Beyond Selidor

…quite literally, as my (twelve-year-old) laptop, which worked as normal (and started up more quickly than my six-month-old work laptop, as always) on Wednesday night refused to switch on and stopped holding charge on Thursday night. I took it into the Apple store on Friday, but as I feared, it was too old for them to be prepared to do anything to fix it. I hate writing on a touchscreen, I’m not going to use a work laptop for personal stuff, so until I can get a replacement, I’ll be a rather ghost-like presence around these parts.

Given I spent most of last night seething with irritation that a not insignificant number of Instagram friends/people I follow were sharing a photo of a protester at the massive anti-government rallies in Tbilisi from accounts which had copied the photo and claimed it was from a US campus protest (at least Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja corrected his mistake and tweeted out support for the Georgian protesters), anything keeping me from spending more time on the internet at the moment is probably a good thing. It sounds so insignificant, but it’s part of this wider problem that I keep deploring: lazy sharing of social media content if it aligns with the sharer’s politics or values, without any effort to check the veracity of the content or the broader output of the source.

In any case, until I can again type on something other than a touchscreen, expect very little from me to appear on Dreamwidth.

In your own space, Scream Into the Void. Get it all out.



I feel weird doing this, but anyway...

Moving from one online platform to another is not going to solve systemic problems within fraught and argumentative communities — it will just replicate those problems in another setting (professional SFF community, I am looking at you)

People who spend the majority of their time and effort complaining about the preferences of fandom at large instead of creating fanworks, commentary, or hype and enthusiasm about the things they would prefer to be fandom-at-large's preferences are exhausting

I would like more of an assumption of good faith when disputes flare up in fast-moving fannish spaces

And yet I would also like people in fast-moving fannish spaces (all right, fine, Twitter. I'm talking about Twitter, and to a lesser extent Tumblr) to consider the source and not just mindlessly click retweet/reblog from a stranger because their post is funny/appears to be aligned with the retweeter/reblogger's worldview

In general, retweet/reblog/share buttons plus algorithmic feeds plus easy to use apps with a low barrier to entry were a real double-edged sword for online community

Shipping is not activism

To be honest I feel like a lot of fandom activism is a displacement activity

I guess this post of mine is something of a displacement activity itself, given the things I'm lamenting are really insignificant in the scheme of things

I did mention I feel really weird writing this. I've said all these things in various places for years, but it feels odd to just pour everything out in a single rantpost. I'm also still in the serene and productive blissed out mood that always descends on me on New Year's Day, and find it hard to summon up much rage when it comes to fandom-related stuff.

In the past couple of days, two stories have been making the rounds, discussed as emblematic of the intense toxicity and problems with Twitter, specifically Twitter as used as a marketing tool and social space for the SFF and YA publishing communities (of which there is of course considerable overlap).

The first is an interview with Isabel Fall, an author whose debut short story (under that nom de plume) and very identity were the subject of a hideous Twitter pile on early last year. Content note for discussions of transphobia, dysphoria, misgendering and harassment.

The second is an essay by YA commentator and critic Nicole Brinkley. Its title is 'Did Twitter Break YA?' which I assume speaks for itself.

As you might imagine, as someone who find Twitter pretty close to unbearable, and who wrote an essay last year about the problems inherent in an entire profession blurring the lines between marketing tool and social circle, these two posts resonated a lot.

That being said, putting the blame solely at Twitter's door, rending metaphorical garments about the evils of 'the algorithm' and 'parasocial relationships' and calling it a day doesn't really get to the heart of the problem. Twitter is a tool, and, like all tools used by human beings, those human beings bring the best and the worst of themselves (as individuals and as groups/communities) to the platform. The problems I've witnessed with YA and SFF Twitter certainly reached fever pitch on that platform, but I witnessed versions of the same blowups on Tumblr, and on Livejournal and personal blogs before that. I'm seeing a lot of authors jump ship to Instagram (which is of course entirely their right), but unless there is some serious soul-searching, they risk bringing the same problems with them to the new platform.

The problem with what the SFF community did to Isabel Fall was not Twitter: it was bullying, weaponising/gatekeeping of identity and authenticity (ironic given the subject of Fall's short story), and a discomfort with representation of marginalised identities/experiences that did not toe the party line. Twitter was the medium. There are people who participated in the pile on who have only offered qualified apologies, filled with special pleading, or who have not apologised at all. They hounded a trans woman back into the closet! They tried to police the identities of those who said they enjoyed Fall's story! That's not Twitter's fault — that's people choosing to be awful, to gatekeep and harass.

