Let's talk about what "malicious compliance" means under an oppressive government entity. This could be a historical entity (example: Nazi Germany or the American Confederacy) or a fictional one for my writer mutuals. Malicious Compliance is the act of complying with a law or rule in the worst possible way, out of protest for the unjustness of the law. The idea is to:
- slow down the process
- protect or hide a victim from harm
- inconvenience others
- tie up valuable time and resources
Many people were saved in Nazi Germany because certain people made a big fuss about the paperwork not being 100% correct. There are also outright acts of strategic disobedience applied in these situations. Slave populations have often "accidentally" broken critical tools.
Let's say you're writing a fictional dystopia wherein the government requires teachers and nurses to register all known queer children with the state, or with their parents, for discriminatory purposes. What can your characters do to stymie this process? Well, first, they're going to need to have a plan in place. Most people aren't good at coming up with malicious compliance on the spot, especially if they've been steeped in a dystopic environment that beats into them that their value is defined by their productivity as a worker.
Plans they could make include:
- Is the registration filled out in a paper form or letter? Can it be filled out and "lost" in a drawer?
- If computerized, can the character "forget" to fill out the relevant notes section on the child?
Can the character warn the child?
- Maybe tell the child about the rule and ask if they meant their "friend" is queer and they need advice for their "friend"?
- Maybe they meant queer as in strange, or gay as in happy. Kids don't always know the meanings of the words they say.
- Can the system itself be tampered with? Can the database be safely loaded with false data to waste the authorities' time?
- Can the child's data be lost in the system by using the wrong name or spelling or address?
- Is there a time limit by which the character has to turn in the child? Can they just wait indefinitely? Or leave it until the last minute, then take a vacation, and forget? These things happen.
A good fictional example of bureaucratic stalling is "Will Save The Galaxy For Food" wherein a Lawful character buys time by insisting that a squadron of soldiers are NOT allowed to "redecorate" the place they're invading and therefore MUST put on little paper booties.
Writers need to understand that if they want readers to like a character, that will NOT be accomplished by making them an efficient worker bee for fascists. You might think a "good" character would just quit rather than be complicit in a bad system, but there are other ways to do good: slowing the bad guys down, obfuscating the truth, redirecting their energies: Chaotic Good Trolls for the cause.
Let's say your fictional government entity is requiring "gender passports" so people can work and play and go to school. Your character is a doctor:
- Can you just sign the patient's paperwork and take their word for it? Will anyone really know if you didn't do an exam?
- The rule may say to perform certain tests, but may not specify HOW or ON WHAT (there's lab samples around here somewhere) or how to INTERPRET the results.
It is your character's ethical responsibility to protect the patient, not to follow an unjust law that puts them at risk.
Now, I know what you're thinking: "Ana, I'm not a writer so I don't need to research this." But you do consume fiction, yes? You watch shows or movies or play games? This is a very common trope and it's important to understand it fully so you can appreciate the nuances. I think it's important to understand certain tropes so you can appreciate what's happening in fiction--otherwise you might not understand why a hero is "cooperating" with fascists rather than just passionately quitting in an act of useless defiance.
It's also very important to be able to tell the difference between characters who are complying willingly (collaborators) and characters who are complying maliciously (resistors). You need to be able to tell the good guys from the bad guys in your movie, right? So I'm going to strongly recommend that everyone, writers and readers and viewers alike, put some real thought and research into what malicious compliance and bureaucratic stalling mean to you personally.
Feel free to drop fictional or historical examples in the comments, for writing inspiration!
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I want to expand some thoughts on this thread that I couldn't get to last night. We talked about malicious compliance: following the letter of the law, rather than the spirit, in order to slow fascism and help the innocent. Let's talk about fictional sabotage now. If you've seen a lot of action movies, you're probably familiar with the concept of, like, the Star Rebels blowing up the Death Factory where all the killdroids are made. But sabotage comes in all kinds of forms!
For example, did you know that most slave societies that we have records for were often deliberately "clumsy" and would break tools that would require the entire workforce to halt for a day or more. The sabotage was focused and directed, not willy-nilly, and it worked because the ruling classes wanted to believe that the slaves weren't smart. Especially if a tool was considered complicated or complex. Nothing takes me out of a story faster than an oppressed workforce that is working at peak efficiency. Even good workforces have accidents; your oppressed surly fictional District 12 or whatever should have plenty of accidents to their name!
Does your hero work with computers? Can he slow down the network with accidental Reply Alls to internal memos? Can he lose key patient data by restarting his machine before saving? Can he reboot his machine during an OS upgrade and ruin the entire image? Your character doesn't need to be a super hacker to do basic stuff like this; even computer experts make basic mistakes like these.
If your hero is a manager, she could confuse and stall cases by randomly reassigning workloads. Like, in the case above where the dystopian government is investigating all queer children, she could reassign their cases internally every week, bringing progress to a halt. Or by having assignments consolidated into a morning stack that everyone just works off of as they come in, sorted by priority, but she keeps changing the priorities. Maybe she uses the chaos as an excuse to create more chaos: daily progress meetings that last 2-3 hours at a time. Requirements for status updates that take an hour to fill out and are needed every day for every case.
Readers love to hear about creative ways someone mucked with someone else's progress; lean into that desire because it's a great source of entertainment. Well placed comedy can help leaven the bread of tragedy, if you will. Think of all those Shakespearean bumbling fools who were ever getting in the way of the other characters. They're audience-favorites for a reason!
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Twitter: Malicious Compliance |
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The Problem with Entrapta |
I was missing my husband over Thanksgiving and ended up marathoning the new She-Ra on Netflix. It is wonderful and I highly recommend it, however I have an issue with the portrayal of Entrapta.
Entrapta was a villain in the original series. The creators of this series chose to make her a member of the "good guys" team first, only to fall to the bad side later after being captured. For a series which is otherwise very good at exploring the motivations of why people (specifically Catra) remain on Team Evil, Entrapta's reasons are... not well fleshed out. She's tricked far too easily into believing her teammates abandoned her on a mission (they thought she was dead) and then enthusiastically builds lethal technology for the Horde because she likes to experiment and doesn't care if her actions lead to people dying.
This is a collection of tweets on the subject. Here be spoilers!
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She-Ra is so good so far and I'm crying at how much I love it, oh my god. Bow is so pure and good and nice and a wonderful example of good masculinity. Glimmer is short and stocky and I stan her so hard. Angella in Bright Moon as a frustrated mom doing her damned best is a mood and I adore her. Every scene with Catra. Every scene.
I love how all the princesses have "girly" powers that most people would scoff at? Glimmer makes sparkles, Mermista turns into a mermaid, Entrapta has Rapunzel hair, Perfuma makes flowers. But they are brave and strong and they make those powers work. And then you have She-Ra who is an eight foot tall giantess with a sword and I love her and I just. *sobs forever in yes*
I don't like Entrapta at all and I don't know if it's because I'm neurodiverse (ND) so it hurts that the one ND team mate is basically turned evil because she's too much of a reckless fool to realize that evil is bad, or... what. If I have any criticism of the series so far--and I'm halfway through Episode 12--it would be to point at Entrapta and say "all of that". It's hurtful that the ND princess is too foolish to NOT join Hordak because she's offered cookies.
In the prom episode she doesn't even remember what the Horde is and I just. Everyone was yelling "I LOVE ENTRAPTA" at me earlier and I'm sorry but I do NOT. She feels like a collection of parodies and stereotypes about neurodiverse people being foolish and easily confused and laughably simple to lie to. She feels like the Fantasy version of "mentally ill people shouldn't be allowed to own guns" and I just. I'm hoping that Episode 13 gives her a Big Damn Hero moment to reverse all this? Please? Please?
Her fall to evil is frustrating because they did such a good job giving Catra complex reasons for why she stays, but with Entrapta it's just "well, you can't trust neurodiverse people, amiright?" Would it really have been so much to ask that Entrapta be well-rounded and have reasons for joining the Horde other than "neurodiverse people are easily tricked"? I mean, make her a prisoner! Have her join the Horde to save her friends! Give her a complex reason besides making her literally a Fool because she's neurodiverse! Neurodiverse people aren't fools just because we think differently! That's ableism!
