meme_of_bilitis | I have doubts that [a femslash meme] would be very long-lived

ayrt

Haha, okay I'll stroke a bit of a hateboner for that one. *In a real age-gap relationship, and ready to smack anyone who says 26 is too young to consent and I'm totally a monster*

I'm sure she's just hopping on trends without stopping to think about them, it sounds like her. I try to be a little generous with her because I myself joined fandom as a clueless 19-year-old with very low emotional/social intelligence and I think fandom in general tends to attract a lot of weirdos, geeks, nerds, and outcasts, so I guess I can get kinda geek social fallacy about it? That and sometimes I envy how much she puts herself out there and doesn't hide in shame and delete all social media when she makes some embarrassing faux pas. I know a lot of people resent that same success, but considering how much less successful I've been in my (non-journalistic, creative) endeavors mostly due to lack of hard work and anxiety about public exposure, I'd have to admit it'd be base jealousy. She's done a lot of things I can easily agree, "No, haha, that's terrible," but she's also done a ton of things that were inoffensive or even kind of fun, mostly because she's out there doing things.

I feel kind of torn between, as I said, no longer feeling mainstreaming of fandom or fandom journalism is something I can support or endorse in and of itself, and disliking "disposability politics," since despite her many (seemingly, many) flaws, she is a pretty catchy writer, like her posts were fun to read, and I'm not liking this trend of, if you've ever had a bad opinion or had your foot in your mouth, you don't deserve to have a career in something you're good at. Which isn't to say she deserves my (apparently pedo/problematic/basically a rapist! thanks Aja! What a wonderful way to characterize a lesbian who dates consenting adults!) support in particular, ehhh I'm just...bad at condemning people wholesale, especially people I don't know.

I'm not liking this trend of, if you've ever had a bad opinion or had your foot in your mouth, you don't deserve to have a career in something you're good at.

I think the key with Aja is not that she put her foot in her mouth once, but that she continues to demonstrate the same self-aggrandizing disregard for anyone's interests but her own, over and over and over again. She keeps doing it, is the problem. Otherwise there would be no "Oh, Aja" meme.

+1

If it were only the receipts from 10, 15 years ago that kept getting dragged up, then I’d be with AYRT. But Aja keeps doing it. Aja’s foot is permanently in her mouth.

+2

The Ronan Farrow thing was only a few months ago. She has not learned better in decades, and if anything is doubling down with her "we need to normalise RPF" rhetoric.

I often check the @tumblrmetrics/@fandom stats on what ships are trending on tumblr, because the notes are a great place to spot the type of anti who's into being loud and in your face for attention, and those are good accounts to block. A lot of the anti handwringing is over Thorki, Reylo, and any Voltron ship that isn't Klance, but every time a RPF ship comes up on there, there are people aghast that that exists too.

I don't even RPF, but it seems "RPF authors shouldn't be attacked," and "RPF authors should be acknowledged and condoned by the celebrities they write about" are two entirely different battles. RPF is like mushrooms! Some people love them, some hate them, but they only grow in the dark!

What Ronan Farrow thing? I missed it.

https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/309987.html?thread=1767001059#cmt1767001059

+100

It's not that she put her foot in her mouth once years ago; it's that she's been and still is putting her foot in her mouth on a regular basis in the present, and she does it in a way that could cause a lot of trouble for other fans.

I kind of knew that nonnies would say this. But that's the thing. Expecting that mistakes are just a thing you make years ago, then you always know what you did wrong, move on, and grow into a person that doesn't make mistakes anymore...it's a nice fault, but it isn't realistic! I, too, put my foot in my mouth 15 years ago and it still happens today. And the thing about being someone who makes your living on opinions and relentlessly puts out content is that you're going to find new and inventive ways to embarrass yourself. I briefly had a tumblr that was popular for opinion, which no one paid me for or anything, but for every 20 opinions people loved and reblogged or followed me for, there would be the one where I didn't word things right or I was just wrong, and what got me out of that scene was that that would be the thing people would remember, that would be what stuck in their minds five, ten years later. When LJ started veering into SJ shortly before the tumblr migration, I remember how if you put your foot in your mouth you'd get people smugly saying they were adding an LJ Note for you with a link/quote of What You Did. And if you look for just the bad things over a lifetime, you do indeed keep finding them. We aren't literary characters with one tragic mistake in our youth. Even as a nonny, I get people professing their love for me and I get them saying things that make me question my value as a person, and I sometimes even wonder if they're the same people. And the thing is, it's the very trait of talking a lot itself that both gets people liking you for it and eventually gets your foot in your mouth with statistic regularity. I don't think one exists without the other. You keep talking, and the foot falls in eventually. It doesn't go away.

