Why I'm An Outsider: Part Eight: Summer Chaos in AG > 18 and Persona Non Grata, or How I Got Banned (Temporarily) From A Goddamn Community I Started

Felicity in a flower garden. I need all the floofy pictures for this one.

Good lord it's almost October. Where did my month go? Oh, right. Seasonal Affected Depression. Or something like that. Fall comes on and I get moody and sad like a punk. Pbbbth. Well, that should be the best time to pull this painful tooth of my time in the AG fandom in the late 2000s, right? Right.

I've been trying to do my posts in chronological order, which is why this one has been hard to get to. Which is probably why I've been putting it off forever, even though I wrote about it once before. But not in a huge public format like this. But I can't get to the garbage that happened to me on AGPT if I don't get through the garbage that happened to me by my then-best friend in the fandom. I honestly thought it had happened after my AGPT shit, but when I started to dig through the archeological mess that is my recordings, I found out that no, this happened first. Fun. Welp, can't have my arsenic til I have my strychnine.

So, the setup, for those new to the Outsider Series who will later go back and read the other seven posts.¹ By summer 2007, there were two major American Girl groups to participate in, not including flittering  message boards which were the way tweens and teens begged for fandom attention before bokeh pictures with song lyrics on Instagram. The first major gathering of AG fans--called, appropriately enough, AG Fans MB--was slowly dying after restricting everyone from the group that didn't fit into their doorways, because you can't live when you close your communities to a small faction. But I was beyond them for the most part. I was part of two major AG fandom communities. AG Playthings was the big, open forum gathering, like the main hallways of a high school. AG >18, which had been started in summer 2006, was the back woods near the school where we smoked, drank, talked shit, and shipped queerly. They worked in balance with each other: AGPT was the public place found when searching for American Girl collectors,² and AG >18 was sort of an open secret place where you could talk some shit and not get hit. I'd started it with my then best friend, PNG, whose name--online or otherwise--I don't use. AG > 18 was doing pretty good at that time. That April, we'd installed two new mods: Bean and Colette. This took the modship of AG >18 to a grand total of four, including me and PNG. We were a self-running community, so we didn't need huge amounts of moderating. At most we were just semi-public figures, who if some one needed some business taken care of beyond public work, we did it. But we were all friends of varying levels, and PNG was my closest friend. To the point she had my address and even my phone number. She complimented my sewing. She praised my Fel-Beth shipping--I was even writing fic.

So that's why it hurt like a motherfucker when, in the summer of 2007, she stabbed me in the motherfucking back.

Prologue: Not Such a Sweet Baby Face
Part One: Finding AG Fans, or How Periods are Bad For Children
Part Two: There's Fundies in My Fandom
Part Three: The Wicked Witch of Customizing and the Birth of AG > 18
Part Four: Halloween is for Jesus, or How Otters Offended a Nation
Part Five: The AG Fans Revamp: No Pagans Allowed 
Part Six: The Great Mass Banning of Aught-Six
Part Seven: The Rise of AG Playthings  

Why I'm An Outsider: Part Seven: The Rise of AG Playthings

And then there were six--at least, until that spring. 

The next chapter of my time in the mid-Aughties of the American Girl Fandom--circa 2006--follows the last chapter of my connections (for the most part) with any and all membership at AG Fans. They had pulled a Charles Lee/John Adams and shat the bed. A whole mess of people from AG > 18 had just been banned from their prohost boards in the wake of the moderating staff overreacting to the idea that there were people in the fandom--nay, in the world herself--that were not 100% Christian, straight, or monogamous, that they were doing their own thing and being happy about it, that we were looking at them or participating in their community, and/or and that some of them, someone, somewhere, might be talking about them behind their backs in an unflattering way. And then tried to feed us some lines about trolling.

In the wake of the Great Banning of Aught-Six, the new hub of American Girl fandom became AG Playthings. As people left AG Fans and their madness to wither like a neglected avocado plant in the harsh winters of Alaska, they went to the open doors of AG Playthings.¹ And you know, for a good long while, AG Playthings was pretty okay to be at. With AG Fans locking down, AG Playthings was the place for news, sports, and weather Buy/Sell/Trade in the American Girl Fandom. It had its nasty aspects, and I plan to talk about them in depth in this and future posts. But they at least didn't start that way. They started as an open, accepting AG community that allowed dissident opinions, complaints, and even calling the mods out on their shit without the fear of being throw out on your ass to bounce down the road.²