It's particularly grating that the fandom has granted her Innocent Cinnamon Bun status when she's knowingly and willingly destroying the planet, and she's allied with Hordak who she knows is a genocidal monster! Those are choices she is making and they matter! (God, and you can't tell me that Entrapta isn't smart enough to realize what Catra intends by breaking that model runestone. PLEASE prove me wrong and give her a Big Damn Hero moment where she helps her friends from inside the Horde. PLEASE.)
Well, that was Episode 13. Mermista continues to be the best and I will die on this hill gladly. And, no, Entrapta could've had a Big Damn Hero moment but apparently did not, though I suppose they could retcon that later. sigh. Whatever. *kicks trashcan* That moment would have been when everything seemed lost and they cut to her and the runestone. She could've thrown a switch to route power into the other rune stones.
She was alone! There was no-one in the room watching her. It could've been her little Big Damn Hero moment to help her friends without the Horde finding out and killing her. Have her quietly build in a "reverse polarity to other runestones" technojargon button. Bam. Then we could believe that she "joined" the Horde because she knew she was captured and so she tricked Catra into thinking she was a useful fool, but she's still helping her friends from the inside.
Which is why I say they might retcon this later and say 'oh, yeah, remember that big battle? Entrapta helped.' and honestly I hope to god they do, but a retcon isn't the same as doing it right the first time. And doing it right the first time would've left the season hanging with WAY more dramatic interest because we'd be anxious FOR Entrapta: she's playing a game of wits and if they find out she's NOT the 'useful fool' she seems, they'll kill her! oh no!
I feel like people think I watch stuff looking for things to hate, but I wanted to be wrong about Entrapta. I wanted her to have a Big Damn Hero moment helping the others so we'd know she hadn't REALLY joined the Fantasy Genocide Team out of foolishness. Honestly, "autistic / ND person convinces the NTs that she's a fool but she's really playing them" would be a really NICE plot-twist if done correctly, because it plays on people's ableist assumptions about us.
Frankly, that would be MY go-to ploy if caught by neurotypicals: pretend I'm a useful fool and let them "recruit" me, then undermine the entire place from the inside.
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[Quote from The Problem of Entrapta by Abigail Nussbaum] Basically, Entrapta is so bent on scientific exploration that she deliberately and knowingly conducts an experiment that could potentially have killed countless people, and rendered parts (or all) of Etheria uninhabitable. That's a profound moral failure that can't be blamed on Catra's manipulation, and can't be explained away by pointing to social awkwardness. Simply put, Entrapta doesn't care that her actions are hurting people.
This post, yes. "But Catra manipulated Entrapta into joining!" is an excuse which completely fails to understand the problems I have with Entrapta. "Hacking the planet" is her idea, not Catra's. She recklessly and enthusiastically dives into an experiment which will kill people and render parts of the planet uninhabitable, and her lack of empathy is tied to her enthusiastic neurodiverse sciencey self. She is the embodiment of the idea that you can't trust mentally ill and ND people with guns or power or being president or whatever because we're all reckless and foolish and will thoughtlessly hurt someone if we're given the power and capacity to do so.
It is impossible to "redeem" Entrapta with a reveal that the Princesses didn't leave her behind on purpose. She has to face her actions and atone--and she's being written in a way which seems to suggest that autistic folks lack that capability to self assess. It's... I don't know the word? Upsetting? Weird? Discombobulating? to see people excuse "joining Team Genocide" and "destroying the planet" as long as it's done by a quirky cute girl.
I find myself thinking a lot about what causes us to excuse the inexcusable, when it comes to fictional villains. I went through this with Ursula and the Disney Villains recently, too, and now again with Scorpia and Entrapta. People who do objectively bad things but are cinnamon rolled in fandom--it's an interesting study in our relationship with fiction. (For the record, I don't think excusing fictional villains must correlate with excusing real life ones; I think we consume fiction *knowing* it's fiction. But it's still interesting to me.)
Scorpia is a sympathetic character (her family was captured) but she is still responsible for her actions. She kidnaps someone with every expectation that they'll be eventually killed by her bosses, and she's aiding genocide and murder. She is, in many ways, a foil for Adora: while Adora had a crisis and fled rather than aid the horde, Scorpia knowingly and with her eyes open embraced her new role within the Horde, trading her morals for the security offered to her. She's also the comic relief AND a gorgeous beefcake lesbian, so it's no surprise that the fandom loves her. But it's interesting to see her culpability glossed over. She's not less responsible for her choices than Adora is/was, after all.
We have an interesting juxtaposition here, I think, with Kyle who makes this explicit: he doesn't like being Horde but he doesn't see any alternative options. Kyle genuinely is powerless; if he walked away from the Horde, he'd be killed the way Adora nearly was. Entrapta and Scorpia, on the other hand, have the power to survive apart from the Horde, but choose to stay.
Incidentally: Several folks have asked whether Entrapta was intended to read as ND or "just" as a socially awkward nerd, and the answer is that it kinda doesn't matter--the damage is the same, regardless. "People who behave like This are dangerous and will kill you" damages us because it affects how people interact with us (and which civil liberties are granted to us) (and how cops engage with us) (and so on). So even if they didn't intend Entrapta to read as autistic or neurodiverse, the overall collection of her personality traits has a high correlation to us, so the portrayal of her fall to villainy needed to be handled with care--and it wasn't. The issue isn't that Entrapta is a villain, so much as how she became a villain. She was turned through a combination of being profoundly foolish and utterly lacking any empathy: two harmful stereotypes about ND folks.
ANYWAY. I love the new She-ra and consider it one of the best things I've ever watched AND I want them to handle Entrapta with much more care in the next season. Both/And.
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Storify: Bisexual Characters |
Storify is shutting down in May and has informed users that we have to migrate our content elsewhere if we wish to save it. This is one of my old threads.
Sitting here getting angry at the idea that bisexuality has to be "established organically" so as to not startle the reader. Bi people cannot fucking win.
If they have a crush on another gender, they're assumed straight and any later bisexuality is treated like a jump scare;
If they have a crush on a same-gender person, they're established gay and any later bisexuality is treated as homophobia.
If bisexuality never comes up, it's erased; if their bisexuality is mentioned in passing, it's "shoe-horned in" or "told, not shown".
There is no way, NONE, to establish a bisexual character that will not ruffle feathers.
I'm still angry about this and here's why. Multiple bisexual people told the person I'm subtweeting that their bisexuality was a "surprise" for them. Their response? "Fine, but that's Real Life. FICTION has to follow NARRATIVE RULES." MY SEXUALITY IS NOT CHEKOV'S GUN.
We are allowed to have REALISTIC, messy, complicated bisexual rep. We don't have to follow Robert's Rules of Order for Coming Out. Bisexuality isn't a PLOT POINT that has to follow narrative rules. Bisexuality isn't a TROPE. Bisexuality isn't a gun over the mantle. Yes, fiction has to follow stricter rules than reality in service to a plot. BUT REPRESENTATION IS NOT A PLOT POINT. Yes, a major plot twist can't be introduced 900 pages in. BUT MY SEXUALITY ISN'T A PLOT TWIST. This person is treating bisexuality as a narrative device that has to follow literary conventions and I am just. NO.
@LabyrinthRat: *nod* If they're established as bisexual and then they end up with an opposite-gender character, then it's a queer-baiting cop-out.
This. THIS IS HOW WE'RE TREATED. Bi character + different gender Love Interest = "settling", "less than", "not queer rep". How many times have we seen a bisexual m/f romance called "straight" or "het"? So many times. As a young adult, I *needed* to know that bisexuality existed. That I could like a boy AND still be bisexual. I needed to know that liking a boy didn't make me straight, that there were other ways to like a boy. So all these folks saying that m/f bi rep isn't what kids need? *I* was a kid who needed that.
"Ending up with a boy means you're basically straight" is WHY I didn't know I was bisexual until I was an adult. I was miserable. I am just so damned angry.
THIS is why we're so on edge and tetchy about bi-bigotry in the community. It's not just bisexuals looking to get angry!! We're worked over for EVERY INCH OF REP we get and treated like we're a bunch of privileged half-straights who have the world and want more. We're not half-straights! And I'm not saying bisexuals have it worse, but don't tell me our erasure is a little thing, please! There is a HUGE amount of difference between a het m/f portrayal and a bisexual m/f portrayal, and we NEED that rep. I didn't need bisexual m/f rep because I couldn't get m/f anywhere else; I needed it to know I could be in an m/f rel AND STILL BE BI.
