![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
felinejumperI can't wade into Purity Discourse on Twitter, or rather I won't (and not like DW is better, given that it's primarily a fandom space, but I do seemingly need to say somewhere publically): oh my fucking GOD the TWITTER DISCOURSE about Tamsyn Muir's old fic is driving me so far up the wall I am taking up residence on the fucking roof, could everyone....stop..........with it. Would that I had something smart or new, but I have been in fandom for circa 1.5 years, which is not very long, and I can tell it's the same ring-around-the-rosy and it's so boring. Tags are great, archive warnings are great, taking works down is shitty, 'glorifying pedophilia' is a bad take, free market of fanfiction!
The weird way Twitter expands the reach of conversations is, in less annoying topics, an interesting thing to look at, but in this case it is just ratcheting up the screaming annoyance factor for me tremendously. I follow a lot of the new-ish queer SFF writers, and they aren't weighing in directly usually, but the "followed by" and "liked by" features imply a level of opinion-allegiance that I don't think is true, and yet I can't resist thinking it. And like: am I going to personally cancel an author because they follow people with bad opinions? I don't want to! Anyway, Gideon was fucking great and I am exerting so much effort to not yell that loudly on Twitter.
I do want to think through (I realize, as I clatter away instead of doing work) about the comparisons to Lolita that pop up all the time, and agency and assignation of intent, based on how we perceive the author. Usually the..anti-antis(?) make this argument: people with trauma work through trauma by writing Bad Things™, and that is one reason it's okay. But it also makes me wonder about, you know, Nabokov, who -- what kind of trauma was he working through, and does he have to be working through trauma to have written Lolita? (Nabokov feels like a not-great example, though, because aren't we all kind of agreed that Humbert is clearly the piece of shit in all of it, if, granted, a piece of shit who is in fact working through some things? And therefore it really kind of isn't promoting pedophilia, or glamorizing it?)
Although, lbr, if I come across a fic that is like "Nazis are hot, actually", I...don't read that author. I do kind of think that author is probably a dirtbag! Except I also know that is not a 100% definite rule!
So clearly we can't judge the author by their work, in a more than artistic sense; it's an undetermined set of functions, it's ambiguous. Similarly, we can't judge a work by its author. The math thing works well, actually: we might be able to constrain our judgements of author/work to some degree, but always insufficiently so for a full solution on How To Only Read Good Things.
I have a friend who refers to being catfished by WWII, which I find charming and also very relevant. The problem is this: you're on a dating site, and someone is like, do you want to talk about Russian tanks in WWII? Do you want to talk about snipers? Do you want to talk about Germany in the 1930s? Either this person is an incredibly hot History Queer™ and you should definitely date them, or they're a fucking Nazi. Schrodinger's Nazi, yuk-yuk-yuk. From the outside point of view, those are just going to look identical, which is kind of a bummer, and also exactly how the working-through-trauma-in-writing looks.
Hopefully that has gotten some of this out of my system.
anyway: have you seen the trailer for Portrait of a Lady on Fire? wow does it look fun.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-25 07:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-25 08:10 pm (UTC)screams UGH. I shouldn't be surprised and yet I still, somehow, am 100% completely dumbfounded by the tedium of that accusation.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-25 08:01 pm (UTC)Anyway, yes, that trailer is Hella cool and I am very excited about the movie!
no subject
Date: 2019-11-25 08:13 pm (UTC)confession: i can't actually find the screenshots of the fic anywhere, so this is a totally on principle screaming fit. But yeah, I don't doubt that at all! That's..what...kinkmemes etc...are for!
Isn't it ISN'T IT, my roommate pointed me at it yesterday and it's so very pretty and dramatic.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-26 02:52 am (UTC)I showed the trailer to my friend who particularly loves lesbian period dramas (rare as they are) and she's enraptured by the idea, which sums it up well. :)
no subject
Date: 2019-11-26 07:13 am (UTC)There is a reason why adult trolls should never be around their young. Orphaner Dualscar comes back from the dead and finds Feferi Peixes. In the end, there's very little Eridan Ampora can do.")
