Is fanon supposed to mean something like fan cannon? I spent 5 minutes wondering if this was going over my head because I haven’t read The Wretched of the Earth.
Yes, fanon refers to widely accepted understandings of characters and stories among fans.
Normally you can use “delusions” instead of fanon
I’m glad you learned a lesson here. We won’t be removing your post so it can maybe serve an educational purpose to others in the future, too. Thank you for being willing to accept criticism.
The problem with the term delusion is that implies “mental illness” as a dichotomic alternative to “just having fun”.
It’s mostly having fun, but there is a line that gets crossed into the pathological when fans get angry at the author/creator when they do something that contradicts something in the fanon. And I don’t mean just being disappointed, I mean full on “how dare they this is an offense to me” anger.
the term delusion is that implies “mental illness”
I didn’t even think that, you’re right
I disagree. Spoilers for everything::
spoiler
Sometimes fanon gets confirmed later, or just adopted because it is actually a quite nice take on the story.
Like Vault Tec being the ones to drop the nukes, or the Xenomorphs being made intentionally as a weapon.
Sometimes the fanon is basically canon but there’s just not textual confirmation.
Like Jon Snow being the son of Lyanna Stark
But most of the time fanon either fulfills a need for the story to be better than it was, or it just refers to established conventions for fan fiction purposes.
fulfills a need for the story to be better than it was
A delusion
If we can spin subtext into a more lesbian story then what some corporate board of market researchers approved, you’re not gonna stop us.
Some of that is better described as fan theories.
It can do both
I like the term “Death of the Author”
death of the author is about reading the text by itself. fan-canon is about making a bunch of shit up outside the text
Don’t be a DEckhead. The stories aren’t real, the characters aren’t real. They’re subject to reimagining and reinterpretation.
Oh shit I’ve been searching for the OG post for like a year now but couldn’t remember enough details to find it lol
Had no idea that was posted here, the original post is so hard to find with google being so shit these days.
That was a good reading but
They’re subject to reimagining and reinterpretation.
That becomes a problem when for example the Korra fandom try to whitewash the nazi Kuvira to be something likeable. Okay the show itself try to do that but come on you should not agree with the bullshit the characters are saying(the authors are saying). The fandom can write an alternative universe that Kuvira is not a nazi piece of shit but why? Why the fixation on the nazi character?
Why the fixation on the nazi character?
Because she was the only villain that was really humanised at all in the show, so people gravitate towards that. I think a better question would be “why did the writers of the show decide that the only villain who needed to be portrayed complexly and sympathetically was the Fascist?”
Why the fixation on the nazi character?
Awesome Hitler effect where western writers make their villain Hitler but also really cool and stoic (also always conventionally attractive) Her death camps are reduced to passing dialogue and we never get a follow up on them (also the ideology behind her death camps is so contrived and incomprehensible as to basically provoke fanon).
A lot of western action stories have a worrying amount of Awesome Hitlers.
I’m genuinely surprised no one’s scolded me for not reading all the theory that’s ever been written and said I would have understood the joke perfectly if I wasn’t such a lib. Either we’ve all moved beyond elitism and purity testing, or we’re all a bunch of libs.
the latter most likely
The oppressed readers of badly written characters imagine themselves taking the author’s position, sleeping in the author’s bed with his wife.
(I’m parodying the quote from memory it’s probably way off)
In Naruto Sakura doesn’t get a lot of screen time and isn’t a big force multiplier. She does some stuff and you get to argue about her capacity to be there against Kaguya or whatever, but she’s rather stunted as a character.
In the fanon they glorify her. No special family but still became the strongest kunoichi, she’s the best educated, etc. etc. It’s not that these things are necessarily untrue, but it’s certainly not focused or highlighted in the narrative.
Naruto pissed me off because I’m like 150 episodes in and she’s still useless.
Her entire driving force thus far is that she has to be stronger / smarter so sasuke will like her.
One dimensional ahhh character
Warning: minor non-specific spoilers about the direction of the characters and narrative of Naruto:
It doesn’t get better. I mean maybe in the anime, idk, I’ve only read the manga. But in the manga while she does do some incredible things, it never really feels earned or believable. She has a couple of moments in the final arc where she pretty much looks at the camera and says “I’m finally on equal footing with the other main characters, I’m gonna show them how great I am!” And then she dunks on some faceless fodder enemies for a moment, then we cut back to Naruto and Sasuke basically transforming into Godzilla and going toe to toe with God. Like, she is in like the top 10 strongest people in the setting’s history by the end of the story, but we never get any believable explanation for how she accomplished that or any satisfying achievement she uses that strength for. She’s like a narrative leech, by existing in proximity to Naruto and Sasuke she absorbed some of their plot armor.
The only female character in Naruto who is ever written even kind of well is Tsunade.
I think one of the weakest things Kishimoto ever does is write side characters with a double whammy of being a woman as well. He does some stuff extremely well - for example, themes you’ve seen in 150 episodes absolutely inform the shape and content of the climax of the narrative writ large. Writing Sakura is not one of his strengths I would argue.
How do you headcanon Hillary Clinton like that, best i can do is a Carol Holliday from Deltarune that doesn’t even have cool antlers or a katana.
a good chunk of it is projection. back in '16, who knows how many pmc types were sold on the marketing pitch that she was “the most qualified person to ever run for president” and saw her usurped.
the 20
1608 election cycle mirrored a very common experience for these types: getting passed over for promotion or missing out on partner by a younger, hipper, male-r silver-tongued devil, an empty suit who “hadn’t paid his dues” but was simply better liked.the core of hillary fans, and i mean the diamond-hard core of true believers, not the cynics and grifters within the democratic party machine who feed off her former fundraising prowess, the people who would benefit in no material sense whatsoever under a third clinton administration but were completely devoted to her, the “party unity, my ass” crew, that’s these poor people.
and i feel sorry them, honestly. odds are they didn’t get into their chosen field because they married someone else who was better at it and rode his coattails. odds are they weren’t gifted higher and higher profile positions only to fail each time and keep getting promoted. odds are they really were qualified for whatever job their personal obama yanked away from them by hosting poker night for the regional manager.
they’re still annoying as fuck tho.