I have been watching erasure and bigotry against bisexual people in the book community for so long now and I am weary to the bone. I feel like I can, at this point, LIST ALL THE WAYS a bisexual character will be deemed Problematic and/or Trendy in a book review.
1. A boy who has feels at another boy but ends up with a girl? "Turned straight. Homophobic."
2. A girl who has feels at another girl but ends up with a boy? "Turns straight. Lesbophobic."
3. A boy who has feels at a girl but ends up with a boy? "Realizes he's gay."
4. A girl who has feels at a boy but ends up with a girl? "Realizes she's a lesbian."
5. A character whose bisexuality is never mentioned and they end up with someone? Erasure. Straight or gay, never assumed bi.
6. A character who ends up with someone but mentions in dialogue that they're bisexual? "Trendy. Told-not-shown. Jumped on the bandwagon."
7. A character who kisses / fucks people of multiple genders? "Slutty bi trope. Harmful. I thought we were done with this."
Let me be clear: many of these tropes CAN be harmful. Slutty bi IS a trope. Queerbaiting IS a trope. Turned straight IS a trope. BUT there ARE ways to handle these narratives thoughtfully and bisexual people with these experiences SHOULD be allowed to try.
When we say "but that was my experience!" the answer is always "well, fiction isn't reality and you can't do these tropes because harm." You know what else is harm? The TOTAL ERASURE of my sexuality and experiences because non-bi people don't like bisexual folks.
About the only time I see bi/pan rep allowed is when the romance is with a trans person. Which is a side-shoot of anti-trans bigotry. People don't have to be bi/pan to love trans people! Stop assuming straight, gay, and lesbian folks don't want us.
We need to talk about how m/f bisexual rep is NOT THE SAME as m/f heterosexual rep. Bisexual people in m/f relationships face constant erasure. They're told they aren't *really* queer. They're made to feel they "settled". Bisexual people in m/f relationships are made to feel "basically straight" despite the bigotry faced--and the book community reflects this.
I see a lot of talk about why we even need m/f bisexual rep when, if you WANT m/f, you can pick a book off the shelf at random. But bisexual m/f rep IS NOT THE SAME as heterosexual m/f rep. Yes, we need it. I needed bisexual m/f rep as a kid to understand that I could BE in an m/f relationship and STILL bisexual. I needed bisexual m/f rep as a kid in order to recognize that liking boys didn't make me straight. I needed bisexual m/f rep as a kid to show me that my sexuality wasn't "turned off" or "straightened" because I held a boy's hand.
"Why d'you need bisexual m/f when there's so much m/f already?" assumes we're hungry for m/f sex scenes rather than THE BISEXUAL REP ITSELF. We know that Exploitation and Representation are different things. We know context and nuance are important. Or, if we don't know that, we need to learn.
Gay m/m books written to titillate straight women readers isn't the same as gay m/m representation.
Lesbian f/f books written to arouse straight men reading along isn't the same as lesbian f/f representation.
Trans narratives written for chasers to jerk off to are not the same as trans representation written by/for trans readers.
We need bi and pan representation that is GOOD and reflects our real and messy experiences for real, messy bi/pan readers.
We're not "half-gay, half-straight" (the original meaning of the bi in bisexual) in need of gay and straight books. WE NEED BI BOOKS. We need bi books to be reviewed by bi readers. Takes from other folks about whether the bisexuality was "established correctly" = NOPE.
And because this keeps coming up: No, I do not think all bi rep is equally good. That's ridiculous. OF COURSE there are badly written bi characters in fiction. Do you know who gets to critique them? Bisexual people! What we do not need or want are generalized rules (esp. from non-bi people!) about how bi characters have to be written!
"They have to show an experience of an attraction to two genders." No! I am bi all the time, not just when attracted to people.
"They have to say 'bisexual' on the page." Look, I prefer that too, but sometimes it doesn't work in the story. Case-by-case basis.
"They have to show more attraction than just a fleeting 'girls are hot'." No, they literally do not have to meet an attraction bar.
"They have to experience bigotry against bisexuals." Hahahahahahaha, NO. We're allowed to write bi fluff, closeted bis, wev we want.
"They have to differentiate themselves from straight characters." NO. You can *stop* assuming straightness is a default we deviate from.
"They have to be canonically bi, not just authorially so." Look, the Dumbledore effect is a thing, BUT perhaps you are not the best judge.
I have written bi characters attracted to multiple gender in CHAPTER ONE and still had people surprised when same-gender sex happened later.
So, again, the Dumbledore Effect (vs. On Page Rep) is a case-by-case thing that BISEXUAL PEOPLE get to discuss. Everyone else gets to hush.
I keep saying this, but allyship includes *being quiet* when something isn't your lane. Let the bi people thrash out the reviews.
"They have to be attracted to someone with opposite genitals, not just opposite gender trans people." Step on Legos if you think this.
"They shouldn't call themselves gay." Look, some of us do and realize later we're not and/or some of us use it as an umbrella term.
And, look, you don't HAVE to READ bisexual books! No one is saying (I hope?) that they're mandatory reading. Just that, by gum, we're allowed to write our own messy rep and non-bi people can please be quiet while we have our bi conversations.
I honestly don't know why non-bi people are invested in this AT ALL or @-ing my thread. If you're not bi, you don't get to judge bi rep. I feel mean saying that, but why would someone not in this identity BE a good judge of the authentic representations of said identity?
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Storify: Passive Characters |
Storify is shutting down in May and has informed users that we have to migrate our content elsewhere if we wish to save it. This is one of my old threads.
I've been talking to my writing-group friends this week about the words we use to describe marginalized protagonists. One of the things we hear a lot about marginalized--particularly female--protagonists is "passive". I have a lot of thoughts about this and I'm going to try to organize them here.
One: We cannot 1-to-1 compare a marginalized character to a more privileged default we've become accustomed to. Marginalized people have been taught from birth to minimize ourselves. Don't stick your neck out, don't cause trouble, don't stand up. That marginalized 17-year-old or 25-year-old protagonist had a lifetime of being smacked down when they tried to excel. I know I did. So when we see a marginalized protagonist being "passive" or hesitant or fearful, where some see a Personality Flaw, I see their trauma. I see someone who has learned "passive" behavior in order to survive.
Now, we can argue whether such a character is "interesting" or not, but that comes back to the "depressed characters are boring" problem which is to say (a) they aren't boring to depressed readers (we exist!) and (b) it's problematic to declare a marginalized group "boring". So to sum up this first point: we can't expect a marginalized character to have had the same experiences as a privileged one.
Two: Much as how "Mary Sue" is rarely applied to male characters, "passive" is rarely used against them even when it would be fitting. When a male character pulls a Refusal of the Call and runs away from his duty, that's not "passive", it's a character arc. When a mentor or an elf girl or a dragon egg plops into his lap and he's pulled into a greater story, we don't see him as passive. When stormtroopers burn down his home and make the decision to leave FOR him, we don't call him passive. When a wizard takes him to a stone--or his adopted brother says 'get me a new sword'--and he gives it a tug, we don't call that "passive". When clues fall into a detective's lap, or when a video game sucks him into the electronic world, or when a girl kidnaps him... not passive?
I feel almost like the passive/not-passive arithmetic is reserved for non-default white cisallohet male protagonists. Which is interesting. I wonder if we don't see privileged men as *inherently* active in ways that marginalized people have to "earn".
Three: I have noticed that "active" marginalized protagonists get complaints for not being passive enough. A girl thinks she's good enough for that hot vampire boy? Mary Sue. A girl dreams of bigger and better things than the life she's been born into? She's a bitch leaving her family behind. (Oh, the SO MANY hot takes about how Katniss didn't love her mother enough like a good daughter should.) A girl throws her drink at a boy who scared and upset her? Violence and abuse! A girl actively seeks out a lover to divest her of her virginity because she wants to be sexually active? The reviews will EXCORIATE her.
All of this points to a problem with using the "passive" label when there's an invisible line, once crossed, that makes her Unacceptable. By which I mean "passive" becomes meaningless as a criticism if being "active" also results in criticism.
