Still thinking about where to post my anime stuff...

[malymin]

I do feel a disjoint from a lot of fandom spaces?

My main disjoint from Livejournal culture, as a kid too oblivious to notice most of the drama and controversies happening behind closed doors, was the shipping focus; I didn't have words for it at the time, but currently, I would identify as a sex-repulsed asexual, and if pressed to use the split attraction model I would call myself an aro-ace. Honestly, it's easier for me to wrap my head around esoteric furry kinks like TF or inflation than actual, real human sex. I try reading about the things attraction does to people's heads and I feel like I'm reading about aliens. Typical shipfic sort of depends on you getting something out of depictions of romance and/or sex intrinsically, to the point that the romanticness or sexiness often takes priority over "in-character-ness". I spent a lot of time scrounging around for genfic. At the same time, the text-heavy culture of LJ meant that "meta", or analysis, was pretty abundant. Dreamwidth fandom is a direct descendant of Livejournal fandom, but the focus on shipfic over other fanwork seems to be intensified.

Tumblr at first was a somewhat better place for shipping-agnosticism, but now it is a landmine. Anything uncritically adored one second becomes irredeemable media the next; people seem to be bad at nuance no matter where they are, but something about modern social media's virality-based structures makes this worse. All conversations are polarized. I feel scared to talk about the flaws in something I love, or gush about what I love about my favorite things, because it feels like getting misconstrued and dogpiled and dunked-in-a-water-filter are inevitable.

There's an entire essay I've wanted to write about Mytho from Princess Tutu. How part of why I feel strongly about him is because, regardless of what the creators actually intended, his arc in season 1 to me reads like a disabled person gradually realizing that he isn't treated well by his caretaker and girlfriend, and exploring and acting on his own thoughts and feelings after an implied lifetime of being told what to think and do by these people. But in order to discuss this, I'd have to go into the thorny territory of - describing how Fakir acts verbally and physically abusive as Mytho's caretaker, how Rue/Kraehe literally rips the ability to give and retract consent out of him and then lies next to his comatose naked body. Because I don't want to tone down how bad these characters' actions are, even if the show doesn't seem to fully realize how bad it is to do these things to Mytho. (I think the show believes it's not that bad because Mytho can't properly process it, due to his lack of emotions; it doesn't realize it might be implying something shitty about real people by doing this.)

But I don't want to declare these characters irredeemable monsters who it's bad for the audience to like or sympathize with: Fakir comes across as having caregiver burnout from being the primary caretaker of an ageless, effectively-disabled teenager since he was a first grader; Rue was raised being told her abusive father and Mytho were the only people who could ever possibly love her, and has developed a distorted relationship to the very concept of love as a result. And this is a work of fiction; if these narratives are badly handled by the second season's shift in priorities, it's the staff's fault more than the characters. But I don't want to condemn Itoh, Sato, etc as irredeemable monsters, either.

Where am I supposed to articulate my complex feelings about 00's children's television without being sorted into a binary moral system? ^_^;

Comments

[stepnix]

yeah

LJ/DW has a really good structure for this kind of thing i think, the hard part is just... getting it to people who will connect with it, and the existing spaces may have different priorities

there's a temptation to make like, an anime_deep community or something, but that's still kind of a long game operation, gotta wait for people to find it

[malymin]

I wonder if any older users have like, advice on how to get a new community off the ground. (Or for what to do if a community already exists, but hasn't been active since 2015... lol.)