anghraine: a close-up of a female half-elf glancing doubtfully to the side (shadowheart (side-eye))
I’m so tired of posts about how the OP never liked the thing made by [creator who turned out to be an awful person], they always knew it was mediocre, and now, aha, vindication.

This isn’t just about JKR, for the record; the specific instance that set it off was about someone else, though of course I’ve seen it with HP.

It redirects the conversation onto the quality of the creation, and the quality does not matter.

The person is awful regardless of whether they’re good at [thing]. The conversation around that doesn’t need to devolve into arguments about whether [thing] actually is good or not, which is at best a distraction. Going on about your good judgment isn’t helping people, it’s just patting yourself on the back and often sneering at those who didn’t have your ~vision, including less visionary people who are among the terrible person’s targets. That is, I hope obviously, a shitty thing to do!

And it also very frequently implies that people’s awfulness—bigotry, abusiveness, whatever—is going to be apparent in their art or their outwards conduct. Often this isn’t true and leads to such obviously bad faith scrutinizing of their work that it weakens the actual, real objections to them as a person. Terrible people are very, very often perfectly upstanding outwardly and, when artists, creators of high quality work. There is absolutely no need to make it about how right-thinking people will know there’s something off about the person in question, or just dislike them before the revelation. Plenty of right-thinking people won’t know and have no clear reason to dislike them!

Just. It’s not about you and how right you were and scolding the less prophetic. It’s about the terribleness of the person and the cultural strains they’re participating in and the harm done.
anghraine: vader and luke dueling in esb (anakin and luke)
[personal profile] incognitajones responded to this post:

I often wonder if they mean hating the *fandom* is part of being a SW fan… because, well

I replied:

The fandom is very hateable, lol, but the posts I’m talking about are definitely referring to SW itself—they’re about how good SW fans understand that SW is generally bad and have a love-hate relationship with it.
anghraine: vader extending his lightsaber; text: and now for the airing of grievances! (Default)
Normally I have a lot of words for things, but sometimes … O_O

Tagged: #this site used to be worse but sometimes it is still like... whoa an actual human typed that and thought posting it was a good idea
anghraine: a man with long black hair and a ring on his hand (faramir [hair])
I’ve talked about it before, but it’s really weird to me when people complain about “Faramir is the one who goes to Rivendell” as a concept when Tolkien goes out of his way to emphasize that the sender of the dream favored Faramir.

Unless I’m misremembering, Faramir has the prophetic dream first, and has it repeatedly where Boromir only has it once, and everyone but Boromir agrees that Faramir should be the one to go. It was Boromir alone who insisted on taking Faramir’s place, and he managed to carry the day. No, it’s not that it was morally wrong for him to take the journey on himself; on the contrary, it was noble and heroic. But that doesn’t make it the only or best course of action when Faramir was clearly being favored…?

Tagged: #also pretty weird when people are like 'it would doom the quest' or 'it would change nothing bc faramir would do the same thing' #they're... different people...? #but also it's just really clear that faramir was meant to go #like—if i set out to write it again i would be way friendlier to boromir than i was at 18 #i'm really fond of boromir! #but i still wouldn't nail it to the railroad tracks of canon as if faramir and boromir are the same person #OR as if faramir cannot possibly be better equipped to deal with any situation ever than boromir #which is ... kind of how some posts on my dash seem to talk
anghraine: a man with long black hair and a ring on his hand (faramir [hair])
“I don’t like Faramir with long hair” is a really odd thing to get on a reblog. Like … take it up with Tolkien.

Tagged: #éowyn is considerably shorter and yet their hair mingles in the breeze. qed #also tumblr keeps reccing quite nice art to me ... where it is not possible for their hair to mingle #like you get canon-compliant art of them once in a blue moon—and then people complain that it's TOO canon-compliant? #i mean fandom's going to be fandom but STILL
anghraine: vader extending his lightsaber; text: and now for the airing of grievances! (Default)
I am very deeply tired of the posts about how no one is neurotypical actually, everyone is disabled if you think about it, mental disabilities are just poorly conceived associations of traits and you shouldn't limit yourself with a label, blah blah blah.

I get that some of this is spurred on by inaccurate generalizations and assumptions about neurotypical people from neurodivergent people who may not fully understand the variations and nuances of NT experience, or who are simply wrong about certain things, or whose venting is imprecise, etc. But some of this so patently arises out of a visceral resentment at not being centered in every form of disability discourse and advocacy, and refusal to countenance the idea that neurodivergent people a) exist as such and b) are marginalized in a way that many NT people are not.

Some of these posts/commentary are coming from other neurodivergent people with whom I simply disagree. But most that I have seen are pretty clearly written from the POV of someone who knows they would ordinarily be considered neurotypical and resents it in a birdsrightsactivist kind of way:



[A screenshot of a Tweet from the user ProBirdsRights, aka birdsrightsactivist, reading "I am feel uncomfortable when we are not about me?"]

Autism on any scale but the most severe (and that only sometimes) does not seem real to most of the people writing these posts, additionally. That's part of the thing that makes this so frustrating for me, personally. This line of discourse is overwhelmingly dominated by allistic people who all but say everyone is autistic in their own way, while revealing a mind-boggling lack of comprehension or basic empathy about what it is actually like to go through the world as an autistic person. They very evidently regard autistic self-advocates as, at most, slightly eccentric but basically normal, self-indulgent people whom they just find kind of grating for some mysterious reason that they do not interrogate at all.

It's like ... even when I'm ranting (like now!), I try to put things in a careful way, in large part because I am very easy to misunderstand IRL and I don't like it. But so many of these posts that I see being reblogged (by well-intentioned people who just ... don't get it) make me want to start screaming. Often the frustration takes me hours or days to articulate. Sometimes I'm just trying to think of some phrasing other than "shut the fuck up, you don't know what you're talking about." I never say that directly to any individual. But there is so much utterly unearned and misplaced overconfidence in so many of these posts that it's difficult not to feel it.
anghraine: vader extending his lightsaber; text: and now for the airing of grievances! (Default)
In response to this post, [personal profile] tree said:

as a resident bad influence, i say do it.

[personal profile] incognitajones said:

honestly it would be a relief to hear a rant about something else right now!

I replied:

Hah, well, it’s this thing that happens now and then where I make a post about one character and get replies/reblogs making it all about some other character. This case was particularly aggravating, though, because my post was about how incredibly cool obscure [Character A] is and I’m getting these notes making it about fan favorites, even though there’s no evidence that those favorites had anything whatsoever to do with it.
anghraine: a picture of grey-white towers starting to glow yellow in the rising sun (minas anor)
I’m trying to convince myself not to rant about things unrelated to the election, since I know the anxiety around the election is making everything that much more aggravating … but I’m getting some responses to a post of mine that are deeply irritating.

Tagged: #and i feel like i shouldn't really respond #so

Profile

anghraine: vader extending his lightsaber; text: and now for the airing of grievances! (Default)
Anghraine

May 2025

S M T W T F S
     123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 5th, 2025 09:20 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios