zorilleerrant

 there's a difference between 'good art' and 'completed the assignment' and I wish people knew that difference. (and for that matter there's a difference between those and 'took a lot of work' and I wish people knew that difference too.)

 found "homestuck 2" and my god that's a lot of words to say "it's extended universe"

I don't know how to get anyone to separate issues anymore.

Like, whether or not you think something is appropriate in fiction is a separate issue from nearly everything. Go ahead and argue to your heart's content about all of that; it's the only way we figure out social progress anyway. But:

• threats, suicide baiting, violent imagery, etc. are just not okay to send to people??? there aren't 'good reasons'
• regardless of what you're trying to censor or why, censorship always disproportionately targets vulnerable populations and people
• there is no way to make a single, simple rule, and no way to enforce case-by-case decision making; censorship will always overreach
• even if you did your censorship successfully, censorship actually worsens pretty much all issues
• diverting resources from actually fixing problems to censoring things instead is fucky as shit?
• 'what will make me/people feel more comfortable?' is a separate question from 'what will prevent, stop, or lessen the impacts of abuse/violence?' and both of those are very different questions from 'what makes me look moral(ly superior)?'

And all of these are different things that need to be talked about in different ways in different contexts. And none of that can happen when people are obsessed with scrubbing xyz out of all fiction except for in the underspecified ways that it's allowed.

 What's 'empowering' in a narrative is highly individual, in the way that anything about a narrative is highly individual. For many people, seeing someone endure horrific trauma and come out the other side is empowering. For many people, the character has to come out stronger, whole, changed for the better to be empowering. For others, the character has to come out devastated, traumatized, unable to cope with life and slowly growing to find a path through nonetheless. Maybe the character has to be broken and put back together. Maybe the character has to get back to how they were before, maybe the character can never function that way again. All of these are empowering in different ways to different people.

And for other people, it's empowering to see a figure whose body isn't and can't be violated, to see someone struggling and triumphing without having to suffer that deeply, to see someone safe and happy. To know that horrible things don't necessarily happen to people, to know that everyone's path isn't quite so full of pain. To know what life could have been like, if keeping that vision alive is important to them, to know what they're fighting for when they try to keep the same things from happening to other people.

And conversely, many things are disempowering to many people. And for some people that's seeing something meaningful to them stripped down and scoured of meaning, seeing something washed clean of whatever it is they found power in. It's seeing a narrative too shallow, too small for what they need. And for others it's in the demanding of something grand and epic, in erasing the small and simple lives all around, of which there are many, and which are hardly ever commented on. It's in the refusal of a changing narrative, a changing perspective.

For some people, it's empowering to read about rape. And for other people it's disempowering.

And this is leaving aside the fact that on a grand scale, myths about women are about rape, sexual abuse, sexual assault, sexual harassment. When they're not, they're usually about marriage prospects, pregnancy and childrearing and family, sex and romance. And in a society that objectifies women, that sees women's bodies as sexual, romantic, and reproductive objects, there needs to be room for stories that aren't about that. Stories that don't include any kind of sexual contact at all, that don't reduce women to these parts and functions.

So there's a story that always included rape. Okay. Then creating a version without rape in it isn't going to change the original, the well known version, at all. Or it doesn't always include rape. In which case it isn't, or isn't anymore, a story about rape. People are engaging with it in different ways and getting different things out of it. Myths can't belong to any person or any group of people, that's the thing about them. They change over time, and they change to accommodate a variety of needs. (Or else, if they didn't, we better try to reconstruct what they were before the Christians burned them down. Maybe the rape was added later, to keep women in their Christian place.)

And sometimes those needs include: everyone is obsessed with this gendered perpetrator/victim dichotomy. All men rape and all women get raped. Most women don't get raped though, even with the broader definitions usually used. Certainly most women don't get kidnapped or tortured or violently beaten with their rapes, the way stories like to make it out is the only thing that can happen. (Many rapes are quieter, softer, and hard to speak about without even other victims trying to speak over them, and those stories deserve to be told too.) In story after story, this is what happens. Women are in men's stories to get raped, or get saved from rape, or to pointedly not be raped at a crucial point in the story. Women are in women's stories to recover from rape, or be yet again saved from rape, or to be terrified of rape and talk and talk about it with the other characters in the story. And yes, those are like real life, which is the problem. Statistically speaking, most women won't be raped, most women won't be sexually abused, most women won't face assault or domestic violence. (And the ones that do are so, so marked by factors other than gender. Disability is so much more likely of a factor in sexual abuse than gender it doesn't even make sense to use a bar graph.)

