Fandom in Recovery

I haven’t been very productive this week at S1E1, despite still being in the thick of first episode reviews. While I always leave room for myself to take a break when I need one and don’t really feel beholden to any sort of timetable, this break has been a little bit unanticipated and, to be honest, unwanted. After a few things went down online the past couple of days, my head’s just been swimming with emotions that I don’t really know how to manage, and it’s kept me from focusing on reviews. I thought it might be a good idea to talk through it all just to get a handle on those feelings and what they mean.

The last couple of days have been somewhat emotionally-taxing for many individuals who participate in or at least pay some attention to the anime twitter community. To put it briefly, an individual with social connections to many other visible members of the community was revealed to have exhibited inappropriate behavior to underage members of the anime fandom, and also to have allegedly committed sexual assault. This revelation pulled the lid off of several other situations that had been whispered about but never really shared outside of very restricted or small communities. I’d rather not get into all the details here, because they’re personally upsetting to me; people’s accounts are relatively easy to search out, though, if you’d like to find out more information. There’s also a Kotaku article about some of the fallout (note that I don’t really agree with this process of “collecting names” on a public spreadsheet, which is what the article spends a lot of time on).

This situation has hit me pretty hard, though maybe not for obvious reasons. I didn’t know the person involved, nor the victims (that I’m aware of). I didn’t interact directly with this person online (though I did follow them until this news started to unfold). I don’t think I’ve ever even attended a convention where this person was present. I think what’s been so upsetting to me is just the reminder that the fandom experiences that I seek out as personal “safe spaces” have a potentially much darker side to them that’s not always known or acknowledged. Also, I think it bears mentioning that abusers’ methods are insidious and disturbingly similar across the board, and I have a lot of sadness because we as a society seem to be unable to find a good way to assess and respond to them.

One of the details that has stuck with me throughout the time that the situation was unfolding is that the person in question took great pains to separate their public, outward-facing persona from the part of themselves who was using that persona to manipulate others. They made an effort to cultivate relationships with visible and respected community members which in part served to shield them from suspicion (not entirely, but just enough). Once the various accounts and allegations started to become public, many people had a shared reaction of both horror at their content, as well as shock at never being given reason to suspect the person of wrongdoing. To their credit, most of these folks have since acknowledged and been very understanding towards the survivors, but the general circumstances – the lying, the “circle of protection,” the suspicion cast on accusers in the past – hits me very close to home.

Some time ago I was involved in a long-term relationship that I realized had become unhealthy. I had been abused, although in ways that didn’t leave physical marks; it was a situation marked by coercion, control, and manipulation. I can’t even quite say whether or not the person with whom I was involved was entirely purposeful in their actions (I definitely believe that abusive actions are a choice, as I’ve mentioned before, but sometimes they might be a choice the person doesn’t realize they’re more than capable of avoiding), but the end results were the same – shame, lack of self-esteem, fear, anxiety, depression. What I didn’t realize until the relationship dissolved was that this person had spent a lot of time and energy cultivating and maintaining their sphere of influence – sharing our private business with others, ensuring that our mutual friends heard a cherry-picked version of the circumstances (and at best misunderstood how I felt and what I was doing), and doing what they could to keep themselves in a favorable light.

At the time I chose not to talk about what had happened and what was currently happening, because of concerns over privacy and because I was ashamed of ending up in that situation. As someone who’d always said things like “if they’re not happy then why don’t they just leave?” finally realizing that “just leaving” isn’t as easy a choice as outsiders make it out to be forced me to reckon with the extent of my ignorance. The end result is that at certain points I found myself isolated from those who could have potentially helped me traverse what was a humiliating and painful experience. I didn’t have a sense of who wanted to be around me or who actively didn’t want to have anything to do with me.

Since that time, I’ve been very lucky to reestablish or reaffirm many of my friendships, and for that I’m extremely grateful. After hitting an extreme low point in my life, it was those friendships that helped to see me through the situation. I have to admit, though, that as much as I love and appreciate the friends that I have, I often still find myself preoccupied by the friends who chose, whether consciously or not, to believe things about me that were hurtful and untrue.

Having lived through that experience and come out the other side, I know firsthand some of the challenges that survivors face in speaking out. I mentioned my situation publicly one time; I chose to use the word “abuse,” and while I didn’t name anyone’s name, based on the details it was easy to extrapolate who I was talking about. It wasn’t more than a day or two later that I received one of the most terrible emails I’ve ever received, sent by a person in the abuser’s protective sphere of influence, chastising me for making my abuser upset and warning me that I had no right to speak publicly to anyone about my feelings. In one fell swoop, one person chose to side with a one-sided story, devalue and dismiss my experience, and take a parting swipe at my self-worth for good measure.

I’m a small-time nobody anime blogger without a lot of online presence or clout, and the person who took advantage of me isn’t a “big name” individual anywhere that I know of, and even so the fact that one person on the periphery of the situation chose to attack my credibility (in addition to the several more who chose the “cold shoulder” approach), made me sick and fearful of what might happen to me. I became nervous of going certain places where I thought there might be even a small chance of encountering someone who had ill intent toward me.

Now, imagine this fear, only multiplied ten-fold, hundred-fold, even a thousand or ten-thousand fold, if the abusive individual has some measure of fame or clout with a community. Imagine reading something they’d authored, seeing them in convention photos, or maybe even hearing their voice on a podcast or in an anime voiceover. I made a very personal decision not to speak in fine detail about my own situation because even the thought of some minor backlash from doing so has always been enough to trigger my anxiety; it doesn’t surprise me that it took multiple people months (and possibly years) to start sharing their own stories this time, since the theoretical backlash could have been (or could still be) exponentially greater.

Like I said, every time I sat down to try to write a review the past couple of days, my mind was flooded with thoughts about this situation and I thought this was the only way to get past it. I keep trying to remind myself that being in a niche fandom can be a really wonderful thing; when you discover a group of people who share your passion for something, it’s very validating. Unfortunately, though, there are also some people who choose to take advantage of that feeling of belonging to something, contorting it into an opportunity for them to position themselves favorably and manipulate the people around them. I feel a great deal of sadness in knowing that these types of people will probably always be around; they’re difficult to detect, they’re skilled at making themselves immune from reproach, and they naturally gravitate toward those who lack self-esteem and are looking for a feeling of belonging. It makes it difficult to open up to others and results in wariness.

I don’t think the ultimate answer to this is across-the-board suspicion, or blame, or walling-off others. I do think we should choose to realize and acknowledge that people we know may be capable of hurting others even if they aren’t hurting us. I think we need to recognize bad behavior in its early stages and be willing to talk about it and address it before it warps into something worse. And I think we need to work to cultivate an environment where people who talk about their experiences don’t have to fear an onslaught of retribution or feel the pain of reopened wounds. I don’t know if that’s a realistic possibility, but I have to hope that it is.

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Thank you, friends. Now back to your regularly-scheduled anime thoughts and reviews.