DRAMA!

I suppose I’ve had to talk it about it sooner or later. I’ve taken to using the term ‘Drama!’ very recently due to some of the Drama! coming from Waicon the other week. Whilst I’ve stated a lot of what I thought about stuff on a previous blog post *insert url link here*, I’m not going over that again except that today I’ve been pointed out to a notorious figure with the Australian costuming community and their perpetually bad behaviour¹. I don’t want to comment about that particular person but it does raise some interesting thoughts I want to talk about.

I may have stated before that I personally believe that Fandom and the many Fan Communities should be as open and welcoming as possible, that no one should be excluded despite their age, gender, sex, knowledge, etc we should all embrace each other despite our differences, or maybe because of them. I honestly truly believe we can become a community that transcends others in tolerance and acceptance if we do work hard enough. Well enough of the hippy crap, because the hard and fast truth is there is still going to be the ugly bad elements that haunt our community and cause no end of problems.

It seems that there are numerous stories popping up over the internet of people acting like jerks within fandom, mostly racial and sexist charged attacks, and I think this isn’t a new phenomenon but people are being more open about these jerks then every before. We’ve been given a platform to speak up and be heard over the jeering idiots who want to bring us down and I think it’s about time we put a stop to them. There will always be some sort of Drama! within the community, there is no way to stop it, but we can diminish it’s impact if we all pull together and maybe push out the undesirable elements to the further fringes, where hopefully they might be able to pull their heads out of their collective asses.

Strangely enough it’s relatively easy to achieve this as time as shown that ‘Social Darwinism’ is a contributing factor in the evolution of practically all social circles. It’s actually very simple, and you’ve probably all done it at some time or another, that when there is an individual that is an undesirable factor within any social element the group tends to try to disassociate with that person, sometimes without realising they are doing so. To put it even simpler, when someone acts like a jerk they tend to get invited to less and less social gatherings² where their behaviour. There are of course always ramifications, but that’s maybe for another time.

This is not a call to actively ban or shun people from communities and gatherings; more a reminder that, for the most part, these things will eventually sort themselves out. Even after all the utterly detestable behaviour I’ve read about this one particular person, I’m still optimistic about our communities. Why? We are calling out this sort of behaviour; we aren’t just keeping quiet or just hoping it will go away. I’m a firm believer that the only way to combat bad speech is with more speech, not less speech. If you see some bullshit, you need to call attention to it.

That being said whilst we need to be vigilant towards these things, we need to still be tolerant with people (especially newer people to the community), teach them why what they are doing is wrong, sharing knowledge is better then condemning and/or ignoring someone. As for any continued misbehaviour? Well I think that’s up to the communities to decide, not for me, but for the most part they do seem to be self-policing.

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1 – Do a Google search for ‘The Lily Files’ on Tumblr. This post isn’t about her or her actions, only my thoughts on such behaviour within the community.
2 – Strangely enough this even applies to gatherings of jerks! If one jerk is either too much of a jerk or not enough of a jerk, the other jerks will disassociate with said jerk.