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verushka70I ran across mention of this on Facebook's Due South by South East community, but I wanted to read the entire article - so I searched for and found it.
The Queerty Paul Gross article brings up fannish history in its discussion of the recently announced casting of PG as HR S2 bad guy Commissioner Crowell - including PG's early role in Tales of the City, as well as of course his embrace of the homoerotic elements of the Fraser/Ray due South partnership and it's subsequent influence on online fandom spaces.
So go read the Queerty PG article! It's awesome!
Here's hoping the crazy children who can't separate reality from fiction - who have already hounded and harassed the only openly queer actor on the show about gay pro athletes 🙄, François Arnaud - don't latch onto harassing PG like they have FA, just because he is cast as the villain.
But... I won't hold my breath on that.
The Queerty Paul Gross article brings up fannish history in its discussion of the recently announced casting of PG as HR S2 bad guy Commissioner Crowell - including PG's early role in Tales of the City, as well as of course his embrace of the homoerotic elements of the Fraser/Ray due South partnership and it's subsequent influence on online fandom spaces.
So go read the Queerty PG article! It's awesome!
Here's hoping the crazy children who can't separate reality from fiction - who have already hounded and harassed the only openly queer actor on the show about gay pro athletes 🙄, François Arnaud - don't latch onto harassing PG like they have FA, just because he is cast as the villain.
But... I won't hold my breath on that.
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Date: 2026-09-06 05:18 am (UTC)I know, right?!
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Date: 2026-09-06 01:18 am (UTC)TYK for sharing this poster and the link to the interview!
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Date: 2026-09-06 09:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-09-06 05:22 pm (UTC)I joked in the Discord that we should welcome new fans with warmth, openness, and an 80-page google doc on Why We Don't ShipWar In This Fandom. (It doesn't exist, but maybe it should?)
Possibly with an addendem of "The Actors Cannot Comment Meaningfully on Real World Issues, They're Acting Because It's Their Job Just Be Normal About Them For Fuck's Sake."*
*I do think actors can comment as meaningfully as anyone else on any given topic, but I'm not going to assume that Paul Gross is knowledgable about police corruption and brutality just because he played a cop. Actors =/= real life experts on anything other than acting.
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Date: 2026-09-06 09:06 pm (UTC)Oh wow. Yeah, no more ship wars. It was bad enough the first time. (Is it happening?? it's like humanity - or fandom - learns nothing... ARGH!)
Initially I thought (about the fen who can't separate actors from characters), "Oh, it's just because they're young." But as it worsened, I thought back, and I realized, Wait, ffs: when I was twelve, fourteen, seventeen, twenty-four, I knew the difference between the character and the actor - wtf is wrong with these kids?"
So now I just think they're probably undiagnosed/untreated mentally ill people. Because 1) it's not just kids, like I thought (though I think it def skews that way), B. in the course of nineteen years as a registered nurse - never in psychiatric nursing, only ER, pre-op, home care, jail/corrections, and outpatient clinics - and dealing with people face to face, all day, every day in non-mental-health healthcare... it's become very obvious to me that there are A LOT of undiagnosed, untreated mentally ill people out in the world.
Most of them (mostly needlessly) suffer alone in themselves. But far too many inflict their illness on the people around them,* having an outsized influence on others and often leading mobs.
And in the 21st century, the "people around them" includes celebrities they don't know but can terrorize via the Internet (and in person, if they're crazed enough).
*I'd argue that our current US pedo-in-chief and his entire administration qualify. But then, so did Hitler. Which I realize sounds hyperbolic. But. It's not. It really isn't.
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Date: 2026-09-06 10:13 pm (UTC)I mean, in the early 00s there were definitely still those who were kinda unhinged, but they had to work a lot harder to harass the actors of their favorite thing. Now they can just ratio them on xitter or insta and suddenly there's a need for a PR statement.
Also, yes to the untreated mental illnesses out there. And triple yes to the pedo-in-chief and all his admin DEFINITELY qualify!
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Date: 2026-09-06 11:55 pm (UTC)Yeah, social media certainly doesn't help and as you point out, it makes it way too easy to harass. Algorithms prioritize "engagement" (for eyeballs for ads) (the tech people who created them have said this; I still read tech news though I've been out of IT for a couple decades). And thanks to evolutionary negative cognitive bias, the majority of people engage the most with negative content... pushing the most negative stuff higher in "trending."
I'll never understand how/why ratio even matters, when in the past few years, US federal law enforcement and Interpol have literally busted bot farms with thousands of individual cellular SIM cards running potentially thousands of socmed accounts. It's all manipulable. You can't trust the numbers.
Socmed has been gamed, has been being gamed, since before Brexit. Hell, it's how Brexit happened: Russia's Internet Research Agency started it, but it's like an arms race now; all the major players do it politically, and you've been able to buy hundreds and thousands (even tens of thousands) of likes"(-based socmed "development packages") for at least a decade.
