felinejumper | dragging the twitter discourse on not-twitter (Reply)

I 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.