It's always coalest before the dawn

[coalcube]

Posting deadline: 18th December at 9am UTC - may be the 17th in your time zone
Story reveal: 25th December
Author reveal: 1st January

Yuletide Discord for Hippos. Google Group for PHs.

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Comments

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

Honestly, I think people lose all sense of perspective when it comes to ars_belli. People write about all manner of shady historical characters and kink on all manner of things that can be (and sometimes are) frankly distasteful, including underage (including extreme underage), but somehow we're drawing a line at nazis? And that doesn't strike anyone as hypocritical?

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

hiiii ars_belli

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

Look, if someone else were requesting RL perpetrators of mass genocide, I’m sure _coal would rightfully scorn them, too. But in the meantime, I’m fine with _coal hating someone who admires and masturbates to RL white supremacists who slaughtered millions of people, many of whom as still considered undesirable and lesser today because of their disabilities, sexuality, skin color, or religion, and still today live fear of violence against them because of continuing discrimination.

People who enjoy underage fic are not harming people IRL. But people who admire Nazis are admiring and perpetuating a very specific ideology of murder on a mass scale for a greater cause. They deserve far worse than just a bad rep in a fanfic exchange, and if you fail to understand that, maybe watch Night and Fog before you go around decrying how unfair it is that people are anti-Nazi.

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

As an argument, I don't find that very different from antis going around crying "paedophilia".

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Lol, this “what about the antis?” whataboutism. What do you think people admire about Nazis if not their ideology and their mass slaughter of people they believed to be inherently lesser than them?

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

You might have a point if people were requesting RPF about, idk, pedophile priests without any pushback, rather than antis calling any gay ship "pedophilia" because they're homophobes. ars_belli literally likes Nazis, this isn't a case of people overreacting to someone's Star Wars fan preferences or anything.

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

Someone with a harmless kink for dictatorships whose armies wear designer uniforms has a fuckton of fictional dictatorships with designer uniforms they can indulge that in. The argument equivalent to the anti position would be to say that's not allowed, either.

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

Nope, it's not at all like antis crying pedo.

It's more like if an individual with a dreamwidth full of pedo appreciation comms signed up for Yuletide and asked for fic about the murder of JonBenet Ramsay.

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

What's hypocritical is talking about how horrible Nazis are and then requesting a bunch of problematic Japanese fandoms like Attack on Titan and Hetalia (not that they are Yuletide eligible, but that's almost worse because they are so large) because they care, or never bothered to find out about the horrors that happened to Korea, China, and much of SE Asia perpetrated by the Japanese. I mean, the stuff that went on in Korea is absolutely appalling, and based on the belief that the Japanese were racially superior to them. So yeah, it can be hypocritical.

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

Ugh, phone typing... I meant "..because they don't care..."

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

+1

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

You know that Hetalia fandom has reams of darkfic exploring the terrible things countries had gotten up to historically right?

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

So we have to give people who salivate (Remember their “ovaries go boom” tag) over literal Nazis the benefit of the doubt because other canons and fandoms are problematic? Is that what you’re saying? Because other canons are bad and people like those canons, we can’t draw the line at actual, literal Nazis?

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

Onoes, problematic canons!! Totally the same thing as real-life Nazis (or their allies)!

You're whacked.

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

1- A whole country and all their citizens are not to blame for the shit specific governments chose to do. Particulaly not the people who weren't voting/not even born when those thigs happened (like I imagine whoever writes AoT is).

2- But they're not stanning actual war criminals. They're writing for fictional characters that mya have a similarity for RL stuff, but are not the same.

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

+0.5

I understand the issue emotionally because I have a different visceral reaction to Nazis than I have to, say, Nero and Atilla the Hun (likely because there are no ideological descendants of them still about in RL) or someone asking for underage snuff fic, but I don't think Yuletide is the place to police fic content.

I don't like the kink shamy nature of AIRT's comment with the "frankly distasteful kinks", but I do think it's requestionable to morally police one specific thing and not anything else. (Just to be clear, I'm not advocating for policing everything that's potentially distasteful or controversial. I don't think there should be any moral policing at all.)

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

No. There needs to be a line of decency so some asshole doesn’t request something that’s completely out of bounds, like Nazi RPF or [whatever the latest US mass shooting] RPF. It’s not a matter of “moral policing,” it’s not letting some dickhead do whatever they want just to be an edge lord. Nazis shouldn’t be allowed in Yuletide, and if you’re so desperate to stroke yourself off to the idea of millions of innocent people being gassed to death in concentration camps, make your own Nazi RPF holiday exchange instead of whining about how unfair it is that’s it’s not allowed in Yuletide.

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

But who decides what's completely out of bounds? Like, sure, we find Nazi RPF really distasteful. What about serial killer RPF - is it okay when they were active long ago (and what's long ago? Ted Bunny or Jack the Ripper)? Some people find noncon fic distasteful. Some people think underage fic is a gateway to pedophilia. Some people find RPF about living people distasteful in general. You have to draw a line somewhere, and it's always kinda arbitrary.

I think RL Nazis should be punched in public, at best (I actually favour more radical approaches, but whatever), but I don't think people who ask for Nazis RPF shouldn't be allowed into Yuletide.

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

For me, it's an issue of degrees of separation. Someone asking for "shady historical characters" (and I'm assuming when you say "characters" you mean fictional people in historical settings) or extreme underage might make me think "... welp, glad I didn't match to them!" But ars_belli tried to nominate Nazi RPF for Yuletide at least once, IIRC - when it's entirely possible that relatively direct descendants of their victims are also participating. That, to me, is very obviously more fucked up than either of your other hypotheticals, and is such a different scenario that I don't think "hypocritical" applies to being bothered by one and not the others.

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

da

Not AYRT, but "shady historical characters" can very well mean "shady non-fictional historical characters". There's been plenty of fic about those in Yuletide (granted, a lot of it is one step removed because it's fic about canons about those characters, but not all of it).

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

This.

To stick with the extra underage analogy, this would be like if someone asked for Toddler RPF and then also had icons of real little kids looking sexy, wrote comments about how they loved X real life famous toddler’s lips and hands and fantisized about them often, and belonged to comms of real kids looking super sexy where other fans talked about that stuff.

All of which ars_belli. At a certain point you need to call a duck a duck when it’s RPF stuff they’re stanning and not fictional or so removed from daily life it’s firmly historical. If you think “real nazis need to be punched irl”, can’t you see that shunning Nazis online is the spirtual sucessor to that?

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

No one said "boo" about Kennedy Family RPF being nominated, so this concern about descendants of victims also participating seems pretty selective.

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

Hey, a_b, I hope that for Yuletide this year you get smutfic.

Reinhard Heydrich being ass-fucked by his own car.

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

Transformers don’t deserve this!

Re: ars_belli

[(Anonymous)]

On one hand, yes they do, and I'm against censorshim more than anything so I can't really do more than EEEWWW at them and scroll past.

But on the other hand, Yuletide IS a comunity. The same people write and read every year, so it's understandable that this weird person who fetishizes nazis is going to get a general EWW from the community more than a rando nobody knows will. After all, people can give a pass to "let's explore this weird and creepy idea", but when it's clear the person has a Thing for RL shitty stuff, it's a natural reacton to give them a wide berth.