First, I must confess something very grave. The title of this blog is, indeed, only an abbreviated version of the true title, which in turn is a strong testament to my unhealthy penchant for both Monty Python and really long titles.

Here’s the true title of this blog: I Fart in Your General Direction! (Your Mother Was a Hamster, and Your Father Smelt of Elderberries!) + Fandom Wars and Unnecessary Toxicity: When We All Need to Go Away or Else Be Taunted A Second Time!

With the explosion in fan wars lately, I’ve increasingly noticed discussions between fans that start out perfectly civil disintegrating into straight-out cussing and ad hominem attacks. Needless to say, this introduces unnecessary toxicity into the community and doesn’t leave anyone better off at the end of it all. The most upsetting part for me is that both sides usually have valid points that the K-pop community ought to hear out, but the entire discussion deteriorates into slinging insults and taking sides. Ultimately, the (very important) issue that started the whole debate is left forgotten in the dust. Not helpful.

Anyway, a lot of the issues that have started or escalated arguments I’ve witnessed in the fandom have come up over and over again, so here are some of the things it’s often easy to forget when caught up in the heat of a fandom argument:

First: It is 100% possible to be emotionally invested in what you’re discussing, strongly disagree with someone, and end an argument on said topic with said person without the encounter escalating into insults and witch hunts.

This is one of those things that is easier said than done. When emotions get involved in an argument (defending the actions or work of a favorite idol, for example), the knee-jerk reaction is to hit caps lock and jump into the fray with fingers flying and fangirl mode fully activated. Then before you know it, you’ve called someone’s mother a hamster and someone else’s father a drunkard reeking of elderberries, and now several hours have gone by without you accomplishing anything remotely productive (unless you count opening up an inter-fandom rift and upsetting multiple people as productive, which I don’t).

As difficult as it can be, though, it is possible to avoid this. Take politics. Excluding the last two decades or so, American presidential debates have been relatively civil. Candidates who disagreed with each other presented logical arguments defending their own beliefs, listened carefully to their opponents’ responses, and formed rebuttals against those responses. If anyone did explode and call an opponent a nasty name, their reputation suffered amongst the public, because who wants to trust in someone who can’t even carry a civil disagreement without losing it? (I’m afraid I’m not nearly as versed on political debates in other countries, but I know similar principles exist in many other places. Please share in the comments if something similar applies where you live :) )

While I’m not saying we all need to talk in the same way as rigidly structured political debates, I think it is helpful to go into a disagreement acknowledging that peaceful disagreement is possible. Caps lock does not a disagreement make.

Second: Along that line, it’s important to recognize when someone is attacking your beliefs vs. attacking you (or someone else) as a person.

There’s a reason the term ad hominem exists; if every argument against a belief were a personal attack, then “argument” and “ad hominem attack” would be interchangeable, and we wouldn’t need two different words for the same idea. Needless to say, they aren’t the same.

Especially in the fandom world, escalating an argument often begins with a misunderstanding. Take the whole issue with EXO’s Chen and the Kunta Kinta comment. In my opinion, this was an issue that really does deserve dialogue in the fandom. It’s a valid topic to discuss, and it brings up a lot of important issues concerning a previously mostly domestic market being expanded to the international level. But instead of bringing important arguments to light, the whole controversy just made a lot of people angry and mean.

The thing is, a lot of fans at the time misinterpreted well-intentioned comments about wishing South Korea as a whole were more aware of Kunta Kinta’s connotation as an insult against Chen’s character. This was an easy assumption to make, because lots of people really were taking the scandal as an opportunity to say truly horrible, unfounded things about Chen. Once that assumption was made, the gauntlet was thrown (alternatively, the fart sent in a general direction), and things generally fell apart quite quickly into hamster-elderberry-fart-slinging after that.

The end result was everybody coming off as exceptionally immature and unkind. Not to mention, an important discussion about cultural awareness and the consequences of the growing Hallyu wave was shoved into the back of the closet with the other abandoned topics no one dares to bring up anymore. Sometimes, a scratch really is just a scratch, and turning it into more than that just makes a mess out of something perfectly reasonable.

Third: When the insults emerge, it’s time to either de-escalate or else just stop.

Insults will not get you what you want. Responding to someone else’s insults will also not get you what you want. When someone has devolved into calling you names, they aren’t thinking very logically anymore, and at that point it’s a judgment call for you. If the other person is still semi-rational, trying to de-escalate might be helpful. If not, just stop responding, as tempting as it is to retaliate. Further responses, whether you word them as an insult in return or as some sort of faux-clever troll in response, just egg your opponent on and paint you as incredibly immature.

Here’s an example from Monty Python: in the French castle scene, the French taunter (who is clearly beyond logic at this point) tells the knights, “Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time!” They literally have a warning from him that he’s not going to respond rationally any time soon, not to mention the several minutes of taunts and insults they’ve already sat through. The knights ignore him, and what do they get?

That’s right. A flying cow to the face.

Do you want a flying cow to the face? (The answer is no, by the way.)

No, I didn’t think so. I don’t want a flying cow to the face, at any rate.

Case closed.

Fourth: If you’re going to construct an argument against your opponent, for the love of everything good, please be careful about when you tear down a counter-argument’s factual support based on “bias.”

This is honestly a pet peeve of mine. Please recognize that literally everyone has bias. Complaining that a source or person is biased is not a valid argument to discount everything said source/person states on its own.

Simply put, it is not possible to have zero absolute bias, not if you’re alive with a heartbeat and thoughts. Is it possible to judge that an article is more biased toward stance A than stance B? Yes, probably. But if you have one article biased toward A and one toward B, it’s not possible to objectively say which article is more absolutely biased. Any decision you reach is based either on the accuracy of the facts in the article (which relates to fact-checking, not bias, by the way), or on which article aligns more closely with your own pre-existing biases and beliefs. This has been backed up by lots and lots of economic research on psychology and media markets (check out Jesse Shapiro at Brown University or Matt Gentzkow at Stanford University, if you’re interested).

This is not to say that you don’t need to consider a source’s bias when reading it. Please do consider it - bias is extremely important in this regard, because it tells you what the source may have chosen to include or exclude when forming its argument. By recognizing relative bias, you have the tools you need to go look for the information this source has excluded from its own argument. But just because a source is extremely biased in one direction does not automatically make the facts it contains incorrect. That would pertain to accuracy, not bias, and there is a very, very big difference between the two.

Anyway! I really hate to see arguments turn so sour over misunderstandings and hotheadedness so often, especially when it’s completely unnecessary and ruins the friendly atmosphere fandom is built upon. Disagreeing civilly is entirely possible (and healthy for a community), and I hope to see more of it in the future.

(If you’ve made it this far, thanks for suffering through all the Monty Python references and humoring my rant on absolute bias :”) . Comment below or PM me with any thoughts, please!)