Posted on

I wasn’t sure whether to bring this up but you can ignore this or post if you also think people should know this. Unfortunately I saw a queer autistic person posting that Atypical is funded by Autism Speaks, which is a ‘charity’ that speaks FOR autistic people, but they are NOT autistic people so are considered a hate group by actually autistic people. They weren’t a fan of Atypical but also it was suggested watching it not on Netflix to not support AS? Maybe ppl watch the sl on vids anyway Idk.

Heh, over the last couple of days I’d spent more time answering asks than I’d intended, usually I try to balance my “productive” Tumblr time between gifs and asks, so I ended up finishing some some almost completed gifsets and posting them. I was going to try to focus more on giffing today after answering some brief asks but then this arrived and I definitely didn’t want to leave it lying there.

First, thanks for telling me! I always like to be more informed than less.

Second, we both know that my opinion isn’t worth much here, this isn’t my issue to speak on, so my role is more to simply raise awareness, pass on info. In trying to balance that and the fact that this is my blog and thus I get at least that much say, I just wanna say a few things:

In wanting to pass on info here, I wanted to find a source to link for the claim “Atypical is funded by Autism Speaks”. That I couldn’t doesn’t mean that it’s not true, I’m just saying that I personally couldn’t find anything and I’d urge people to look into it themselves. I found this tumblr post which also could not find anything BUT, my point is not to say, “Hey, this person from the relevant group is giving us permission!”, I’m just saying it does seem to be difficult to find info connecting them. Autism Speaks has positive reviews and articles on the show on their website and spokespeople have commented favorably on it in news articles but it’s hard to find anything beyond that.

Now, again, people can make whatever choice they want on this, I’m just talking about my own approach on this, but as a person who gets fairly little rep, much of it bad, as a Muslim, as a lesbian, as a desi, as all three of those at once, my stance is not to judge people for continuing to watch something that hurt me. There’ve been a lot of shows that’ve done us wrong over the years, many that I’ve quit, many that I’ve been furious at and wish they HAD gotten cancelled but as much as I might judge people’s tastes for still watching them, I’m not judging them.

I also tend to think better of shows that try and listen and improve. Seeing these criticisms now, when I just finished watching Sam as the sweet boy from s3 who goes through a lot of pretty universal issues and succeeds, maybe the show did take in what people were saying and apply it?

All of this which means basically nothing, lol, as I said up front. It’s not up to me to absolve or give permission on this. One could say my reasoning works out pretty conveniently where I still get to watch and and enjoy what I wanted, the f/f. So, I’m publishing the ask, posting my thoughts, and uh, everyone is free to do what they want with that.

Posted on

I thought you were talking about Isobel Evans for an embarassingly long time…

Lol, the Izzie and Evan talk leading you to odd places! That’s like me and that one post saying how ridiculous it was that anybody would get off a plan to Paris for Ross Geller, and I always skim it and think wait, what about Paris Geller now? 

To cap off this comedy off errors, I googled Isobel Evans and when Google said she’d been played by Katherine Heigl, I was like…Izzie, Heigl, is this Grey’s Anatomy? Despite all the related links and pics being from Roswell, d’oh.

Posted on

“You know, I’ve seen some people say they find it harder to root for the f/f ship when the guy is this nice” I feel like people who really thirst for femslash content are always pigeonholed into just being about diversity. You have to be like I really love this couple that HAPPENS to be two women not to get flak if the male character chill. Even without the cheating bit,f/f couples get held at a higher standard just to be empathize with.

Hmmmm, that’s an interesting point. But saying the opposite, that you like a ship because it’s two women (although as you know, it’s never just that, that’s the start of a whole bunch of requirements that have to be checked to be into something–and look at how I’m justifying it even here, lol) also gets dismissed. That’s why people try to say it’s not just about two women in the first place.

People act like fandom culture’s changed recently with how diversity is used as a tool to bludgeon others into forcing your ship’s superiority, but ship wars have been a thing for a long time, this is just another tool to win them, and one that was seen as a disadvantage not too long ago. Or even now, when you have f/f relationships or m/f relationships involving POC in mainstream media, there’s a backlash. It’s pretty understandable that people try to counter that and try to justify their ship. But of course it gets messy, and the original ship war culture where it can’t just be defending a ship but putting down others distorts it. So then it becomes about how if you don’t ship something, you’re against the very thing it offers, e.g. homophobic for not shipping this f/f couple, racist for not shipping this other couple, which is of course going too far to win a ship war. BUT sometimes people who hate a ship ARE homophobic or racist! The very roots of where we are now are so convoluted and messy, there’s no easy platitude where it’s like, oh, you should just ship and let ship. I mean, as a personal approach, that is mine, but it’s only so easy for me because other people have already fought for so much.

But going back to your point, we’re already aware of the hate f/f ships get for existing, and then if there’s cheating it’s worse, and then if it’s cheating where the guy is nice, well, the perception and external gaze we’re always of seems that much worse. I don’t know if that’s what it was for the people who I saw say that, probably not, they may just be thinking, this guy’s so nice, but it’s hard to keep all those other elements out, they’re such a part of us.