barbie-ender-earl

[barbie-ender-earl]

yk what, man? I want justice for Nihachu. The dsmp fandom and mcyttwt treated her horribly, especially when she started distancing herself from W*lbur and accused the dsmp writing team (headed by him) of pushing her out. She's undergone so much abuse in her life and there is no way her relationship with W*lbur, whatever it was like, was healthy. She deserves so much love and support.

[barbie-ender-earl]

Uncle taught

[barbie-ender-earl]

hi, i completely agree that the fandom has a problem with misogyny and often fails at self-introspection. my question is, do you have any resources/tips/thoughts on how to be better about it? even, how to recognize it in yourself the first place? "ok i'll stop being a misogynist now" is a lot easier said than done, especially for people who might not be that educated on the subject, and majority of the people in this fandom are quite young as well.

this is long as fuck and possibly somewhat incoherent bc it took so long to write but i did my best

my biggest tip for people who don't know much about misogyny is to look at your own behavior and learn how to clock what you're doing as sexist.

are you criticizing a female creator? think about why you're doing it, what the actual beef you have with them is. if it seems to be just a sense of discomfort or thinking they're annoying or overly loud or pushy, think about male ccs who act the same way and why you dont consider them annoying. are you annoyed with them for being on a male cc's stream? why? does it feel like theyre taking up too much attention? do you get annoyed with them for talking too much or flirting with guys? for gaming especially-- do you get annoyed with them for not knowing something or being "bad" at a game? think about why that is and why its just funny when a male cc is bad at games or doesnt know something.

a HUGE problem i see in this fandom is the Madonna-whore complex, repackaged as the little sister-racist dichotomy (kudos to @yourlittlemenace for that phrasing).

if a female cc is deemed to be "playing nice" (doesnt talk too much, is "nice", streams with male ccs but doesnt flirt with them, isn't "overtly sexual"), she's the little sister of the group. all the male ccs "protect" her, she literally folds their laundry, she doesnt call out how people treat her, and the fandom pretends that this is a normal and cool way to treat women who are public figures. this also goes for mom/big sister/etc. if you think you haven't done this, think about all the aus where you've forced puffy into some kind of maternal or sisterly role when it made no sense. then think about how pissed people got when she decided not to be the server therapist and was "mean" to Tommy (in lore, with permission. that she didnt even need to get. see that clip i rbed earlier from her podcast.)

if the fandom decides she doesnt play nice, if she flirts with male ccs too much or stands up for herself or points out how unfair it is that she's being treated this way, she gets demeaned, harassed, and shunned by the fandom. consider, again, puffy. consider how niki flirted with wilbur and talked about misogyny and got called a racist for *checks notes* "speaking to schlatt and fundy" and "not being a native english speaker". she got called a slut and a queerbaiter for kissing another woman despite being bisexual.

consider how hard people went down on hannah for having said the r slur several years back versus how hard they went on dream for the same thing. and how people dug it up as a direct response to her being on stream with dream. consider how every time hannah talks about how unfair it is that the mcc subreddit treats her like trash, she has to delete all her tweets bc they harass her to hell and back and act like she's an asshole for pointing out their hypocrisy.

the fandom doesnt do this across the board; i shouldnt have to say this, but its not an everyone versus no one issue. some people do this outright and loud, some dont seem to realize theyre doing it, and a few people dont do it at all (incredibly rare, i can count on one hand the number of people who genuinely seem to try to avoid these issues, which is why im complaining).

in terms of lore, have you ever once done analysis on a female character? why do you think you haven't? the bechdel-wallace test is an (imperfect) way of gauging how a piece of media ignores women and prioritizes men. think about the fact that there are FOUR female ccs on the DSMP and they are continually ignored in favor of male characters. consider that puffy and aimsey both talked about trying to do genuine lore and getting shafted, either because no one was online and wouldn't put in the effort to stream with them or because they received insane amounts of criticism for breaking anything on the server, despite the clear lack of "no griefing" rules and the precedent that you can blow other people's shit up (tommy leveling one of puffy's builds, amongst many other examples).

a quick thing about ships: have you ever wondered why m/m ships are so popular? the general consensus amongst people who care about feminism and are into fandom studies is that for a long period of time, m/m was hugely popular because women are so rarely written as full and complete characters in any media. so people took to engaging with m/m ships and writing about them because they were the most fulfilling relationships, and because misogyny led them to be predisposed to be uninterested in female characters.

say an m/m ship is incredibly popular, something like, i dunno, john watson and sherlock holmes from bbc sherlock. lets also say the canonical media presents one or both of the characters with a female love interest. how do you think a fandom that prioritizes m/m ships and is primed to be disinterested in women as characters (either because of our society's role in teaching people that women do not matter or because of fandom's history in assuming female characters are not fleshed out) is going to react? if you said theyre going to send undue amounts of criticism her way and act like its an act of homophobia to give a canonically straight character a female love interest, congrats, you've figured out a huge component in fandom misogyny. take this, amplify it over several decades, and add the psychic damage that supernatural gave society. queerbaiting is bad but mistreating female characters in service of nonexistent queer relationships is also bad.