All of which I didn't say, mostly because Aja is not the hill I want to die on! Though I liked some of her Daily Dot articles years ago, it's not like we were besties or anything. I didn't want to say this either, because it's probably one of my Proof I Haven't Changed Bad Opinions, but I really don't like acafans/acajournalists for a specific reason, which is that I feel that, as their work is meta, they profit off fandom as a whole's labor, and they use it to "get things"--money, prestige, a good grade. I don't mind stuff like toastystats because that's not about "getting things" but about giving something to fandom, but I cringe so bad when people write papers about fandom--even if, hypocritically, I've read some of them. It makes me bitter because it makes this profit off other people's labor of love, and because I haven't had the opportunities they have, and to tell the truth, neither have a lot of fans. We're all equal in fandom, until some of us go to college and some of us don't, and then the labor of those without opportunity somehow translates into a path to prestige and money to those with opportunity? I don't like it. Hell, I don't mind when people sell fanworks (another Terrible Opinion!) but at least they're selling their own damn labor, not mine, even in the form of an anonymized data point. I still sweated and toiled over that goddamn anonymous data point. And unlike say, owners of a platform who might use your fanwork to generate revenue in one way or another, they don't even give anything back, no matter how smugly they think they do. Some kid's college paper on fanfic sex makes us cringe to think of the professor reading it, we don't feel served. The articles might have been fun--in the past, most articles about fandom tended to be inaccurate pearlclutching disasters, so reading stuff by someone who actually knew what fandom was and didn't awkwardly space "fan fiction" on the edge of erupting into moral panic was refreshing. But it's become increasingly clear she has a mainstreaming agenda, which isn't an agenda of serving us with fun stories about ourselves, but exposing us against our will to outsiders, because she assumes we weren't perfectly capable of exposing ourselves but avoided that deliberately. And she has used fanworks as more than anonymous data points, which means that she got paid while the fans who worked on the pieces she "spotlighted," at very best, got used. Since the exposure was often very negative for them, worse than that, but even if it had been neutral, they write fiction and she gets a paycheck. It should be some kind of rule, if we can't make money on our fics, you can't make money analyzing or discussing our fics!

That fandom is mainstream now definitely can't be laid at her doorstep. There were much larger changes in the social media landscape that probably made that inevitable. At worst, she was probably trying to burn a shirt while the house was on fire, and the shirt got burned despite her efforts. But I still don't like the results.

And yet, all that said, I'm bad at grudgewanking people I haven't met. I'm bad at following them and always thinking the worst of them and waiting for them to fuck up again. I don't like it. It's bad energy. I do take back that it's all grudgewank for CC, though one really must not underestimate how powerfully CC is/was hated, and how old fandom_wank fans influenced new fans as they came in. I think her "fandom journalist" game was going to earn her attention even without the CC drama, so yeah, it's legit that she's hated for that stuff. I think last I heard she's writing for Vice? That's high-profile. I'm not really happy about it either.

That's a huge wall of tl;dr to say "honestly, I'm not an Aja stan but I still think you're all way grudgey and don't realise you've been brainwashed by fandom_wank", anon.

Uh huh.

At least you admit that other people are better than you at evaluating a person's clear and repeated actions over many years, even without having met the person. This is not some kind of whisper campaign, this is public record. Your personal inability to hold grudges is irrelevant to this conversation.

I try to be a little generous with her because I myself joined fandom as a clueless 19-year-old with very low emotional/social intelligence and I think fandom in general tends to attract a lot of weirdos, geeks, nerds, and outcasts, so I guess I can get kinda geek social fallacy about it?

NA: Aja's pushing 40. She's been at this shit for years now. And, yes, if you're defending someone who's written a flattering portrait of Thanfiction, or who's sicced a fandom on someone for changing their Tumblr URL, you are engaging in Geek Social Fallacies and you need to stop.

/was never in HP fandom, didn't know about her until long after the CC thing, and can't stand the woman

DA "written a flattering portrait of Thanfiction"

It was worse than that. She interviewed some of Thanfiction's victims and then threw out most of what they told her to give him a chance or whatever.

https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_strange_lives_of_Andrew_Blake

DA

Oh gosh, I had forgotten about that. Yeah, there is no "oh well she put her foot in her mouth back when" about that. That is legitimately harmful.

I have doubts that [a femslash meme] would be very long-lived

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