This is a rant.

[anghraine]

For some reason, I keep stumbling across conversations about me -- some of which are deeply flattering and some of which are the Internet equivalent of accidentally overhearing your classmates slagging on you in the bathroom -- and the whole thing is kind of awkward. Do you say something? Do you pretend you didn't notice?¹ I don't know what the protocol is for these things!

Honestly, I've always found it bewildering that anybody ever bothers to talk about me if I'm not there to remind them of my existence, but apparently it happens! I'll be minding my own business and run across people going omg brilliant (yay!) or omg bitch queen of the universe² (...) and it's super uncomfortable. Which is only peripherally relevant to what I'm ranting about, but for some reason "overhearing" two completely separate instances of people talking about me (one of each type!) led directly to this. I don't know how coherent it is and I'm definitely speaking as someone who replies compulsively and is generally happy to argue into eternity, but whatever, here we go.

There's this bizarre behaviour in humans called “expressing an opinion.” Fandom at large, as far as I can tell from the various fandoms I've been in, is deeply uncomfortable with the phenomenon, doing its best to minimize the potential or actual risks involved.

An opinion, you see, is just an opinion! I know, shocking. But let me explain. People don't have reasons for their opinions that vary from the rational to the nonsensical—of course not! People disagree because we have feelings, and our feelings about things we read or see or experience are all different (for no reason, of course). Feelings, after all, are neither wrong nor right. Ever! They simply are. So it is with opinions. Nobody is ever wrong and nobody is ever right, and all opinions are completely subjective and can neither be validated nor condemned.

And since all opinions are created equal, nobody ever needs take responsibility for an opinion. If the arguments you make to support your opinion are ill-conceived or offensive or simply mistaken, you don't have to say, “I didn't think about that” or “I'm sorry” or “I was wrong about that”--heaven forbid! No, instead you say, “well, it's just my opinion” or “it's a pity you feel that way” or “everyone has opinions.” There's the ubiquitous “your mileage may vary,” too, which as a disclaimer can be useful in forestalling pointless debates, but is more often seen within debates as a shorthand for “I don't have any actual arguments, so I'll just pretend that nobody else does either.”

This is then extended to an insistence that nothing is good or bad or anything in between, people just have good feelings or bad feelings about it. If you have good feelings, you enjoy it, and therefore to you, it's good. If you have bad feelings, you hate it, and to you it is bad. But there is definitely no such thing as actual quality. Nothing is better or worse than anything else, people just have different feelings because they read/saw one of them first/middle/last, they're grammar nazis/illiterate, they liked/hated/never knew someone like the main character, they just wanted him to be perfect/boring/monstrous/whatever, and honestly the list of reasons why there are no reasons just goes on and on.

It's generally assumed, therefore, that if you enjoy something you think it's good, and if you don't like something you think it's bad. The idea that somebody might distinguish their subjective enjoyment from their opinions of something's objective merit—heresy! Remember, there's no such thing as quality! In anything! Ever! There are only feelings!

Nothing is bigoted: it's just an opinion. Nothing is wrong: we've all just got different opinions on things. Nothing is stretching a point beyond the bounds of credibility, nothing is constructing a straw man (you don't like your hero exploiting women or committing murder? You just can't stand characters with flaws!), nothing is irrelevant or idiotic or making up things that never happened. Nope. If any anybody tries to call you on these things—or heaven forbid, argue with you—you can instantly silence all disagreement by explaining it's just an opinion!

You know, just something you're personally convinced is true. But it's not important or anything.

Seriously, though. Some opinions are wrong (e.g., the woman on an Austen mailing list who insisted that it was totally valid to see Darcy as thirty-something, she'd always imagined he was in his late thirties: um, no). Some are impossible to disprove but based on faulty reasoning. Some follow from a mistaken premise. Some are just offensive as hell and no, they do not have equal standing with all other opinions. This is not American news; we don't have to pretend that there are two, and only two, equally-valid sides to everything and bring on someone batshit insane to argue with the climatologist.

Sure, some things are debatable or ambiguous and can be reasonably interpreted in multiple ways. And if you think you're making a reasonable argument, you don't need any “but it's just opinion” to weasel out of defending it. Acknowledging alternate points of view: fine. Using their existence to silence disagreement and refuse to answer for your own stated beliefs: please stop it.

---------------

¹Do you leave passive-aggressive notes in your lj?

²To be fair, that's an exaggeration. But if I read with my gut and not my eyes, that's what it says! And c'mon, guys, it's just my opinion!

Comments

[katharhino]

Yep.