The problem with 'toxic YA Twitter' is not Twitter (nor is it really the open secret that most YA is bought by adult readers and is therefore written with that readership in mind): it is the fact that publishing has created this fevered atmosphere of scarcity in which it's a prudent marketing strategy to weaponise and gatekeep identity, representation and authenticity and direct Twitter mobs towards the competition. (And this ties into the wider problem of doing away with specialist marketing departments and expecting authors to handle their own marketing using social media.) Twitter, again, is the medium.

I don't have any easy solutions, because many of these problems have sprung from very worthwhile, sincere intentions — a desire to push against structural inequalities in publishing, a desire to create more stories for readers who deserve to see their lives mirrored in fiction more frequently, and to see those stories succeed. But the solution to these problems is not to rigidly define 'good representation' — that leads to people's experiences being erased, identities being policed, and Twitter mobs being directed at those whose representation is deemed to be insufficiently pure.

I do not seek a world absent of critique, negative reviews, or a wide range of reactions to every single story. But I do seek a world in which the first weapon in the arsenal of critique is not identity policing. I seek a world in which the behaviour of people in the SFF and YA communities is given greater weight in determining their character than the community's reaction to the content of their fiction. And I seek a world in which the intentions and moral character of SFF and YA readers who enjoy messy stories, dark stories, morally grey or villainous characters, and the kinds of relationships they'd never enjoy in real life are not constantly called into question.

Weirdly, I feel less broken by this result than by the Australian one earlier this year. I'm obviously feeling upset and angry, but there's a kind of clarity in the scale of the defeat: a confirmation that yes, communities like mine in England — young, multicultural, relatively prosperous cities and university towns — are isolated pockets of light amid a dystopia of deprivation, xenophobia and darkness.

( Ramblings, copied from Facebook, written on only two hours' sleep this morning )

We must build the Republic of Heaven where we are: and if 'where we are' is geographically tiny, relatively densely populated cities — and the international online communities which link them — rather than an entire geopolitical entity, so be it. I'm done with the hand-wringing on the centre-left, the endless demands to contort ourselves accommodating the 'legitimate concerns' of a pack of ageing, frightened racists who are convinced that migrants and/or the EU have caused the effects of austerity, rather than the governments responsible. Those voters are gone, and they're not coming back. If we want to govern again, we will have to find new voters elsewhere.

I. A friend of mine, a (white) university lecturer from Canada who did his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in the UK, was in a pub with his wife, a (white) British secondary school teacher. One of the other patrons started ranting against 'the immigrants'. My friend pointed out how expensive and difficult it was to emigrate to the UK, using his own situation as an illustration.

'Oh, I wasn't talking about you,' the ranter said. 'It should be easier for people like you to emigrate. You're not like all those others.'

II. I have been in the UK on several student visas, and the process is extremely complicated and very strict. You must prove yourself able to support yourself financially, prove that you're a genuine student, and, if English is not your native language, prove English-language competence. I am now on a one-year post-study work visa, which is similarly arduous to receive. If I were not in a relationship with a person from within the EU, I would have to leave the UK - the country in which I have lived for the past seven years - next June.

Almost all my non-EU friends in the UK who have finished their postgraduate studies are here on spouse visas. Employers don't want the expense and hassle of applying for work visas. Those friends of mine who don't have a partner from an EU country have left.

III. A friend of mine, an American woman who did her undergraduate and postgraduate study in the UK and is married to a British man, recently took the test to apply for indefinite leave to remain as the spouse of a British citizen. Every single question was a variation on the following theme:

'Are you eligible for benefits in such-and-such a situation?'
'No.'

IV. As a German citizen, my partner can waltz through passport control in seconds. He can earn as much or as little as he likes. He can stay in the UK forever. But he cannot vote in general elections.

As a non-EU citizen, I am occasionally hassled at passport control (although less than someone non-white and non-native-English-speaking), as if my student status might be suspect. I must prove that I have access to funds beyond my actual daily needs every time I apply for a visa, even though I am eligible for no state benefits. I can vote in general elections, but my time in this country is measured in visa expiry dates.

V. Were I to want to move to Germany with my partner, we would have to get married, as although the UK treats de facto relationships as equal to marriages, Germany does not recognise them. However, since same-sex marriage is illegal, same-sex de facto relationships are exempt from this restriction.

VI. I come from a country whose leader - an immigrant from the UK - locks up refugees in internment camps in various Pacific countries and denies that the situations from which they've fled are really all that bad.

Anti-immigrant rhetoric in Australia suggests that the country is being overwhelmed by floods of these refugees, but in actual fact, the number of refugees who have arrived in Australia by boat in the past decade is a fraction of the number of refugees who arrived in Italy in a single year.

