Anghraine

sqbr responded to this post:

It also opens the door for “I know there’s no indications they’ve done anything bad irl, but I can tell they’re terrible because I hate their work” and “They can’t have done anything bad irl, their work is too good and makes me too happy”. Both of which do a lot of real world harm.

[ETA 5/13/2024: I don't recall if I ever replied, but I completely agree!]

Apart from outright bigotry and viciousness, there are few Tumblr trends I find more annoying than tagging anything related to social justice as #compassion fatigue. I don't know how widespread it is, but it's happened enough on my posts (even fandom posts that only vaguely touch on actual social justice) from enough different people that it doesn't seem like a fluke.

And I haaaaate it. That is not what "compassion fatigue" is about and characterizing any allusion to the existence of societal inequality as a matter of compassion fatigue is incredibly gross, IMO. Most people who have used the tag on reblogs of my posts do it when reblogging posts about autism specifically, though the most recent was completely unrelated to that, and it's approaching auto-block territory.

D:

My best friend and I watched the second season of Halo last night. It's been very watchable, more than S1 IMO, but I have enough reservations that it had started to feel like a bit of a chore. It's both more ambitious and less cohesive than S1, with major characters disappearing for significant stretches of time (I was worried about Miranda!) and a split between so many arcs and subplots that it's weird and tiring. I like most of the characters in themselves, even the ones who are dreadful human beings (Halsey is my terrible fave!).

However, it's ... interesting that so many dudebro-type Halo fans had tantrums over the show being anything other than a direct recreation of the game (the protagonist of a TV show having emotions???) and particularly over it being "woke." I can't speak to the matter of fidelity, given that I've never played the games and my brief experience of watching them seemed pretty underwhelming after Mass Effect, but it is anything but woke. In particular, the critique of the UNSC undercuts itself in this season more than in the first and this season is far more racist.

( Spoilers within! )

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.

I reblogged this post about the annoying trend of urging people to select unproblematic faves and added:

#bless

Back in January (of 2024!), I saw sqbr's fantastic post on gender, female characters, genderswap, and original female characters. It's here and it's great. A nuanced, complicated take on this kind of genderbending is basically a bat signal for me personally, and at first I was going to comment directly to them, but my response grew as I thought about it, so I figured I'd put my response here instead of spamming their blog. I've basically been thinking about it off and on for the last two months. If you're reading this, I'd advise you to check out their post.

So, backing up a bit: I've often found the genderswap/genderbending and original female character (OFC) discourses to be—well, in all honesty, incoherent, unfair, and deeply stupid most of the time. I feel like a lot of "the discourse" around these things is contingent on 1) a “why are we not about me” approach to gender and 2) a sort of internalized fandom hierarchy, especially with regard to original female characters vs canon female characters. As I see it, all characters are someone’s OCs. As a consequence, the framework in which female characters produced by a generally male or male-dominated creator/creative group should be considered more authentically female than female characters produced by fans who are very often actual women can seem profoundly unjust and also simply very strange.

For instance, I love a lot of the female characters in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time and would not argue that they aren't actually women. Moiraine Damodred is one of my favorite female characters in fantasy, partly because she's a woman in a role that goes to men most of the time. But the "fictional women created by a male author" vibe is intense and inescapable in these books. The idea that fans' OFCs reflect a less authentic femaleness than Jordan's powerful women getting sexily spanked over and over feels pretty bizarre.

And this extends to genderswap/genderbending, given that when influential people in Hollywood or the broader entertainment industry change a male character's gender to female (either the character was previously conceptualized as male in the creative process, or the work is an adaptation of a source in which the character was male), the same wing of fandom that condemns fannish genderbending tends to be completely supportive and to see the new version as a legitimate female character. We can see this with Ripley, Azula, Joan Watson, etc. And even going the other way, nobody seems to think Luke Skywalker is somehow not a real male character even though George Lucas kept changing his gender, or that there was anything wrong with Lucas doing that. The condemnations of genderbending cis male characters to female ones are pretty specifically about fans doing this, especially female fans.

That's a longer rant than I meant it to be, but the reason I bring it up is because this has always struck me as a baffling argument as well as an unfair one. But I think sqbr's post highlights an important distinction between arguments about characters' femaleness and arguments about characters' female characterness, if that makes sense. The ways in which female characters tend to be framed by the narratives they appear in shape our sense of what female characters are and what is desirable for them to be.

For me, M->F genderbending is partly about my own wobbly, weak sense of gender, but also partly an expression of affection. It's satisfying to give the kind of centrality and/or Very Special Boy treatment that my male faves typically get to a girl or woman, and to explore the ways in which the kind of frameworks typically given to male characters collide with generally patriarchal settings, all without sacrificing my fave. So, say, my female Luke Skywalker has to deal with The Space Patriarchy and with being Special and Important and centered in a way typically reserved for male characters.

And that's often a major part of the appeal of M->F genderbending for me—a female character getting the structural narrative benefits typically reserved for various kinds of male characters, but without fundamentally disrupting the structure of the cast as given in canon. So turning Luke into Lucy feels fundamentally different to me, and much more satisfying, than inventing, say, a female triplet to take his narrative place.

