if someone does the “fine, you’re right, i’m clearly a terrible person, i’m satan, i’m the worst person alive, i should just die” thing in response to criticism of their harmful behavior, they are trying to manipulate ppl and flip the situation around so that they look like a victim
stop tolerating this in 2k17 tbh. like really and truly, if you or your friend thinks this is okay pls call the hotline on the bottom of the screen and learn how to take responsibility for your bad behavior
The bad thing is I do this on a regular basis. Not because I want to manipulate people, but because that’s actually how I feel. I’m bad at receiving concrit. I can’t say that everyone who reacts this way feels the same as I do, but…not every case is like that.
have you considered that, regardless of your intentions, reacting in such an exaggerated way would make it very difficult for anyone to criticize you or tell you that you’re harming people with your behavior? i’m not interested in searching out people’s motives, i don’t really care why someone does or says manipulative things. being unable or unwilling to simply apologize and not make it about themselves is a solid indicator that a person is not interested in being held accountable for their bad behavior, and people, especially the injured parties in question, shouldn’t have to tolerate it.
take responsibility for your bad behavior 2k17 tbh
Okay, life lesson time.
When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I kept getting involved with people who would say, “Oh, I’m a bad person” any time I brought up ANYTHING that was the least bit of a disagreement.
Like, “Please don’t leave my X on the floor” would get, “Oh, I’m a horrible person!”
HERE’S WHY THIS IS A HUGELY PROBLEMATIC BEHAVIOR, and if you think I”m calling you out and you think you’re about to shut down, take a breath, remember that this is about learning, and keep reading.
What is important is what happened after. My boyfriend might say, “Oh, I’m just an awful boyfriend” and instead of him acknowledging the BEHAVIOR and working on fixing it, he’d get me trying to buck him up for the next half hour, telling him he was a good person. The behavior that started it all would not change.
Well, things led to things and I went back home to live for a while, and found that the same exact thing was happening… with my mother.
And then I learned about pattern arguments. Pattern arguments are the ones where you keep having the same nonproductive argument over and over again. They don’t all follow this pattern, but this is a really common one.
The trick?
BREAK THE PATTERN
First you have to know what the pattern is. In this case: 1. Grievance 2. Self deprecation 3. Ego stroking
So, with my mother, we started in on one of these, and she said, “I guess I’m just a terrible mother.”
And instead of reassuring her, instead of derailing the issue and letting it go… I said, “When you say that, it makes me wonder how terrible a daughter I could be that you would think you were a bad mother. We have this conversation this way over and over, and the problem that I have always gets pushed aside in favor of trying to make you feel better. When you’re willing to have a real conversation about this, I’m happy to talk to you, but I’m bored with this argument, so I’ll see you later if you want to really talk.” And I left the room.
Now, my mom is a reasonably self-aware person, and does a lot of hard emotional work, and so she got it, very quickly. 10 minutes later she came out and found me, and we had a real conversation about whatever the hell the issue really was, and we have literally NEVER had that particular pattern argument again in 23 years.
Boyfriend came to visit. I was upset about something, he started in on the “I’m just a shitty boyfriend” thing… and my response?
“Yep. You are.”
His jaw dropped. He blinked.
And I said, “Look, that’s what you do. You say shit like that and it means you don’t have to change your behavior, and I’m tired of the pattern we have where I tell you something isn’t working for me, you tell me you’re terrible, and I spend half an hour making you feel better. I’m tired of it and I”m not doing it anymore. If you’re willing to have an actual conversation about this, and not just the same old argument, I’m game. But this thing we do where you talk yourself down and I butter you up? Is boring. And I’m over it.”
We also did not have that argument again. (The relationship finally ended for real a while after, but it ended in a grown-up way, and not with a ridiculous meaningless fight.)
When you knock yourself down, the gut instinct for the people around you is to pick you up. But that means you’re not pulling your weight in the relationship. You’re making them do the work and you’re not actually hearing them.