And all the fear, in every kind of story, in books and movies and word of mouth, it leads to a culture of fear. And many, many rape victims will tell you, the constant, pervasive do this or it's your fault and do that or what did you expect is worse than the trauma itself. Or it makes the trauma worse. Or it makes recovery impossible, because post-traumatic hypervigilance is what's expected of women just to live their lives. (By other women, mostly. It's mothers and sisters and girl friends and women mentors that create this outlook, not men.) (And we have so many other cultures of fear. Drugs. Gangs. Terrorists. Hacking. That's what America's built on.)

You never know when you'll be in a car crash, either, but when I have a panic attack around cars, it's rightfully regarded as a mental illness. This generational trauma is a dangerous pattern, and something needs to change. And one of the things that can change most easily is letting people tell different stories, not the same one over and over again.

Why is child abuse a less important topic to explore than rape? Why is it less empowering for a character to heal from that? Why is being beaten physically, without sexual assault, less serious? Why is it okay to change other traumas - the death of a loved one, natural disasters, wars, police brutality, home invasion, shootings, animal attacks - based on the narrative one attempts to convey, and the themes one wants to explore, but sexual assault is untouchable, held on high as some specific, precious thing that must remain intact at all costs? (I mean, I know why. It's all tied up in purity ethics and sex as the unforgivable sin and women as metonymy for vagina.)

Because a lot of people, and it's pretty easy for me to see why, don't think it's particularly empowering for Hades to rape Persephone until she likes him back. And a lot of people, they don't want to see themselves in a character who makes the best of a bad situation, who's forced to marry a man she doesn't like even if he doesn't hurt her, and he likes her, and she has to learn to love him back because she has no choice to leave. And a lot of people don't even like the one where neither of them wanted to be in this marriage but it is what it is. They want a love story, and they don't want it to be based on sexual and romantic coercion, which seems pretty understandable to me.

So say you want to write a story about love and marriage after rape - why does Hades have to rape her? If Zeus rapes her and Hades rescues her, is that allowed, or is that still erasing what 'really' happened? If she chooses to go to the Underworld because she just can't look at his face again, is that still writing victims out of their own story? If she's only threatened, is that enough, or does she have to actually be attacked?

If she does have to be attacked, why does it have to be sexual assault? What if her mother hits her? I know the story resonates with a lot of people whose mothers try to control their lives, who cry crocodile tears any time their precious daughter is too long out of contact. What if her father hits her, and it's her mother who can't get away from him? What if it's a bully?

What if it's something less personal, more systemic? What if she runs away to escape pervasive racism, classism, ableism? What if she runs away because she's treated as a stranger in her own home, and she wants somewhere more welcoming? Why are those traumas more mutable, more open to interpretation?

And what if people see themselves in Persephone, and they don't want to be hurt. What if they see her and they worship her and they love her, and they don't want hardship to befall her. What's so wrong with rewriting something pleasant and happy, something comforting? Not all stories are there to be interesting. Not all stories are there to lend strength, to give hope, to offer absolution. Not all stories are for more than one person, even. Sometimes a person needs to tell a story people know, but with all the bad parts taken out, and that can be empowering too. It's why so many of us enjoy fixits. Sometimes that's the myth people need.

There's no original myth. We have no access to it. Even if we knew where it started, even if we knew the cultural context in which it was created and how the people whose myth it was reacted to it, we can't feel it in our bones, because that isn't our culture, and it had things we don't and it doesn't have things we do, just in how it sees the very building blocks of the universe. (And what about those people at the time who objected or who told a different version or who added things or took them away? Which one of them is right?) Why are some things what we make of them, and others too precious to change?

 okay so basically:

• people who deal with something day in day out often don't want it in their fiction

and

• people who don't deal with things every day can't handle very much of it before it becomes emotionally or intellectually overwhelming

now people from both categories:

• might have problems dealing with various things for unrelated reasons
• often have periods where they can't handle anything upsetting or need to relax from it for a while
• may find it helpful to deal with one topic and not another, or only one at a time
• need to watch out for things that are bad for their mental health, that either heavily co-occur with or are inherent to the topic

but the thing is that means most people select for 'default' media and that's why there are so many straight white dudes being popular out there and not as many of anyone else, even beyond the kind of extra scrutiny people get for the other stuff

 “Don’t play so loudly, Bella,” they said. She was six years old. The neighbors ran around the garden hitting things with sticks, and she sat primly, clutching a doll made to look exactly like her. The doll was enchanted to wear exactly the same clothes she did, day after day, and when she went to thread a ribbon through her dolly’s hair, her mother slapped her hand away.

