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2020

Coalway to Hell

Yuletide Weather Forecast:

Temperatures are estimated to fluctuate between active panic and total apathy into the next weekend. Main assignments will have a minimum temperature of regret and a complete climate change once editing is complete. Expect treat writing to continue at all free hours unless the dangerous front of procrastination cropping up in the Northeast successful moves into the area, effectively killing the treat storm conditions for the season.

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Why is Franzeska someone to be wary of, again?

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Your_Vagina_is_a_Bigot;_My_Vagina_is_a_Saint

Racist wanker.

1. Racist and misogynist
2. Wanky as fuck
3a. Deeply unpleasant person with a deluded sense of self-importance
3b. Hypocritically whiny about people holding her to the standards of an expert after setting herself up as an expert

Honestly, I think the response to her was and is overblown. Her inflammatory meta understandably did not go over well, but I think a lot of people are acting in bad faith when they paint her as this awful malicious racist. Is she a bit racist? Probably. Does she write too authoritatively for her actual level of expertise/knowledge/whatever? Yeah. But I don't think she's actually actively trying to be racist/misogynistic/anything else, and more importantly, it's not like she's some hugely influential figure that stokes these things in other people. She's really only brought up so people can hate on and discredit her. Of course as always there could be context I'm not aware of.

If I thought it was ONLY that one piece of meta that was the problem, I'd say maybe you had a point, but apparently she's been low-key skeeving people in one of the vid exchanges (Festivids? Equinox?) for so long that they finally banned her this year. They didn't add any kind of new rule AFAIK, they just banned her specifically, because she'd made so many other people in the exchange uncomfortable over the years.

Deets about this? I heard about the banning but not about her skeeving people out.

I know some people over on FFA have talked about her essentially dancing on the line of requesting racekink-without-ever-out-and-out-saying-it in incredibly weird and off-putting ways.

SC
For clarification, Franzeska was being weird and off-putting, I mean (the nonnies were just relating the stories).

As a POC, there are like 1900 people in Yuletide who have never gone out of their way to be accidentally racist in public, even a little bit. I can appreciate that you can look past her breaking from that batting average, but once is enough for me, and so I'm happy to avoid and think that once is too much considering everyone else seems to be able to keep their racism, passive or otherwise, effectively tucked away.

FUCK OFF

Compared to, for example, ars_belli? Franzeska's racism is ~excusable~ on an "I can excuse racism but I draw the line at animal cruelty!" level.

This is what I want to get across by making the above comparison:

Is she a straight-up Nazi?

Well, no. To the best of my knowledge.

Has she ever stood around simpering over how awful she feels about ~this whole unfortunate situation~ while her white male relations went out and lynched a black kid who happened to glance in her general direction (about whom she'd complained to her relations)?

Also no. To the best of my knowledge.

However, her medium level of racism etc shouldn't be excused, and the fact that she's probably no more racist than any of the Conservative/Republican family/other loved ones any of you* folks Shut Up And Keep The Family Peace for doesn't mean that she should a pass on being a medium-sized piece of shit.

Franzeska has been in fandom for going on thirty years, and she has had people gently educate her about her shitty middling racism, and then less-gently educate her about it, for going on thirty years.

And for going on THIRTY YEARS, she has not changed, and not changed, and not changed, and continued being a medium amount of racist that's just one side of plausibly deniable, but when you look at her pattern of behavior over the course of thirty it's right there writ large:

She's a fuckin' racist piece of shit. Not a Laura Dern Elbows Deep In A Triceratops' Ex-Dinner Sized Piece of Shit, more a Medium Sized Pony Piece of Shit, but a piece of shit nonetheless.

At this point I don't care how big a stink it is, I still don't want it in my house.

TL;DR we don't get to excuse and step around medium sized racism just because the people doing that racism are less bad than Nazis and the KKK.

-----
*I disowned the last of my racist family and friends this year, and made sure they know why, because I am sick of keeping the peace so that other people can keep on being thoughtlessly, comfortably terrible in my vicinity.

People who think she is some super ultra racist are massively underestimating the general level of racism in fandom. If people pulled up many-years-old meta every time someone's name was mentioned a lot of people would look really bad. (She is definitely not the most racist person in yuletide this year.)

But she:
1. Says the quiet part out loud
2. Doesn't know when to stop digging, shut up, and apologize
3. Does not admit she was wrong, in general, even when she clearly was and she clearly knows it
4. Does things she thinks are anti-racist that read as the opposite to fans of color, due to not shutting up and listening to fans of color (or other people in general)
5. Has enough of a history of doing these things consistently that just seeing her in a conversation or fest is enough to set a lot of people off (she was at the center of the first! ever! yuletide racism wank! in the first! ever! yuletide! and things have gone from there.)
6. Has been prominent in certain parts of fandom for long enough that she has become a useful whipping-girl this year, especially given her role in the original design of AO3

What's the first-ever Yuletide racism wank? This was way before my time.

I was very new to fandom at the time, but I believe it was something about she wrote a casefic set in the 19th century and there was something about the way she portrayed a character/plot point (possibly an OC of color?) within the setting/plot that someone else said was racist. It was subtle enough that it started a long meta fight about whether it actually was racist or not, with lots of people on both sides who still have good rep in fandom, and she never conceded anything. If you look up her 2003 YT fic on AO3 there's comments on it that preserve the edges of the fight. Most of her later wanks have been similar - she does stuff that's just on the line of deniably racist, often while thinking she's being inclusive, and then does stuff that stokes the flames instead of calming them, and that means the next time she lands on that edge there's less benefit of the doubt for her.

I don't think I even ever read the fic, I remember it mostly because I had written a historical Jewish headcanon into my YT fic that year and was tiny and terrified someone would call me out for antisemitism I had put in without realizing, but it seemed to be limited to people arguing over Franzeska's fic only and nobody noticed mine. I don't know if she already had history that made people look at her fic more closely, or if that was close to the start of her getting a reputation. As you can tell my memories of the details are very vague but it was definitely Franzeska's fic.

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