So that brings us to another point:
How to deal with criticism
Okay, so if you’re not going to knock yourself down when someone says something negative about you, what DO you do? We don’t actually train people to take criticism well. But it is an art and a skill and NECESSARY to finding emotional stability in the face of a critical world.
I see it as a flow chart, but since the flow chart I made for it ended up in a book that I don’t own the copyright to (not a big deal) I’ll write out the decision tree here instead:
1. Someone offers criticism (constructive or not!)
2. Listen and think about it without immediately trying to defend yourself. You can say, “Okay, I need a moment to take that in and think about it because I want to understand it.” Or something else appropriate to the situation. It is okay to ask for time to think in most circumstances. Most people will appreciate that you are thinking about their words instead of immediately getting defensive or counterattacking. Think about whether what they are saying is valid, might be valid or is not valid.
3A. If it is valid, then you have a choice. You can try to fix the behavior or you can acknowledge that it is a valid criticism but decide you aren’t likely to fix it. Start by acknowledging the validity of the criticism, and then say what you’re going to do to fix it, or say that it’s valid but it isn’t something you’re willing (or possibly able) to change, or say that it’s a valid criticism and you’ll need to think about possible solutions. They may have a suggestion. Taking it or not is also a choice.
3B. If you’re not sure it’s valid, but it might be, tell them, “I really need to give this some more thought.” or “Can you tell me more about this? I’m not sure I understand the issue well.” Or “If you can point me at some reading material or search terms, I’d like to study this before I decide what I’m going to do.”
3C. If you know it is not a valid criticism, STOP a moment, and look at WHY they are making it. This is where Active Listening can be very helpful. “I hear you saying that X is a problem. I don’t see it that way right now but I’d like to understand better why you do.” Or if you think they don’t have enough information, “I hear you saying X, but my understanding of the issue is Y. Here’s what I know about it if you’re ready to listen.” If they’re just looking for a fight, tell them you’re not interested in fighting, and disentangle yourself.
4. If the criticism is something you are going to listen to and take action on, tell them what kind of action you’re going to take. If it’s something you’re hearing and thinking about, tell them that. If it’s not something you’re going to do anything about or it’s just wrong, thank them for their input and move on.
Literally never is it going to be helpful to say, “Oh, I’m just a terrible person.” That’s very much like a nonapology-apology in terms of how unhelpful it is to any conversation. It’s kind of worse because it actually expects emotional labor from someone who is already having to bring up something unpleasant with you.
Think about what they say Decide whether you’re going to do something about it Do the thing, or tell them you’re not going to do the thing. Don’t demand emotional labor from other people when you were the one who messed up.
Apologize if appropriate.
This is all predicated on the notion that you’re talking to someone who actually wants to communicate and isn’t just an asshole on the attack.
Because seriously, the whole “I’m a terrible person” thing?
Boring as fuck. Knock that shit off. Maybe you are. Maybe you aren’t. But take responsibility and have a little self-respect and don’t make others pick your emotional dirty towels off the metaphorical bathroom floor.
Something I wanna point out is that it’s not just, “Oh I’m a terrible person.” I know my personal thought patterns lean towards, “I’m lazy,” “I’m messy,” “I’m careless,” generally describing myself in a way that lets me off the hook for negative behavior because “that’s just how I am.”
Be cautious describing yourself like this. Maybe frame it as “I do things that are careless,” acknowledging that they’re actions that you can make an effort to change rather than damning yourself to a negative descriptor. It frames it better for your own mental health and makes room for improvement.
