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Due South fandom wanks like a Mountie...
...meaning politely, with excessive courtesy, and attempting to make as little noise as possible. But in the end, someone's still gonna have to launder the long johns.

And somehow, over a decade later, the wank is still all about the Rays.

First, belmanoir posts about, generally, the marginalization of Fraser/Vecchio shippers by Fraser/Kowalski fans, and why it's important to phrase things carefully, and be respectful of everybody's shipping preferences, and that "If you're concerned that something you're planning to post might be offensive, consider running it by a non-F/K shipper to get their opinion."

In the comments, mikes_grrl gets a tad defensive, and provides some background:

mikes_grrl: I can't pretend that this post isn't in response to ME. I know it is.... It was my experience that posting my own opinion, carefully hedging that it was my opinion, in a comm got me slapped down FOR MY OPINION. I joined the comm because I thought it was about the love of the pairing in question, but my impression now is the comm is for those who love that pairing exclusive of all others. Which, really, is fine. It's just not my cup of tea. That's why I left the comm.

nakeisha: The problem for me with your post on [info]ds_closet was mainly one of timing insofar as you chose to rave about how much you liked Ray K and F/K on a F/V comm in a month that was dedicated solely to the love of F/V. I'm sure that had it been made at any other time, there would have been less upset. But you did it during the Fraser/Vecchio Valentine's Month. I know your post included a passing reference to you loving F/V as well, but the main focus was F/K and RK.

mikes_grrl: Quite frankly, no, I don't see what you are saying at all. I'm sorry, but did you READ my post? I'm assuming you did, but wow -- we see it entirely differently. I did not "rave" about F/K love and then mention F/V in passing. I also did not eventually go back and try to imply what I was saying was my opinion, I stated from the very top of the post that everything I said in it was my opinion. When that was not enough, I went back and edited to clarify even more what I had already thought was clear.

Let me clarify: The whole gist of my post was that F/K fic is prevalent in the fandom, which is why it is hard to find really good F/V fic, and oh I found this awesome F/V fic and I want to share it with you. That was what the post was about. Period. The fact that I mentioned my own appreciation of F/K as an element of that should not have been an issue. Really, it should NOT have been an issue.

But herein is my point: by even mentioning F/K, my post was labeled "Pro-F/K - Anti-F/V" which is absurd. Just totally absurd.

Elsewhere, the dreaded moniker "Stan" is deployed, leading to, among other things, eggplant-based analogies.

"Respect has to go both ways."

Vecchio fans = LOL SENSITIVE. At least that's what I'm getting from this anecdote.

F/K subtext? What F/K subtext? Also, please refrain from slighting our sparkly welcomingness.

"I love how carefully worded and reasoned this post is.... Personally I think you hedge a bit too much."

It's all very polite and thoughtful and considerate... maybe a little too polite and thoughtful and considerate.

ignazwisdom is not impressed:

Honestly, DS fandom, you are one of the nicest groups of people around. That's usually a great thing. It makes the fandom very welcoming to newcomers. Sometimes, though, the obsession with being the Nicest People Ever gets a little bit out of control and actually starts to alienate people, including people who've been in the fandom for years.

...

But fans taking their toys and going home over incidents like that is totally old meme, so I'm more alarmed by the number of people nodding along and saying that yes, people should never talk about how they're not interested in Not-So-Popular Character A or Not-So-Popular Pairing B because that's hurtful to fans of Character A and Pairing B. (Or, whatever, people should think real hard before they say anything about a character or pairing lest it offend someone who likes that character or pairing. It adds up to the same thing.)

zvi_likes_tv also has stuff to say:

[The OP] would be laughed out of, well, every other large fandom I've ever been in for suggesting that not slagging off on someone else's favorite fictional character would make you a better person [not slagging off on the characters because they are female or not ignoring the characters because they are not white, to me and many other people, is a different case than announcing to all and sundry, "Eh, dude's fugly"]. And the thing about making the veiled threat that the F/V people will leave all the F/K people to stew in their own Kowalski-ly juices is that ... that's not an intrinsic problem for people who like Kowalski, anyway. The people who swing both Rays can border-cross to the F/V exclusive comms, and be part of the larger fandom, and the Vecchio only people can live in their gated Italian enclave, and the only reason this would be a problem for F/K people is the subcultural blackmail of the Ray Wars.

and

There's a difference between "my life would be better if the world were like this" and "I think you're behaving badly." Bel's post was structured like someone challenging racism, a moral issue. It's not "you're making me sad when you act racist"; it's "your racist behavior is wrong." People couching it in terms of politeness also are making it a moral issue. The opposite of a polite person is a rude person. And rude people are bad people. So, saying, "This is an impolite behavior," effectively, is "Only bad people will keep doing this after I tell them to stop it."

I can't see the moral wrongness in saying, however forcefully, to anyone who isn't David Marciano or his family, that you don't want to imagine the homosexual adventures of a character he played on TV 15 years ago.

...does it count as racewank when the point of the exchange is that, hi, it's NOT racewank?

zvi_likes_tv: [the original post] is classic Cult of Nice. Very much on the "everyone should just be polite, but I'm not going to define polite behavior, because you should know without me telling you, because you are, of course, polite in the way I mean" wavelength. And it co-opts a lot of language and arguments that have been made with regard to racism, etc., in a way which I find extremely discomfiting, inasmuch as Vecchio fan has a history of persecuted minority of about ... fifteen years? and almost no one has ever lost a job or suffered violence or the dissolution of their family because they think David Marciano was hot in a gay way.

secretlybronte: This keeps being... said. In places. About the language of oppression being used inappropriately in this discussion. I would very much like to see it stop. On the flipside, I just posted an entire thing below that was basically like, "Woo for freedom of speech" or, like, freedom to misuse critically important terminology.

zvi_likes_tv: Well, my take on it is, one can appropriate the language of fighting oppression to discuss how one feels when someone dislikes one's favorite fictional character. And I can think that one is…how to say this without sounding like a dick myself?…demonstrating one's lack of understanding of the discussions about race and other intersectional problems, in a way which stops me from taking one seriously as an intellectual opponent or a mature adult.

fspider: Oh, well said about the language issues. When I first read it, I thought it might be some bizarre take on the recent racefail, and then was really uncomfortable when I realized it was supposed to be interpreted straight. You could find/replace some of the stuff around how to apologize for unintended offense, but the core subject is on radically different planets.

The language of challenging racism: you're using it wrong.

Me, I'm just still bemused by the concept of DS fandom being biased against F/V shippers. THE REVOLUTIONARIES HAVE BECOME THE OPPRESSORS!

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	charmian 2009-02-17 08:06 pm UTC (link)
	These Ray Wars you speak of.... Are they like Star Wars or something? (They seem to have been long ago, but not in a galaxy far, far away.) (Reply to this)(Thread)