![]() ![]() Aesthetics more quickly crystalize into identity, and with those identities comes a sense of ownership.Īnd at the centre of all of this is Boyfriend Dungeon. I am, however, suggesting that it has allowed for subcultures to become increasingly prevalent and insular. I’m not trying to suggest that Tumblr invented subcultures. I cannot tell you the number of early-20s gay women on Tinder who have the word cottagecore somewhere in their bio. Once you build a community, people start tying their identities to and associating values with said community. Are you that kind of lesbian? Dark academia. Do you like ghosts and cemeteries? Ghostcore. Do you like cute nature shit? Cottagecore. However, the community-forming effect of tags also extends to aesthetics. For fandoms built around shared interests like an anime or video game series, this makes sense. Interact with the same users in the same tag enough times, and a community forms. Tags let you tailor your feed so that you’re only seeing posts from people in that tag. This is best exemplified by what Tumblr is known for: fandom. Tumblr’s tagging system has a similar flattening effect, but as a social media website, it has an additional function: facilitating community. This flattening effect is how depiction becomes - for some - synonymous with endorsement. There’s a tag for “Student/Teacher” but there isn’t a tag for “Student/Teacher That Acts As An Interrogation Of The Complexities And Abuses Inherent To A Relationship Compromised By Power.” If you’ve spent 10 years on AO3, that tagging system is absolutely going to shape how you understand art, whether you know it or not. However, this categorization also encourages flattening. If I’m on AO3 looking for a fic where Master Chief goes to a coffee shop with the Arbiter, I can find it by exclusively searching fics under those two tags. This system allows your audience to very specifically tailor their experience to their own desires. ![]() Does it include particular relationship dynamics? Tag it. Does it take place in a particular setting? Tag it. Does a piece of fanfic include two specific characters? Tag them. What’s different about the tagging system is the ease, speed, and volume of categorization which can occur. People like art, people look for more art that resembles what they like, those resemblances become categorised in genres. There are three points of overlap between these two sites: fandom-related content, extreme audience overlap, and, I would argue most importantly, the tagging system. ![]() And for that, I would argue we’ll have to look at the structure of Tumblr and ArchiveOfOurOwn(AO3), the two biggest fandom-related websites on the internet. I am, however, interested in how the idea of an anti transformed between the early-2000s and the mid-2010s. You can read those pieces, and they’re good. I am not that interested in the individual arguments here. The most dedicated antis say that anti-antis are pro-pedophilia, the most dedicated anti-antis say that antis are puritans and borderline fascist. To be an anti, then, is to actively campaign against art that includes such problematic material, which is how we get anti-antis - called such because they aren’t for people making art about, but they believe that said art shouldn’t be policed. Regardless of framing, tone, or content, the dynamic itself is fundamentally poisoned and encourages people to mirror it in real life. To be clear, this isn’t just about finding these dynamics distasteful it is actively believing they should not exist or be depicted in media. However, in 2016, the term changed to mean someone who was against the depiction of relationship dynamics deemed morally compromising, student/teacher relationships for example. If I don’t want The Arbiter to oh-so-tenderly smooch Master Chief, then I would be a Master Chief/Arbiter anti. “Anti,” in fandom hell, originally referred to people who did not like a specific relationship pairing. ![]() Strap in folks: It is time to address anti-shippers and - I hate this - anti-anti-shippers. To answer that question, I will have to regale you with a short history of terrible discourse. And for all of this, many people have been left wondering how the fuck we got here. Middling review scores from some publications, adoration from a large subset of the game’s audience, intense backlash (including harassment and vague threats of violence) from a smaller part of said audience, and the backlash to the backlash throughout the corner of the industry I happen to reside in. The response to Boyfriend Dungeon has been…scattershot to say the least. This piece is, instead, about everything hanging in the air around him. He is terrible, well-depicted, and this piece is not about him. There is a shithead at the heart of Boyfriend Dungeon. ![]()
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