One thing that a lot of transmasc people struggle with before they fully realize they’re trans is the question of “do I hate being treated like a woman because women are treated like shit, or do I hate being treated like a woman because I’m not a woman?”
and one method (though not entirely foolproof) to figuring that out is asking “would I be upset if another girl was treated like this?”
like, I’d be just as mad if some dude said “you can’t do math because you’re a girl” to a female classmate as I would if he said it to me
however, I never got uncomfortable at waiters calling my female friends “m’am”, I was only uncomfortable when they called *me* that
and obviously everyone’s feelings are different and there’s tons of variables at play, but if you find that there’s a lot of the second scenario going on with you, there’s a good chance you’re not entirely cis
Those that derail the adventure by saying “I’m gonna kill it”
Those that derail the adventure by saying “I’m gonna steal it”
Those that derail the adventure by saying “I’m gonna fuck it”
Kill:
Paladin – unflinchingly devoted to combating evil, or dangerously repressed? Either way, inclined to smite first, ask questions never, because they don’t approve of necromancy.
Ranger – if you’re lucky, the ranger has a tragic backstory that requires revenge. If you’re not, they’re straight up a trophy hunter.
Barbarian – tendency to get murdery when confused.
Steal:
Rogue – if it’s not nailed down, the rogue’s taking it home. If it is nailed down, they’re also taking the nails.
Wizard – look, those spell books aren’t going to read themselves, unless they will, in which case the wizard really wants them.
Fighter – less impulsively stabby than the more niche stabby classes, but may be unlikely to resist the urge to acquire something fancy to stab with.
Fuck:
Bard – if you don’t roll to seduce the big bad, are you even really playing a bard?
Sorcerer – it runs in the family, probably.
Druid – this is not the intended use of wildshape and no one wants this but there goes the druid anyway.
Wildcards:
Cleric – depends pretty heavily on what sort of god they follow, but you’ll probably know how they’ll ruin everything by the time they do so.
Warlock – honestly, who knows, it’s likely even they’re not sure which category they’re going to fall into until their patron’s orders come in.
protip if you ever eat too much sour/acidic shit and you burn layers off your tongue suck on a tums tablet cause theyre used as stomach antacids but i didnt consider that it would act immediately on acidic surfaces but it does and it provides temporary tongue comfort
this would have been useful information when i murdered my mouth eating ten warheads in a row
hey quick question what was going through your mind when doing that
And I dont mean if youre like “yeah, I’d date one because sometimes they still have sex” I mean reblog if you’re okay with having a relationship without any sex involved. I don’t mean a relationship without love because there are other ways to display affection and love just without sex. That’s it.
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise – female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship – and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios – this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming – again, for the sake of simplicity – that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom – and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women – for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. 🙂
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.
When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.
Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.
If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…
And then we will ship an OT3.
I would like to add a probably problematic addendum to this. In that in certain pieces of media that are pretty much all centered around families–where everyone interesting is related to each other in some way–that makes the probability that incest ships will get somewhat popular fairly high. Simply because there aren’t any real OPTIONS for ships that aren’t in some way incestuous or otherwise weird and taboo, like huge age gaps or really noticeably unbalanced power dynamics.
I’m not CONDONING shipping those things. I am simply saying that when you decry the horrific depravity of fandom for daring to ship two people who are related, maybe consider the statistics involved, and consider HOW those ships are commonly shipped over the fact that they are at all. Like if you find that fans are going out of their way to write characters who are siblings as not related to each other in AU for fic or whatever then like?? Yeah. That’s probably a factor.
I’ve been in different fandoms for ten years so far, and in that time, I also happen to have gotten a Sociology degree. And these are the “rules” I’ve picked up on.
1) Shipping will happen. Accept it and plan for it.
2)The most popular ship will be amongst whoever character’s inner life, relationships, and screen time are delved into the most–as long as…
Addendum to 2: they’re marginally attractive. If that important main character happens to be, say, a talking dog, then most of the fandom will resist and ship other things because of the “marginally attractive” rule. Others will come up with elaborate body switch/humanization/whatever plots to handwave it away and imagine the dog looking like their favorite actor. There will be a small group who straight up ships the dog as is anyway, but waaaaaay smaller than if it was a normal attractive male human. But still–you’ve put a talking dog in center stage, so prepare for fanfic to be written about it in some way. It will just be significantly less if it breaks the “marginally attractive” rule.
