originally posted on Dreamwidth in 2024, with minor edits made since then. Mentions of child abuse, abuse, and incest.
If you've never been on Tumblr (and I envy you deeply if this is the case), it's a cesspit of judgement and harassment. Suicide-baiting over fictional disagreements runs rampant there. I have been on there since 2010 (and yes, I'm only 23, so do the math). I have seen things.
Because of my severe disabilities, I can't really leave the house or socialize IRL often. So, I rely on websites like Tumblr for socialization, and I pretty much always have. Sometimes I wonder: if I never joined my school's "Tumblr craze", would I be a completely different person today? I think I absolutely would. I think I would've ended up there eventually, but I don't think I would've joined it so young, because joining it at nine whole years old
really messed me up.
For my first few years, I was in what I like to call "real fandom". I didn't have a LJ account, but I frequently checked it for Classic Who and Spike/Angel fanfiction. I followed mainly 25+ year olds on Tumblr (who, bless them, did not know my real age during this time because I was smart and lied about it, which I would stop doing once the "you HAVE to disclose your age" discourse blew up.
Yeah.) I wrote whatever kind of fanfiction I wanted to write, because I didn't have people in my ear going "if you portray anything darker than a florist AU you must be a terrible abuser IRL". I didn't feel a need to clarify I don't agree with a villainous character's actions whenever I discussed them---I assumed, well, he's not real and I am, so it doesn't actually mean anything. I didn't feel a need to constantly censor myself, and drastically self-correct/forcibly change aspects of myself based on any criticism I received regardless of its validity or authenticity---this is what is
expected of you on there. I also didn't feel a need to care much about what other people thought of me. I just did my own thing in my own corner.
I miss that time
so much.
From what I remember, Tumblr was sort of always toxic (barring maybe during the quiet first period of its initial founding in 2007), but it really started to get bad around 2016, which is... interesting, considering what
other things were going on during that time in its very US-centric userbase. I talked to my therapist today about this whole phenomenon, and while she didn't really Get it (which I absolutely cannot blame her for, because it is batshit impossible to explain to someone who isn't experiencing it firsthand themselves), she did point out that a lot of it is fear-based, a lot of it has to do with this blind fear that conservatives have intentionally crafted against this exaggerated narrative of a Child Abuser, which is something that all normal people find revolting, except they don't
really mean child abusers, they mean queer people. To them, it's one in the same, even though they're statistically more likely to be the abusive ones. Being queer is inherently abusive to conservative ideology at large. I was talking to some friends today about how this is completely intentional, and two-pronged: they want us to in-fight as a distraction and they Also want everyone else to see us as inherently pedophilic too. So why are we pushing this narrative for them? Why are we running around in circles calling each other abuse supporters over fiction, when we could be fighting against actual, IRL abuse?
And further, why am I expected to partake in the discourse just because I want to use a website? I don't want to be part of any discourse or moral crusade against a fictitious Scarymonster---I do experience a
real Scarymonster in real life every day. I want to post about my favorite shows and talk to my friends. When there are extremely drastic world events, I raise awareness for them! But mostly I just want to mind my own business nowadays. Not to mention I myself am a survivor, so it is deeply triggering to see this discourse.
On Tumblr, this is also seen as equivalent to taking a stance in support of hurting others. I am not even fucking joking.
Anyway, after my very few years in Real Fandom, the harrassment campaigns began, and then I began this cycle of viciously self monitoring to ensure I didn't do anything anyone could potentially interpret as offensive or harmful. There was a reason for this: left and right, people (even children as young as 13!) were getting called out, publicly humiliated, targeted, suicide-baited, and even doxxed for infractions that, honestly, had either no real effect on the IRL world or were just taken completely out of context/were misunderstandings. Except no matter how much people tried to inform them that they were misunderstandings, that things could've been solved had they just
talked to the callout post maker, there was still pushback, assuming that any defense of the self was malicious and therefore further proof that the individual in question was Wholly Entirely Bad. There would be frequent "um, you reblogged from someone who reblogged from someone who did/liked xyz thing" anonymous asks during this time, and while that's mostly rightfully seen as embarrassing now, it still happens with some discourses. People making mere mistakes, even with intent to do better, were still eternally bad and didn't deserve friends.
I'm someone who seriously struggles with OCD. I first began showing symptoms of it when I was 8, and these tendencies have been extremely distressing ever since. So I was the exact kind of person to fall victim to this mindset so deeply. I had nothing besides Tumblr, I couldn't bear to lose my only friends! I had severe obsessive compulsive disorder! I was stuck in a bad living situation, it was my only escape! Of course I was going to constantly try to reshape myself to fit this ever-changing ideal of the most Unproblematic Person. I had, in my eyes at the time, no choice.