Yeah, many are scams... But enough are not that I don't trust most of the numbers. Of course, the catch is that it costs $ to buy them. But it only takes one tech-savvy person to literally shift elections. And that's before the voter suppression and hacked/manipulated voting machines.
So I just don't see socmed numbers (or anything else on it) as reflective of reality in any way; I'm just entertained on it/with it/by it, and typically not for very long. But I guess I'm really weird that way (and I have browser extensions that block YouTube feeds and "recommended" videos because I'm sick of crap I don't want - the negative engagement algorithms - shoving content into my happy place (and interrupting streaming music lol).
To be fair, though, it is very easy to slip into the lull of "just scrolling what I like" and thinking everyone on socmed is as reasonable as me even though rationally I know they all are not.
(Although tbh the only place I've been able to truly scroll ONLY what I like/want to see its Tumblr, via tags. But then I can/will get lost for hours, so I'm not immune when my id is driving on Tumblr, lol! I have to ration my Tumblr or I'd never get anything done - including fic!)
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Date: 2026-09-06 09:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-09-06 10:15 pm (UTC)I think Conundrum mentioned on discord that our Fanlore article is pretty lengthy....
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Date: 2026-09-07 12:01 am (UTC)Huh, maybe there are good links to anti-ship-war posts in the Fanlore page? I haven't looked recently, tbh. (I used to have a fanlore page, but I didn't create it, I think it was just a stub, and it's gone now. I should probably do something about it but... Time. Is a thing.)
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Date: 2026-09-07 12:50 pm (UTC)And, you know, we oldies will rise up to defend him from the haters!
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Date: 2026-09-07 01:32 pm (UTC)I would, or I will, if it's on Tumblr. But I only have FB and IG anyway, not xitter. (I like to think "xitter" is pronounced "shitter", though I'm pretty sure that's not phonetically correct, since that's what it's become under Musk.)
And I don't really engage on either of those, I just passively consume content occasionally. Sometimes I'll comment on a post, but it's so infrequent that on one FB group, my comments were put in a holding status because I do it so little that they were algorithmically decided to be spam, I guess.
Definitely I don't engage with mentally unwell people online. And I think it's safe to say that those who can't separate actors from their roles are inherently mentally unwell. It's just a personal choice I learned to make some time ago (thanks, Ray Wars...) to minimize the awfulness and negativity into which one's life it falls.
Plus, in the past 11 years of the American pedo-in-chief's political career here in the US, I've found that you can't change people's minds about much of anything even if you try. At best you can shame them for immoral/unethical (and un-Christian, if they're self-proclaimed Christians) posts... But these days that doesn't even work, because people are shamelessly awful online and socmed "engagement" algorithms exhibit mob rules. You have to wait for them to wake up to reality once reality gets bad enough for them. And even then, you'll still never change some cultists' minds. Just my experience.
That being said, I truly appreciate that people like you will engage and defend others and think it's worthwhile to do so. It just isn't, for me, not with some snotty brats a thousand miles or more away who I can't engage with in person. (Because, in person, I absolutely would and do engage with shitty people about their shitty behavior.)
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Date: 2026-09-13 09:11 pm (UTC)I clearly didn't think it through before my (rather glib, in hindsight) comment to you. I too avoid xitter and don't engage with FB or IG either if I can help it. So I guess I meant Tumblr and real life, if I even thought about the reality of it. I have to confess, being new to fandom, I really didn't stop to think through the very real shitty behaviour that might come about.
And also in the discord server I help mod for The Mentalist, we have a zero tolerance policy (which is easy enough in a somewhat closed and mostly-controlled environment) so I think I am only used to friendly and non-contentious communities - I'd heard of, but forgotten, how awful things like the Ray Wars were.
I really hope we don't regress back to that - but with the low attention span (and dubious politics/ morals/ ethics) of certain folk coupled with socmed algorithms - ughhh.
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Date: 2026-09-13 10:44 pm (UTC)Oh, no worries! I figured you were busy (beta-ing my Scott/Kip fic for one! TY so much again!).
Yeah - Tumblr is really my favorite/only truly interactive socmed. I prize it above all other socmed because I have never, not a decade ago when the pedo-in-chief won the first time, and not now, seen any pro-MAGA/pro-Trump shit on Tumblr. Ever.
Maybe it exists on Tumblr - but, if it does, either Tumblr's algorithms don't shove it in my face (unlike, say, Youtube or FB), or my (very basic) user customization of Tumblr has made it so whatever pro-Trump/pro-MAGA crap is on Tumblr has never once crossed my dashboard (which does not seem possible on Youtube at all, and mostly not on FB).
This makes Tumblr far superior to all other socmed, imho. (Plus almost every Francois Arnaud post that I see on IG winds up on Tumblr anyway, so I'm not missing much when I don't use IG for days or weeks; whatever he posts/does, wherever he goes, all seems to wind up on Tumblr - as do CKR vids by mangustert. So who needs other socmed, lol?!)