( Spoilers for Torchwood and oh god great linky madness within. Enter at your own risk. )

This post brought to you by the ridiculously helpful mousies on wank_report, the letter W and the number 4. (The W is for wut and 4 is how many cups of coffee I've already had today).

Dearest, beloved, Fandom Wank.

I know you were looking forward to great excitement today. Some of you said words to me that indicated you anticipated fiery 'judgement' upon those who remained fresh and dewey white, those you call n00bs.

Anyway, you got today instead.

Stop anticipating things, we'll just break your hearts.

Sincerely,

Sepia P. Magpie, Esq.



PS: Use this post to reflect on how you could be better people. Or just fuck around in the comments.

Do you remember the Barista, please!(™) wank, wherein we learned the terrible trials and travails of brown people in SGA fandom AUs, and the original commenter was sorry, but the main banner waver that she tagged-in so she wouldn't have to soil her hands.... Well, that guy has issues in general. (Sambo? Really?)

More importantly, do you remember the extensive post on this topic by liviapenn, which probably had several good points that got totally buried when it devolved into a discussion about racist portrayals of Characters of Color as kitties?

Good. We're relatively caught up now. On with part two, because the whole damn fandom has fallen into this fountaining explosion of splooge, and they've started seriously flinging it into each other's eyes now.

You've got your countless discussions and debates. Was it rude? Are Ronon and Teyla aliens? (Wait, what?) Why should the writer's discomfort matter? Wait, isn't this actually about class? (Apparently not.) And so on and so forth. Metafandom has become almost entirely lost to debates about the justification for pulling white people over on the information superhighway.

But in amidst all the "No, you're racist," "No, you're overreacting," "No, you're missing the point," and "No, you are" arguments and counter-arguments, something really special is going down, because permetaform has decided that all these other discussions just aren't hard-core enough for her feelings on this topic. It's time for her to show just how much she despises "the other side" in this whole affair: by defriending and shutting out of her life anyone who might have been involved with the side she disagrees with about this.

No, really. Anyone. The deleted comment in its entirety? "LOL Agreed! :D" Nor is this the only case of probable overkill; the comments are chock-full of bewildered people wondering what the hell they did that was so bad.

In fact, not only is she defriending for people making humorous replies to anything involved in the matter, she's also defriending people for doing... absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell. ltlj--that LTLJ--certainly doesn't have the slightest clue what she did, and permetaform's reply appears to indicate she just didn't hear LTLJ agonizing about her supposed faults loudly enough in public. This might be because even coniraya--remember him?--thinks she handles race well in her writing. Naturally, this produces results, if possibly not the intended ones: LTLJ makes a post bitching permetaform out from head to toe, and then deletes her LJ, disgusted with the world in general.

How does permetaform feel about this? Well, in an ETA, she tells us:

I've just come back from doing errands and ltlj's recent post was pointed out to me.

And what I'm actually feeling right now is a great huge ball of relief. Because when I first saw ltlj's name come up as associated with this mess I felt a great sense of betrayal because I'd greated respected and admired her. Finding this out was on the tail of looking at comments from people I'd respected before and just...feeling all kinds of upset and astonishment.

So yes, I jumped to conclusions. So yes, I was considerably more angry than I should have been. And yes, I should have followed up on the names as I have done with the other names instead of immediately reacted the way I had.

I sincerely apologize to ltlj for finding ill in her when there was none. I apologize for not following up and double-checking her own words before defriending. I apologize for the tone in my own comment.

I don't apologize for calling her a racist because in my post I called both everyone and no one a racist, because I believe that everybody has elements of racism in themselves to a degree. I do not level "that obscene hateful accusation" because I don't think it's useful in discussions of prejudice.

And frankly, thank you for your ranty post. It makes me very relieved to have misjudged you because it makes me very relieved that I can keep my respect for you.

This, of course, is the original edit: she's edited the post about three times since, and will probably edit more. And thus the entire, wanky saga boils down to this: one woman apparently deciding it was all an after-school special style lesson to teach her about how it's okay to have faith in things, but you still shouldn't feel shy about declaring people to be racist.

Don't we all feel like we've learned something important, now?


Note: I have ltlj's post and several different edits of permetaform's post saved, and can upload and link upon request. And at the rate permetaform is changing what she's saying, by tomorrow she may be trying to insist all she was talking about was the goodness of fluffy bunnies, so keep your own save button handy.


ETA: Various edits of permetaform's post and a saved copy of LTLJ's post are here.

On the 4th, permetaform made a new post about this. A sample:

"I realized I was being Triggered during the events of the past post, Triggering being reacting to a present situation as if the person in the present is instead the person who've given one trauma in the past."

And from the mouths of experienced wank-watchers, a groan goes up....

omglawdork writes an SGA AU story in which Ronon is a barista.

It seems that "barista" is some kind of underground racial slur nowadays. I knew there was a reason I hated Starbucks.

ETA: Parts Two through A Billion