And this is basically the exact opposite motivation as the one described in sqbr's post, of relating to female characters because of the narrative framework typically given them. I don't think either of us are wrong, factually or morally, we just sometimes have different tastes in terms of how we do fandom and gender.

I do think they're very correct about how a lot of female characters who are kind of presented as badass or whatever by way of receiving traits often assigned to male characters don't hit the same note as female characters who are given the kind of narrative framing often assigned to male characters. And I also think sqbr is right that what we all get out of female characters, what we find appealing in them, or gratifying, or admirable (or cringey, reminiscent of painful RL experiences, an annoying trope given female form Yet Again, etc), is hugely variable between people in ways that can actually be entirely legitimate for those different people. I've known female SW fans, for instance, who couldn't latch onto Leia the way I did because of the ways she's sidelined by the narrative structure of the OT (particularly ROTJ). I think that's perfectly fine, actually, even though I don't feel the same.

In addition, I had some amorphous thoughts about how when canon female characters click for me, they tend to really click, which sqbr also discusses in their post. An easy example for me is Attolia Irene in The Queen of Attolia, whose experiences and choices are profoundly shaped by patriarchy and who is given the kind of messy sympathy and resourceful triumph that is often reserved for characters like Gen and who is beautiful in a way I personally find hot as a lesbian. I briefly thought about what f!Eugenides/Irene would be like—cool to be sure, but tbh I'm not that interested because I'm so invested in Irene specifically.

Sort of relatedly, I do find it annoying when there's a discussion going on about favorite female characters in a canon, especially a male-dominated canon, and people respond with canonically male characters "because he's a lesbian to me" or whatever. I’ll defend a lot when it comes to genderbending, but that’s not cool.

I reblogged a piece critical of the supposed "Jaws Effect" used to prop up the "fiction corresponds directly with real-life consequences!" takes that have become popular.

Tagged: #wow almost like the effect of fiction on reality is more complex than a 1:1 correspondence

This post only makes sense in context, so:

Firstly, DaftLimmy on Twitter said:

People should be born Cancelled. And you've got to spend your whole life trying to Walk It Back.

Roo Honeychild, still on Twitter, responded:

it's called Catholicism

Hozier (yes, that Hozier) left a like on that response.

angelsaxis on Tumblr posted the screenshot of all three, and captioned it:

Today on Hozier liked

My friend ameliarating, who is Jewish, said:

#sounds like all of christianity? but I don't know enough to know #christian friends #is this just catholicism?

I responded:

Not all Christian sects subscribe to the doctrine, though more than just Catholics do. It is really strongly associated w/ Catholicism, however.

( Read more... )

Continuation of study hall this post.

I began the last post with Austen's allusion to Samuel Johnson in Mansfield Park. In context, the reference comes from Fanny's time at Portsmouth, when she compares Portsmouth vs Mansfield to Johnson's take on marriage vs celibacy—that is, that while marriage has some pains, celibacy can have no pleasures. (Portsmouth = celibacy and Mansfield = marriage in this analogy. Analyze away!) His line comes not from his poetry, but from Rasselas, a "prose fable."

I would ... not call it a fable, though I'm not sure what I would call it. My professor talked of it as a proto-novel: it has relatively distinctive characters, episodic adventures tied into something approximating an over-arching plot (though without appearing interested in an actual dénouement—it doesn't so much conclude as stop), more or less characteristic dialogue, and a major theme. The theme, of course, is Johnson's favourite topic (and/or pet peeve): the proper way to pursue happiness.

However, the characters are very, very thinly drawn, serving more as vehicles for the discussion and reflection than anything like credible human beings. The prof says we don't really get that level of sophistication and psychological realism until Austen, though I think we do see it in drama from the Renaissance onwards. But prose, yeah, iffy, though there are still some compelling characters.

Like! FANTOMINA, GUYS. She has maybe three personality traits, but they are all amazing. It's about a woman who would be a genius superspy in another time, but in her own, wastes her talents on this douchebag that she's completely obsessed with. We've got to assume he's really good in bed, as 1) his name is Beauplaisir and 2) he shows no attractive personality traits, and the actively repellent one of discarding every woman he gets entangled with as he quickly bores of them.

Spoiler: every single one of those women is Fantomina. It's not her real name. She's a lady who keeps disguising herself as different women to catch his interest, without ever being caught. This happens over and over again because, well, her superspy talents are wasted on this asshole. She would have just kept on going, with every indication that she would have succeeded indefinitely, if she hadn't gotten pregnant. Boo. There's a pretty great scene when Fantomina is finally pressured into revealing the identity of her lover, and when Beauplaisir is like "umm I'm pretty sure I would know if I'd dishonoured a lady," Fantomina's like "welllllll as it happens I seduced him under multiple disguises and he never realized he was fucking the same woman. My bad!" And then they're like, um, it seems weird to punish this guy for being stalked by a superspy ~of lust.~

Anyway, back to the less entertaining but more thoughtful fable thing. Not a real novel—or short story/novella—but inching closer. (I still miss the richness of Renaissance drama, though. Now THOSE are characters. Sometimes. *squints at Volpone*)

RIGHT. JOHNSON. ( Read more... )