There is no Naj, no Israa, no HIV-positive status, and no lesbian couple<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe real, singular author was one white girl named Alix, a 19-year-old American college student. Not HIV-positive, not living in India, not married and not a lesbian. In the end, the elaborate web of identities unraveled to reveal a single person behind the curtain \u2014 no sprawling backstory, no international struggles, just one college student fabricating two entire existences.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But why go to such lengths? Why construct an intricate false identity just to participate in a fandom? The answer lies in the deeper psychology of online spaces, where personal validation often becomes just as important as creative expression. Nothing can be written, drawn, pondered or put out in the world without an accompanying accusation that the one who put it out also partakes. To write is to condone! <\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\nTumblr thrives on an all-or-nothing purity culture where creative curiosity is replaced by moral posturing. It has always been home to strange, self-sustaining ecosystems where fandom, identity, activism and an overwhelming fear of being problematic collide. The Hamilton fandom was no different \u2014 it wasn\u2019t just about enjoying a musical; it was about proving you were engaging with it correctly.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In these spaces, simply liking something isn\u2019t enough. Tumblr, more than perhaps any other social media platform, runs on a currency of identity and oppression. The more marginalized identities one can claim, the more authority they wield in conversations. It\u2019s not just about being right \u2014 it\u2019s about having lived experience to back it up. The result? A bizarre, self-perpetuating competition to see who has suffered the most, where one\u2019s worth is determined not by their contributions, but by their perceived struggles.<\/p>\n
This phenomenon, often dubbed the \u201ctrauma Olympics,\u201d fosters an environment where individuals feel immense pressure to justify their presence. In the wake of reactionary, callout-heavy online culture, participation in fandom isn\u2019t just about artistic exploration \u2014 it\u2019s about proving you deserve to be there. Creativity takes a backseat to personal validation, and suddenly, fandom isn\u2019t about the content itself but about who has suffered enough to engage with it in the first place.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s how you get something like the hivliving scandal. It wasn\u2019t enough for a white college student to simply be interested in the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and write a fanfiction about it. Something in her own psyche \u2014 some need for validation, authority or maybe just an unexamined sense of entitlement \u2014 made her take it further. It wasn\u2019t just about writing a story; it was about becoming someone who was \u201callowed\u201d to write it while dodging all the necessary steps to write it respectfully.<\/p>\n
Perhaps, we now feel the effects of the oft-donned victim complex of white women: the deep-seated need to center herself in narratives of suffering, to prove that she, too, has endured, that she belongs in the conversation. But, to her, being a white woman wasn\u2019t enough \u2014 she needed something grittier, something more tragic. So, she draped herself in an identity she saw as more compelling, one soaked in oppression and hardship: a queer, HIV-positive, sex-trafficking survivor from India. It wasn\u2019t just about trauma \u2014 it was about exotic trauma, the kind that people would listen to, the kind that couldn\u2019t be questioned.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\nThere\u2019s an undeniable fetishization at play here, a romanticization of the BIPOC lived experience as something both tragic and poetic, something she could borrow to justify her own creative impulses. She didn\u2019t just want to tell a story about suffering \u2014 she wanted to own it, to speak over the very people she was supposedly representing. It\u2019s easy to point fingers at Tumblr\u2019s culture of performative identity, and sure, it may have enabled her, but at its core, this wasn\u2019t Tumblr\u2019s doing. This was her own calculated fabrication, born from a mix of insecurity, entitlement and a deeply ingrained belief, however incorrect, that her voice mattered more when it wasn\u2019t actually hers.<\/p>\n
2015 Tumblr was an Ouroboros-esque circle jerk of people nursing their own victim complexes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The hivliving scandal wasn\u2019t just about medical fraud or fanfiction ethics; it was a case study in how internet culture pressures people to fictionalize themselves just to feel allowed to participate. And, ironically, it proves the very thing Tumblr\u2019s moral watchdogs fear the most: Sometimes, people are not who they say they are, and they\u2019re lying to get the better of you.<\/p>\n
At the end of the day, fandom \u2014 at its best \u2014 is supposed to be a place where people can embrace the weird, the niche and the unhinged without fear. It should be a space where creativity thrives, where people can explore ideas, identities and historical rap battles without needing to justify their interests. But when the culture of constant scrutiny and purity policing forces people to prove they have the \u201cright\u201d to engage, it doesn\u2019t foster better, more ethical fandom \u2014 it just pushes people to lie. Instead of demanding credentials for every creative endeavor, maybe we should be open to people\u2019s personal explorations, writing silly little stories and embracing their freakishness without endless flashing credentials. If we could do that, we might not have to deal with elaborate catfishing schemes, medical fraud scandals or yet another white college student pretending to be an HIV-positive, sex-trafficking survivor just to write about historical figures kissing.<\/p>\n
Maybe \u2014 just maybe \u2014 we could let people get weird without the witch hunts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Daily Arts Contributor Estlin Salah can be reached at <\/em>essalah@umich.edu<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\n
Related articles<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Content warning: This article contains mentions of human trafficking and sexual assault. \u201cHamilton\u201d did the impossible: it made kids care about American history. A Broadway musical with hip-hop battles about the Federalist Papers was, unsurprisingly, more engaging than the cyclical American middle school reteaching of the same curriculum about the same war, year after year.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":750,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[789,794,790,792,791,788,793],"class_list":{"0":"post-749","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-circle","9":"tag-complexes","10":"tag-jerk","11":"tag-mutuals","12":"tag-nursed","13":"tag-tumblr","14":"tag-victim"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=749"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":751,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749\/revisions\/751"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}