Four: This is subjective (as are most book discussions) but "passive" isn't an objectively bad or uninteresting thing. I *like* the story of the quiet little hobbit whose life was turned upside down because a wizard decided he needed an adventure. Stories about passive protagonists are, perhaps, written for readers who feel passive themselves, as escapism. If presented with a magic portal and the title of Chosen One, I might NOT leave my family and my responsibilities to go adventuring. But if thrown into that situation, I would react in ways true to myself. Why do I have to *choose* to go to Narnia for a story to be valid? Life includes things we *didn't* choose to happen to us. Those stories are valid to write. Maybe not for everyone! But valid.
@sapphixy: [quoting Dante from CLERKS] "I'm not even supposed to BE here today!"
YES. A VERY APPROPRIATE QUOTE! Stories are about people and character. It troubles me when we act like an entire TYPE of people--"passive" people--aren't valid characters. Especially when that label is often applied to folks who have been marginalized and traumatized, whose "passivity" is really "survival".
NOW HAVING SAID ALL THAT, reading tastes are what they are. If some people prefer active characters that's 100% fine! But simply saying "Bella Swan is passive", however true, doesn't make the book bad any more than saying "Bella Swan is a brunette" does. And I think it's critical to note that "Bella Swan is passive" is very much a thing, but "Bilbo Baggins is passive".....kinda isn't. Or whoever. Luke Skywalker. Eragon. Harry Dresden. Hicks from Aliens. John Connor. Think about why we rarely discuss their "passivity".
@fromankyra: Arthur Dent's whole shtick is his passivity, and that's used as THE example for the relatable everyman character.
YES. I adore Arthur Dent and have never heard him called an uninteresting character for being passive. Anyway, I think that's the sum of my thoughts. This thread brought to you by a discussion I brought up in writing-group last night.
A fifth point has occurred to me on this active/passive topic and I'm struggling with how to phrase it properly. We do not have nearly enough marginalized rep as protagonists in fiction. When I read someone with my marginalization, I identify with them. But I've noticed that more privileged readers/viewers will not "identify with them" so much as enjoy *observing* them for entertainment. This can manifest less as "oh god, it's ME but set in Narnia" and more as "do things to entertain me, Mx. Character!" So "this character [I don't identify with] is passive" can come from a character they don't identify with failing to grippingly entertain. Whereas other "passive" characters they DO identify with--Arthur Dent, Luke Skywalker, Dante from CLERKS--aren't expected to entertain.
This isn't necessarily a BAD way to approach fiction, but I think it's important to understand from an audience-centering approach. I've had to explain to a lot of guys in my life that while THEY don't identify with lady-reboots (SW, GB) the movies aren't really FOR them. Ladies in Star Wars and Ghostbusters and so on give feminine-identified people a protagonist to identify with. They aren't FOR men. So "this character was passive" when we mean "this character didn't entertain me" can sometimes point to maybe the character wasn't FOR you.
On an individual level, that's okay! Nobody has to like something just because it's ~diverse~ in one way or another. Like, I know some folks who read protagonists that aren't like them and then feel guilty for not 'getting' something that wasn't FOR them. Please don't feel guilty! Tastes are subjective and weird and they're allowed to be what they are. I think it's just something we want to think about when we talk about critiquing, reviewing, sharing, etc. "This wasn't my kind of thing and that's okay" is very different from "This was bad because it failed to entertain me, personally."
I wonder if it's worth recognizing that, say, "Entertainment Value" and "Identity Representation on Page" may not be the same things. An active character will entertain me, but a passive character is more likely to be someone I identify with. And I think that's due in very large part because my entire life has been shaped to traumatize me into a passive position for survival.
While I have you here, this might be why so many women adore Sansa while the men tend to favor Arya, afaict. Because a girl "quietly surviving" isn't entertaining, but she's identifiable. A girl running around on a murder spree is very exciting! But I can identify with a girl's anger and desire for revenge, and I can be entertained by murder, but it's... a different kind of "identify".
@lirelyn: YES. I like Arya fine, but Sansa is the one I'm most anxious to see come out on top. Zero men have understood when I say that.
@StoryHospital: Identifying with Arya's desires is the wish-fulfillment fantasy. Identifying with Sansa's survival is the mirror.
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Tropes: Writing with Chronic Pain |
[This post was previously posted on my Patreon blog.]
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There was uproar in the writing community this week about an interview by an NYT bestselling author about her latest book, in which chronic pain is described as a magical gift. I made a lot of tweets about that, as did a bunch of other really smart people, and noted how frustrated I was with the topic itself because this isn’t 101 entry-level stuff and a lot of people were going to be confused and frightened off the topic of writing characters with chronic pain. And, sure enough, tentative questions came in from very nice people, all asking the same thing:
Should I not write a chronic pain character?
I want to emphasize from the start of this that I am not The Speaker for the Spoonies. So when I say ohmigosh-please-write-all-the-chronic-pain-characters-I-need-them, understand that someone else may feel differently from me on this. I also want to note that there are a lot of different ways to approach chronic pain, and some people are going to hate whichever approach you take. The answer here (in my mind) is not to not-try-at-all, but rather to do your best and warn your readers what they’re signing up for when they read. But let’s go over some guidelines.
Why is your character in chronic pain?
Too many writers have been trained to use a “default” character model—white, heterosexual, cisgender, and able-bodied—and think that any deviation from that model requires some kind of story explanation. So we get plots where the main character doesn’t just have chronic pain, oh no, it’s been “gifted” to her by magic or god or vampires or an ancient curse levied on her family by a coven of riled tax accountants.
I’m not saying never do this, because I can imagine an author with chronic pain—i.e., an “own voices” author speaking to their own experience and being clear about that upfront—finding some cathartic escapism from that. I, too, get sad feelings sometimes about losing the genetic lottery in terms of spinal configurations and I can see how “no, how about I have this because I am awesome” could be fun to write.
But! There’s a big difference—and it’s a difference that will come through on the page—between a CP author writing unapologetic author insert awesomeness to explain their chronic pain vs. an able-bodied author grappling for an story-explanation of why their “normal” character mold was “tainted” with chronic pain. That’s gross and stigmatizing, like we’re “less than” the able-bodied characters.
Consider instead: your magic-wielding protagonist could just... have chronic pain? without a plot reason? just because some people do? We’re not such a rare segment of the population that our inclusion warrants an explanation, and such explanations can shy really close to unwanted “justifications” of why there’s a CP character in your epic fantasy. Believe me: we don’t require a justification to be here. Just let us be here. We should have been here all along, but authors have been pretending we don’t exist.
While we’re on the subject, avoid “explanations” of pain that are front-loaded with guilt or shame or stigma. Pain shouldn’t be leveled on your character as a punishment or because they have mental illness or an abusive family or a guilt complex such that they “wished” pain onto themselves or caused their disability in some way. This contributes to a body of work which says that chronic pain is something guilty and shameful that we’ve brought on ourselves or had inflicted on us as victims. Again, consider us just having chronic pain because lots of people have that.
Is your character cure-seeking?
This is complicated and you’re not going to please everyone here. Know that from the start, be sensitive, and label your book appropriately so readers can decide whether or not they want to read your work.
Here is the thing: A lot of chronic pain people are cure-seeking in real life. Both of my spinal fusions were an attempt to fix my back, and a lot of effort and planning went into making those work. Seeking a cure can be a big part of a spoonie’s life. Plus, if you’re writing magic-users or advanced-technology, some people are going to be interested in an escapist tale where the pain was fixed. Some #ownvoices authors are going to want to write an escapist tale wherein pain was fixed.
Other people are not going to want to read that at all. They can come away from a cure-seeking narrative feeling discouraged because magical cures don’t exist in real life. They can come away feeling gut-punched if the narrative acted like life without a cure isn’t worth living (don’t do that in your story, please). They can come away frustrated that yet another chronic pain character couldn’t just be without their pain becoming part of the plot. These are valid feelings, which is why I say to label your work with care.
But here are things you can do:
(1) Give your character more plot than just cure-seeking. Remember I said I spent two spinal fusions trying to fix my back? I was also doing other stuff at the time! I was going to school, writing books, watching movies, falling in love, and making friends. The surgeries were important parts of my life, but they weren’t my entire life. I had millions of other driving motivations than just my pain.
(2) Don’t glamorize cures as the only thing that makes life living. How fucked up is that? Please don’t do that! Major life events shouldn’t hinge on the cure—people with chronic pain can still find love, beat the big bad, kick ass, and be awesome without needing a cure to accomplish that. If there is going to be a cure offered in the story, my feelings are that it should be like ordering a cherry on a sundae: a nice sweet little addition, but the sundae would be fine without it.