I think we've lost the art of arguing. People either push way too far until everyone is angry, or they are scared even to defend themselves. Calm debate just doesn't happen.

[anghraine]

Pretty much, yes. Maybe I'm just missing something super obvious, but most of what I see is people completely overreacting (how dare you criticize my argument? YOU'RE LIKE HITLER) or people bullying everyone else. Which isn't to say there aren't awesome discussions in place, there's just -- drama. And this whole idea that all opinions are created equal is really bizarre to me.

[sathari]

Oh, man. Wow. Ouch!

I admit freely that I basically hover around the Outer Rim/Wild Space of fandom these days, so I can't comment on the pervasiveness of this trend, but: I totally agree that there is a continuum from: objectively observable facts (e.g., and it's been a while since I've read Pride and Prejudice but if there are clearly stated details about when Darcy was born/what his age is at the time of the story, then the woman who's asserting that his age is otherwise needs to admit her fail relative to a consensus interpretation/serious critical discussion, even though IMO she doesn't need to harsh her own headcanon/enjoyment of the story [so saith the owner of much crack!headcanon]) through stances that are more or less supported by canon details and/or relevant outside references (e.g. there are a lot of different mythical/literary tropes and psychosocial themes/issues in Star Wars and a lot of the validity of a discussion of same is how you back them up) through things that are pure opinion (what you like vs. what you don't, regardless of merit).

And also whether this is a cancerous form/ other swing of the pendulum of the "differing schools of thought in the social sciences" thing, because in the soc. sci. there are a lot of differing and downright contradictory points of view, but they all hold together at least somewhat coherently (and this is true for literature as well, IIRC) even if their detractors may think otherwise (LOL) but fandom's response is to attempt to avert/circumnavigate flamewars by going too far in the other direction. (Synthesis, we need a synthesis! Balance in the Force, I say!)

I have to wonder if there is something to the fact that a lot of fans are geeks, and sometimes intellectual superiority may have been the only psychosocial defense we had for why we'd rather spend an evening at home with a book rather than doing a social activity, and that's why it's so hard for some of us to go, "Yeah, this is lowbrow; I don't care, I still love it and would rather spend hours on it than do x more socially-acceptable activity, so what"? (Or maybe that's just me, lol; it took a long time for me to feel... safe... admitting that I loved stuff that was not as high-art as stuff I hated, and that I would honestly rather spend days straight analyzing Star Wars/Star Trek than a lot of the classics. And also that I like a lot of the tropes in the classics/mythology a lot better when they come with spaceships and lasers and women who get to use them at least occasionally! :) )

[anghraine]

Darcy says he's twenty-eight (at the end of a novel covering a year). So yeah, that's less interpretation and more failure of reading comprehension.

I agree that things are rarely so cut and dried as that, but I still see some pretty asinine arguments even when I agree with the premise or conclusion or interpretation or whatever. Namely, anything that invokes all-opinions-are-equal or all-opinions-are-valid or all-opinions-are-meaningless or any of it. Especially when accompanied with the condescending, "Well, you only feel that way because X." (It's amazing how many people seem to be under the impression that my first exposure to Star Wars wasn't TPM.)

I think it does come from geekiness, in a way -- this idea that we must always be excellent to one another, don't let them divide and conquer us blah blah. And when you're used to assuming you're brilliant, having other people of your type come up to you and say "your argument is bullshit" is obviously disagreeable. This weird forced equality of opinions and assumption that enjoyment = evaluation and whatnot seems really bizarre, though. And not really conducive to anything but frustration.

(Er, I chose the icon on the randomizer.)

[sathari]

(It's amazing how many people seem to be under the impression that my first exposure to Star Wars wasn't TPM.)

I suspect that a lot of the "all opinions are equal" crowd wouldn't have gone back for more if they disliked their initial exposure to a fandom that much. (Which, props to you for giving the OT a shot after TPM!)

I think it does come from geekiness, in a way -- this idea that we must always be excellent to one another, don't let them divide and conquer us blah blah.

That, and that if what you like isn't "high art", "intellectual", whatever, then you have no excuse for liking it instead of mainstream stuff--- that if your stuff is just as "lowbrow" as sports and fashion magazines, then you should just suck it up and do "normal" things instead. "This is schlock, but it's the schlock that I like, even though most people like this other schlock that I can't stand instead" is not a safe place for a lot of us.