Brief discussion of the Gang Situation. The AGGiR--for we were still living in Redmond--was now one member larger by that Giftmas, with the addition of Felicity Merriman, with all her pretty tribadism and her missing her Elizabeth--and not wanting the blonde one. She was best friends with Naomi, close to Addy as another Historical even though Addy had to school her on why her grandfather's plantation was an issue and Owning Slaves Was A Bad Idea, and had a crush on Marisol that Marisol didn't even get a whiff of. Yes, Lissie liked Brunettes, and a whole photostory was made about how she did and how the gang didn't judge her one bit for being queer. As Otters said outright: "I'm not going to give up my faith because of what other people think I should be. I'm a pagan, and I'm proud of it. Being a lesbian--a tribade--is part of who you are. Do your own thing and screw the haters." It was 69 pictures of dolls,³ full of the F word and blatant paganism, and out of respect for some of the members of AG Playthings, I did not post it there or even a link to it. But I did post it at AG > 18, and I did post Otters Teaches Paganism Part Four: Yule on AG Playthings with warm reception.

So what did I have to complain about? A lot. As 2006 became 2007 and Nicki replaced Jess, I continued to post on AG Playthings comfortably and be a content participant, work at Nintendo, and make good friends in the AG fandom. And things happened, for good and for ill. These are going to be in the order I took remembering notes in, because it was around six to seven months of AG Playthings participation mixed with AG > 18 participation.⁴ Also I have no access to anything AGPT anymore, obviously, so I can only go on my notes I've had.

None of these were big sweeping things like the Banning of Aught-Six or what would later be The Final And Complete Bannination of One, Nethilia from AGPT. But they were things that happened in, on, and around the fandom.

This one might be on the long side. Let's go. [/Alexander Hamilton]

Prologue: Not Such a Sweet Baby Face
Part One: Finding AG Fans, or How Periods are Bad For Children
Part Two: There's Fundies in My Fandom
Part Three: The Wicked Witch of Customizing and the Birth of AG > 18
Part Four: Halloween is for Jesus, or How Otters Offended a Nation
Part Five: The AG Fans Revamp: No Pagans Allowed 
Part Six: The Great Mass Banning of Aught-Six
  

Why I'm An Outsider: Part Six: The Great Mass Banning of Aught-Six

The holidays were coming, and so was the bullshit.

Depression sucks. Depression sucks a lot. You don't get anything done like you'd want, things get pilled up in piles, and all your executive function gets shot to shit. I fight major depression--and I don't mean "oh, today I feel bad" bullshit, I mean "brain no worky so I sit there and don't do anything and can't get anything done really pbbbt" depression which is a chronic illness. I've wanted to do tons of reviews--including Grace stuff, I got all I wanted from Vanilla Bean's collection I'm pretty sure--the introduction of Maryellen to the gang, and a huge helpful post about adding to the AG collection without breaking the bank that is still sitting in queue to work on and has been since frigging September.¹ And then my brain is like "no, you're going to do fuck all for weeks and weeks" and the photocorner stays a mess and leaves no room for shots. I'm not going to lie about why there's been a dearth of posts. I try and my brain chokes up. I'm going to try to do better, but every day is a struggle, and some days turn into weeks of terrible.

With that said, I hope you understand.

Before we get into the point of the post, news catch up. Yes, I've seen Lea Clark. From what I can see in her looks she's Marisol with the Hazel Eyes that AG bought way too many of, and she's at most biracial because AG can't give us a full PoC. My protest and post stands. American Girl needs to give us dolls of color for the Girl of the Year, and not just mixed ones with whiteness imbued to smooth over white racism that makes it so that characters of color have to be mixed with white to be acceptably ethnic. We'll see what her stories offer. But one character is not enough, especially when surrounded by frequent whiteness. I'm tired and you should be too. Blech.

To the story.

When we last left you at the story of AG Fandom Fucking It Up in 2006, AG Fans had just moved from Hostboard to phpBoards and taken the opportunity to do a widespread ban on Paganism and Pagan displays, as instigated by Yours Truly, the Pagan. They had also closed the board to the point that new users had to agree to the rules before they could read them. It was a nasty knot of BS, and while I had a lurker account to see the mess and get news, I was not a participant and was more a participant of AG > 18 and AGPT.  This was December 6th, 2006. I'd started working on a photostory called Naomi's Giftmas Surprise at the start of the month, which would slowly introduce the sixth member of the AGGiB,² and taught myself to restring to restring both Addy and Beth Cady (and found it a lot easier than I had thought it was).  We kept snarking at AG > 18, and newsing at AGPT.

December 13th, 2006, is when shit really got fucked.

