“Don’t like, don’t read” is so exhausting because it acts like fandom can only be harmful if people go out of their way to read triggering fanfic. As if it’s all isolated and underground and easy to avoid. Like. I’ve never read a Reylo fic, but if I search for Finn stuff, there it is. If I scroll the TFA tag, it’s there. Fans write “Finn meta” that tears him down to elevate Reylo (shit, journalists do it too). Finnrey shippers and Finn fans are demonized for noticing any of it.
We can avoid it, sure – if we leave fandom. We’re fans, we’re not going anywhere.
EDIT:paragraph breaks, come on tumblr
Another thing that makes it impossible to just ‘filter out by looking at warnings’ fandom stuff that’s harmful to you:
People tag for things like ‘this fic includes an incident of racism’ which is a good idea to tag for but it’s not the same as ‘the narrative/narration/trope/idea/etc in this fic is racist’.
People will tag for bigotry happening as a plot point in their fics but they aren’t going to tag for their fic itself being bigoted – mostly because very very few people set out to deliberately write something bigoted.
For example: another character being racist towards Finn in the fic will be tagged as racism happens in some way, but the same author isn’t going to tag for ‘i have used racist stereotypes to portray this character’, no one tags their own art whitewashing either, etc. Cause they haven’t done this conciously (and this isn’t great but how you react when it is pointed out to you is more the crux of the matter here I’d argue)
And it’s the latter people are objecting to not the former.
fearlessstateofmind backup 