Reflection and Analysis

Star Wars - Shipping - It Actually Gets Worse? (7/5/24)

My last reflection was about how I'm floored at--

a.) Kennedy and Headland are purposefully courting the demographic of fandom that loves stories that romanticize abuse as they are under the mistaken impression this demographic makes up the majority of the fandom when, in reality, they are actually a minority.

b.) Headland actually admitted to reading fanfic for The Acolyte.

I discussed how my theory that they purposefully did things such as giving Finn and Poe love interests so that Reylo fans wouldn't feel threatened by competing ships -- I feel my suspicions were confirmed.

This? This was just from seeing the article's title and a few quotes, but now I'm more aware of its contents and egads.

I've repeatedly said in my reflections that what's been happening actually goes back further than the Ghostbusters 2016 film, that it actually has direct ties to the rise of the anti-critique crowd around, say, 2010 within the fanfiction community, where they started pushing the idea that certain individuals should be the exception to the rule when it came to reviews/comments that didn't strictly praise the work.

I've said before this is a group that honestly believes themselves to be in the majority when they are actually a minority group because they surrounded themselves with like-minded individuals, but they refused to listen to those of us who told them--

a.) You are not the majority in the fanfiction community.

b.) It's not the job of the reviewers/commenters to only leave praise, but instead the job of the writer to either not publish (aka make their work publicly available for everyone to read) or to publish to a site where they can turn off reviews/comments.

c.) Stop redefining definitions and etiquette to suit your self-centered purposes.

Let me repeat that this group is a group that honestly believes they are the majority of fandom when they are, in fact, a minority. This is a group that believes fandom should completely shelter them from the realities of the world. This is a group that felt because the way certain words were defined and certain etiquette ruined their fun, they were allowed to ruin everyone else's fun by changing how things were defined rather than taking agency and avoiding the things that triggered them, such as posting to a site where people couldn't comment or review if they didn't want ones that pointed out flaws in their work.

One of the long-standing rules of thumb in fandom was that if something was a personal trigger, you avoid it. This group honestly pushed the idea that if something triggered them, writers should avoid it, such as ships they didn't like. Yet they were also the ones who would ship things like Reylo because they loved stories that romanticized abuse.

Which, as I've said in my previous, not all Reylo fans are about that, but the ones that are flood the others out.

But I've learned a bit more regarding what Headland said during her interviews and--

Well, she's definitely part of that crowd.

I mean, back in 2010, she would have been thirty, which is around the age of these individuals. More specifically, she graduated from high school the year Phantom Menance came out in theaters, which was the start of when nerd culture started being de-stigmatized, and we saw an influx of individuals who jumped on popular trends coming into fandom.

Now, this isn't to say Headland wasn't a nerd, but it's worth noting that she headed into college at a time when being a nerd was de-stigmatized finally and with this came an influx of people outside of nerd culture wanting to come in and leave their own mark upon fandom only to find they couldn't control things as say the popular girl at school could control the social structure of the school.