feiwynne:

ladysilvrene:

feiwynne:

So Symbrock is
really taking off. I fully support the ship and think that is
awesome. This does however create a bit of a situation that people
who relatively recently joined the Tom Hardy fandom might not be
aware of. Frankly some people who have been around a while may need to be reminded too. I do not want a repeat of 2015.

I have a lot of
content from last time in my Tom Hardy tag if you want longer form
commentary, but the cliff-notes version is that he had a several
years long span of his life that involved extreme drug abuse problems
to the point of regularly being blacked out, while also being
surrounded by violent criminals. At one point he gave an interview in
which he implied he had a sexual history involving men  during that
time period, and later has said he is not attracted to men. A large
number of people, including dozens of entertainment media reporters
have insisted that the only possible explanation for this
‘discrepancy’ is internalized homophobia. You can see this
interview here, where he describes coming out of a drug induced
blackout to find himself in the aftermath of being held at gunpoint
naked in some unknown creep’s bed, and consider if there might be
another explanation for that. Please note that interview happened
several years before he started getting harassed to ‘come out,’
‘for the good of the children.’ If you have lingering doubts that
he is secretly queer negative I’ll also point out that he
effortlessly uses they / them pronouns for one of his kids. He is
definitely not queerphobic, he is a person with a considerable amount
of personal trauma, and we need to be considerate of that.

And we are now in a
situation where Tom Hardy is now the likeness of the internet’s
favorite ship, which is a monsterfucker ship running primarily on
tentacle porn. I’m not telling people not to ship Symbrock, I’m
Symbrock trash with the rest of you. Just please be mindful and
respectful of the context here. If you do very explicit art,
particularly anything with dub con / non-con elements, consider using
the comic likeness instead. I’ve seen a few written fics where
Brock has massive internalized biphobia and a history of inebriated gay hookups, you aren’t being subtle, stop it. Be respectful when
submitting fan questions. If you have questions about his personal
history, stop, and rethink your life choices. He may have been
curious at one point, he isn’t now, leave him the fuck alone about
it. If you have sexual / romantic themed questions about the
characters, be very clear you are talking about the characters. And
just generally, please don’t be dicks.

Seriously. Keep your fandom shit to yourself. Don’t torment the people making this art and entertainment for you.

I want to be careful
about pushing too hard on the fandom for what is ultimately the
responsibility of the media. Normally with fandom works my position
is as long as content is published to fandom spaces and properly
tagged its all fine. If talk show host or interviewer digs stuff up
and shoves it in an actors face to get a reaction thats on them, not
the content creator.

But in this case we
have an actor that deserves extra consideration and media that has
already been acting terribly. We have to operate on the assumption
that interviewers and hosts will be jerks, invade fandom spaces, and
be asses about it. Unfortunately there isn’t much we can do to make
them stop, but things like notes on works explicitly not permitting
their reproduction without the agreement of the artist / writer could
be a start.

I’ve also seen a
lot of artists lamenting they cant get his face right, and I’m
going to be over here going ‘maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe
don’t try to hard to fix that.’