The crazy thing is that, because they have ‘paid their dues’ they think they are entitled to lead, but they are working within a completely cynical crowd, where ‘paying your dues’ only does three things, gives other leverage over you, makes people nervous because you have leverage over them, and demonstrates that you are willing to eat as much shit as they can shovel at you and smile through stained teeth.
There are so many times when Hillary could have bucked the system, even a tiny bit, and instantly gained a popular following, but she can’t because she is just fundamentally not smart enough (or at least equipped with the knowledge) to recognize those political opportunities outside of her D.C. bubble.
On the other hand she would also sometimes try to buck the system, but always at the most inopportune moments and in the absolute worst way - Starting Obama birtherism and the Pied piper thing
I don’t even think that was her bucking the system, both of those things are tried and true old school Democrat tactics. Like, literal Arkansaw Dixiecrats tactics. Her literally just working within the system and tactics that she is familiar with.
i can’t attest to this personally as i’m not AmeriKKKan, but that does sound like a fairly convincing description of the Clintonite Character
Now that you mentioned it, if I were Bill Clinton I’d be asking my doctor to test me for non-descript fatal coughing disease
i used to call it bunker-induced supercancer, but then i learned that deer basically don’t get cancer, so i guess it’s something else
we just slipping the false concept of misandry into everything on the fediverse, huh
idk i just wish misandry was real, then i could be a ranked competitive misandrist.
Trans women have an unfair advantage in misandry /s
I will be the first trans woman who actually gets banned from a sport for winning too hard!
Removed by mod
black people can’t be racist
Not against white people no
They can be racist but not against white people
I don’t think dropping this without explanation is ever helpful. People use “racist” to mean “prejudiced” and other people use “racist” to mean “act in a way that reinforces institutional racism,” and without specifying which one you mean, you’re just being smug at someone because you use a cooler definition of a word.
I do agree that needing an explanation is good, but.
cooler definition of a word.
I disagree, the systemic definition of racism is the only correct one. Racism reduced down to just personal bigotry is incorrect and it gets spread because it perpetuates the racist system by colloquially reducing its impact.
People who use racist to mean prejudiced or personally unfair are not using the term in good faith.
Words don’t have inherent meanings. If they did, there wouldn’t be multiple languages.
I don’t understand how this relates to what I said. Words have multiple meanings and don’t have intrinsic meaning but there are ones that are more appropriate than others.
Allowing people to subvert the systemic meaning of racism whitewashes its impact. Black people cannot be racist towards white people because it has no basis systemically. Minorities can perpetuate systems of oppression against themselves but its never becomes a “reverse racism”
In other words, who benefits from the meaning of racism being stripped of it’s systemic meaning? Considering the context is some dbzero user trying to claim white people are oppressed and misandry is real this isnt an issue that’s “lost in translation.”
By arguing black people can be racist against non-whites you’ve already admitted racism exists not merely as a system of oppression, but as prejudice too.
So yes, black people can be racist against white people, just not in the comically evil ways that white conservatives say they can.
By arguing black people can be racist against non-whites you’ve already admitted racism exists not merely as a system of oppression, but as prejudice too.
No, that doesn’t follow. Oppressed people absolutely can be active and even willing participants in the systemic oppression of their own people.
Good point
Depends on whether you’re saying that every act of prejudice is comparable to the historic weight of hundreds of years of racism as a system. A slave being prejudiced against the slaveowner is not an act of racism. It holds no difference to a trans person being prejudiced against a terf.
These acts of prejudice shouldn’t be elevated to acts of hate. They’re the oppressed lashing out at their oppressor.
I’m obviously not saying prejudice is on the same level as hundreds of years of oppression. I don’t know how you could even extrapolate that from my comment.
lol ok
Poor white people, they have it so hard :<
Not arguing against white privilege
The point is that you do not experience racism the same way at all because there is no system of racism against you nor is there the weight of hundreds of years of systemic racism against you.
If I call you a cracker right now it means nothing to you. It doesn’t affect you one bit. It rolls off you like water because it’s just funny to you. It has none of the history. It has none of the weight. You haven’t been oppressed for your skin colour one single bit in your entire life. You can be called a cracker a hundred times and it causes not even one emotional ripple within you because it isn’t racist. You sincerely do not experience racism as a force, not even one tiny bit, and that is why none of it affects you.
We’d have to get into some extreme cases of actual physical harm before we get close to actual racism committed by black people against white people. But even in those cases I would argue it isn’t racism, it’s the uneducated bubbling of anger expressed by the oppressed against their oppressor in ways that only occurs that way due to a lack of education on how to explain their rage in linguistic ways that do not appear as racism. Take the Palestinian for example, an uneducated Palestinian without the social teaching of phrasing and language that frames their struggle as oppressed vs oppressor, as Palestinian vs the Zionist, would likely default to jew-hate. But would it actually be that or would their rage still fundamentally be just an expression of their oppression without the linguistic framework that provides positive PR over negative PR?
But this is part of white privilege: white people can not be subjected to racism for being white. That’s half the point.
there are many misandrist women, but the wider ramifications of misandry are largely immaterial
Hillary Clinton
during her 2016 campaign
