all of us need them or want them.
but it’s no more infantalizing trauma survivors to offer trigger warnings, which give us the ability to choose to engage with the material (it’d be infantalizing if they just said ‘NO! You can’t interact with this!!) than it is to offer an elevator to a cane user who would prefer to take the stairs.
/Tons of people with PTSD have had severe triggered effects due to required literature/
/I literally used to go catatonic/ and it caused a break down to the point I was /younger than 13 and cutting in class because it was the only way for me to stay in the present/ At 18 a required reading in a class pushed me over the ledge of a psychotic break down that would eventually wind up with me in a mental hospital because I thought tiny men were trying to break open my chest cavity during class. I know other PTSD suffers who it caused a. panic attacks b. psychotic issues c. uptick in self harm d. dissociation or e. repressed memories to come back and that’s a whole nother ball game.
and I don’t like trigger warnings (for me personally.) I don’t use them, not for me at least. But I fully respect my fellow -trauma survivors right- to use whatever tools they need and the fact that yeah, schools need to provide tools to be accessible.
/Stop speaking over people/ You don’t have PTSD. You don’t get to talk about what mocks us. What mocks us? is people like you thinking you can speak for us.
The fact that you think your experience, the people in your classes, who you don’t know if any of them even had PTSD- somehow speaks for people who have it…. is so ridiculous.
/Can you not?/
^^
How about huge tradition-oriented institutions haven’t accommodated PTSD with trigger warnings before because PTSD didn’t exist as a medical condition until 1973 and the concept of a ‘trigger warning’ only gained wide use when a critical mass of people with PTSD began using social media to talk to each other in places non-disabled people could hear us?
“Nobody accommodated this mental illness in this way before, so the accommodation isn’t necessary” is like the ouroboros of ableist inertia. Wow.
Also: FOR FUCK’S SAKE.
IT’S JUST A NOTE SAYING THERE’S SOMETHING POTENTIALLY UPSETTING IN THE BOOK.
They are not ripping the book out of your hands. They are not telling you not to read it. They are not telling you it’s bad. They are not burning the book.
It’s putting a fucking note in syllabus saying “book contains $thing”.
And you know what else?
Some of us are fine … if we know what we’re getting into. The warning doesn’t mean we don’t read the book. It just means we read it prepared and braced, with coping mechanisms in place.
And that means we make it out okay. Whereas if it just fucking dropped on us, we might not be.
And it’s a fucking note.
Kimchi and Justice 