I’ve seen this thing going back and forth across Tumblr for a few days now
Last week, zamii070 attempted suicide after several dozen callout blogs began to say she was “problematic”, alleging various things about her personally because of the stylizations she made in her fanart of characters from Homestuck, Gravity Falls, MLP, and Steven Universe. The apparent attacks on her raised issues of toxicity in the fandom(s) and whether or not fanart where the subject is depicted differently from the original medium erases the representation from the show.
It has recently come to my attention that the person who started this whole callout did so because they were jealous that Zamii was dating the person they had a crush on (a person Zamii has referred to as “Pizza”). This person made the callout to specifically drive Zamii to suicide to effectively make Zamii’s partner single again.
This is coming from comments on the Homestuck subreddit made before it was discovered Zamii was in the hospital for her suicide attempt.
Bigots are using this as an excuse to say “lol Tumblr SJWs” because we have one person who managed to manipulate dozens of people to harass a young woman to depression and suicide just so their crush would be single again. I mean fucking plebcomics started a “Je suis Charlie” thing to draw SU characters skinny in “solidarity” with Zamii.
Don’t stand for this bullshit. Don’t give into the mindset that one person’s fanart is a problem. Don’t allow someone’s stalker and harasser to win. And don’t let the asshole 4chan bigots win either.
This is a good and important post. However, the fact that the manipulative asshole was able to use progressive language and SJ discourse to their benefit in this way, and that these “callout blogs” did not get told to tone it down, shows that we do have an issue with the current discourse in progressive circles on this site (and others; it’s not unique to tumblr).
The prevalence of “fuel your rage” and “you don’t owe anyone an explanation” creates a bad, anti-analytical environment that reminds me of some maoist circles. Like, these mindsets can be useful and I’m not saying subjugated groups have to always be polite and nice, but in some circles, anger has been treated as a virtue by itself, and that can be used as a tool by manipulative people. I’ve seen it in real life, and now I see it here.
^^^^ This so much.
Social Justice is losing its “brand name” if you will because of the behaviors outlined in the post above.
Because, more and more, calling out is nothing but a bully pile on that is neither Social nor Just.