(3) Consider adding characters who choose not to be cured, for whatever reason. There are a lot of reasons not to pursue cures for chronic pain. Sometimes cures can carry risks of their own (for example, I nearly died in my first spinal fusion surgery) and sometimes cures can offer only temporary relief and then worsen over time (see also: my second spinal fusion, which I regret now). Some people with chronic pain are perfectly happy with their current pain management process and don’t want to mess with a good thing. Some people just don’t want to! (See: My mother, who has scoliosis but hates doctors and the thought of surgery.) That’s okay! The point here is that your chronic pain character shouldn’t read as a stand-in for all chronic pain people.
Does your character medicate through the help of a friend / lover?
This one is complicated and can bring up a lot of power dynamics that you need to be aware of.
For one: a character really should not fall in love with their pain management person. This is not unlike falling in love with your doctor or therapist; yes, it is a thing humans do (see: transference), but it’s very fraught for a reason and it would be super unethical for the doctor/therapist to reciprocate those feelings. A good character can't become romantically involved with a patient and remain morally good, in my strong opinion.
Now, I’m not saying characters shouldn’t be able to help each other, just that you need to tread carefully. In my book Survival Rout, Aniyah and Miyuki are already romantically inclined before Miyuki thinks to use xer magic powers to help Aniyah with her chronic pain. For me, this was akin to my own spouse using his talents to help me through my pain flareups, but that effort came after we were already romantically involved, not before. There was no risk that I felt drawn into a relationship with him because of what he was doing / could do to manage my chronic pain.
For two: Be aware that a loved one who helps with chronic pain could represent a situation the CP character might be unable to safely leave. That’s a power imbalance, not unlike an impoverished character marrying a fabulously wealthy bachelor with an unfair / lopsided pre-nuptial agreement. Are some people willing to read books like that? Sure. Are some readers going to be very uncomfortable if the text doesn’t acknowledge the built-in power imbalance? Yes.
As a very general rule, unless you’re an #ownvoices author I would strongly advise against making the love interest someone with a talent that can help the CP character manage their pain. That doesn’t mean the love interest can’t help in normal, mundane ways but they should ideally be ways that other people could do just as well or better so that the CP character doesn’t feel “trapped” in a relationship with them.
How does your character feel about their pain?
Please imagine you’re in pain right now. Not fun, right? Now imagine you’re in pain all the time. How does that feel? Okay, at first you might feel kind of hopeless. That’s a thing, yes. But “hopeless” isn’t our only setting. We have sorrow, we have anger, we have frustration, we have gallows-humor. We have “I can’t mentally deal with this right now, so I’m not going to think about it”. We have emotions about other stuff! Sometimes we don’t think about our pain at all because while it’s always there, it can become a background thing we don’t constantly dwell on. It’s still there, but we deal.
Here’s some things to stay away from: Guilt. Shame. Extra super-compassion or understanding or empathy because our chronic pain made us ~magically~ more sympathetic to god’s suffering creatures. Suicidal or self-harming unless you’re an #ownvoices author and you know exactly what you’re doing and how carefully to tread. Basically anything that makes us Saints, Sinners, or the Walking Dead because of our pain. We’re just normal people who happen to be in pain all the time! We react to that like normal people do. We’re not Gods or Demons or Undead.
Be sensitive, get sensitivity readers, and be chill about criticism.
No matter what you do, someone is going to be upset. Embrace that and let it be freeing instead of stifling. When someone is upset with you, thank them for sharing their perspective, take the criticism on board, and move forward doing better. Support authors with chronic pain and elevate their voices. The fact that you care, and that you’re reading this with intent to try and not screw up, is itself a wonderful sign. You’re moving with careful steps instead of barging in pretending you know everything.
Thank you! ♡ ♥ ♡
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Tropes: The Real Me |
[Content Note: Entitled Behavior]
There isn't really a proper deconstruction today, and I'm sorry for that. I've been kind of swamped with the filibuster work (because I'm so close and really just want to finish) and also my cough is still lingering which means medicated cough syrup which means sleepy-head. But! I did have a thing I wanted to talk about, that maybe you all will want to talk about too! (Discuss! Or not, lol.)
Husband has got us watching House, M.D. which... yeah. Ya'll can probably imagine how much I yell at the screen because it's about a privileged asshole who feels like medical consent is for ninnies, but it's also one of those properties where there are enough laughs and I like the actors involved well enough that I keep watching. So that's nice, your mileage may vary, etc.
But! We watched an episode last night (Insensitive) where Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Dean of Medicine, Dr. House's boss, and generally awesome) goes on a first date with a nice guy she meets on a dating site. Dr. House, being that he's an asshole, keeps interrupting her date and she sees through his bullshit and tells him to leave her alone because she's enjoying herself and he can live with it, so there. And it's really a great scene, and I'm fist-pumping along because yeeeaaah! You tell him, lady. Etc.
But then her date gets all pissy with her about being passionate about her job before revealing that his real issue is that she's passionate about telling off House. He's upset that she's more reserved around him, a guy she doesn't know from Adam, than she is around House, a man she's worked with for years and has a complex friendship with:
I don't know whether it's House, your job, or you just thrive on conflict, but you should hear yourself when you're talking to him. Nothing else in the world's going on. You're focused, confident, compelling. Don't take this the wrong way, but I'd like to go out with that woman.
And now I'm groaning at the TV because I have heard this speech eleventy billion times before from men about wanting--no, demanding--to see "The Real [Me]", as though I'm being fundamentally dishonest or hiding my true feelings if I don't disclose every detail of my life on our first meeting.
It takes a truly, truly, astonishing level of privilege to assume that everyone walking around today could safely disclose everything about themselves to a stranger for the sake of instant honesty and intimacy. Every thought I think, every feeling I feel, every painful past memory, every aspect of who I am laid bare for others to poke and prod and consume for their own pleasure.
And it takes even more privilege to insist that people not only should walk around with their open selves on their sleeve at all times (any failure to do so is dishonest! a moral failing! a sign of immaturity! or of hidden feelings they can't deal with yet but totally should! please let me diagnose you as an amateur psychologist!), but that they should also be expected to disclose-on-demand anything else that might be demanded of them by a random privileged stranger.
The "real me"--like the real a-lot-of-us--is more complex than one mood in one interaction with one person. For most of us, it takes years of interaction, under a variety of settings and situations in order to intimately understand what makes us tick. The demand that all of us, particularly those of us whose viewpoints aren't constantly privileged in mainstream media (and, indeed, whose viewpoints are constantly flattened and minimized and two-dimensionalized in the same mainstream media), provide a window into the soul on demand is dehumanizing garbage.
Expecting a woman to have the same relationship with you on the first meeting as she does with a man she's been friends with for the better part of a decade--and then holding it against her when she doesn't--is unreasonable, entitled, patriarchal nastiness.
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Tropes: I Don't Want To Be Apocalypse Eve |
[Content Note: Apocalypse, Self-Harm, Childbirth and Child Endangerment]
Good morrow, future denizens of Tuesday. I am writing this from the bleak apocalyptic dystopia past of Sunday, and wish you good tidings. I also hurt like hell, which I am tired of saying and I would bet ya'll are tired of hearing. But that is why this post is not a proper post and is instead a rambly post on a trope that bothers me. I've been holding this post in brain-reserve for a rainy day, and I reckon we're here now.
So here's the thing: I don't want to be Eve.
Waaaaay back in 2011, I wrote a thing about The Road and how I personally feel that it's perfectly understandable to commit suicide when you literally have no future to look forward to because the apocalypse has happened and there is no food and no animals and no canned goods and no plants and no hope whatsoever for life continuing because living means eating and there is no food source anymore. Like, I didn't set down the rules for that particular apocalypse, but once those ridiculous rules are in place, I don't really see a dignified exit strategy as a bad thing. YMMV, etc.
Today I want to add to that position the less-controversial addendum that I also don't want to repopulate the earth after an apocalypse. And how very, very, very sick I am of that trope popping up in fiction.
Now, I don't necessarily mean that I have issues so much with people choosing to be Adam and Eve. If that's your thing, fine. I am more than happy to extend to others the reproductive freedom to create society from scratch via human reproduction as I am to demand for myself the reproductive freedom to not do that. Nor am I even really ripping on Earth All Along tropes, where you're expected to assume that the survivors of the space vampires or whatever were our ancestors. I mean, I'm not a big fan because overused plot is overused, but whatever floats your boat.
