I find the EBB thing really... full-on anti rethoric trying to sneak into it at last minute. "We're

[dragonlady7]

censorship, the witcher, Anonymous

via https://ift.tt/38hRBSX

It is anti rhetoric. And it goes deeper than I’d expected.

See, I did try to reach out for clarification, and it was ignored. I poked around and asked other people if they knew what the hell was going on, and I never could get any good answer. The event had been announced long before, signups were already happening– this sudden content-restriction thing seemed to come out of nowhere. And any questions they didn’t ignore were answered as though they were asked in bad faith, and in ways that contradicted one another. (It does not engender faith in a subjective moderation process when a mod decides to clarify a policy by deleting an earlier statement rather than editing that original post to reflect the update? It also does not engender faith when each successive clarification was less clear than the last. It super does not engender faith when the list of things is so clearly not well-researched and kind of random (genuinely, tell me, how many vore fics are there in the Witcher fandom? I’d expect there’d be a bunch but was startled to find that’s not the case), and when it repeatedly comes down to “well you just have to ask about your specific thing”. I’m sorry, you want me to invest how much of my time into this project, and then beg for approval??? from people who take any pointed questioning as a personal attack?? I would not do this professionally, and I will not do this for free.)

Now that several of us, not satisfied with what few answers were forthcoming, made our own posts saying “well, if that’s how this is going to go, then we can’t participate”, the response has overwhelmingly been absolute fury. I’ve only had one or two asks (well, besides all these supportive ones) that seemed to be trying to be helpful– one of them was very faux-cheerful, and hinged on the premise that of the banned topics, it was only graphic depictions of them that were banned. Which was not what had been stated, and also, who tf decides what’s graphic, when this canon includes so much dark stuff in the original source?? The next clarification https://eskelbigbang.tumblr.com/post/639419406775140352/hello-we-have-decided-to-turn-off-anonymous was inconsistent (underage, for example, was listed both under “not graphically” and also “not at all”, but as separate entries), no more detailed (still no explanation of what counts as “graphic”?) and contained a furious insistence that people were “spreading misinformation”. This complete inability to take any kind of criticism– there’s no avenue that would have been acceptable, there, private or public, private are “harassment” and public is “spreading disinformation”– that’s an anti thing. Nobody there wants a conversation.

The fact that those of us who objected have been furiously told to “start our own event” and now that another, inclusive event was announced, there’s been a campaign of bad-faith asks and DMs very clearly trying to bait the exchange mod into some kind of answer they can do something with– yeah they don’t actually want anyone to make their own event, there. That’s an anti thing. They don’t want this kind of content to exist anywhere.

One of the angry reblogs https://in-love-with-writing002.tumblr.com/post/639430711276945408/an-update-on-the-aro-eskel-fic-progress to my post (don’t read that if you aren’t prepared for complete incoherence) was just FURIOUS that I would WRITE such a thing. “Don’t get preachy on your fucking blog!” they said, in a tag. How dare I write about this in my own space. There is no space where it would be acceptable for me to discuss this, in their own words– questioning them gets dismissed as “snark” or “attacks”, talking about it in my own space is “spreading misinformation” and also “attacks”–

Because that’s how antis work. There is no dissent that is allowed. You cannot, cannot deviate from the narrow path set, there. It’s a fucking cult, you guys.

I’m not angry at them, I’m terrified, for them. It can destroy people’s lives and ability to cope with reality, getting sucked into things like that.

The vast, vast majority of responses I’m seeing are agreeing with me, but the ones that aren’t are really chilling.

I do feel terrible for the mods; at least one of them certainly had no idea what they were getting into. But that’s the problem with anti stuff– since no dissent is tolerated, there’s no way to gently warn them, or pry them out of it. Once there’s a toehold, there’s no longer room for dissent.

My biggest regret is that one of the big anti recruiting techniques is grooming, and just like the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses sending young members out to recruit is designed to teach them that the world is hard and cruel, this kind of dismayed and respectful disagreement being so aggressively framed as an “attack” is only entrenching them further within the anti culture.

But I can’t save them, from here. All I can do is make sure that this bizarre misguided “think of the children!” culture doesn’t get further normalized.

(please note that the EBB DOES allow explicit sexual content, which apparently is fine to show to children? like somehow the FBI or the FCC or idk the USDA, whoever they think cares about this, is going to be super chill with your vanilla gaslighting soft domestic abuse E-rated smutfic [allowed, by their rules] and not with, idk, M-rated fantasy fireplay [Not Allowed unless maybe you’re a friend of the mod and can convince them it’s not “too graphic”].) (Your picture was not posted)

Comments

[vulgarweed]

Did they ever make any attempt at all to define "hard kink"? Because wow, you canNOT leave that undefined and assume everyone's even reading the same book let alone on the same page!

[dragonlady7]

They were offended to be asked, but when pressed, they listed a bunch of randomly-assorted kinks (including gore?? like, separately as a kink, not just as part of action, they later clarified-- so like, you can cut heads off but you can't fuck the neckhole? IDK), leaving out a lot of notable ones all the kinksters in my circle were astonished by the omission of (how many ppl really write scat when feet are perfectly allowed?), and then doubled down that they didn't mean you couldn't have anything dirty, it just couldn't be graphic (if it was kinky) (sex is fine!) (but this is about the children) and then were like you just have to ask if you're not sure! after having treated every single question before that as a rude attack so uh. in short. uh.
no.
It was very clearly "uh oh we think the gross trash people [who are certainly in the fandom of an extremely dark canon featuring explicit violent and sexual content onscreen-- there are even offhand vore references in the games] might join this, how can we make sure that only Acceptable stories get written about our uwu fave [whose few canon appearances, none of which are in the TV show so far, feature him doing drugs and having semi-consensual sex with a sex demon]" so the guidelines were "basically none of the stuff we think is gross" and you have to crawl to them to find out what constitutes "gross".

My stuff probably wouldn't; the day before I started posting about this, someone pointed out to me that ten of my works in the series I wrote for this fandom had been added to a collection I'd absent-mindedly approved but turned out to be a rec list for antis. But like, oh my god. No! I'm not going to bow and scrape to find out if my canon-typical material is accepted-- not for a Big Bang for which I'm going to write a 30k piece????????? Holy shit guys.
(I'm definitely not going to join an event that was pretty tailored to exclude the BNF who is the only reason the Netflix fans knew who that character was, as she'd written an exquisite and quite dark series of stories about his video game characterization before the Netflix series [which, again, doesn't yet include him] aired. Like... it's pretty clear from some backchatter that they expressly didn't want her to write for this. That's shitty.)