Yo.
I just wanted to give a heads-up that sometime in the next few weeks I’m going to private all of my posts and no longer respond to comments posted here. I’ve been putting it off for a long time for sentimental reasons, but the truth is that I’ve just moved on. Click through for some meandering about it if you feel the need, but the tldr is that I’m not 17 anymore, not 24 either, and don’t really want to be, so I’m closing up shop and sailing off into the sunset.
I grew up in a very difficult, abusive, conservative Christian household, and this blog is basically a real-time reckoning I’ve had to do with that. The internet was a place where I was able to be exposed to and contest with ideas that weren’t allowed in my home life growing up (so much so that there are certain books and authors that are still triggers for me, because they remind me of my father going into weird rages about ~the liberals~). I am eternally grateful to have grown up with the early internet, during the forum and blog era where the kind of personal relationships that governed those spaces allowed me to be a flawed person from a flawed background, and to work out with other human beings what it actually meant to be a decent person in the world we lived in. We’re all, of course, products of a cissexist, white heteropatriarchal order, and we all wrestle with internalized biases, but growing up in the kind of environment I did fucks you up even further than that baseline.
So I got to work those things out, on an internet that, at the time, was not the mass-media public space it is today. I’m sure that was a process that hurt people. I have so many regrets. But I also met some of my closest friends, lifelong friends, and I am so lucky to have met humans that were willing to grow up with me and forgive me and help me learn and heal. There was one night where the reason I got up the nest morning was because of a comment Keleri left on my LiveJournal. I cannot overstate the impact people like them had on me.
However, the net result is that I am an extraordinarily different person than I was back when this started, and even than I was a few years ago. Putting an enormous amount of distance and several social workers between me and my family-of-origin was huge; I think even just three or four years ago I wouldn’t have been able to admit things were as hard as they were growing up. Finally getting diagnosed with autism provided me with a new framework for understanding a lot of the conflicts I’d had with people over the years, where I struggled so much both to communicate my feelings or to properly interpret someone elses’. And, of course, there was Mr. Act, who provided me with a way to interact with other humans based on love and kindness instead of fear and domination.
So this just isn’t me anymore. There’s still work I did here that I’m proud of — the F/SN LP reads as extremely childish to me now in many ways, but it was still a huge accomplishment. And I still hate John Green so, so much. But on the whole, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with implying I stand by everything I’ve ever said by leaving it here. I think if I went back and reevaluated everything I’ve covered here, there would be at least as much that I felt differently about as stuff about which I’d feel the same, if not more. I just know more now. I know more everyday.
(Also I somehow ended up in the role of community manager, which was literally a living nightmare. IDK who put the autistic person in charge of mediating social interaction but wow was it a mistake for everyone, I don’t think I made a single correct decision over the entire time period, but I did often have stress meltdowns and lash out at people, A++ .)
Also the internet isn’t what it was anymore. The personal is pretty much gone in favor of, to quote Sarah Z, the horrifying panopticon of the torment nexus. And I do feel that in the current system there’s a degree to which my letting these things stand uncommented on is akin to an endorsement. I also really don’t want to like, publish a paper on how critical it is we examine the marginalization of black women’s gothic fiction only to have people start emailing me going, “Yeah but I have a screenshot of you saying this game wasn’t racist when it showed black people as animals,” because individually responding to each one of them trying to explain that, yes, I thought awful things as a traumatized 22-year-old that I don’t think now, is emotionally and physically draining in a way that’s hard to explain and I literally never want it to happen. My original idea, that seeing someone fuck up and grow over time might be useful for people, was definitely naive, but it wasn’t as expressly false back in 2011 the way it is now.
I can’t, of course, leave you without some recs, so here are some amazing video essayists doing the kind of work I do, at the time of writing, agree with. Give them followers; they deserve it for producing such amazing content and enduring such horrifying harassment.
Xiran Jay Zhao (also READ THEIR BOOK it’s a fucking masterpiece)
Defunctland (not the same thing, so sue me)
For a lot of things, I’m sorry; for a lot of things, thank you; for a lot of things, I love you all <3 G’night.
Hey! Long time lurker who feels a lot of resonance with your reflections on growing away from your upbringing. I’ve always found your posts insightful (though to be fair I haven’t looked back as much as I’m sure you have), so I’ll be sad to see them go, but I hope you’re off to happier trails. Your TFioS series was instrumental in making me reexamine how I consumed literature, which is to say I understand why you’d want a clean slate, but I also want to thank you for the good bits you did along the way. Wishing you all the best!
It’s been a good time. I’ve enjoyed your writings, but I can understand wanting to distance oneself from old work like that. Take care out there.
This blog, and your posts, played a huge part in writing my first novel. So thank you, and take care!
I’m a long time lurker. This blog’s analyses (and often your posts in particular) were formative to my developing media literacy, and while I understand your plans to take them down, I’ll be tremendously sad when they’re gone.
Wishing you all the best out there!
So. This is a message for the person who wrote this post, the one who knows the email address attached; I as a person am Nameless because getting into public fights has influenced how lurkers on this blog (that also belong to other fanfic sites) have interacted with me, and I don’t want any more of my marginalization- and mental-illness- influenced thoughts being taken out of context and misinterpreted by people who don’t know how to deal with anyone outside the white culturally-Christian norm. I’ve really had enough condescension from people who think I’m the most condescending youth of them all for my thinking of my own non-white culture as the default instead of as an ‘other’, which really isn’t your problem but I thought I should explain why for my own sake that I’m hidden like this.