Now, of course, I try to be the best person I can be. I genuinely don't ever want to offend anyone or do anything unintentionally harmful, and I do appreciate genuinely being informed when I've done something wrong. I never have ill intent and I always want to make things right. But for these people, it stopped being about that long ago, and now it's a
morality competition.
I think I finally began to realize how bad it was only in 2020, when my best friend of many years got harassed for posting about a ship I liked.
The ship is between two unrelated characters who have a rocky relationship within canon. One of them crashes a bus while the other is in it; one of them puts the other on the ceiling when he's asleep; it's canon one of them unintentionally psychically tortured the other for six decades. But the criticism wasn't about any of that, it was hatred because, in one issue in a different adaption of the characters --- a comic from around the 1960s--- one of the characters gave the other a father's day card. This made it equivalent to incest and therefore liking it made you worthy of being called a freak and harassed.
(The characters would then go on to have a child together in the future of the show. I am still ecstatic about being avenged there.)
But instead of speaking up about it, which is what I should've done, I joined in. I did NOT join in the harrassment. But I did outwardly adopt the mindset that anyone who liked that ship was weird, while going in cycles of secretly liking it and attempting to force myself not to like it. It sucked the life out of me, because it involved a character I was deeply in love with and hyperfixated on, who I desperately wanted to see loved. Later I would discover I'm fictosexual, and that my feelings for that character were very real and very personal. But I would frequently meanly vague post about anyone who even implied it as a joke, and I regret my actions during the time so so much. I wish I hadn't done any of it now. But this kind of judgement has seeped into not even being a norm anymore; it's an
expectation. There's absolutely nothing controversial about the ship I liked. That instance happened once and never again. They're an alien and a human, not related. But it still "counted" as "bad". Anything, then, can be spun into being problematic and it'll catch on if the claimant has a big enough following.
I didn't begin to seriously deconstruct this mindset until 2022, when I joined the Babylon 5 fandom. I met a lot of people there who were much older than me, and who had been and still were in Real Fandom. I realized that most of the time, the people I thought were weird were just. Normal human beings with jobs and school and friendships and pets and lives. None of them ever wanted to hurt anyone. I made a lot of friends who were against this mindset, and I began to seriously be ashamed of how I generalized and dehumanized these strangers for their interests. What made me different from a high school bully? Nothing; I was the equivalent of one. I hate it so much.
Now I'm slowly figuring out how to enjoy things and exist authentically. I'm finally allowing myself to openly like truly irredeemable characters again, and ships involving them. A lot of things still make me viscerally uncomfortable, and will never be things I want to read because they seriously trigger me. But I don't think the people who create this stuff are automatically inherently evil irredeemable IRL abusers who genuinely want to hurt others. Finally, after almost a decade of this issue absolutely eviscerating my mental health and making me suicidal, I am embracing the nuance. And there is nuance! The only way to know what someone is truly like is to know them in real life. The majority of people making "immoral fictional content" have been victims of those immoral things themselves, and we cannot deny victims their voices just because we find what they're saying unsavory; it is then we feed into the "good/bad victim" mentality, which is only harmful to survivors. Even if someone making the art isn't a survivor - and that information is by default no one's business anyway - the human mind is complex, and never as simple as "thinks about = wants to do." Believing it is is how you get the following: ableism and harm against those with OCD, "video games cause violence, not societal problems :))" mindsets, etc.... It's just not a place to go, not just because it is untrue but also because it is unkind, presumptuous, and a
very slippery slope into some very bad places. Have your discomfort, but when you let personal disgust over things that cause direct harm to zero people (no, being made uncomfortable by a fic
you chose to click on is not direct harm and you know that, too) get in the way of how you perceive other individuals' humanity, that does far more harm than good to the people you believe you're protecting. I'm embracing the nuance, and there is a fuckton of it, and if I, a severely autistic person, can see it, then you can learn to see it too. I believe in you.
It still seeps in sometimes. On an earlier post of mine, I still felt a need to go "but what this villain did was obviously wrong", even though I was clearly speaking from their POV and no one would've assumed I thought they were right. I didn't even realize it until I got a (much appreciated) comment. I think, after 14 almost 15 years on Tumblr, deconstructing this deeply-engrained mindset is going to be kind of perpetual for me. An endless process.
But I'm confident I'll make it through.