 I wrote a fic about Tonks being nonbinary. This is effectively a prequel to Just Tonks, but they don’t have to be read together, I just felt like a lot of people missed what I was trying to say about Tonks, so I wanted to write something that described her feelings a little better.

 I think there's a place for transgressive art. I think it doesn't age well; either it loses its transgressive value and it becomes just another thing (why is there just an abstract portrait, why were people so against it? it's okay I guess) or it becomes clearer why it was transgressive in the first place (oh, I see, they weren't just whining, people were in danger and the art is making light of that) and just becomes uncomfortable. I think that's okay, because all art has a context and it will never mean as much once you need a provenance (or provenience) for it. Art that's a political statement is never meant to have a long shelf life anyway.
I think there's a place for humor in art. I think humor can be a kind of art, I think the amount of thought that goes into it, it kind of has to be. I define art as 'anything intended for an audience' and that's pretty much definitional to humor. Sometimes it comes about by accident, but so does art every now and then, so that's alright.
I also believe very strongly that bad art should not be subject to different rules than good art. Because that's subjective, of course, and because it would take way too long to sort out the chaff even if we had a working definition, but also because the people who were charged with making the definition would always be dangerous to the people whose voices were drowned out. (You'll catch me saying a lot of art shouldn't have been made, but I don't mean 'the artist should have been prevented from making it' so much as 'why is this a bestseller/blockbuster/critically acclaimed TV show/international scandal'. Banksy isn't transgressive he's just every other SWM thinking he's cool.) Also because it gives people a lot of room to promote prestige artforms over new media and niche and transformative art, and fuck them.
(I also think 'pure entertainment' or 'just for fun' should actually be held to substantially higher standards than things that are intended to be artistic explorations, because society does suck, and something needs to change it, and that has to be on anything it's not harmful to regulate. We all know why art is so dangerous to regulate, but like. So many people are all 'well I'm not trying to make art' and, well, be a little less racist then, yeah? Like maybe don't make caricatures of Natives and then say how happy they are to sell off their land for pie. Especially things that are just there to make money, because we really need to lean on them, and especially things that claim to be positive role models. Not always feasible, but you'd think it might be sometimes.)
Which means there's a place for transgressive humor, too. And yes, of course it's not going to age well. But on the other hand I'm watching Friends which was never intended to be transgressive at all and was in fact the epitome of mainstream humor, and as it turns out 90% of the jokes are queerphobia and the other 10% are the friends emotionally abusing each other so I don't really think that aged well either. I imagine everything we call sweet and wholesome right now is going to look pretty damn off in ten or twenty years, too.
Because transgressive art doesn't just do the work of being interesting and shocking and uncomfortable, it does the work of delineating our society's boundaries. And without boundary work, without anything to focus on, nothing can change, and also it's stifling as fuck to have to color inside the lines all the time. Sometimes it's helpful, sometimes it's harmful, but it needs to be there; we need to see the boundaries either to enforce them or to break them down, and transgressive art, especially transgressive humor, is one of the easiest ways to shine a light on it.
What's 'hurtful' is a symptom, not a cause, and don't think I don't notice the people most likely to try addressing only the tip of the iceberg are the ones who never run into anywhere it's not explicitly. (If white people could stop telling me what is and isn't racist, if straight people could stop telling me what is and isn't queerphobic, if abled people could stop telling me what is and isn't eugenicist, that would be great!) When we're fighting for what language there is for us to have, it's always going to hurt someone, but it's going to help someone else, and the only choice is to muddle through as best we can screaming the words that mean something to us.
Anyway the point being someone said Family Guy should be banned and no one should be allowed to watch it because ThInK oF tHe ChIlDrEn and I just don't understand why mainstream liberals sound more and more like fundies every day.
Is it smart? No. Is it bigoted? Lots of the time yes! But unfortunately also less so than many other shows that get touted as Woque! Is it funny? Lots of the time, also yes! And it certainly shows us where society thinks the limits of acceptable and normal are, and we need that if we're going to improve anything for anyone, ever.
And also what fanfics have nearly as wide a reach as Family Guy? They don't set policy. Family Guy doesn't even set policy. Steven Universe sets policy. B99 sets policy. Friends sets policy.

