Tumblr crosspost (15 January 2021)

I know I should build up a Twitter presence™ for my serious business author account, but also … I don’t want to.

(This is clearly flawless reasoning at all times!)

#in fairness part of it is because #i'm on the fence about whether my novel is ya or not #the characters are young (12-16) and it's in first person so that's very ... present #though they get older over the course of the series #but most people have thought the style is not very ya-ish #so idek if it's worthwhile to dip my toe into the boiling sulfur lake that is ya twitter #regardless i haven't even checked my account in like three months #anghraine babbles #emphasis on 'babbles' #tbh i'll probably just stick around on tumblr until it collapses into a white dwarf and then drag myself by my fingernails to twitter

[ETA 4/10/2024: lol, a more innocent time when it seemed assured that Twitter's heyday would outlast Tumblr! And while I have many objections to Tumblr's current management, Twitter is assuredly worse and more unusable in every way, sometimes to the point of horror and sometimes to the point of outright comedy. I actually had started using Twitter actively on my writing account, as it happens, but I refused to continue after the Elon purchase.]

Tumblr crosspost (15 January 2021)

[ETA 4/10/2024: I'm only preserving this on general principle; the submission window it's referencing is long past, of course.]

I know at least a few of you followed me for that SF/F publishing list, which is extremely outdated at this point. However! I just saw (*sigh* on Twitter) that Diabolical Plots is currently open to submissions for January, and they have a pretty detailed list of what they’re looking for here.

Tumblr crosspost (16 January 2021)

primeideal responded to this post:

tbh i’m only doing short stories but i cannot believe it is worth it to get involved in SF/F twitter. nooooo.

I replied:

I’m much more of a novelist than a short story writer, and it’s like … ugh, fine. But the hellscape of SF/F Twitter is half the reason I neglect my account tbh (so it only has … like, 30 followers, lol).

colorwheels14 said (on Jan 15th):

I know other professors who are on twitter for academic presence and reasons… I am not. Because there is no way I’m interacting with strangers on twitter.

alishatheninth said (on Jan 18th):

Just tell us what it is when it’s out so we can buy it, please!

I replied:

Aww, thanks!

I don’t think most people are interested tbh, which is fine (my “Anghraine” self has always been mainly for fandom), but I’m a little leery about explicitly connecting my pro and fannish identities. I’m not putting a lot of effort into the separation, just trying to avoid having one lead directly to the other. So I probably won’t say directly. I might broadly hint, though :)

I swear, I'm not going to drag over every weird Tumblr take I see

I promise! In general!

But damn, I was actually thinking this one had some good points riiiiight until the last two lines.



tbh I remain convinced that most fanfic discourse relies on strong generalizations about fanfic without any clear definitions of what fanfic is and, perhaps more importantly, what it is not. I know it's pretentious, but I think that's part of the reason these takes fail to accurately differentiate the ways in which no art stands alone from what fanfic does, and especially fail to distinguish community norms driven by specific social contexts from aspects inherent to the form.

I mean, this take and all the other, usually worse, takes like it are essentially framed in terms of assertions about qualities intrinsic to the forms of fanfic vs original fic, without any attention to the effects of community and culture. They often get annoyed by "what about Shakespeare/Ovid/adaptation?" etc, but an argument based on form does invite those comparisons. I've never seen any of them provide an effective rebuttal based in the same formal reasoning. The terms have to shift to questions of quality or culture or simply "That's different" with no reasoning at all.

When accuracy is not enough

I saw an interesting, but also somewhat disturbing, conversation about the history of the Sansa Stark hatedom that touched on something I've been thinking about for awhile.

The Sansa hatedom discussion was sparked by someone asking about the reasons for the dudebro Sansa hatedom of days of yore. Someone else brought up these same dudebros' idealization of Arya by contrast with Sansa and how they basically valued Arya in "not like the other girls" terms. Yet another person argued that this was #problematic because the criticism of NLOG is homophobic. Somebody was like ... don't you mean misogynistic? Neither of these characters are gay? The previous person explained that the criticism of NLOG ignores the social context that it arises out of and disproportionately targets GNC women who are often lesbians, hence the connection with homophobia.

