superborb

My thesis: everyone's unique and varied life histories mean that blunt forms of gatekeeping invariably hurt those they intend to help. No one is static and failure is how we grow.

I'll first discuss how my particular background affects my perspective, why I think gatekeeping negatively impacts people within the diaspora community, with a detour into how this leads to the facile recommendation of “research”.

The direction I'd like to push the conversation: examine your take and ask yourself who is going to read it? Who is going to read “you’re a guest in this house” and feel like, wait, are they really Chinese? What effect do you intend to have?

Disclaimer: the timing of this post is obviously in conversation with other tweets; however, it is not intended to directly address any particular tweet, but overall trends in fandom. In other words, this is not a subtweet of anyone, but rather arises from several conversations I've had over the last year. Parts of this post were written as far back as 2020!

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In conclusion: people should be allowed to fail in fandom, to get things wrong, to learn and to grow. If you're going to try to set norms, you need to consider their side effects and the rationales and logic behind those decisions.

1. Diaspora vs Chinese-from-China feelings on culture. Growing up diaspora means living through racism that completely colors the perspective -- it's hard to explain why wearing qipao as a costume is A Problem or cultural appropriation broadly to people who haven't had the experience of it being uncool and othering when you do something and then cool when a white person does it. From someone who grew up in the dominant culture, it just seems like a good thing that people are interested, right?

Anyway, this leads to a feeling (a logical one!) of possessiveness over the tidbits of culture that you can claim for yourself.

2. The nuances of cultural erasure for a canon that was created by the dominant ethnicity and culture of Somewhere Else. As point 1 says, I highly doubt Chinese-from-China would feel as possessive over MDZS/CQL as diaspora fans do. They have many canons that reflect their world; as diaspora, there is relatively few canons that speak to the Chinese diaspora experience. So we attach ourselves to the things we can see a glimmer of ourselves in, in familiar faces, even though we aren't really their target audience.

I personally don't like most modern AUs or really, fic that gets too removed from the Chinese roots of the canon and just /feels/ wrong. It's just not what I enjoy reading. But I'd argue that it's way more erasure to celebrate [insert vaguely often American modern AU here] through its ubiquity and influence on the fandom. I know I fall more on the "this is a transformative works" fandom side of things generally, though I also know that fic and fandom can be deeply racist. But blanket bans on what kind of transformative works are permissive... MDZS/CQL are out there in the world! We can't erase it by any fanworks.

I do fully understand /why/ people are uncomfortable with certain transformations, I just think that in the absence of criticism of transformations that are similar, it leads to point 3.

3. I am so, so, so uncomfortable with anti-Semitism in a world where the alt right is resurging. Adding to the previous tweets I made a while back, characterizing Jews as "greedy," "taking over" are clearly dogwhistles. Please, I beg you, do not. The double standard where Christian AUs don't get backlash? Also seriously anti-Semitic.

As a nonreligious person who grew up in the US, where Christian Chinese are common, I absolutely 100% really do not like Christian AUs. And hey-- I can skip them when they're tagged. The fic getting backlashed was tagged as AU and Jewish from the very beginning.

In conclusion, I don't really want to be ~discourse all the time~ like I feel like I've been recently. I wanted to do two things: a. to push back on the narrative of "you're pushing out diaspora folks!" a bit and b. leave an opening for my ideal, a more nuanced discussion about why certain things feel like erasure and certain things do not. I think it would be revealing.