 people keep bringing up "I only want happy endings" as if it's some massive outspoken minority opinion, like just radically out of left field and no one has ever said it before, and like. this is the mainstream opinion. this is how most people feel.

very few people are actually saying "it has to be sad to be art" and if they are, they almost always suck at art. what people are trying to defend is that there ARE good reasons for sad endings, that it's fucked up to be like "well why would you even bother writing it if it doesn't have a happy ending" or "all stories should have happy endings"

people go up to someone who likes sad or ambiguous endings, who like grimdark, who like angst or whump, and they're just like, well why do you have to like it

and then when you try to explain your preference it's all two dozen famous authors tweeting about DON'T FORCE ME TO READ SAD ENDINGS I'M BEING OPPRESSED

 Just read The Alchemist's Touch (Underrealm) because of a popular post floating around, and...disappointed. (Some spoliers) Like, first of all, it was not remotely like Harry Potter. HP is set ambiguous now, and is a secret magic world hidden within the real world. This book was written all Old Timey (seriously, it keeps using mayhap like every paragraph), where magic is open, known, respected, etc. and creates a privileged magical overclass, and is about political intrigue. So it's not even the same genre. Kind of feel like maybe the author has never read any fantasy books other than HP, or else thinks anything set at a school which is like half of SFF is identical. Anyway I really wish people wouldn't try to write things all Old Timey as it rarely adds anything and usually is just distracting and irritating - the book would've been decent with that script change.

The part that really bothers me is that even though this is a world that explicitly has power and access differentials based on money (among other things), and has starving and homeless people, the main character keeps talking about bigotry against rich people ('it hurts just the same' style) and the narrative treats it as not only reasonable but important? There's also a lot of multiculturalist racism, but sort of the background radiation sort you get in typical fantasy.

Anyway, the thing it advertised itself on was women and queer characters, and it did not do well at all. First off, there was only one explicitly queer character, a woman, no explicitly queer men. A few times people suggested queerness in relation to the main character and he got offended and was like 'no clearly I'm normal'. Also does the regular bi erasure things of suggesting people can only be attracted to men or women, not both (or, god forbid, some other category entirely), and then the really creepy thing of one dude being sad about a chick rejecting him, but then he finds out she's a lesbian and is okay with it??? Really hate that trope, also hate people in real life who do that. Creepy. But the thing is, there weren't even that many women, and all in archetypal roles.

• central character girl, fellow student, both older and has been studying much longer so not in a position to threaten mc's competence. also explicitly a poor orphan, so nonthreatening sociopolitically as well. by far the most developed female character, but also extremely typical to have one in a school based story.
• mc's aunt. very motherly, doesn't know what's going on. not significant to the story, also doesn't appear that much except to do deus ex machina. does not seem to have any motivations or personality.
• mc's sister. mentioned only. not a character.
• mc's mom. appears briefly as accessory to mc's dad (an important and central figure), barely mentioned.
• a prostitute, mc's love interest. does not seem to have any motivations, personality consists of interest in mc's work and goals.
• The Mean Girl
• also some other Mean Girls in her squad
• an administrative type with unclear job. described as ugly, implied to be stupid and not very useful. mc hates her.
• The Teacher. wise, competent. motivations unclear and unimportant. personality: Teacher.
• a student, who for some reason really likes and looks up to mc. no other personality traits, no motivations. doesn't even know him.

That's it! That's all of them! Only one of them is even characterized, as opposed to the reasonably strong characters of mc, central character boy, the Mysterious Assassin, and the VotW, as well as a fairly well developed depiction of mc's dad, who only appears briefly but then is talked about through the entire rest of the book and probably responsible for the whole plot. I don't think two women even have a genuine interaction anywhere in this story. There's like one place where mc's mom and aunt wink at each other. For a book that promised a lot of strong women, this really did not deliver.