Welcome to the garden ◘◘ All creative works by ChoiBok & Ismaire Jeong ◘◘ Dark fantasy and horror LGBTQ+ stories written by an enby married couple • ENG/한(intermediate)
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In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn't limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.
Stop me if you've heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn't happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.
Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it?
Isabel Fall's case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.
More specifically, she used the phrase "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.
But... well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn't be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.
A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn't all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.
Only... we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don't we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.
So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but "Isabel Fall" is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.
Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.
It's heartbreakingly familiar, isn't it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel's shoes, even if the outcome wasn't so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of "the community" as a nebulous undefined entity.
There's a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:
The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader. This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings. “[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”
A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why "proship", once simply a word for common sense "don't engage with what you don't like, and don't harass people who create it either" philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it's an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It's an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side's faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.
It's not about joy. It's not about resonance with plot or characters. It's about hate. It's about finding fault. If they can't find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.
And that's if they even went so far as to read the work they're critiquing. The ones they don't bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it's bad, it's fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it's unforgivable. It's a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who "deserve it." Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.
Isabel Fall's story follows this so step-by-step that it's like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.
Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection... they zeroed in on the discomfort. "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can't even type out the words "kill" and rape", instead substituting "unalive" and "grape." We don't deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.
So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn't be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.
Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; "there is a callout thread against them" is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.
So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn't matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.
And that's the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It's never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group's vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.
And that's what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.
And that's... fandom, anymore. That's just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don't make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.
Isabel Fall's harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, "more, please." It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.
Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It's a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).
It's a deeply toxic environment and I'm sad to say that Isabel Fall's story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I'm sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don't think we can ever go back to peaceful "for joy" engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.
Worst Fear (Sketchtember 2024 - Day 13)
[Hollow Hearts]
Choi: This is a recreation of an angsty shower scene that I wanted to do of Samak. Back when it was Tegaki E, I doodled a moody composition of Samak just brooding under a running shower. Unfortunately, I couldn't do very much to expand on it because a few users started commenting on it and started taking it to very irrelevant story territories. Samak back then just had the quality of being a thirst trap in RP circles, I guess 🤷🏻
Anyway! I'm happy how this turned out as far as redraws go. It certainly was cathartic to draw Samak crying out of anger, rather than lying back passive and depressed.
Now as for the prompt: Samak's worst fear was losing his boyfriend, Cole. Which happened. And not only did it happen, it was in the worst possible way - at Samak's own hands. Now he has to live with that, and it haunts him all the time. And that was all just the *beginning* of Samak's story.
How exactly that all shook out, and what happens next, you'll have to stay tuned to see...!
Grieving (Sketchtember 2024 - Day 12)
[Rara Avis]
Choi: I promise, Izzy and I didn't intend Day 12's prompt to bring twice as many child deaths in the pictures. But I do gotta say... I'm glad that we're really showing off the "dark" in dark fantasy in our works now ✨🌑✨
The royal siblings Goldie and Sand grew up in happiness, preparing for a life of responsibility and duty, until the assassination of their entire family line. Goldie (26) and Sand (23) found themselves orphaned, grieving, and wandering into the wild countryside. This particular scene is timed around 2-3 weeks since their loss, after they encountered a mysterious scoundrel, whom they contracted to lead them the way to a remote dwarven stronghold.
When everyone turned to sleep that night, Goldie was left alone with her grief while carrying the weight of the last remaining royal bloodline. You can only imagine the ruminating it would take for her to then see a hallucination of her dead baby brother in the mirror.
And it doesn't get easier from there.
Worst Fear (Sketchtember 2024 - Day 13)
[The Judge]
Ismaire: Matthew's worst fear is losing Eden and Bradie. And much to his own horror, especially as he continues regenerating toward his previous full size, he realizes one of the things most likely to cause that to happen is… his own monstrous instincts.
When he was injured, Matt's body had undergone a hard-restart. Growing back to full size was like growing up all over again, and just recently he had started experiencing these insanely strong hunting urges, as if for the first time. It had caught him off guard, and Eden had… he didn't know, maybe just moved the wrong way at the wrong moment, and something in Matthew had screamed--
-- 'PREY.'
Guarding Eden's bedside that night, Matt promised himself he'd ensure this never happened again, or he would leave.
Grieving (Sketchtember 2024 - Day 12)
[V E S S E L S]
Ismaire:
The three exhausted survivors finally made it back to Wendthy's hideout to move her little family to somewhere safer, as agreed... only to find the door hanging open - and just past the threshold, her whole life turned upside-down.
No... not them, they were just children! It couldn't be too late. Wendthy couldn't have just lost everything she had worked so hard to protect because of one terrible, vengeance-driven mistake.
