snowflake challenge #3: screaming into the void about internalised shame in fandom

[serpentinemalign]

i remembered the image this time! be proud of me!

In your own space, Scream Into the Void. Get it all out. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

okay let's talk about my fandom hot take that only people in private have been exposed to... until now. the core of modern-day fandom cruelty and nastiness is personal, internalised shame externalised out onto the world.

i feel this in my heart, not my head. it's not something i can quantify. i see it in the quote retweeted posts floating around on my twitter... but i could really just be seeing myself reflected, because i am a very self-absorbed person.

i'm not here to talk about other people's bad takes, because that will be anything but cathartic, honestly; that's just giving people free board in my head (and your mind is the only place it's okay to be a ruthless landlord).

i'm here to talk about my own shame, and how it led me to this conclusion.

i said this is cntw but i will be talking about noncon fantasies so please only read if you feel fine to do that!

some of you will know that this is not my first account. i've been in fandom for almost 15 years, and 'serpentine malign' as a handle is only 4 years old. i'm thrilled by the friends and mutuals i've made since. the freedom it's been to just be horny on main, talk openly about ALL my kinks, refuse to censor myself, and quietly but firmly align myself with other fans advocating for creative expression. but let's be real! what motivated me to create this new presence was something between fear and paranoia. i wanted to start from scratch, vet my followers and curate my space from the start, because it's easier to build a fortress on a fresh foundation than try to patch up a house rotting from the inside.

i moved to this handle because fandom had become an uncomfortable and unwelcoming place, and because my tastes were only getting more fucked up. it started in my mid-teens and only got worse from there. i started getting nasty and passive aggressive and judgmental people on extremely innocuous posts, and in response i too became nasty and passive aggressive and judgmental. it's a cycle. it makes you tremendously paranoid because you just don't know what's going to inspire hatred and snide comments so you adjust your behaviour to anticipate an impossible amount of vitriol.

my tumblr dash was a hostile place full of horrible takes that kept me up at night. i just freefell into it being that way one day. i was addicted to the discourse. and just trying to fill a void i hadn't acknowledged inside myself, a hole created by repression and shame.

when i was in my mid-teens and still shame-free, i wrote a self-indulgent novella that was literally nothing but noncon serial recruitment fantasies. a superpowered woman travelled the world mindbreaking every single person on earth, one by one, and passing along her mindbreak powers to her hosts. there was no story. the end of the novel was the entire world moving to her whims and rhythms. there was no hope of escape and it was bliss. the world was horribly overwhelming and the hive mind was going to make it all better. i look on it fondly because that was also the same year i was properly, utterly depressed for the first time and it was pretty awesome to have something that made me think it was all gonna be okay. but i was also a little frightened by what i wrote. why this thing just got under my skin the way it did and poured itself out upon the page. i had a bunch of moral crises about that too! but it wasn't quite the same level of meanness as i acquired later down the lines, it was more just, i was a teenager who didn't understand that wholesome morality was not a requirement for good fiction.

two years later, drunk on tumblr discourse about what 'good writing' looked like and how the world is tired of dismal and problematic stories, i decided to revamp the story. it lingered with me for reasons i didn't understand, but of course now i needed to cut out all the problematic parts. like the sensationalist rape fantasies that made up... literally the entire book?

now it was a soft lesbian love story. only one person would get controlled, and it was the protagonist. she was depressed and just wanted help and understanding. my softened mindbreak lady felt a great amount of guilt about her powers and hated the curse of her family. she didn't want to hurt anyone or violate them. it would be better if she had no powers at all. in fact, the central tension of their relationship was that mindbreak lady felt used by depressed lady, like her powers were just free antidepressants. i felt so clever for flipping the script. there was lots of dilly-dallying around consent and i was terrified that people would also take exception to the idea of one person becoming 'addicted to' another person. it was so paranoid. i wrote and thought more about how i would defend my artistic choices than actual prose for the book. you ever read that eve kosofsky sedgwick essay about reparative and paranoid reading, or those hundreds of commentary posts that are like, 'you know when someone is chronically on twitter because their writing style is so defensive'? that.

anyway, the end of the novel was them confronting mindbreak lady's fucked up mom who was basically wanting to turn earth into a breeding farm for nondescript reasons.

i think this concept would be interesting in the right hands! it just didn't interest me to be writing it! i was writing it for the wrong reasons! in my new antagonist i was confronting my own fucked up desires from the initial draft of the book, and trying to take them out with precision, like a sniper. cut out all the Bad parts, transform them into an easy villain, and supplant the plot with things i read that people liked in tumblr posts. and yet... i couldn't bear to pull the trigger or make the first incision. i didn't understand why i couldn't get a word of this story out. i planned and planned for years and years and the first word of prose just. never. came.

you know what i did write tons of? fic of incredibly abusive ships! sometimes i would keep it to myself, sometimes i'd publish it (only the parts that had been scrubbed and sanitised of course and with a million apologetic tags about how 'oh my god this is so toxic i'm sorry')... the fount was flowing fine there. but i hate the way i used to talk about my ships. i was so fucking judgmental of other people if they didn't ship them the exact same way i did, and ESPECIALLY if they wrote fluff. i twisted my darkfic into the real moral good because, after all, i was showing the 'true sides' of the characters and anyone who wrote them doing cute stuff was obviously just not shipping them the right way.

i was a fucking hypocrite. i wanted to write filth and darkfic but i felt guilty about it so i just spent my time crafting defences and being bitchy about other peoples ships or fics. please be assured that i don't do that anymore! i was never the kind of person who would harass or dogpile people - i was much too afraid of conflict to do that, which i suppose i'm thankful for. i was just very opinionated and mean-spirited in private while my public posts smacked of fear. it's shit behaviour that emerged from my own shame. i was like that about fandom drama too. just sitting on the sidelines eating popcorn and joking around while i ignored the fact that people were getting hurt.

these days i constantly see people who seem like they're in the position i was in in my late teens. often we will share a common interest and they might make legitimately cool stuff, but they are so unnecessarily judgmental and you know it's because they're self-conscious about their own likes. they have fully internalised that paranoia, and they're afraid to unapologetically express themselves and be self-indulgent, whether because it's cringe, or because there's some moral 'wrong' attached to it.

i guess the thing is that we all have skeletons in our closets but some of the skeletons don't hold up to scrutiny. they're plastic models, beneath which the real bodies are buried. at some point you have to grow up and clear out the rotting corpses.

the thing that really changed my mind when i was younger was having people to talk to who who were genuinely interested and curious in my darkest imaginings, and who actually called me out when i was being judgmental.

i'm a little too antsy and unstable to do the work of being compassionate to people who will tell me to fuck off because i write freak shit. but i do sympathise with them because i've been there.

there we are. void screaming over.