this is relevant in general but i also believe its relevant for the dsmp because of the complete lack of m/f ships. aside from phil and kristin, who are literally married irl and kristin isn't even on the server, there are no m/f ships that involve female creators. this is not, despite what you may think, due to the inherently yaoi nature of minecraft roleplay. this is because the creators, including the male ones, are afraid of the blowback of m/f flirting and how fucking awful people are to female ccs anytime it happens. once again look at niki. as another example, consider how notfounders harassed the living daylights out of mxmtoon for flirting with gnf on twitter. if i was a cc i would avoid it like the plague too considering how happy people are to dig shit up about them or accuse them of being a slut or an attention whore/"pick me girl" for speaking to a man.

one last thing, this is more about fanart than anything else but stop drawing women to look like teenage boys. the amount of fanart i see where i literally cannot tell if someone has drawn niki or tommy is fucking insane. niki has curves. draw her with them. if you cannot draw women or people outside a very specific body type you cannot draw. fatphobia and misogyny have a clear overlap.

i cant think of anything else and ive already spent forever on this. look into feminist media analysis. think twice about how you react to female ccs & female characters. consider not just what characters have interesting stories but who is allowed to have interesting stories. you might be neglecting someone who has a lot going on because you're dismissing a female character as inherently less likely to be interesting. you might not even know someone has an interesting story because the fandom neglects it so completely.

as a final little note: like i said earlier, if you're not familiar with gender & sexuality studies, you may not know this, but homophobia and transphobia are rooted in misogyny. the idea that gender is immutable and rigid is because of the patriarchy. this is why gendered slurs are used against queer people and why queer men in particular get accused of and demeaned for being feminine. your understanding of queerphobia is incomplete without considering how sexism plays a role.

also go read everything rayne fisher-quann has ever written but especially this piece on getting woman'd and listen to you're wrong about

#I've thought about all of this!! #finally someone has written out all the ways this community was misogynist 😭 #but I'll just add that tommys 'comedic style' back when I was still into the dsmp was blatantly sexist #and no one really cared cause 'he's little brother coded' 'he's only 17!' 'I'm a girl and it doesn't bother me 😊' #like I'm sorry but my little brother is his age and if I heard him call Puffy 'captain pussy' on a stream with thousands of people watching #I'd assault him

[barbie-ender-earl]

This is all I've been thinking about for the past few days

[barbie-ender-earl]

[barbie-ender-earl]

some of the best media to come out of this fandom have been the sadist animatics mangoball and tubbo3091

[barbie-ender-earl]

A symphony forever unfinished

[barbie-ender-earl]

@ Dream SMP Bloggers: Apologize to Michael Mcchill.

#i stopped caring about the dsmp ages ago #but his stuff was so cool #one of the many ccs who would've done amazing stuff if they'd been given the chance to push it farther

[barbie-ender-earl]

The dream smp ccs had something unique and beloved and super interesting and they got too cocky and careless with it and killed it. They had one of the biggest fandoms that only happens once in a decade in their hands and they killed it. They killed it by being inconsistent, giving empty promises, using the fans' love for the server as a way to get high viewer counts.

They killed it by not communicating with each other, actively excluding other ccs, and they killed it by giving one of the most important storylines in it one of the lamest they couldve come up with.

And I am sorry for all of us who loved this story and held hope for it to be better, for those who hoped that the ccs would actually be careful with the topics they portrayed. I'm sorry to those who spent months, years creating and making analysis and theorizing and doing the art and fanfics and animations, who have to be let down like this due to a rushed ending that came from damage control lore streams.

Just remember that at this point. S1 and the characters in it are for us to use. Your hcs and what-ifs cannot be decanonized now. Go ham.

One of the best parts of the dsmp was the fandom. The way we took crumbs and turned them into a feast. I hope that if you still care about the Season 1 after this to not be discouraged to make your own version of it in your head. Create the narrative that you wish you had.

#they really had an incredible thing going #but then when it stopped being fun they threw it away #and whenever they wanted those sweet views back they'd reanimate it's corpse and act like it never died #then abandon it again in a week #leaving the smaller ccs there with nothing to do cause they had no authority over the storyline #all bullshit #I'm not gonna say it was all a waste though cause season 1 was incredible #and if I'd never been introduced to the dsmp I'd never have known who Technoblade was so I don't regret a moment of it

[barbie-ender-earl]

can people on twitter just fucking trend #DreamGroomingAllegations or some shit at this point bc clearly no cc gives a fuck about #DropDream trending bc it just sounds like a normal ass dream anti trend that they dont wanna take seriously

#really tired of seeing this ignored #dreamwastaken #dream #tw grooming

[barbie-ender-earl]

two of them

[barbie-ender-earl]

everyone tagging that “mourned by the narrative” post as c!wilbur is making me crazy because like. in the most literal way the story missed him. it ached without him. does anyone hear me. there’s something about the way the story fractured into parts after he died that feels like grief. there’s something about it that feels just like it. i’m going insane

[barbie-ender-earl]

i think (cc) hannah ponk fundy eret bbh niki michael eryn cpk and aimsey all deserve a thousand dollars in reparations for how dirty they got treated both by other ccs and fans re: dsmp lore

[barbie-ender-earl]

Unicorn Technoblade cause yes, I think he's cool like that

*Grits teeth* don't make a pinkie pie connection

[barbie-ender-earl]

mentorly advice

[barbie-ender-earl]

the mangoball prophecy

[barbie-ender-earl]

Another mangoball special would fix me tbh