VII. One of my colleagues at Original Library Job is a (white) British man. Two years ago, he got into a relationship with a Chinese woman who had entered the country on a partner visa with another British man (that relationship had since ended). My colleague and the Chinese woman got married and applied for a spouse visa.

This was denied on the basis that their relationship was not genuine, and because the UK Border Agency believed that because the woman was a political dissident, she was using my colleague to get out of China. Their case is still dragging through the courts, and apart from one brief holiday together in Thailand, they have not been able to see each other. As she was refused a UK visa, the woman is denied entry to all other EU countries as well.

VIII. I reject the dichotomy by which a wealthy, educated Westerner who emigrates for work or study opportunities is an 'ex-pat' while a poor person from a non-Western country who emigrates to escape dangerous or difficult political, social, environmental or economic circumstances is an 'immigrant'. I am an immigrant. My German partner is an immigrant. The Polish woman who cleaned my former college accommodation is an immigrant. The girl I went to school with whose father was jailed for political dissidence in Thailand was (originally) an immigrant, though she may identify as Australian now. Our relative privilege levels mean that we are not treated equally, nor should we pretend that we are all the same. But on a basic level, we should reject any language that implies that one type of immigrant is excellent (and should have an easier time of it) while another type is to be despised and mistrusted.

IX. In other words, if you are arguing against racists by saying that not all immigrants are brown and/or Muslims, I don't want you on my side.

I'm not sure if you know this already, but my absolute favourite, favourite kind of story involves angels and demons, over-the-top battles between them, and theologically-tinged interactions between angels, demons and humans. Discussions of free will, the value of flawed humanity, and the incomprehensibility of angelic/demonic nature to ordinary individuals are all desirable bonuses. Unfortunately, very few authors get the tone or narrative right - or rather, very few tell the kind of story I want to read. (I should also clarify that I'm not a religious person, and the kinds of stories of this type that I enjoy normally bear little resemblance to any recognisable depiction of angels or demons within any religion.) I can only think of about five stories that did what I wanted, and they all have their flaws: Paradise Lost (which only works for me if I read it against Milton's intentions), His Dark Materials, Supernatural (which has other, massive problems that a lot of people find extremely off-putting, with reason, and also comes saddled with one of the worst fandoms I have ever encountered), Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel books (in which the angels are extremely peripheral to the main story of a masochistic holy prostitute and her adventures as a spy), and Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice (shut up! that book is WONDERFUL). Sarah Rees Brennan's Demon's Lexicon trilogy is fabulous, but its demons don't come from any recognisable theology and aren't really the point of the narrative.

In order to get the stories I want, I've waded through a lot of rubbish, from Sharon Shinn's Angels of Samaria series, with its anaemic love stories and irritating plot twist, to some truly dreadful YA paranormal romances (anyone ever read Fallen by Lauren Kate?), in which angelic nature is simply a convenient way to engineer EPIC, IMMORTAL SOULBONDS. I expect very little when picking up a story about angels and demons, which is why Estelle Ana Baca's Cherubim and Seraphim, the first in her Ministers of Grace trilogy, doesn't bother me as much as it could have. But it's so full of typical weaknesses of characterisation and plot that I feel exasperated. Why is it that almost no one can write angels and demons right?

( Spoilery dot-points behind the cut )

In spite of all those complaints, I'll keep reading the trilogy, because, as I've already established, beggars can't be choosers. I guess I should get on with writing my own 'war of angels, demons and humans' book that I've been writing for years. After the PhD, maybe.

---------
*Although one is orphaned in a really terrible way.

Fandom, I love you to bits, but do you think you could manage, just for once, to acknowledge that female characters exist?

Sincerely,

Ronni

This post is brought to you by Fandom A, which seems to have reduced its most awesome female character to being a sort of cheer squad to the main slash pairing, Fandom B, which alternates between ignoring my favourite character and blaming her for the stupidity of her husband and son and only mentions my second-favourite (teenage) character when discussing which creepy old man to pair her off with, and Fandom C, which prefers incest pairings to writing about female characters (admittedly, the canon is horrible in this regard and tends to kill off every female character as quickly as possible).

This post is also brought to you by the knowledge that if people wrote fic for my favourite mini-fandom, it would all be angsty incestuous pairings of the (male) Imperial family members, with a side order of woobiefied (male) villain.

Bonus points if you can guess the fandoms.

PS It's not so much that I want people to stop writing fic, making art and producing meta focusing on male characters. It's that I wish it could be supplemented with equally good amounts of fic, art and meta about female characters. I wish female-centric texts would become as popular as male-centric texts.