I do get that a lot of the kneejerk condemnation of NLOG rhetoric arises out of the misogynistic and gender essentialist and generally fucked-up perception of GNC women as threatening to femininity in some way, that plenty of those GNC women are lesbians or otherwise WLW and thus it can factor into homophobia in practice, and that those condemnations of the NLOG rhetoric are trotted out to dismiss the most basic criticisms of gender role expectations for women (imagine a conversation about the connection between the make-up industry or body hair removal and the widespread social pressure put on women to conform to narrowly-defined and generally harmful and expensive beauty standards that did not promptly turn into defensive choice feminism screeds).

I even get that there are over-invested Sansa stans who prop her up at Arya's expense because they find Sansa's conformity to feminine gender performance appealing and more appropriate to their own expectations for women/girls, and that they have used criticisms of NLOG rhetoric to bash Arya (or basically any woman/girl who even mildly diverges from gender performance norms).

But in this case, the conversation was about the ways Sansa has been harshly criticized for her association with femininity/feminine performance, mostly by adult men hyper-scrutinizing the gender performance of a fictional eleven-year-old girl, and framed as inferior to Arya because those men (like many men!) hold anything and anyone associated with femininity in contempt. That is something that very definitely did happen, frequently. There is a reason that "like a girl" or "girly" is an insult and has considerable power in defining what masculinity looks like to so many men and boys (there are further complications w/ this that I don't have the time to get into, but it's certainly a very conspicuous aspect of the construction of normative masculinity). The idea that an entirely accurate description of something that actually happened is problematic, even unspeakable, because the criticism has been misused in other contexts sits really uncomfortably with me. It feels a bit like creeping up to alternative facts from the other side.

However. I'm also writing about hyper-scrutiny in my dissertation—generally speaking, the way in which women's behavior (especially wrt sexuality) is placed under such intense scrutiny that you get this obsessive nitpicking and over-scrutinizing of anything and everything a woman or female character does or feels. Literary critics absolutely fall prey to this and that's the context of the discussion in my dissertation—essentially, that each individual nitpick they're making could be correct as far as it goes, but the cascade of so many of them and the way some early modernist critics concentrate this scrutiny on female characters does seem pretty misogynistic after a while. And I've seen that kind of behavior in other contexts.

Like, when MTG released LOTR art in which Aragorn was depicted as Black, some people were explicitly racist about it, and some people explicitly welcomed the depiction. But the thing I noticed was the way that some people would make all these detail-focused criticisms of the art that didn't mention race at all, but seemed very disproportionately directed towards the art pieces that presented heroic characters as POC. And many of the people doing this were familiar as the same people who responded similarly to The Rings of Power, especially the characters played by POC. Some of these critics just kept escalating and eventually went full mask-off; there was one former follower (former because I blocked him) who at first seemed a normal enough nitpicky purist (something I get), then suspiciously so, and within a couple of days his blog was just overtly racist responses to any heroic Tolkien characters being depicted as POC. Some of these people never went that far, but would actively minimize the impact of racism and misogyny on the general ROP discourse (like, there were popular ROP discourse memes in which the more respectable criticisms were presented up front in large letters and the racism/misogyny in significantly smaller font on the edges of the image). Others didn't do that, either, but still hyper-focused on every "wrong" detail about characters played by POC like Disa, Arondir, and Míriel.

It is, let's say, unsurprising that the ROP characters who probably got the most positive fandom reception in the end despite the general histrionics around the show were Elrond, Durin, Halbrand, and (more controversially) Galadriel. The most popular ROP ship by a gigantic mile is a white het ship, and at least on AO3, Celeborn (who does not appear in the show and is only very briefly and belatedly mentioned at all) shows up in more ROP fics than any of the characters played by POC (Arondir and Isildur barely squeak onto AO3's top ten list of commonly tagged ROP characters, following after Galadriel, Halbrand/Sauron twice, Elrond, Adar, Elendil, Gil-galad, and Celeborn, with Míriel, Disa, and Bronwyn not even making the list).

So, like ... it's not news that Tolkien fandom is racist and misogynistic. But the broader point is that popular condemnation of something can reach such a volume and be so disproportionately targeted that even things that are individually true or at least defensible in isolation start looking really suspect. And often they are really suspect in ways that become pretty obvious (it's about ethics in gaming journalism!!!!). But I'm not entirely sure how to reconcile my extreme distaste for "you can't use criticism of NLOG to characterize dudebro fans actively using that exact framework in a grossly misogynistic way because of the homophobes" and my extreme distaste for Tolkien fandom's refusal to consider the context before they start going on screeds about Arondir or MTG Aragorn.