thought experiment:
a fanartist shares her work online. it’s good. astonishingly good, so good that even people outside of fandom can appreciate it.
is it okay to send this artist death threats?
this artist is a bit arrogant maybe? like she sometimes responds to compliments on her artwork with agreement. she believes she’s extremely talented and doesn’t act humble about it or downplay it.
how about now? are death threats okay? what about rape threats?
you think her artwork might be fake, actually. most people’s first response to seeing her art is “this isn’t a photo???” and now you’re looking at it and…maybe it IS a photo and she’s just put a filter over it/done some clever editing in photoshop. you feel duped.
is it okay to send her death threats now? or rape threats? or maybe a message telling her to kill herself? she’s faking art for popularity, after all.
even if her art isn’t fake, she seems to produce a lot of fandom wank and drama. she constantly whines about the hate she gets, probably just to get sympathy points. maybe she’s also faking the supposed hate she gets for attention.
hell, if she wants to be pitied for getting hate, why not give her some? is it okay to send death threats, rape threats, suicide baiting at this point?
people say nice things to her and she bites their head off. she posts the anon hate she gets, including some of the graphic rape threats, without trigger warnings. she ignores advice to turn off anonymous messages and block/report the people who send her hate. she seems mean. she seems utterly unwilling to accept help.
how about now?
considering all of that, is it okay to send her death threats? rape threats? suicide baiting?
I sincerely fucking hope you already know the answer is no, no, no, no, no, it is never fucking okay to send those things to someone. not even if they seem like an obstinate asshole who gets way more credit than they deserve.
and you’ve probably already guessed that this is about a real person. if you’ve been in fandom spaces for any length of time, you’ve almost certainly seen art by @eliciadonze (also known as euclase). that art you saw and went “I’m sorry did you say this was a drawing?!?” was probably hers. she’s amazing. and she’s been getting hate, death threats, rape threats, suicide baiting, every single day, primarily from the Supernatural fandom,
for 10+ years
it’s not fucking okay. even if you believe every rumor you’ve heard about her or you’ve personally seen how she handles the hate she gets and you disapprove. if you’ve ever sent Elicia a hateful message, you are cordially invited to fucking unfollow me.
for the record,
- she really is that talented
- she worked hard for that talent and how much pride she takes in it is not up to you
- she gets hate when anon is off, and she turns it on so she can post the hate, because posting non-anon hate is dangerous for her
- she posts the hate because sometimes she just doesn’t fucking want to be alone with it anymore, which is completely understandable
- it’s not suspicious that she later deletes the hate. she’s allowed to not want to keep their vitriol up on her blog, for any reason
- blocking and reporting people who send her hate is dangerous for her
- she gets hate on every platform and through her email. she cannot turn this off if she just, like, really tried
- she does not know who to trust because the same people who send nice messages send anon hate. she’s discovered people she thought were her friends had sent anon hate upon blocking the anon. I personally witnessed someone make a pretense of running a blog archiving her Supernatural fanart for her, only to reveal themselves as a hater doing this just to insult her at the end of it, for no reason other than to undermine her trust in people. you do not understand the extent to which people hate her.
- traumatized people are not obligated to be unfailingly nice to people before they deserve kindness, before they deserve a life without abuse
- she’s trying to tag trigger warnings, but if you’re more outraged over her neglecting to tag triggering messages directed at her because someone else might be affected by it than over someone sending her the triggering message in the first place…your outrage is performative and you fail at being compassionate towards people in situations with any kind of nuance
- she did not do anything to deserve this. she does not deserve this. no one deserves this.
TL;DR: if you’ve ever sent @eliciadonze a hateful message, you aren’t welcome on my blog. she doesn’t deserve the daily abuse she gets.
(if you want to support Elicia her ko-fi is here and she appreciates reblogs of her artwork.)
Hi please reblog the shit out of this amazing coherent message from a kind person who understands why victim blaming is bad for all of us
Friendly reminder that this is still happening.
This is horrible that anyone would send such threats but to have it ongoing for a decade?? Because she’s sharing her ART??
Fuck y'all who sent her hate, if you’re on my page you’re definitely not welcome here either.
Without sounding (lmao any worse? utterly surrendering my dignity at this point?), this post doesn’t even begin to cover it.
I have a lot of new followers.
So I’ll just tell you: it’s worse than this. It’s been worse than this for more than ten years.
This post covers a single fandom. Like. I drew a lot of art for that fandom for a long time, but that’s just that fandom. This post doesn’t describe how other fandoms, men, nerd culture, mainstream art, etc. have treated me. This doesn’t describe hate blogs made by other fandoms. Sexual harassment that drove me from Deviantart. Sabotage of my career. This doesn’t cover it.
Experience tells me people don’t have patience for complaining. They don’t want to hear whining, and they certainly don’t want to hear even more whining.
I have to wait for people to make posts like this so anyone will listen. I have to wait for someone else to notice I’m bleeding.
I have to make my problems small and singular so you’ll believe them.
It’s the Supernatural fandom, and it’s a lot more than that.
The “my little random moments of pleasure” series:
EW Supernatural Halloween Photoshoot 2017 N°1 {x}