No, what I want to die as a trope is this Save The People With Uteri!! trope that comes up in fiction where an apocalypse happens and suddenly there's all this prioritizing of survivors based on the assumption that (a) continuing the human race is the most important thing ever right now, because while things may seem bleak with only 58 people left alive and the entire planet overrun with cannibalistic fungus obviously the highest priority to be had right now is babies, and (b) the people with uteri who are being saved for their baby-making ability will have any interest in churning out Human Race 2.0. Because with regards to that latter point, I sure as hell am not.
There are a million examples of this in fiction, but the closest one at hand is from Piers Anthony's Rings of Ice (which is a really dreadful book but, like many Piers Anthony books, didn't seem so dreadful when I first read it because I'd had so little exposure to genuinely good science fiction / fantasy that it seemed like I had to take whatever I could get, and it's only in retrospect that I'm able to gape with astonishment at just how horrible and creepy and dreadful and rapey his writing is), so I'll just copy and paste that in rather than have to type something else out manually:
"At least they let me out!" Zena said. "I haven't been allowed to do anything useful for weeks!"
"You're lucky," Floy said, leaning heavily on her pole so as not to fall.
"What's lucky about it? Everybody has to pull his weight, and I'm eager to pull mine."
Floy shrugged awkwardly.
"Now don't you do it too!" Zena cried. "I haven't raised an issue about it because there's been no privacy -- but something's going on. What's the big secret?"
"You really don't know?"
"Of course I don't know."
"Well, Gus says there's going to be a lot more rain. Enough to drown the whole world, maybe."
"Gus is right, for all the wrong reasons. But -- "
"So we'll have to make more people. Babies."
Zena sighed. "Gus has had the making of babies on his mind from the outset. The mechanics of it, anyway. He and Karen -- "
Floy shook her head. "Karen wouldn't live through it. That's why she uses an IUD. And I'm too young, Gordon says. But you -- "
"That's enough!"
"Sorry. You said you wanted to know."
Zena paused beside a plain of bare bedrock, scoured clean by the water. "I'm not having any baby!"
"You're the only one who can. So Gus said to take care of you, because if anything happened to make you sterile -- "
"I said enough!"
You probably got the gist from that, but basically the entire world is permanently altered (think Noah's Flood but with nowhere for the water to go to dry up after because rather than this flood being supernatural, it was actually imported from space), nearly every person on earth is dead, pretty much the only thing available to eat is a moss of dubious nutritional value, and so clearly the top priority right now is to make sure that one-eight (or one-sixth, I forget who is and isn't alive at this point) of the remaining survivors not be allowed to help out with the whole surviving thing, because her uterus is too valuable to accidentally damage.
And I hate the fuck out of this trope.
I hate the fuck out of this trope at least in part because it isn't occurring in a vacuum. Women are already treated like they are nothing more than baby-making body parts. (And women who don't have a uterus, or who are infertile, are already treated like we are less than nothing, and not "real" women.) "Pre-pregnant", or the concept that all fertile women should be treated like they are or soon will be pregnant, is an actual term that is actually used unironically (and that is a big fucking problem).
Tropes like this -- which prioritize the survival of fertile women not because of their humanity (which would prioritize everyone, regardless of fertility), or even because of their skills in ensuring the survival of the group (which would prioritize people based on their ability to see the survivors safely through the current danger) -- reinforce the belief that women are valuable only insomuch as they are incubators. Any other value (of their person, of their work, of the value they add to society, etc.) is so secondary as to not rank a mention.
But I also hate this trope on an in-universe level for condemning these pedestaled fertile women to a life that they may not want, for a "benefit" that will likely benefit them personally not at all. (After all, "ensured the survival of the human race" is a goal that a woman or man is more than welcome to have, but if there are any benefits to reap from that, they're probably long-term ones.) These women who have been "saved" especially for them to take the role of nu-Eve now get to experience childbirth, which is the second-leading cause of death for women, in an environment which likely lacks basic medical care. (Since your average zombie apocalypse is low on electricity, antibiotics, OBGYNs, etc.)
Then they get to do it again. And again. And again. Because if there's one thing we know about repopulating a ginormous planet with shiny brand new people, you're going to have to churn out a lot of those babies in order for the work to really count.
And then you have to raise them in a world that is almost entirely devoid of community helpers (no village for your child!), where dangers lurk around every corner (even if it's a cozy apocalypse, there's still going to be a host of basic safety issues like how "minor" things like influenza and broken bones can kill you outright), and where safe food and drinking water aren't even remotely something you can count on. Good luck, nu-Eve, as you struggle to build a shelter that will stand up to the storms, farm enough nutrients to keep from getting scurvy, filter drinkable water that won't give you dysentery, and all while popping out another child every nine months because the human race needs babies as quickly as you can make them!
Like, if that's your idea of a good time, I salute your hardcore-edness, but it sounds like hell to me.
When the apocalypse happens, save me because I'm a person and because people should try to save each other when all we have is each other to depend on in the ruins of our society. Or save me because I have skills that will make me valuable to our new society: I can write our history for whoever may come after, or I can compose stories for the entertainment of our people, or I can cook or clean or sew or farm or weave baskets or tend livestock or whatever else. But don't save me because I have a uterus, because it's mine and I won't be using it for you. I don't want to be Eve.
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Tropes: I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream |
[Content Note: Misogyny, Homophobia, Racism, Rape, Suicide, Ableism, Fat Hatred.
This is a very triggery post.]
Dear Old Mouldering Classic Science Fiction / Fantasy Works which "Everyone Must Read":
It's not me, it's you. I'm breaking up with you.
I'm serious. I couldn't be more serious. There is too much really wonderful modern stuff out there -- much of it written by women and people of color and non-Heterosexual Cis Privileged Men -- for me to waste another minute of my life reading something that maybe once contained a germ of a good idea, but was buried from the beginning in shitty writing and misogyny so thick you could spread it on wonder bread, and which only became as famous as it did because of white male privilege and privileged gatekeepers. The next time I see some MUST READ classic work by a straight cis man written in the 60's or whatever, I'm just going to assume it's marinated in privilege-sauce and go read a book about lesbian trans women astronauts, or something equally more likely to be infinitely better.
Because I deserve to read good things (and Narnia and Twilight).
Hang on. Let me back up a bit.
Tropes: Tropes vs. Women |
by Silver Adept, practitioner of the Dark Library Arts and author of Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense.
So this happened. The video series Tropes vs. Women's second installment was briefly taken down from YouTube after a significant influx of "inappropriate" flagging lodged against it. Forty-five minutes after the creator of the video appealed, YouTube restored the video.
There are two salient issues here, one philosophical, one technological.
Philosophically, most creators with a female-coded name can tell you about the harassment that comes with appearing to be a woman with opinions or stories to tell, whether it is publishing houses that believe your story won't sell if it's written by a woman (Jo Rowling, Ursula LeGuin, Elaine Konigsburg, for example), trolls on your blog, the glass ceiling, the clear difference between male and female Halloween costumes, the color-coding of toys, other bloggers accusing you of not being a true fan by virtue of your gender (clearly you're just there to tease the boys, don't'cha'know). Ah, and media that generally believes that proper female roles are wife, mother, girlfriend, or dead. And that innovation means combining those roles and their associated storylines rather than attempting to break new ground and add different roles.
Tropes vs. Women, then, is not just an effective tagline, but a succinct summary of both society and the grand majority of media choices available in society, for passive viewing or interactive gaming. Gaming, in particular, is laden with tropes that put women in ineffective or subservient roles, as objects to be rescued or avenged. That's the point of the first two Damsel In Distress videos.
Incidentally, this series of videos were funded through Kickstarter, which meant, in this case, more than six thousand people pledged and provided an amount of money to see this series made. Now, making numerical comparisons between the number of funders and the number of game players in a "target demographic" for popular games makes the funders look like a tiny minority that can be safely ignored. Doing so, though, mirrors what game companies are already doing - shunning what could be a very loyal, lucrative, and "bigger on the inside" fanbase in favor of playing to the "known quantity".
With that in mind, let's talk about the technological issues. Most social sites have a marker on them that someone can use to report problematic content. For example, if you are looking through your favorite blogs and then there is something that provokes the response "HOLY SHIT WHAT IS THIS PEDO-GURO STUFF DOING ON A MY LITTLE PONY FANVID SITE", there is usually a "flag" button or icon you can use to indicate that it is inappropriate for the site.