My mother sent me this article by Annabel Crabb about Facebook. While I have no particular issue with the article (because I agree with Crabb in thinking that Facebook is not a benign entity, and because I think there are other forms of social media that are better), the comments enraged me. I normally know better than to read comments on internet news articles, but I couldn't look away for several moments, which meant I was blasted by the usual garbage about young people who spend too long on the internet and don't have any 'real' friendships. There was no way I was going to let that one lie.

You've heard it all before when I've rhapsodised about my internet friends and so I won't wax lyrical on that particular point again. We're all on Livejournal or Dreamwidth, so I think I'll take it as given that everyone reading this knows that internet friendships are, indeed, real.

One of the other weird - and unexpected - benefits of having online friends is that you end up learning a lot about the life, history and politics of a variety of other countries and cultures. Due to the demographics of my particular set of internet friends, I have a much more solid knowledge of what it's like to live in Iceland, France, Finland, Ireland, various parts of North America, and, indeed, Britain and Germany, years before I lived in any of those places. (My friendships are limited to a certain extent because I only speak English - and now rather bad German - and I imagine if I were multilingual, my circle of friends would come from even more places.) Online friendships give you a much broader perspective of what it is to be human, and I'd like to think they help to make you a more empathetic and knowledgeable person.

A second point to consider is this. I am an Australian, and lived in Australia until I was 23 years old. Then I went to the UK to do an MPhil (and later PhD) degree. I'm currently living in Germany. Even if you take online friends out of the equation, a significant proportion of my friends live scattered across the globe. Many of them, understandably, live in Australia, but a lot of the Australians have wandered off to the UK, the US, France, Italy, New Zealand, Korea, Japan, Cambodia and so on. Then take the friends I've made since moving to the UK. They are a mixture of people who were undergrads at some point when I was studying in Cambridge (and have since completed their degrees and moved elsewhere, either for work or for further study), or they were postgrad students or postdocs, working in a field which requires you to move in order to be where the jobs are. And in two months, when I'm back in Cambridge, I'll have a similar bunch of Germany-based friends whom I'll have left behind. If you take my last ten Facebook interactions, they were (in reverse order):
1. Messaging my boyfriend, who lives in Cambridge, in order to organise a time to talk on Skype;
2. Talking about music with people who live in Stockholm, Michigan, London, Lahti and Thurso respectively;
3. Chatting with a friend who lives in South Wales;
4. Chatting with my boyfriend's sister, who lives in another part of Germany;
5. Discussing the potential Galax-Arena film with a bunch of Australian friends;
6. Talking about the LGBTQ pride Oreos with an Australian friend;
7. Organising a group present with a bunch of friends from Cambridge;
8. Wishing a pair of formerly Cambridge-, now Peterborough-based friends congratulations on their engagement;
9. Commenting on an article my (Cambridge-based) boyfriend posted on my wall; and
10. Talking about Cirque du Soleil with an Australian friend.

Not one of those conversations could have taken place without the internet. I loathe the phone, even if I could've afforded those kinds of international calls, and in any case, it is the internet that enables the kind of spontaneity that typifies the above interactions. Quite simply, without the internet, I wouldn't be able to interact with the vast majority of my friends in a way that is natural and spontaneous. And I think I'm fairly representative of my age and demographic.

Finally, while I am at my happiest when I am interacting with people both 'in real life'* and online, with some kind of balance between the two, in my years online, I have encountered many people for whom the possibility of online friendship was utterly transformative. For whatever reason, these people found or find 'real life' interaction difficult, undesirable or impossible, and the internet perfectly suited to their personalities and interests. And I think that the existence of the internet, of online friendship, is incredibly valuable for this reason. I personally find it easiest to have meaningful conversations through the medium of text, either through blogs and comments, Twitter conversations or various chat platforms, and I am incredibly grateful that such things exist.

We're never going to convince the cane-wavers. And that's okay. If they can't see that what we have is valuable, that what we do is friendship, I don't want them here anyway.

___________________
* I put this in quote marks because the internet is, of course, part of real life.

[Note: I'm using 'women' to mean cis women here, because the people I'm ranting about are not aware that there are any other women besides cis women.]

So. The Personhood Amendment. Not a pretty piece of legislation. I'm almost speechless with rage, so I think instead I'll link you to another person's words, which do more to rebut pro-lifers' claims that they are, indeed, pro-life than anything I could possibly say.

