oracne: oracne | Fanfic Classics - In what ways can fanfiction be a valuable part of the criticism of a text? Can it appeal as criticism to readers outside the fanfiction community? -
bossymarmalade: but we must always be polite about it - We're the scary people on the screen, and we're the scary people in life -- even to a child who's at least partly one of us. Don't ever tell me that it's just a movie. These are the stories that tell people who we are. -
solvent: yet more meta, but this time with multimedia footnotes (and David Mitchell yay) - Sometimes polite engagement with an idea just isn't enough because of the presumption, underlying such polite engagement, that the idea being dealt with is a morally neutral one worth taking seriously. If I claim that your argument is not only wrong but ethically repellent, I'm obliged to take into account the fact that it might hurt your feelings for me to say so; but I'm also free to take into account the fact that it might help hundreds of other people to hear your argument characterised that way -
via_ostiense: Racebending fail - The racebending ficathon is a protest of whitewashing and white-defaulting, and to remove the protest element is to silence critiques just so that some white people can feel less uncomfortable about their privilege -
wrabbit: soft censorship vs warnings - I think there's a conflation happening between art and its distribution. It's entirely possible to write socially unethical things or to write triggery things and then distribute them in ways that are ethical and self-conscious. -
lookninjas: What It Is, and How It Is Done - But what gets me even more than this insistence that some monolithic quasi-governmental army is waiting to swoop down on anyone who dares to write the non-politically correct viewpoint is this idea that there's any daring to be found in that viewpoint in the first place. Let's get real here for a second: this so-called "non-pc" viewpoint is nearly always the most prevalent viewpoint in the culture. -
dotfic: On feeling safe in fandom - Where there are fans who don't feel safe because of bias and prejudice and marginalization. Where there are fans who don't feel safe because if they address controversial topics, they'll get accused of ruining fandom, harshing the squee, over-reacting, of being too sensitive, of not being sensitive enough, of trying to oppress others with their views. Where fans who bring up a subject know for sure there will be a backlash and waves of resentment and that they'll get sniffed at as troublemakers.//How is that safe for anybody? -
dotfic: Of spoons and sporks, reader reactions, silence, and the "majority" - You guys, I'm having trouble reconciling the scroll bar and close tab are your friends concept, which is very dear to my heart (CLOSE TAB and I are bff's and we hang out eating ice cream and snarking) and IMO required for fannish sanity,[...] with my strong belief that if you post something on the internets, *people have a right to respond to it*. -
ephemere: The pomegranate lamp - It's laughable -- vile -- to see people equating criticism with unfreedom, the anger of the oppressed with unsafety. They are nothing like each other. And those people who have been branded as "mobs", "sharks", "packs of wolves", are nothing like oppressive systems, because the vantage points from which they speak are those of, or in alignment with, the oppressed in the first place. -