3)There will always be outliers in fandom. Just because a fanfic exists of Roy Orbison in clingfilm, doesn’t mean much. That just tells us about the proclivities of that particular dude who write it. When we notice overall TRENDS and popular ships of broad swaths of people, then we can start seeing actual patterns. So there WILL be people who break these rules in disturbing ways, but those people are exceptions to the rule that don’t discount the overall trend.
Now, WHAT fandom and people as a whole considers acceptable for the “generally attractive” rule, that’s when we can notice some interesting things. The majority of fandoms where I’ve seen lots and lots and LOTS of ships around what are technically underage teenagers are from media that are a)Films with characters played by much older actors, and b)written narratives where we can imagine the characters as said much older actors. Our idea of what certain ages “look like” is warped pretty heavily from Hollywood casting much older people in the roles. Fanart of teenage characters from written works usually bear this out–they will usually be drawn older than an actual person that age tends to look.
Now, let’s apply this rule to one of the mysteries of Tumblr: The goddamn Onceler. Now WHY of all goddamn things the completely mediocre Lorax movie got so much fanart and fanfiction attention, I don’t know. I’m still picking apart what creates MORE fanfic of one media property over another(its not just popularity–lots of book series can be popular but have bupkis for fic), but I have a feeling, even if I did, the goddamn Lorax would probably still end up as a paradox. But when you look at the characters with ACTUAL SCREEN TIME in the movie, it becomes easy to apply this rule. The only people with significant lines and screen time are characters who are VERY clearly children, a strange little creature voiced by Danny Devito, and the Onceler. The only marginally attractive one is the Onceler, so the only possible option fandom could come up with is to pair him with HIMSELF from the FUTURE.
When you frame it in terms of how fandom makes decisions on who gets shipped, it makes perfect sense. Weird Onceler time shipping was bound to happen just from how the movie is written. If your only alternatives are straight-up pedophilia and imagining this strange orange creature with DeVito voice having sex, then yes, I’d choose shipping the Onceler with a future version of himself too.
Let apply it to another fandom: Supernatural. Now, any fan of that show can tell you that for a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time, everyone but the two main characters–who are brothers–dies around them. ESPECIALLY if you’re presented as a love interest in any way. The two attractive brothers have absolutely no one to depend on but each other, only about once a season visiting a long-time associate holed up in a bunker, who provides pretty much only resources and infodumps(spoiler alert! They also inevitably die, it just takes longer). Think of the rules: the Supernatural writers basically wrote their fandom into either writing incest, or sitting on their hands and shipping nothing at all. I will certainly not deny that incest is a kink some people have, but statistically there are no doubt lots of shippers in Supernatural who never thought of doing such a thing–and for which the kink has no particular thrill–who have nevertheless been roped into doing so just because the need to write SOMETHING to comfort those beleaguered characters.
After Supernatural had an episode or two lampooning fan culture and generally letting the audience know they were aware of their fandom, they finally wised up that they’d put their fans in this weird position and gave the brothers the consistent angel associate, Castiel. But this was seasons and seasons late in the game, so for some, that damage has already been done, so to speak.
You’ve made a show where most of the characters are robots, like Transformers? Well, prepare for written robot sex. You’ve written a show about humanized animals and their adventures? Congratulations, you’ve made furries. You can apply this to basically anything.
I think this also ties in with fandom’s accepted problem with racial minority characters as well. If the show just shoves a character in there for diversity’s sake and the writers seem unwilling/afraid to actually use a character, then the fandom won’t either. The characters fandom will write the most about will statistically be white males, because those are statistically the most common heroes and characters with the most development and screen time. Now, does the usual unconscious bias of fans also hurt matters? Ab-so-fucking-lutely. But fans also aren’t writing in a vacuum. They’re building off the original work, and some of the flaws of the original are going to come through.
It’s amazing to see how this post has grown and the amazing additions to it.