( Potentially triggering for child abuse, neglect and rape )

I'm fed up with Tea Party types who claim to be libertarian and anti-government, except when it's the case of a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, then no government intervention is too much. I'm fed up with pro-lifers who care only that a foetus grow into a child, but care and do nothing to ensure that that child (and its mother) continue to have a life after birth. I'm tired of them thinking that abortion is just something that happens to bad people, that if you bring up your daughter (only your daughter) well, then of course all her children will be loved and wanted and safely born within marriage, when statistically it's highly likely that every one of these people knows someone who had an abortion. I'm tired of them arguing that if you don't teach teenagers about contraception, they somehow will not think or want sex at all. (Let me tell you something: I still remember when my then 14-year-old sister came home after a sex-ed class at school and swore never to have sex at all, because of the risks of STDs. Knowledge is power! How can a child, a teenage girl, make a decision like that without all the knowledge?) I'm tired of MY personhood being ignored I feel their words like a physical attack. Their hatred for women is like a blow. I'm scared. I'm angry, and I'm scared.

Again, because it's worth reiterating,

“Pro-life” is simply a philosophy in which the only life worth saving is the one that can be saved by punishing a woman.

This rant has been building in me for quite some time. Three things, however, convinced me to finally write it.

First is the increased number of secrets posted on fandomsecrets along the lines of 'social justice types are ruining fandom'.

Second is the number of people I've encountered over the years who react to any criticism of their favourite books/films etc with 'But it's just a story!!!!! Why can't you just ENJOY it?!?!'

Finally, every so often I'll be talking to my boyfriend about a particular book or series or whatever, and he'll say something like, 'I don't know how you can enjoy anything if you're always thinking about these sorts of things [meaning a combination of social justice issues and general thematic concerns]'.

I think he at least gets it now: that is precisely how I enjoy all texts. I can no more switch off that part of my brain than I could give up breathing. But I must confess that to the first two issues, I can say little more than 'huh?' Fandom, to me, seems to demonstrate that everything is interesting or enjoyable to at least someone. You like kids' tv shows from the early 90s? There's a comm for that. You want to make icons of a particularly obscure anime, or discuss continuity issues in Marvel comics or write porn about what band members get up to on tour? You'll fit right in somewhere. There's a corner of the internet for those who like men in tights, vampires who sparkle and knights who say 'Ni'. And if there isn't, you can make one.

But if everything is worthy of enjoyment or interest nothing is above - or beneath - criticism. And, shock horror, it is perfectly possible to like something without thinking it's a paragon of perfection. In fact, sometimes it can be more interesting to like things in spite of their flaws.

I enjoy some pretty problematic stuff. I love Supernatural, which has almost parodic levels of sexism, racism and the odd bit of homophobia. All its female characters end up either evil or fridged. Every PoC is evil. It is quintessential tale of a couple of White Dudes with Issues. And yet I find those White Dudes with Issues completely compelling. I love what it says about family, about sibling relationships, about how to be good (and, more importantly, to do good) in a bad world, about the tricksiness of words, about how to communicate when you mistrust the slipperiness of language and feelings. But the part of my brain that allows me to see and enjoy all these positive and interesting themes in Supernatural also enables me to see that there is much in the series that is deeply, deeply wrong and in need of criticism.

I see no contradiction in being able to adore Firefly for the way its characters talk, for the beauty in the relationship between Simon and River and for its story of a family that is made, not born, while at the same time taking issue with a universe dominated culturally by the US and China with no Asians, and being absolutely disgusted with everything to do with the characterisation of Inara. I can admit that Buffy got me through highschool and is to a large degree responsible for my feminism while at the same time acknowledging that there are things that happened in the series that (rightly) hurt a lot of queer people.

It is possible to love His Dark Materials because Pullman's language is beautiful and its characters are compelling and it gave me the words as a child to articulate my own atheism, while also noting that Pullman's depiction of organised religion is a parodic interpretation of the worst excesses of Catholicism. It's possible to enjoy The Vampire Diaries for its fantastic portrayal of female friendship, because Elena is just awesome and the series goes where Twilight feared to tread, while at the same time thinking that there's some dodgy stuff going on in terms of race and don't even get me started on the character of Damon.

Because nothing is 'just' a story. Stories do matter.

If you don't want social justice getting in the way of your squee, if thinking with some nuance about stories is so annoying that you can't enjoy them, well, fair enough. It's perfectly easy to avoid. Stay in the corner of fandom that suits you best. If you see someone criticising your beloved tv series, film or book, walk away. The internet is big enough for all of us.

But don't you dare tell me I'm ruining fandom by talking about these things, that I can't enjoy texts unless I encounter them passively without criticism. To me, the unexamined text is not worth reading (or watching). That's just how it works for me. You stick to your corner of the sandbox, and I'll stick to mine.