The kids couldn't have known what was going on outside. They must have seen her friend at the door and let him in, with no way of knowing he had downloaded that virus that was making every robot, cyber-body and implant in the city go nuts and... and do things like this.
Not the kids, please. Please let this be a bad dream.
Support (Sketchtember 2024 - Day 11)
[Sweet Nightmares]
Choi: Rico, Rico, oh Rico… She genuinely means well and is a brilliant mind when it comes to magitech engineering and field medicine, but her bedside manner has always been a point of contention from her teammates. Thankfully, she doesn't care what they think as long as she can do her job and get the results. Auset's her boss and his opinion trumps everyone else's. Besides, Auset's never told her to stop what she's doing in spite of the shared feedback.
The poor guy in the foreground is Dietrich. He remembers very well they had no choice about using duct tape last time, which he did consent. But that doesn't mean he appreciated her enthusiasm in MacGyvering a medical wrap out of an inappropriate adhesive.
Support (Sketchtember 2024 - Day 11)
[The Judge]
Ismaire:
I'm pleased I get to show off another member of Darr's hunting team in action. Reba is a fantastic team support, both in terms of her skillsets and her personality.
On the skill side, she is the "heavy" expert in the team, trained in using some of the most complex and dangerous equipment that HOST's operatives have access to - like a giant arm-cannon that requires a generator backpack and a delicate balance of timed shots in order to not risk overloading. Thanks to her body-building hobby, she's also able to use most of this equipment completely without implanted enhancements, which she is very proud of.
On the personality side, she is willing to drop pretty much all notion of self-preservation and rush her freckled ass into danger for the life of any teammate or bystander. She's an absolute determinator and would fight until the life leaves her body no matter how dismal the circumstances.
Movie Night (Sketchtember 2024 - Day 10)
[Sweet Nightmares]
Choi: The trio decided to watch The Nun for their movie night at Bidan's apartment. You would think that living a life of fighting monsters and exorcising ghosts would numb them to the horror genre, but it really doesn't. At least in their line of work, they have control of their actions and choices. It's different when you're watching helplessly as the audience...
The specific scene they're reacting to is when Sister Irene gets blindsided by one of the possessed nuns. Vance has an appropriate reaction to the jumpscare (his maek ears pop out when he's distressed). Poor MyungJin actually hates dealing with ghosts, and as far as she's concerned, demons are just god-modding ghosts. Bidan's gauge on being terrified by horror movies has yet to be determined, but he's not unhappy that he's in the middle of a cuddle sandwich; he's just critical of the human's stupid decisions for going without any firepower.
Movie Night (Sketchtember 2024 - Day 10)
[Rara Avis]
Ismaire:
Goldstone and Sandstone, the two oldest children of fai royalty, have abandoned their seats to sit as close as possible to the stage on "theater night." A specially requested performance group has come from across the kingdom to put on a play about the founding of the fai kingdom as it is known today, when their ancestor made a pact with the primal of the earth element and secured protection and prosperity for their people that has lasted tens of generations.
The two close siblings whisper and giggle to each other as they enjoy the colorful performers' prancing in elaborate, symbolic costumes. It's the most fun they've had since winter came and it got too chilly to play outside for long.
---
We haven't settled on the final designs of characters in this story and are still experimenting, so they are likely to change quite a bit as we nail it down, but we at least know these two cuties will be "fai" - a basically faerie-like race in the world of Rara Avis. More about them to come once they're grown-up~
I was just noticing how our Cara media was turning out, and had to take a sec to record this cute arrangement. Outer 4 corners are my sketches, with Izzy's in the cardinal directions.
In all my years online, I finally made a compressed GIF on my own. Nothing fancy other than the snipping tool's record and exporting with Clipchamp. Making that lil gif up there really got me to appreciate gifmakers who create hi-def gifs under the size limit and still make it look good. Hats off to you folks 🫡
Guilty Pleasure (Sketchtember 2024 - Day 9)
[Sweet Nightmares]
Choi: When he's not out hunting monsters with the Hunter's Guild, MyungJun is a voracious reader. He'll read fiction and nonfiction, but his real guilty pleasure is reading manhwa. Despite his serious exterior and discipline, MyungJun likes to kick back with a bit of fantasy and romance to recharge his batteries.
Guilty Pleasure (Sketchtember 2024 - Day 9)
[The Judge]
Ismaire: I guess it's about time I dragged Darr and Ashe into a sweet prompt together, huh?