It's been *years* since I read it and I still remember how deeply and obviously fucked up it was, textually, in a "aggressor is a creep and a monster but the victim does not pick up on the signs" kind of way. And it's been tagged up, down and sideways, for people who don't want to read it.
If it's about something specifically on kinkmeme, then I dunno, it's hard to believe she didn't warn on those, too. But I was so late to Homestuck fandom that the kinkmeme wasn't on my radar any more, so I know very little about it.
(and "oh my GOD the twitter discourse" is such a Mood)
no subject
Date: 2019-11-26 08:59 pm (UTC)Oof oof. I'm not in Homestuck fandom, but that IS a hell of a summary. Problematic Themes for sure! (I cannot emphasize how much of it seems like gibberish, knowing zero Homestuck.)
And also: seems tagged! Seems like there are multiple warnings!! Seems like she did the thing!!! Ahhhh.
I want to like...give benefit of the doubt, maybe folks are looking for the kind of extremely comprehensive-ish tagging & meta-voics in the tags ("cannot emphasize the dark enough", "heed warnings!") that is more common nowadays? Maybe, but I doubt it somehow, and the issue is just like "[author] is trash", which is. Cool, or whatever. Certainly a different argument lacking nuance etc etc, twitter discourse is sending me to an early grave mood.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-27 07:03 am (UTC)Homestuck trolls have nigh-total societal separation between adults and minors (children live on the homeworld and are raised by intelligent non-troll animals, pretty much the only adults on the homeworld are members of a special caste who take care of creating new trolls from genetic material provided by all adult trolls, other adults are in other parts of massive space empire). Trolls sometimes have really strong similarity to an older troll, if the troll-infants-from-genetic-material process lucks out like that. Those who know they have this kind of Ancestor often idolize them in some way.
Feferi Peixes is the heir to the Empress, and as such, very similar to her. She's also like... 13, I think? Possibly a couple of years older. Orphaner Dualscar was the genetic ancestor of Feferi's best friend Eridan Ampora. He's dead in canon, he was a massive asshole when alive (killed someone he perceived as romantic rival, among other things). He was also distantly in love with the Empress.
In the fic in question Dualscar somehow came back to life. He immediately fixated on Feferi, because she was similar to the Empress, but unlike the Empress, she paid attention to him (because an adult troll would have been a novelty, he knew stuff about her ancestor etc). He groomed her and eventually raped her. She told Eridan and Eridan immediately killed Dualscar.
The fic is in Dualscar's viewpoint, but it's very hard to read it as justifying his actions if you have *any* reading comprehension at all. And for those who don't have any... Dualscar is killed. Feferi's friends are on her side, not his. Bad person does bad thing, is immediately punished. Isn't this what antis want, a very obvious consequence?
I tried to find the original callout, but it seems to be gone by now. Found some snippets on Fail-Fandomanon search (of course they discussed it, should've started looking from there) and going from that it was definitely about "author is trash". After all, the author wrote fanfic about Bad Topics. They also accuse Gideon of depicting grooming, because, quote, "one of the antagonist had manipulated a character since they were a kid to fall in love with them to complete their revenge". I'm... not optimistic about their reading comprehension.
SFF twitter was really good for finding new stuff to read, but I've got to say, quitting it did wonders to my blood pressure. Nowadays I see Discourse only if I go looking for it.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-25 11:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-26 08:23 am (UTC)Should I be reading this in Natasha Lyonne's voice?
no subject
Date: 2019-11-26 01:52 pm (UTC)JUst Natasha Lyonne's extreme eye-rolling exhaustion at ALL TIMES. Gravel-voice is optional but definitely how I'd like to be conceived of.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-27 02:14 am (UTC)I am (grimly, perhaps) amused by the "catfished by WWII" story. Someone I enormously admired was, I discovered, also a quite serious Civil War (US) re-enactor. I never had the courage to collapse the wave-form by asking him which side? I was afraid of the answer.