Prologue: Not Such a Sweet Baby Face
Part One: Finding AG Fans, or How Periods are Bad For Children
Part Two: There's Fundies in My Fandom
Part Three: The Wicked Witch of Customizing and the Birth of AG > 18
Part Four: Halloween is for Jesus, or How Otters Offended a Nation
Part Five: The AG Fans Revamp: No Pagans Allowed 

Why I'm an Outsider - Part Five: The AG Fans Revamp: No Pagans Allowed

One of these girls ain't wanted on AG Fans.

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men an' dollybloggers gang aft agley.¹ I had plans for photoshoots, my loves. Not only do I have Addy's and Kit's and Kaya's 2015 LE outfits, I had plans to snap mad pics of them and start to review the hell out of each. But my homeplace informed me that they were redoing all my windows and that meant clearing everything away from them. Including dismantling my photoshoot corner. And my altar (how very fitting for this next topic). Oh, and my body decided that functioning without another daily lifestyle med is for chumps and I caught a cold that fucked me up on the hardcore. I'm full of issues. It's like Nat Geo up in dis bitch. So rather than reviews--those can come next month--what you get is more about how AG Fandom had fucked up problems and shit. And this is one of the BIG ones from AG Fans.

Enough prologue. Let's get into this.

So Halloween--Samhain for us pagans--2006 had passed, and the message couldn't be clearer to me. Paganism was super offensive to those of AG Fans, enough to get an album thread shut the entire fuck down and deleted. I had stuck my neck out to test the rules on faith and demonstrating it to see if they fairly applied to me as well as others. The response had been the equivalent of a smack in the face--I had been shown in no uncertain terms that this was not to be tolerated, thank you young lady, you keep that non-Christian stuff in the dark where good White Christian God-fearing children can't see it.

November went on, with the hot mess continuing to happen. AG > 18 stayed in our corner for the most part, talking amongst ourselves and getting hella annoyed with racist and bigoted thought running unchecked and discussing the ongoing microdramas that kept going on and thinking the way people were being treated was some grade-A hot steaming load of bullshit. Meanwhile, AGPT was on the rise as the better place to be to talk about American Girl without feeling like a lesser person--the album had gone over fine there!² I was actually liking it over there, since I could be who I was--black, pagan, poly, bi--without the mod staff getting panties in the ass any time I pushed back against bigots.They had fuckups, but they were less fucked up than AG Fans, which was saying something.

As for AG Fans? Bigotry abounded, and it continued on that people were banned behind closed doors for protesting mod abuse and told things in sickly sweet language complete with condescension smilies and tone. This included statements that AG Fans was willing to look at your dolls but you had better take your goth and devil issues elsewhere.³ Posts on AGFans were getting edited to remove such subversive language as "alternative lifestyle" and replied to with saccharine sweet statements when people rightfully protested. The claim outright said by one of the mods on AGFans to someone's post was that "Would I want my eight year old to see it?" should be a good baseline for how the place was run, and since some people didn't want their eight year old knowing about certain things, it was just best not to talk about it. Would you want your precious eight year old to know about homosexuals and other non-Christian faiths?

dot dot mother fucking dot.

Okay, first of all eight year olds shouldn't be on the internet unsupervised, so there's that shit to start. And second of all, yes. I don't want my theoretical eight year old to become a goddamn prejudiced asshole who thinks that it's okay to be a homophobe and that talking about alternative lifestyles is so goddamn taboo that the mods have to ninja edit posts lest a kid read the word "girlfriend" spoken by a girl and instantly stop going to church and embracing witchcraft and lesbian acts.⁴ I plan to also teach my kids about paganism and any other faiths out there--even that it's okay not to have one at all--what their reproductive organs are for beyond "naughty things we don't touch and talk about," how to buck against an unfair social system, and how to curse out every other kid on the playground if they need to. Don't expect me to muffle myself because you're too fucking ignorant/lazy/stupid/bitchy to parent your child. Because last I checked, no one's crawled kicking and screaming out of my uterus yet--and not from lack of wanting to carry a child. REGULATE YER OWN DAMN KIDS. If you're that damn concerned, take your eight year old off the internet--and probably put them in a tiny box somewhere until they're married or run away from home.

Back to November 2006. I had gotten the message that my pagan albums weren't wanted, and that should have been the end of it, right? The pagan had been told, she had been told very blatantly, and she knew to keep her filthy heathenish ways away from good people. And that was that.

Nope. Nope, there was still fall out to come, and oh was it coming and it was going to be nasty.