Let this be proof that, at least much later in the story, Darr finally lets his death grip off the gas a little and learns to relax… sometimes. Almost exclusively with Ashe, and still not as much as he should, but he's learning. He still tends to feel like anything done for personal pleasure is a 'guilty' pleasure, but the two of them just love jamming together so much.
I mean, he painted those lilies on Ashe's guitar for him, for hell's sake. He's so dumb sometimes. Still, progress~
Morning Routine (Sketchtember 2024 - Day 8)
[Hollow Hearts]
Ismaire:
This is Samak and Cole again, although you'll notice that just in the few days since the last HH post, Casting Director Choi has changed their designs a bit, lol.
Being a honey rancher is not an easy job by any means, and this alien desert doesn't provide any easy conditions. But sometimes there are cool moments, like when you get to pet the giant fluffy bees and wake them up for the morning. (Getting covered in their scent puts the rest of the bees at ease so you can go harvest the produce. Also, it's fun~)
Morning Routine (Sketchtember 2024 - Day 8)
[V E S S E L S]
Choi: Obviously you can't see it, but Victor has worse sharpie graffiti on his front. Fortunately none made it on his face, which he made absolutely clear to anyone with the marker that he'd "bite their dick off."
... Yeah, Victor's a hot mess, but we love our high-functioning trash baby. Who says you can't party and run a high-profile company at the same time? All you need is a smart mirror and a daily planner 👍🏻
And for clarity's sake, he's brushing his teeth.
Happy Birthday (Sketchtember 2024 - Day 7)
[Sweet Nightmares]
Choi: When the main storyline starts, we have it set around June/July of 2018. MyungJin's birthday is on August 15th, so we planned to have some birthday shenanigans for our witch's 25th birthday :)
On a sidenote, MyungJin's not opposed to wearing lingerie. They just never really had people who were interested in it as much as their current boyfriends, so she can't help feeling bashful about wearing lacey intimates in front of people she just only started getting committed to. Plus when all MyungJin's ever worn were comfortable lounge clothes, flannels and denim, and one little black dress, expensive underwear doesn't even come into consideration.
At the same time, she isn't wrong for calling out Bidan's kink for lingerie. However self-serving it may seem, Bidan knows what he likes and takes great joy in giving his lovers all the finest garments he can buy for them 💖
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Happy Birthday (Sketchtember 2024 - Day 7)
[The Judge]
Ismaire:
Darr gets this Day 7 prompt for the second year in a row, whoops. He just has that kind of luck, I guess~ But where last year I showed him saying a happy birthday to someone who really needed it, this time he's wishing he could say it in a situation where it's just better for everyone if he doesn't.
He'll never send that text. He can't. This is supposed to be a one-way communication channel, and it's not worth the risk.
Target Sighted (Sketchtember 2024 - Day 6)
[Sweet Nightmares]
Choi: Remember Giuliano from awhile back? Yeah, that's him in his shifted bipedal form. Fox spirits in general are large in size (for example, Bidan's fox form measures to 8ft long from nose to hind quarters), so you can only imagine how menacing it must be to be stalked by a towering hulk like Giuliano.
Hopefully Bidan's backup is coming soon...
Target Sighted (Sketchtember 2024 - Day 6)
[RED]
Ismaire: This sketch prompt turned into a 3-panel sketch comic about how dragons in this world go just non-functionally feral around cats. In particular the dragons' young leader-to-be, Celine, loses her composure the first time she travels to a human town where they keep cats to hunt the mice, and… this.
Yep. Celine and I are one and the same in this regard. God I love cats a/sldfjdljafd;k
A little break from the Sketchtember prompts for a sec. Last couple days got busy so I'm playing catch up x_x
We've been playing around with Unvale.io as a way to organize our characters (sorta like Toyhou.se). The first time we fiddled around with it, it was neat to see pages for a gallery, traits, and even a written section for an OC. I just posted a drabble in there, so go check it out if you wanna read some pre-teen intro shenanigans :') MyungJin's kind of a butt, but what 12-year-old isn't?
Cuddle (Sketchtember 2024 - Day 5)
[Hollow Hearts]
Choi: Surprise, it's not Sweet Nightmares. Here's a pair of star-crossed space cowboys, bonding together after a long day's work on the honey ranch. For this universe's cowboys, though, they're actually referred to as "bumbleboys" because their livestock are giant alien bees 🐝🍯
Featured OCs from left to right are Samak and Cole. I'm still working out the foundation of their relationship, and tbh, parts of their designs too. Samak was originally an RP character I designed for a Tegaki E group back in the day. Meanwhile Cole was originally known as Casey, a backstory character whose death was used as an example for why Samak turned to bounty hunting. I plan to keep some of the tragedy from the original backstory, so I guess we'll see how it all shakes out in the future :)