![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
A depressing reflection on the current state of Spuffy fandom
I've spent the past few months rediscovering my love of my very first ship: Spuffy
But lately I'm starting to feel like every author in the AO3 tag is a racist SWERF.
I had a particularly traumatic experience yesterday with a WIP I'd been following.
I've liked some of the author's other stories. I thought this one had a particularly interesting premise: what if Riley got turned after he started visiting the suckhouse?
The author seemed like they were really trying, in the beginning, to be conscientious about representation of marginalized people.
The author wrote a scene in which Buffy has a nightmare about her awful soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend Riley cutting off pieces of her body to “make her fit in a box.” That scene was accompanied by a very long author’s note explaining that the author by no means believes that people who are born with missing limbs are less whole or less fully human and that the scene is my no means meant to perpetuate ableist beliefs.
Yesterday, the author posted the chapter in which Riley gets turned into a vampire. Riley is turned against his will, by a vampire sex worker. The scene is written as a sexual assault. The author, again, put very conscientious warnings on the chapter to protect people from being triggered by this sexual assault scene.
Meanwhile, the same chapter introduces an “exotic, foreign” dark-skinned vampire prostitute OC, and then promptly has said OC murdered at the hands of the story’s romantic lead.
Apparently the author thought the best way to establish that the story’s romantic male lead was 1) bisexual and 2) faithful devoted to the female lead (whom he is not actually dating yet) was to have him “resist the temptation” to fuck a “dirty brown foreign whore” and then kill said “dirty brown foreign whore” in his “pure white” Buffy’s honor.
The author didn’t even try to make it seem like Spike was killing the vampire prostitute for murdering humans. Spike instead has an entire mental rant about how prostitutes are worthless and pathetic and deserve death no matter how much he might want to fuck this particular one.
This is the same author who was so worried about offending the disabled and triggering sexual assault victims that they wrote entire paragraphs worth of author’s notes angsting about the importance of good, conscientious representation. But they saw nothing amiss with this horrifically offensive racist caricature of an OC they invented.
Not a moment of consideration for how non-white Spuffy fans might feel reading a scene like that. I suppose the author thought we’d be “flattered” by the dehumanizing sexual exotification of the dark skinned foreign other. I’m sure this all seemed really romantic in the author’s head.
I left a comment expressing how, well, blindsided I felt about the latest narrative turn.
I think the author responded, but I don't really want to read their response, because I suspect it will only make me angrier.
The author posted another chapter today.
The more the story gets into the dark underworld of vampire prostitution and "bite addicts" the more it feels like the author is using this fictional environment as "safe outlet" to express their very real contempt for real life sex workers and real life addicts.
The further the story goes along the more I get the impression that the author really does think that real life sex workers and drug addicts are less than human and better off dead and need to be punished for their very existence.
This isn't the first time I've been reading a Spuffy fic that started to feel like vitriolic SWERF propaganda halfway through. However, this is the first time the author used the death of an invented "exotically beautiful foreign dark-skinned duplicitous queer slut" OC to make their point.
I've been leaving encouraging comments on pretty much every chapter up to this point. I don't imagine I'll ever leave another comment on any of this author's fic ever again.
This experience is leaving a very bitter taste in my mouth.
How many more of the Spuffy WIP's I'm following are going to betray me like this?
On the one hand I want to find new fanfic to cleanse my palate. On the other, I'm not really feeling resilient enough to get emotionally invested in new fic.
I feel like I need a brand new fandom, but nothing new has caught my interest in ages.
Ugh.
Perhaps I should just go back to working on that original novel I started prior to the beginning of the pandemic.
But lately I'm starting to feel like every author in the AO3 tag is a racist SWERF.
I had a particularly traumatic experience yesterday with a WIP I'd been following.
I've liked some of the author's other stories. I thought this one had a particularly interesting premise: what if Riley got turned after he started visiting the suckhouse?
The author seemed like they were really trying, in the beginning, to be conscientious about representation of marginalized people.
The author wrote a scene in which Buffy has a nightmare about her awful soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend Riley cutting off pieces of her body to “make her fit in a box.” That scene was accompanied by a very long author’s note explaining that the author by no means believes that people who are born with missing limbs are less whole or less fully human and that the scene is my no means meant to perpetuate ableist beliefs.
Yesterday, the author posted the chapter in which Riley gets turned into a vampire. Riley is turned against his will, by a vampire sex worker. The scene is written as a sexual assault. The author, again, put very conscientious warnings on the chapter to protect people from being triggered by this sexual assault scene.
Meanwhile, the same chapter introduces an “exotic, foreign” dark-skinned vampire prostitute OC, and then promptly has said OC murdered at the hands of the story’s romantic lead.
Apparently the author thought the best way to establish that the story’s romantic male lead was 1) bisexual and 2) faithful devoted to the female lead (whom he is not actually dating yet) was to have him “resist the temptation” to fuck a “dirty brown foreign whore” and then kill said “dirty brown foreign whore” in his “pure white” Buffy’s honor.
The author didn’t even try to make it seem like Spike was killing the vampire prostitute for murdering humans. Spike instead has an entire mental rant about how prostitutes are worthless and pathetic and deserve death no matter how much he might want to fuck this particular one.
This is the same author who was so worried about offending the disabled and triggering sexual assault victims that they wrote entire paragraphs worth of author’s notes angsting about the importance of good, conscientious representation. But they saw nothing amiss with this horrifically offensive racist caricature of an OC they invented.
Not a moment of consideration for how non-white Spuffy fans might feel reading a scene like that. I suppose the author thought we’d be “flattered” by the dehumanizing sexual exotification of the dark skinned foreign other. I’m sure this all seemed really romantic in the author’s head.
I left a comment expressing how, well, blindsided I felt about the latest narrative turn.
I think the author responded, but I don't really want to read their response, because I suspect it will only make me angrier.
The author posted another chapter today.
The more the story gets into the dark underworld of vampire prostitution and "bite addicts" the more it feels like the author is using this fictional environment as "safe outlet" to express their very real contempt for real life sex workers and real life addicts.
The further the story goes along the more I get the impression that the author really does think that real life sex workers and drug addicts are less than human and better off dead and need to be punished for their very existence.
This isn't the first time I've been reading a Spuffy fic that started to feel like vitriolic SWERF propaganda halfway through. However, this is the first time the author used the death of an invented "exotically beautiful foreign dark-skinned duplicitous queer slut" OC to make their point.
I've been leaving encouraging comments on pretty much every chapter up to this point. I don't imagine I'll ever leave another comment on any of this author's fic ever again.
This experience is leaving a very bitter taste in my mouth.
How many more of the Spuffy WIP's I'm following are going to betray me like this?
On the one hand I want to find new fanfic to cleanse my palate. On the other, I'm not really feeling resilient enough to get emotionally invested in new fic.
I feel like I need a brand new fandom, but nothing new has caught my interest in ages.
Ugh.
Perhaps I should just go back to working on that original novel I started prior to the beginning of the pandemic.
no subject