hydratrashmeme | Chatter post

Chatter post

For all your discussion needs.

Ground rules:
- Try to keep it loosely trash party related, or at least Cap fandom related.
- Disagreement is fine, nastiness is not.
- Being offended is not carte blanche for nastiness.
- Trashmeme ground rules apply. Read at your own risk, no romanticizing your noncon garbage, no wank about the moral acceptability of noncon kink.
- Body shots, sniper shots, and tetanus shots are all available at the open bar. Party like it's 2014, kids.

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The No-romanticizing rule is already posted in the header of every post.

The haters are never going to accept us. I feel we're making a classic mistake: Trying so hard to side with our abusers that we don't care who we have to throw under the bus for it. We're desperately struggling to make clear that we are the GOOD darkfic people, go and hate on the BAD ones, those who dare to give Rumlow a redemption arc or something equally *horrendous*.

No. Nobody deserves that level of hate and bullying for fic they enjoy, no matter what. And I'm sick of rolling over and presenting my belly to people who want me dead.

I’m looking at the top spoilers prompt post and there is only a reference to the rules.

Looking at the other prompt posts, I see in the middle of them:

“Rules in brief: don't be a jerk except to fictional characters, warnings for particularly fucked-up garbage are nice but not required, thou shalt not judge the trashiness of thy neighbor's kinks unless thy neighbor is trying to pass off their rotting banana peels and half-eaten pizza crusts as a healthy romantic dinner for two, off-topic comments may be chucked out of the dumpster at management's discretion, management's discretion decrees that omegaverse, soulbond AUs, D/s-verse, non-superpowered AUs, and dark!good guys AUs are off-topic.”

To a casually interested person, that’s a long wall of text to make sense of. To an actively disinterested person—what hater doesn’t fall into this group?—how is that supposed to not be a tl;dr?

The rules as written are cute, but brevity gets to the heart and soul faster. In general, writing for short attention spans means writing in bullet points, and then getting to the meat of hour topic. Anyways:

3. Trash allowed; garbage not allowed—don’t be a jerk except to fictional characters. No being judgemental—that includes kink shaming—except when rules 1 and 2 are being broken.

4. Management allowed to be choosy about trash. Mods can freeze garbage to nothingness. This includes off-topic prompts such as omegaverse, soulbond AUs, D/s-verse, non-superpowered AUs, and dark!good guys AUs.

Adding to what I wrote above, if the spoilers post is going to stay, and anything having to do with CA:CW is going to go in there, mgiht as well have the rules on top.

But not only because the post is here to stay, but also because right now, as the top post, that’s the first thing first-time visitors see.

What I've been noticing is that when HTP members are fighting with haters, it tends to go like this

HTP Fan: Pretty well thought out and well presented argument which closely matches up with things which have been widely accepted to be true in fandom for years and are backed up by an almost overwhelming number of real life experts (sometimes with statistics and links). If this was a formal debate, the audience would agree that you clearly just won by a mile.

Anti HTP Fan: Quit trying to excuse your filth, I don't care.

HTP Fan: Logic, history, reason, expert testimony, statistics, fandom tradition, empathy!

Anti HTP Fan: LOL Nazi Rape Fetish!

They will bully until someone proves them wrong, at which point they get trapped in some sort of feedback loop where truth, logic and the for instance original point no longer matter. BEcause a lot of them don't actually want a legitimate discussion, they want to scream at people who they hope will back down quickly. The idea that you might be a real person with feelings and a legitimate argument was never part of the plan. So they pull the classic teenage Mean Girl gambit of "Why did you think I was even talking to you, loser?"

I think the rules of the meme are fine as they are, because it's not really about kink shaming people but, as the mod has said, keeping the focus narrowed. However, we do need to be careful about using "But we're not like THOSE people" arguments because people who are determined to hate the HTP don't care either way.

(New Anon)

This. I can't help thinking that we're ignoring the elephant in the room that the anti-HTPers DON'T use the comm. If the response to anti-HTPers in the tag is 'Let's tighten the operational parameters of the comm. 'Cause, idk, but it makes ME feel uncomfortable that the comm rules aren't inserted every 10 prompts. Won't somebody think of the newbies?' we're getting into the abused/bullied mindset and asserting excessive control over something we CAN in the belief it limits damage from forces we CAN'T. That's never going to work.

The comm's fine as it is. If someone posts a non-applicable prompt, there's nothing wrong with the current process of politely directing the prompter to the rules post and alerting trashmod to freeze the thread.

Also, mine's another vote for easing up on the 'we're not like THOSE people' rhetoric. As defences go, throwing other fans under the bus for what/how they ship 'cause the moral purity police've decided what you ship is objectionable, isn't a good one.

This isn’t about changing the rules of the comm—they’re fine as they are. This isn’t about changing the operational parameters of the comm—also fine as they are. Nor about changing how rule-breaking prompts are reported—also fine. This isn’t about inserting the rules more often—that would be so damn annoying, inserting them into every comments page of prompts, who would do that?

This is about taking the prompts posts, as they already exist, and that 1-paragraph summary of the rules—as they already are on every prompts post (except the spoilers post)—and rewriting them into something clearer. This is about taking one paragraph and re-writing it into easy-to-scan bullet points and maybe rearranging things to move them from the middle of the posts. I have a preference for moving them to the top with a first-things-first, but moving them to the bottom also works.

You can take me to task about othering people. I’ll even rewrite Rule #3:

3. Trash allowed; garbage not allowed—don’t be a jerk except to fictional characters. No being judgemental—that includes kink shaming—but do report when rules 1 and 2 are being broken.

But that doesn’t take away from my point that things can be re-written into something clearer and that’s all this is about.

If anybody profits from making the rules more clear, by all means, go for it.
If you're thinking it will make the haters stop hating on us, well. I'm afraid as has been said somewhere above, it's mostly not about logic with them. Maybe I'm wrong though, I hope so.

DA: tbh I don't think anyone who's not mature/intelligent enough to read and follow rules written in paragraph form is gonna be mature/intelligent enough to follow them in bulletpoints. Especially when the topic at hand is as emotionally charged and nuanced as the trashmeme.

Mine's another vote to leave things as they are - I don't see why we should dumb things down for new folks or anti-HTPers. I'm relatively new to the comm myself and I had no problems understanding the rules as stated. And, haters gonna hate, no matter what we do... so we might as well not worry about it and instead just enjoy all the delicious trash. ;)

I actually had a lot of luck with one HTP-er when doing a combo of summarizing the rules plus pointing out how darkfic are highly controlled entities for exploring trauma. But I also realize that I’m lucky that I wasn’t flamed back because the person later admitted she had “unconventional methods” for dealing with trauma and that she took my word about what the rules were.

While she admitted she still had reservations about darkfic comms since you sometimes can’t tell who’s there to get their rape fantasy on vs. who’s there to get their rapist fantasy on, knowing the rules here really calmed her down about this darkfic comm.

Yup

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Chatter post

Re: Post the rules at the top of every prompt post?

Re: Post the rules at the top of every prompt post?

Re: Post the rules at the top of every prompt post?

Re: Post the rules at the top of every prompt post?

Re: Post the rules at the top of every prompt post?

Re: Post the rules at the top of every prompt post?

Re: Post the rules at the top of every prompt post?

Re: Post the rules at the top of every prompt post?

Re: Post the rules at the top of every prompt post?

Re: Post the rules at the top of every prompt post?