The lectures for this week are on topics I’m a little familiar with as I follow and read up on gaming news constantly. This extends to me as a gamer myself as I love to look up explanations on lore for certain games and this leads to fandom pages that have fan fictions. Diana Flogel’s lecture on the subject of fan fiction is something that humors me as my takeaway from it is just harmless artwork and fantasies from fan. Some more ludicrous than others but the subject in how these fan created content as being a type of media that supports queer culture intrigued me. She made a great point on how there’s is no education on queer culture in public schools. That these fandom sites such as Tumblr are used by the community as a form of education on the subject. I’ve never looked at fan fiction to be a form of expression beyond just spreading joy and entertainment with their work and imagination. The toxicity part of it is very unfortunate to learn about as well since it seems like the internet is ruthless in talking down on things or people just because it’s easy to be anonymous. It doesn’t help that censorship on these fan fictions depicting same sex relationships are getting taken down. I know the policy change of sexual content on Tumblr in late 2018 was a major blowback for queer culture as it was used for a free space. I was only knowing of Tumblr or other social media’s such as Instagram to be used as a platform for fanficfion but didn’t know how far back it goes with Flogels timeline on the sites that were used such as fanfiction.net. I’m myself have never made up stories about certain medias that I’ve enjoyed have posted theories on certain video games or movies. It can sometimes be fun with other people agreeing with you or expanding upon your theory but then there are some that can be toxic and call your way of thinking “dumb” to put it lightly. I can only Imagine what kind of hate that fan fictions get but can imagine the outpour of love that can come from it. In terms of the video “GTFO” on women and gaming, this too is a topic that I was somewhat familiar with. Immediately when starting to watch the video I thought about Anita Sarkeesian as I know she was a topic o discussion regarding women in gaming a few years back. I was happy to see her included in this video to share her experience as I know she experienced a large amounts of hate on the internet. I guess you could say that I learned how much people are going to go to hurt someone over the Internet weather that’s making posts about them on media platforms and (my first time seeing this) drawings or artworks depicting someone being hurt or sexually assaulted that are meant to offend that person. Even going as far as finding personal information of someone with the purpose of sharing it as Anita said has happened to her is ridiculous. The lengths is just unfathomable to me . I agree with how Women in gaming and how their treated on it expands to just how they are treated in general. The difficult part of this is how someone can be anonymous when giving hate speech towards women. I guess both of these topics of fanfiction and gaming can relate to my topic of dating apps is how someone compose as another person by way of cat fishing. This makes it so that they could pose as somebody of wanting and match with people and mess with their mind mentally by way of messaging. This could be seen as toxicity or hate speech, same as the lecture mentions and video.