On smaller blogs and websites, a single flag can draw the attention of the blog owner or a moderator to examine the content and make a decision to edit, delete, ban, leave it up intact, or other modly actions. For a site such as YouTube, however, where several days' worth of footage is uploaded every hour, even employing all of Amazon's Mechanical Turk wouldn't really be enough to pre-screen everything. Instead, Google relies on algorithms to make decisions on what to do about flagged content. One flag may not provoke a response, or it may get sent to the bottom of a moderating queue. One hundred flags, spread out over time, might push the video up the moderating queue so that it gets dealt with sooner rather than later. A thousand flags over an hour will probably trigger an automatic takedown. Hopefully, it still gets sent to a moderator to examine and make a decision about, but there are no guarantees.
Give yourself a gold star if you've spotted the problem with a reliance on algorithms. As Slashdot, reddit, anyone hit by Anonymous, and anyone doing or being on the receiving end of a Denial of Service attack (Distributed or otherwise) knows, if you get a lot of attention in a short amount of time, most computer systems will pull the plug on whatever is receiving the attention. (Actually, so will most societal systems, now that I think about it.)
So what brought forward this field of flags? Most likely, a decently large group of people that we would euphemistically refer to as "haters", for whom other terms exist, but their use would be either profane or problematic. When confronted with several examples that the philosophical underpinning of their favorite game or series is rooted in very female-unfriendly tropes, and that this underpinning extends all the way from Mario to Duke Nukem, their reaction is to both deny that it happens and to attempt to silence the person espousing such heterodox beliefs, for whichever justification seems to work best. (They can usually be picked from the stock of justifications used to try and silence any other minority or disliked group. Just change the names.) Enough of them flagged the video as inappropriate that the YouTube algorithm kicked in and yanked the video.
Here's the part that's really problematic. From what I gather from the article and its linked tweet, the algorithm did institute a review by a person to determine whether the content that was flagged was mistakenly or maliciously flagged. The review apparently determined that the content was in violation of YouTube Guidelines, although no specifics were given. Furthermore, such a violation placed the account in a warning state, where further flag attacks could then get the account suspended or removed. The content creator, Anita Sarkeesian, had to go through an appeals process to YouTube to get the content restored and the warning removed. It was apparently a swift process, and once re-approved, the content returned within the hour. Where, if the haters are determined enough, they can re-trigger the takedown by re-flagging, forcing another appeal and so on. The onus is on the content creator to have to keep putting their material up. Which is tiring, as those creators beset by trolls will tell you, and discouraging.
Having people monitoring everything all the time would be cost-prohibitive for YouTube, not to mention the possible legal issues. That said, if the algorithm pushes a flagging incident up to a person to review, it's incumbent on the person doing the review to be thorough in both review and explanation of decision. The system failed, this time, in forcing the creator to go to the appeal process.
This incident, though, is a microcosm of the bigger problem, the one that series like Tropes vs. Women are looking to address - privileging men as agents of narrative and subordinating women makes for problematic works, no matter how popular, and effectively reinforces cultural narratives about appropriate roles for men and women. With video games, the interactivity means an even greater missed opportunity to subvert or avert those tropes. If six thousand plus people can find a Kickstarter to talk about the issue, how many thousands more are waiting for a game that actually deals with it? And how do we guard against people misusing helper tools to malicious ends?
I have no answers, fortunately. Instead, let's keep having the conversation and developing the answers together.
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Tropes: No Place Like Home |
[Content Note: Abuse]
Leaving Narnia. Returning to Kansas. I don't know what else to call it, and there's probably a more formalized name for this trope, but a quick search didn't net me anything. But broadly-speaking, I'm becoming more than a little disenchanted with fantasy stories where the protagonist (usually a small child) sorts shit out in a troubled fantasy world, gains friends and prestige and (optionally) love interests, and then in the final pages of the narrative either gets shoved back into the Real World without their consent (a la Narnia) or chooses to go back for no more compelling reason* than because the authors felt like that was The Right Thing To Do.
* In the specific case I'm thinking of, which I won't share because spoilers, so instead I'm invoking Oz and Narnia because those are fairly common knowledge.
To be super-clear, I don't have a problem with protagonists choosing how to live their lives and making their own happy endings. There's nothing wrong with choosing to go back to the Real World because of parents or friends or preference or because otherwise you'll never eat another ice cream sandwich again. That's fine. But I do have a problem with the fact that I'm starting to feel like this trope is frequently invoked because the authors felt like it would be actively Wrong for any protagonist to decide that zie likes the fantasy world better than their original "home", and I disagree with that assertion. There's nothing intrinsically or morally "Right" about accepting the world you were born into as fundamentally better for you than anywhere else: it's a valid choice, but not the only valid choice.
And I additionally can't help but feel that this underlying assumption -- that taking an opportunity to leave forever a place that may not be healthy or safe for you, rather than trying to stick with it and work it out because it builds character or whatever -- is deeply problematic when it runs in parallel with various different types of marginalizations. Sometimes abuse victims seriously just need to get out; sometimes people dealing with homophobic and/or transphobic cultures and families choose to leave for their own safety. Sometimes a magic world is just objectively better for a person with a disability, or anyone else in search of a magical fix** to a life-affecting issue.
** I can't help but note after typing these words that the very phrase "magical fix" sounds synonymous with 'lazy' and/or 'morally degenerate' to a lot of people in our culture. How fucked up is that?
Yet if we're constantly being presented with this cultural narrative that pleasant places are great for vacations and character building but that, ultimately, there's No Place Like Home and -- more fundamentally -- it's actually morally wrong to permanently leave home forever, even if that choice to leave is motivated by self-care, then there are a lot of harmful messages accompanying that cultural trend.
I get why a lot of authors take this route: on the surface, it's optimistic. Characters Johnny and Jenny have Learned Valuable Lessons and will now use their knowledge and determination to make the world a Better Place for themselves and others. On a meta-level, the author knows that the reader can't realistically aspire to live in Oz or Narnia, but zie can aspire to take those lessons and improve their lives, just as Johnny and Jenny chose to do, when leaving their fantasy world and going back home! I understand the appeal of this trope to authors, as a neat, tidy ending tinted with rosy optimism and can-do spirit.
But still ... I'd like to see just a few more people stay in Oz and Narnia, and I'd like to see that condoned as a morally neutral choice, no better or worse than coming home to England and Kansas. And I'd love to see at least a few authors highlight why that is, and how some people in our culture are marginalized more deeply than others. Because privileged readers like Kim and Kenny kinda need to hear that there's more to life than making their lives easier -- there are also people out there suffering even more than they are, people who can't make their lives easier just by employing hard work and determination. And marginalized readers like Sarah and Shawn could probably stand to hear that when their lives are too hard and too painful for them to bear, it doesn't mean they are to blame for not being smart enough or trying hard enough.
And I think that's another reason why I find this ending trope depressing: sometimes the authorial choice that seems "optimistic" is really quite depressing if you poke too hard at it. If there's really is "no place like home", then a lot of us are in a bad place with no way out. Just saying.
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Tropes: My Wife Left Me |
Here is a trope that I would be happy to see the back of: using "my wife left me" as shorthand to convey the concept of an intense, all-consuming personal project. Most recently seen in the Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter prologue:
I papered the basement walls with printouts of old photographs. Time lines. Family trees. I wrote into the early morning hours.
For the first two months, my wife was concerned. For the second two she was suspicious. By the sixth month we’d separated.
Look, here is the thing: yes, sometimes intense personal projects split relationships apart. Sometimes people -- of any gender -- decide that they feel like they are the only person trying to make an existing relationship be a relationship. Sometimes they choose to leave. Sometimes this happens, yes. I am not denying that.
But this trope -- which I have seen many, many times -- is almost universally employed with the framing that it is a woman in a different-sex coupling doing the leaving. And since we are naturally inclined to side with the male artist being left, given that we are after all in the process of experiencing (and hopefully enjoying) the work that his wife left him over, it instantly casts the individual woman doing the leaving as an antagonist to the very existence of the work we are reading. A woman tried to prevent this art from existing, says the trope-deployer, but I stuck with it for your sake, dear reader. And, no: I reject the attempt to position me into an antagonistic relationship with a woman I don't know for the sake of a framing device.