Prologue: Not Such a Sweet Baby Face
Part One: Finding AG Fans, or How Periods are Bad For Children
Part Two: There's Fundies in My Fandom
Part Three: The Wicked Witch of Customizing and the Birth of AG > 18
Part Four: Halloween is for Jesus, or How Otters Offended a Nation

Why I'm an Outsider - Part Four: Halloween is for Jesus, or How Otters Offended a Nation

And then there were four. And the drama really started.

I was enduring the American Girl Fandom in August 2006 a lot better than I had been earlier in the same year. Firstly, AG Playthings was a up-and-coming board to counteract the super repressive fundamentalism of AG Fans. The mods allowed open discussion, and challenges to people's opinions. So I could talk about my sexuality, race, and faith a lot more openly than I ever could at AG Fans. (That is, at all.) And AG Over 18 was the LiveJournal based spot that we jokingly called the space behind the main school where the "bad kids" gathered to snark on bullshit, think critically about American Girl beyond the squeal and the buy, and watched Felicity and Elizabeth make out, and offered the idea that Kit had the possibility of growing up to be a fine young man.

I was starting to feel a lot better about being part of the American Girl Fandom. It didn't have to be all fundamentalism and controlled speech and "what about the children" in every corner any more. And the best part for me was how AG > 18 was just thriving. I had only thought we'd have a few people there, but we were so active and inviting. Quite a few people would join to feel a lot less pressure around them. It was a place where you could breathe deeply and not feel like you were walking on razor-blades to just talk about yourself and your dolls without getting fussed at for having such "unwholesome" things as naked doll ass, race talk, queerness, and hair streaks.¹ We were passing around older AG pattern scans, snarking on things, making non-wholesome jokes, talking about things that mattered to us, poking at Emily being the English Friend of Molly, and becoming a community. It was a thriving community I'd help start. That was a very good feeling.

I'd made a lot of friends, especially on AG > 18. PNG (Persona Non Grata) was probably my closest friend of them all.² We talked for hours. Not just online, but on the phone--to the point I ate up too many minutes on my phone plan and had to scale it back to avoid high fees. Around late July to early August, she said she'd like to send me early birthday and holiday presents. I accepted with glee--people sending me things! Wow! She went on the AG site to send me still-newish #26 in the Ready for Fun Meet set (because I was worried about the new one upcoming not being something I liked; I was right) and found Marsiol for cheap on eBay with her near complete meet set. And that's how Amber "Otters" Flynn and Marisol Luna joined up, doubling my gang in the course of a day. Only a few days later she also located and purchased Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who arrived very soon afterwards--within a week.

She...needed her hair did. So badly.

She wasn't my only friend either. In fact, the day before Otters and Marisol arrived, I'd met Colette and Inky, and we'd hung out in downtown Seattle. Not only was I making friends, they wanted to meet me!

They sat on a statue man's butt. We took pictures.

That September, I got a job--a real one, working for Nintendo Consumer Service. Nothing big, and likely not to last, I'd personally thought. It was basic customer service for the Nintendo DS--connecting it, troubleshooting, setting up repairs, etc. I did my training the first two weeks of October, started working right after my 26th birthday, and accepted that I would have to work over the holiday season--the reason I hadn't gotten the job last year was because I would be out of town over the holidays.³ My fiance was doing good in his college classes, and with me now having a job we were a little less boot at our throat for finances. I was doing well both in life and starting to do well in fandom.

And then Halloween came, and I pushed harder against AG Fans than I ever had before and blew things up.

Prologue: Not Such a Sweet Baby Face
Part One: Finding AG Fans, or How Periods are Bad For Children
Part Two: There's Fundies in My Fandom
Part Three: The Wicked Witch of Customizing and the Birth of AG > 18

Casual Fridays: Beth Cady, A Historical American Girl

Beth Cady: An American Girl!

Another Friday, another Casual Friday. So as not to swamp the blog, I'm aiming for every other Friday or so being my Casuals. This Friday, we're going to meet a girl I consider as much a part of my Historical gang as any of the others.

Meet Beth Cady: An American Girl.

Beth Cady's full name is Elizabeth Cady--or, when she grew up and got married and became all historical, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Yes, the feminist. But I don't call her that because she's "13" around here. (By the full name. She's still very much a feminist, because woo feminism.) She was made as a limited edition collectable by Götz¹ for the state of New York in 2000, and only 5000 were made. She was gifted to me by an ex-friend (long ugly story; I don't talk about it), and I've had her since August 2006. She was the fifth member of the AGGiB², and goes by Beth Cady both to separate her from Felicity's Elizabeth and because Beth Cady is a damn adorable name.

More details about her below the cut.