MsScribe Is Eternal

[snarp]

Written as a response to these two posts, originally posted here.

The recent shitshows in the Steven Universe and Sherlock fandoms are very hard to distinguish from the infamous MsScribe Incident in Harry Potter fandom in the early 2000s.

When we talk about that now, we talk about MsScribe's sockpuppetry, and mostly kind of forget that she was just making use of a pre-existing moral panic about whether Harry/Ginny was a racist ship. There's a reason most of her "bad" sockpuppets were stereotypes of fundamentalist Christians.

Have those bad SJW kids developed time travel?! We have to stop them! They'll create a time paradox that will destroy Homestuck! We'll all be Superwholocks!

And that itself looked like any other moral panic. It doesn't matter whether the scapegoating is over racism or drug use or child abuse or sagging pants or Satanic ritual sacrifice! It's all connected.

In general:

* To scapegoat adults, the eternal surefire winner is accusing them of hurting other people's children.

If you don't have good data to support this but don't want to make stuff up (the mark of a quitter), you can always vagueify it like so: "they're just lazy and spoiled and have ruined everything for the next generation."

* To scapegoat kids, just say they hurt more vulnerable kids!

Vagueified: "they're just lazy and spoiled and are going to ruin everything for the next generation."

Some other good options for either: Having sex/relationships wrong (don't do sex stuff online, kids, that's gross and predatory and you're going to get innocent adults arrested), being religious/non-religious wrong, or engaging in some sort of "uncleanness" in terms of personal health and hygiene, food, or where they spend time.

As a note to all you scapegoating beginners trying to get your start - ritual uncleanness doesn't work as well as it used to in most places! These days, you go after people's dietary and exercise habits, their drugs/medications, and their hygiene products, on the basis of whether they're "natural"/"safe"/"healthy" or not and whether their stuff was made by a "good" company.

(#i'm helping #and the blood libel is always a winner of course #there will never be a society that won't buy into a blood libel against SOMEONE #i rate these things internally on a scale of 0 to 1492 blood libels #the 'artificial vanilla' thing was only like a hundred blood libels #which is not very many)

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[metaphortunate]

What is happening in Steven Universe fandom?

[snarp]

There's a relatively-popular teenaged fanartist with the username zamii070, who was getting a lot of personal abuse, ostensibly for drawing Rose Quartz too thin, drawing Garnet without her afro, etc. She posted on October 20th saying she was killing herself; on the 23rd she made a video post saying she was in the hospital. Here's the tag for her username as of the 20th; here's the 21st.

As you can probably see from the first tag link, there were a number of anonymous blogs specifically devoted to yelling at her. There were at least eight of them, and her username was in the title of most of them. Which is not how an organic mass-shaming fuckarowe looks - that's calculated.

My feeling's that this was coming mainly from a small number of people who either 1) know her personally somehow or 2) were tossing out abusive "Bad Tumblr SJW" stuff at a bunch of SU fanartists for a while looking for a reaction, and got one when they hit her.

(Honestly, it was so weirdly-focused on this one kid that my initial assumption was that she was sockpuppeting her abusers. But a number of smart people seem sure she didn't, and I'm done digging into this sort of stuff, so I'm going with the Bad Ex-Friend(s) theory.)