I grew up with extremely strict immigrant parents with a set of cultural rules that aren’t the same as the mainstream US. Your shitty father reminds me of my idiot mother, who, while I was a teenager, got into alt-right Trump conservatism, and started enthusiastically promoting a terrible, suicidal ideology that advocates for both my family’s deaths as racial minorities, and also my death as a queer teenager. An influence like that made a kid like me into a person that interrogates everything vigorously, because for a person like me it’s not about feelings, but survival.
In a way, though, I think being one of the people specifically targeted by conservative shit at the time was protective — over the past few years, I’ve seen people grow vicious and dangerous. Hate crimes spike and yet my ethnic group is STILL voting conservative, because they think that being hard on crime is the way to stay safe.
> We’re all, of course, products of a cissexist, white heteropatriarchal order, and we all wrestle with internalized biases, but growing up in the kind of environment I did fucks you up even further than that baseline.
So, like, this is true in a sense that anyone decently well socialized in white America gets a faceful of bigotry, but from someone raised outside of it, ‘internalized biases’ sound kind of a like brainworm because if you question them/think about them you can hear what they are, and then they aren’t internalized anymore. Also things are extra confusing if you are not white passing so thinking of yourself as more fucked up than whiter people, uh, don’t blame yourself that way please.
> Finally getting diagnosed with autism provided me with a new framework for understanding a lot of the conflicts I’d had with people over the years, where I struggled so much both to communicate my feelings or to properly interpret someone elses’.
Sooo, I’ve had multiple people ‘explain themselves’, explain why a social situation they’re in has gone badly, by using autism as a framework, but I think that’s fucking stupid. Autistic people are good at rules that don’t change, and communication is built upon rules. I think the real problem is cross-cultural, if we’ve learned different rules, because we suck at adapting to each others’. And this is important because I’m also fucking autistic and my non-neurotypical-ness has been the source of many issues, and it’s not something inherently wrong with your brain that makes you run into conflicts, it’s not knowing how to deal with differences that you’ve never been fairly taught or learned about.
For example, my race generally tends to be smaller and skinnier than others, including northerners in general as well as European Americans in particular. In comparison to the White American beauty standard, which is based on white people, girls of my race tend to be smaller or underweight; they’re not called mannish or masculine, they’re ‘hyperfeminine’ and ‘attractive’, and I assumed that all girls only got called those things. Hearing those words make me extremely uncomfortable because being an object of beauty isn’t actually a position of power. For this and other reasons, I spent most of my teenage years around boys; I did not want to know what racially tinged thoughts people had of me, and I did not ever look myself in the mirror, and also I didn’t want to set off my own dysphoria. So based on my own experiences with my race and my body and avoiding thoughts people had about how people look, I had no idea that fat white women would ever be considered masculine and not just women — this I put together the first time only a few days ago.
I was raised in with ‘color-blindness’ as the precept in my ethnic enclave; I really did not learn of this insane American bullshit until I had an very sensitive, close-up discussion with someone who I dearly trust. My parents’ culture is to raise their children while not acknowledging race (and its physical attributes), and consequentially not thinking that racism is real, and hearing your stories of your mom being unable to stop commenting on your body (as well as my own experiences with someone of a related race whose mom was also like that), I kind of think it’s still better to be raised with no acknowledgement of beauty standards as being important at all. But, I also failed to communicate with you on this front because I had no idea these standards fucking existed, and so even if it’s really not our responsibility to learn a-whole-nother culture, it’s what is necessary to being useful/being part of a bigger conversation about what stories that aren’t being told that should come into existence anyway. And that’s what I really love about you — “I’ve also always known that the stories in our bubble can’t be where things end, because there are bigger stories, cultural ones, that she’ll hear no matter what I do.” How can anyone hate someone that thinks like that?
> I just know more now. I know more everyday.
So like yeah, hard same.
> I also really don’t want to like, publish a paper on how critical it is we examine the marginalization of black women’s gothic fiction only to have people start emailing me going, “Yeah but I have a screenshot of you saying this game wasn’t racist when it showed black people as animals,” because individually responding to each one of them trying to explain that, yes, I thought awful things as a traumatized 22-year-old that I don’t think now, is emotionally and physically draining in a way that’s hard to explain and I literally never want it to happen.
Yeah, so this is definitely bad faith harassment. I think it’s probably harder to tell if you start off feeling you’re doing something wrong but don’t know what, but someone that’s kept a creepy fucking screenshot, someone that’s mad you didn’t do more, wouldn’t be approaching your other (clearly not hating black people) writing to say that no, you’re actually a racist, how dare you support antiracism, because the part where you’re being a good person is the thing they’re actually mad about. My suspicion they’re from kiwifarms or something, which is the evil internet group that loves keeping screenshots to harass people, and I remember seeing your guys’ name or site linked there which, uh, thinking about it, actually may have to do with why you keep getting the worst people here that come trolling, like this channer guy that uses a standard playbook of *chan harassment tactics meant to make people angry.
Anyway, I say this after like a few days of ruminating over why this post was affecting me so much. I think, if you don’t want conversation, detach your email or something, but leave the posts up. I’ll join the several other people talking about how useful your posts were to developing media literacy and questioning things and holding an opinion that other people don’t and it’s good that they’re kept up for other people to look at too. There’s no writing without commentary and no commentary that doesn’t hold meaning. Even if it isn’t the best thing to take at face value, there are others probably in the same position as you were a while ago that’d gain something. And that’s really valuable.
Hey
That sound so incredible rough.
Just want to say thanks for the great posts over the years, I have really enjoyed them!
Br