And then there is the discomfort-with-being-outgeeked part, and the part where sometimes defending your argument thoroughly would mean outing your RL persona more than you are comfortable with--- as Darths and Droids so aptly points out, many geeky types have weird and obscure interests and professions, enough so that correcting someone on a finer point of something could potentially link back to your RL identity, especially if you have to cite sources. So the cultural tradition, if you will, of not having to back up your opinion could've evolved, implicitly, out of the need to respect that you might be arguing with someone who is an expert but isn't comfortable linking their fannish self with their RL self, so that "live and let live" becomes the norm.

The random icon selection is wonderfully apt, hee!

[anghraine]

Oh, I didn't hate TPM at first, I just thought it was boring and stupid and didn't think any more about it. I didn't love ANH the first time I caught it either, when I was watching my stepniece watch it, and I didn't actually intend to watch any more (CANNOT DEAL WITH MORE GARBAGE COMPACTORS). It was only when my best friend guilted me into watching the original trilogy in a single sitting, on his pristine original VHS tapes, that I finally saw it and went from 'eh' to 'cool!' to 'omg' to 'BEST THING I HAVE EVER SEEN' to *SOB*.

Mostly, the irritating thing is that plenty of people who saw the prequels first didn't like them at all--especially TPM--and plenty of people who saw the originals first and loved them also loved the prequels. So the 'you only think that because x' is inherently flawed in this case, AND it's always a dismissive, trivializing one in any circumstance. I've seen it a lot in other fandoms. 'You just think he doesn't have a mistress because that's what's romantic to you' or 'you just think Númenóreans are beardless because you find that more attractive' or whatever. Apparently nobody comes to any conclusions based on what they consider good or consistent or probable.

I see the opposite of what you're talking about, geek-wise, I think--a lot of Internet lawyers and Internet historians and Internet armchair psychologists. But I do think the comparative anonymity has something to do with the relative unimportance of credentials. IDK, but I definitely see the 'all opinions are equal!' bound up closely with the cult-of-nice thing, where being nice becomes far more important than being genuinely considerate, let alone making cogent arguments, and you see it more in certain spaces.

I've never been in a fandom where I see more of it on a regular basis than Austen fandom, say, though SW journal fandom has a bit too; there's hardly any in HP fandom, Middle-earth fandom, and pretty much none in anything meta-focused, especially social justice spaces. The whole 'if you were really tolerant you'd be tolerant of my intolerance' argument generally gets screams of laughter there, say, where in RL I see it regarded in much more of the 'all opinions are equal' thing--it's not merely an online thing by any stretch of the imagination. I don't know, maybe it's just some modern cultural thing that bleeds into online stuff.

[sathari]

*nodding in comprehension @ Star Wars comments*

Yeah, my experience in geekdom has been more of the, "talk casually online with a fellow fan for a while, get to know them well enough that we talk RL stuff, find out that they have some combination of professional/practical/academic experience that is informing their fandom creations, usually in at least something of a systematic and thoughtful way, even though they don't wave their credentials around" rather than the "internet-pseudo-expert" crap. Which now that you mention it probably is unusual!

I was initially surprised that Austen fandom would attract that level of aversion to intellectual rigor... then it occurred to me that probably a lot of the intellectually-rigorous Austen fandom is happening in, like, university lit departments rather than online? So online/casual Austen fandom is getting, if you will, a lot higher concentration of the intellectual lightweights than fandoms where there's less of an opportunity to pursue your fannishness in a professional/academic environment--- you can make a living as an Austen scholar and that's probably what many of the intellectually rigorous ones are spending their fannish energy trying to do; not so much as an HP or Star Wars one, lol.

[anghraine]

Re: Austen fandom, there's probably an entire epic about that, but from my experience -- I came onboard in 2004 -- there was a lot of ... it was both more thoughtful and acrimonious back then, and internet historians would wage warfare and so on, and there are still enclaves of that in certain sites. But there was a pretty strong backlash and these days, yeah, I think there's a suspicious of more academic-style Austen.

And there definitely is that thing where stuff you'd do fannishly *can* be respectable in RL, or at least marginally so. I mean, I paid for a term's worth of textbooks off an Austen fanfic I never took offline. And Austen criticism never really tapers off, even if a lot of it is kind of batshit. You can realistically specialize in Austen; not so much in Star Wars or Harry Potter or even Tolkien.

[sathari]

Yeah; and WOW. That just all sounds so... unpleasant for someone who just wants to trade thinky-thoughts about works of fiction they love!

And oh, yeah, on the fannish stuff, and also, I am wildly impressed by the following: I paid for a term's worth of textbooks off an Austen fanfic I never took offline. Like, seriously, sweet!!!!

[anghraine]

Heh, thank you. It's not much and I'll definitely want to use a different name for anything else I do, but that's one of the upsides of the fandom.