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When accuracy is not enough
Apr. 10th, 2024 05:27 pmI 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.
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.