Additionally, since this is most frequently employed against wives-leaving-husbands, it reinforces the stereotypes that:
- Men are the only ones who create Serious Art.
- Women are preoccupied with silly daily things that distract from Serious Art.
- Women do not understand or appreciate the importance of (and sacrifices made for) Serious Art.
I reject all of that. Period.
There is a better way to say "I became increasingly involved with my project, even to the point of neglecting relationships of all kinds and possibly even to the point of self-harm" (or whatever the author wishes to convey in any case) that to reach for the tired-and-harmful "my wife didn't understand my art".
(Note: I think, based on the nature of the prologue and the cursory research I did on the author prior to this post, that the entire framing in this case is fictional: I don't think Seth Grahame-Smith was given the lost diary of Abraham Lincoln by a vampire named Henry, so I'm dubious that his wife subsequently left him over the ensuing project that followed this encounter. But whether it is fictional or not, however, I find the trope equally harmful when deployed in this way.)
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Tropes: Taking Heart with Ni No Kuni |
[Content Note: Ethics of Magic]
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Tropes: Writing Personas |
[Content Note: Spoilers for Persona Revelations, Disabilities and Hospitalization]
Greetings, you readers of the future! It's the day after Christmas as I write this and I'm still on my Christmas Break Video Game kick, and in light of the many interesting questions we've had in the last month or so about characterization based on the characters of Eustace Scrubb, King Caspian, and Aunt Alberta, I figured it was time to have another one of those How To Do Nuance As An Author posts. This time with 100% more Persona.
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Tropes: FF7 and Tropes About Women |
[Content Note: FF7 Spoilers, Rape, Death, Pregnancy, Fetal Experiments]
I like Final Fantasy 7. It was one of the first games I played on my Playstation system, and I even somehow came into possession of their marketing "first chapter demo" discs at the time, which meant that I anticipated the game's release with a good deal of happy tension and tenterhooks. (And that was back when demo discs were, themselves, fairly new and exciting things to be in possession of.) I remember being stunned by the epic size of the game -- three whole CD discs!! -- and while I couldn't make heads or tails of the plot the first time through (due to the a combination of the translation and the fact that I wasn't used to the concept of unreliable protagonists), I replayed the game often enough and read enough fanfic online to get a good feel for the game. To this day, I remember it fondly as a classic.
It also has some Unfortunate Implications when it comes to its female characters.
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Tropes: Darren Shan, Dangerous Extremist |
[Content Note: Drugging, Violence, Reference to Infertility, Ableist Language]
One of these days I'm going to get back to writing nice things so that you all don't stop following me Because Negative, but today is not that day. My only excuse is that annoyance, irritation, and blind searing hatred for random things is more motivating for me to write about than happiness and yummies. (This is probably why my forays into journaling never work.)
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Tropes: Sexism and Subtlety |
[Content Note: Sexual Harassment, Homophobia]
I'm a sucker for film novelizations.
It came as a surprise to me, too. I started with the Aliens franchise; I love the movies so much that I picked up the novelizations in order that I might have more information to roll around in. Character thoughts, backgrounds, motivations; I lapped it all up like a hungry kitten. And then after discovering that I had more than a taste for film novelizations as a concept, I started buying them up by the basket-full.
As a general rule, film novelizations tend to be a bit of a mixed bag. (Not unlike the movies themselves, I suppose.) It doesn't help that movies, by the nature of the medium, tend to trade in stock stereotypes. Every minute you're not fleshing out a character is a minute that you can devote to the over-arching plot, after all.
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Tropes: Being Dana Scully |
[Content Note: Conservative Christian Upbringing, Rape, Sexual Violence, Death, Hate Crimes, Child Molestation]
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| Via PinkRayGun in a topical article. |
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Tropes: Moving the Fitzpatrick Scale |
This deconstruction is one that... isn't. I guess it's one part deconstruction, one part open thread.
Husband and I saw The Hunger Games this weekend. Now, I have to say that I love-love-love those books. The Hunger Games trilogy is my favorite of all time, and I don't say that lightly. Husband, on the other hand, went through the series feeling kind of meh. So I wasn't sure he would like the movie. I wasn't sure I would like the movie.
But I did. I loved it. I thought it was practically perfect in every way. And I thought Jennifer Lawrence did a fantastic job as Katniss; I thought she nailed the role in every scene.
But there's this:
Much of the criticisms are going to be waved away with some variation on "but Jennifer Lawrence is BRILLIANT!" and she is. But the fact that Lawrence is brilliant as the central character, Katniss Everdeen, does not retroactively justify the casting call for an olive-skinned, dark-haired, grey-eyed character which contained the specifications: "She should be Caucasian, between ages 15 and 20, who could portray someone 'underfed but strong,' and 'naturally pretty underneath her tomboyishness.'"
Actresses of color were not even given a chance.
And I still don't know how to feel about the Katniss call. On the one hand, I personally imagined Katniss as white, and I (mistakenly) thought white = Caucasian (without understanding the nuances of Appalachian lineages), so at no point did I expect Katniss to be anything other than white. And that's my own Privilege showing. And I absolutely do think it's a problem that Hollywood doesn't even give actresses of color a chance at these roles.
On the other hand, apparently that casting call came out from the actual author. (I can't find a source for this, though.) And I have unclear feelings on how much an author should be able to dictate the transfer to visual media, but my initial feeling is "kind of a lot" since the visual version is probably going to be what sticks in everyone's mind from here on out. (For instance, as disappointing as the movie was, Mrs. Coulter will now always be Nicole Kidman to me.)
And I don't know how to correlate my one feeling on Author Influence over my other feelings that Multi-Racial Casts are the way we should go for movies because they're awesome and genetics and continuity be damned. So I have no idea how to feel about any of this. I'm doing a lot of listening and thinking mostly.
But then there's this. I was listening to audiobook version of "The Help" yesterday, and I realized something: Hilly Holbrook has "olive skin". Just like Katniss Everdeen. Huh. So now I'm wondering just how many "olive skinned" protagonists have been whitened by Hollywood lately.
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| @ bloggang.com and cdn.buzznet.com |
Miss Hilly got a round face and dark brown hair in the beehive. Her skin be olive color, with freckles and moles. ~ The Help, Chapter 1
He could be my brother. Straight black hair, olive skin, we even have the same gray eyes. ~ The Hunger Games, Chapter 1
Open thread below.
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Tropes: The Subversive Power of Slash-Fic |
Ana's Note: This article originally ran as a Slacktiverse Special. This is a repost in case you missed it the first time.
I've been thinking a lot about fan-fic and slash-fic lately.
Now, it's really difficult to write a post about fan-fic and slash-fic without defining the terms for the readers who aren't familiar with either. And it's really difficult to accurately define these terms because they mean different things for different people. So I'm going to try to define what the terms mean to me, but with the advance warning that I tend to define these terms more loosely and more broadly than many other people do. And, it's worth noting: I don't own the terms and I'm not the definitive guide for using them. So there's that!
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Tropes: When Good Men Do Nothing |
[Content Note: Sexism, Rape Culture, Violence]
Here's the thing. You have this character. You want him to be a bad guy. Maybe not the Bad Guy, but a bad guy that most people wouldn't like in real life. Maybe you know someone like this guy in real life and you think, hey! I'll put that guy in my novel. That's fine. It's fair. There are some crappy people out there, after all. It's a decent characterization.
But when your bad guy is going around blatantly doing horrible sexist stuff, and your good guys never actually call him on it or indeed do much of anything besides sort of weakly and ineffectually protest, your good guys do not seem like Good Guys to me.
This does not mean that your good guys should punch the bad guy in the face in a fit of righteous rage over the bad guy's sexism. Feminists are not actually all about beating up men. What it does mean is that your good guys might actually seriously and effectively call your bad guy on his sexist stuff. Or they might stop hanging out with him entirely! And they might, just might, do things to effectually help the victims of his sexism! Because those women he is hurting? Are actually in fact people. So you might want to do something about that.
And if that doesn't seem "realistic" to you because in real life you never call your buddies on their sexist stuff despite there being real live victims in front of you being hurt, you might want to reevaluate how you are living your life.
Feminism Pro-tip: Being friends with sexist guys is not actually good ally behavior.
Writing Pro-tip: Good Guys have to actually be good, not simply better than the bad guys.