What Are Your Thoughts On RPF?

what are your thoughts on RPF?

Chris Hemsworth could hold a gun to my head or promise me the reward of groping his thighs and I still wouldn't read self-insert/reader RPF.

I swear people who write self-insert and reader RPF fanfiction have a personal mission to flood any and every relevant tag they possibly can with it. Its like they have a game of seeing just how many tags they can force me to add to my block list.

I do, however, fully support RPF as a form of fiction, and I do read celebrity/celebrity RPF. I think, like any true 2012 girlie, my first dip into RPF was One Direction.

I have some points of contention with it, and I could talk quite a bit about the differences in respect, interaction and boundaries between RPF and character fiction, but the gist is that I wholeheartedly support RPF and consider it a valid form of fiction.

Pre-emptively blocking people is good for everyone.

Seriously. The amount of times I see people whining or laughing about being blocked when they 'haven't even done anything' just tells me that not many of you know its actually a really good way to properly curate your online space, and its not something to be offended over.

Blocking is a form of protection. Its also a form of mutual protection.

Especially on websites that don't offer more extensive or usable filtering, tagging and avoidance options. Twitter, for example.

Blocking isn't some personal insult. Its a method of saying; hey, we clearly shouldn't interact, so I'm gonna build this soundproof wall between us to make sure we can't.

To use The Salmon Analogy, if I run a restaurant based on salmon as the main ingredient, and you're allergic or or severely dislike salmon, me refusing to serve you isn't a personal sleight. Its me recognising that you can't or really don't want to eat salmon, and its me protecting you from an unpleasant experience and myself from you inevitably screaming at me for serving salmon.

If you are someone who enjoys 'objectionable' content, such as gore, and you stumble across an extremely anti-gore blog, its absolutely a viable option to pre-emptively block them. Maybe your paths never would've crossed, but its better to ensure they don't than potentially wind up the victim or hate or harassment.

Blocking is an absolute sure-fire way to ensure that you do not see something you do not want to. It should be used as liberally as you want to.

starker, destiel, now you got me real curious what other ships you like ;)

If they're two attractive men, I like them.

If they're two attractive women, I like them.

Here in the House of Gays we honor and feast upon most. Not all, because we do have some standards here, but most.

Although in all honesty I don't know if I have the right to claim being 'a Starker' (do they have a fanmade fandom name? Or are they just Starkers?) because I think the last time I read Starker was when Endgame came out. I think its hot, but I'm not particularly invested in it. I just also know it gets a shit tonne of hate and the people who do ship it get attacked a lot, so thusly a shield to the innocent my body became.

I'm going to be fully honest, I hate the use of problematic as a coined term for fictional ships. I feel like problematic has just become one of those terms tossed around at anything and everything and often used as a gotcha net.

"I don't care about your ships as long as they're not problematic."

Okay. Are we talking about incest or just a ship where they have clashing political opinions?

Am I not allowed to ship the sentient wolf creature with the twink or am I not allowed to ship the two middle aged store clerks who have different views on wanting children?

What if one half of my canon ship gets de-aged to eighteen? Is it suddenly problematic to ship them for as long as that character remains de-aged?

What kind of age brackets are we defining as problematic these days? What are the cut-off points for when its not problematic for two people to fall in love? What if one person has a birthday before the other one and for a few months they're not part of that acceptable bracket anymore?

Problematic is just being used as a one-word way to shut people down and force them to comply with your own expectations and boundaries. Problematic is thrown around as a way to box people into behaving and existing in ways that make you comfortable.

"I don't like the way that you exist so I'm going to brand you as this negative word that forces you to change to suit my preferences or be shunned by society."

Problematic means to constitute as or to present a problem. It is not the shiny new term for 'if you ship this thing you're a terrible person.'

"If you like monsterfucking or eat meat you can't reblog my aesthetic slime post" is honestly the funniest concept to come out of the new age of social entitlement tbh.

I wish I had a place to post my fucked up arts without being cancelled 😭

Honestly I think the drawn arts have suffered perhaps the most out of modern censorship. Especially the communities, too, because when sites ban things to please advertisers, investors and the handful of people squawking about protecting the children, it creates this mentality of; 'if its been banned its bad, so whoever makes it or enjoys it is bad too.'

There will literally always be at least one person who comes after you for what you create. Lord knows I enough enough angry anons in my inbox on a daily basis and all I do is rant about antis and occasionally knock my braincells together with enough force to say something vaguely helpful.

My best advice for avoiding being 'cancelled' is to heavily, heavily curate your online space and the people you aim to include within it. This could be by:

Following specifically other blogs who post similar content or express interest in similar content to what you produce or your interests.

Pre-emptively blocking blogs who express disgust or hatred for the content you produce or like, blogs who express moral stances conflicting to yours, ect. This is expressly helpful on sites like Twitter where options to limit engagement are limited.

Tagging properly, and including trigger and warnings tags whom others are likely to have blocked. This prevents people from seeing something they don't want to, and also gives you coverage if they try to accuse you of 'spreading it around.'

In cases of art that may have more extreme content, try using spoiler flags or any filtration option that requires viewers to actively consent to viewing it. Relevant to above, nobody can cry wolf about 'being exposed' because they would've had to physically reveal the work to themselves.

DeviantArt unfortunately recently changed its policies to a frankly ridiculously constrictive degree, so while I previously would've recommended that as a place to host your artwork and find a safer community, I can no longer. Hopefully someone is successful in pushing for the site to reform to its previous rules soon.

ArtStation is an option. The site is not eligible to anyone under 18 and sexual, gore, fetish, and 'mature' content is allowed provided the usual stipulation that you aren't using it in order to cause, infer or threaten harm against someone. A lot of the site is geared toward marketing artwork, though, so you might be hard pressed to find more of a community aspect to it.

Rule 34.com is... Objectively one of the best places you can host your artwork if you create content that is based on sexual themes. The protective rights aren't the greatest, but anyone who uses Rule 34 has no leg to stand on regarding morality and censorship.

Reddit has a lot of subreddits for sharing art, and a bonus is you can find subreddits specifically geared toward artwork based on things like gore, violence, sexual content, ect. Filtering options and monitoring are basically non-existent, however. Also, Reddit sometimes spontaneously decides a specific post is against its TOS and yeets it.

There's also the option of building a Discord server based around sharing artwork of certain themes, which is objectively the format that allows you the most control over who views it, but it also means your art has a limited presence. (Can't be reblogged, ect.)

If you do check out any of the websites, always be thorough in reading the Terms of Service and the Community Guidelines.