Now THIS is fandom discourse worth reading
But also, it’s worth pointing out that fandom does itself create cultures and trends which feed into one another.
I honestly think that’s actually where the Lorax fandom on tumblr came from. Around about the time it came out was when fan creators were getting really good at meshing together computer animated films in the form of GIFs and fan videos, combining movies like Rapunzel, Brave, How to Train Your Dragon, and Rise of the Guardians into stuff like the Rise of the Brave Tangled Dragons mash-ups. Fandom were expressly looking for content from pretty, high-budget animated films. Edits and mash-ups subsequently lead to ideas, which creates fic and fanart, and this new content becomes a source of fuel and interaction for further fandom escapades. However, if you don’t have the technical skills to make the necessary video and image edits, you’re probably just going to end up jumping into whatever fandom has content you’ve seen/accessed, and doing stuff like roleplay blogs, fics, headcanons, etc for that one. Hence, Onceler blowing up Tumblr.
Teen Wolf became a fandom sensation in part because it gave teens who had been interacting with the Supernatural fandom an outlet that was geared more towards their interests, and gave Supernatural fans fresh content with a familiar formula. A lot of what happened in Teen Wolf fandom was built off of trends that had been established in Supernatural fandom. And SuperWhoLock, like Rise of the Brave Tangled Dragons and other fandom mash-ups, was a result of lots of crossover between fans that made it easy for people to just move around between those fandoms, and, with a wide audience and lots of content being created, to also contribute something with a certain degree of guaranteed success and attention.
But this networking creates trends that are problems, too. Namely, the established nature of slash fandom and the way in which it manifests means that a lot of people just expressly go looking for two white dudes in any major franchise, and then start shipping them together. Slash is a fandom genre unto itself now, and people know how it works and what to expect from it, so they perpetuate it and look to mainstream content to provide specific tools for it – regardless of what got them into it in the first place. Even when there are other viable and prominent alternatives in media, even when things get more diverse, the ‘slash fans’ now look for specific elements to reshape in particular ways for an audience who knows how to look for it. Rather than seeing two characters in the series and feeling inspired to ship them, they instead look for the basic elements that appeal to them (and it’s not just slash that does this, either, among M/F pairings, villain x heroine is commonly subjected to this).
This can also happen inadvertently when a series is building off of an existing fandom, like when the Star Trek Reboot came out, and new fans had a plethora of existing Kirk/Spock fanfiction to sink their teeth into. Or when Iron Man came out and, even though a Captain America movie hadn’t even been hinted at, the Steve/Tony ship saw a dramatic upswing in interest, and previously tiny archives of fanfiction started to blow up.
Fandoms have had issues with racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc just the same as mainstream fiction, but in different ways and with unique trends that have carried through and impacted one another. Fandom is not purely reacting to the source material – it’s also reacting to the rest of fandom, and to the fandoms around it. Usually that’s the missing factor in people’s data. Why would Iron Man/Captain America become a huge ship for a movie that didn’t even have Captain America in it? Even a minor appearance in the actual film should have put someone else over the top, and even if we go ‘fandom was too sexist for Pepper and too racist for Rhodey’, there was still Happy. But that discounts the influence of fans from the comics influencing the rush of movie fans, and also the existing fandom content for the Steve/Tony ship.
So fandom has its own media trends that mean that a lot of people now look to mainstream offerings just for specific content that they can bring back to fandom in ways they find entertaining. Shippable hot dudes. Villain x heroine or hero x rival or ‘best friend’ dynamics that fit easily with ship formats. Unfortunately, this can actually cause catastrophe when the mainstream media finally breaks form and does something diverse, because even people who want to manipulate those elements don’t necessarily know how to work with something that isn’t staring at a baseline of ‘zero’ in terms of representation. And trying to apply fandom concepts that all operate under the presumption of a mostly white, straight, cisgender cast can backfire SPECTACULARLY when you’re not actually working with that.
Organized Chaos 