Anghraine

I was actually slightly on edge about getting into a frankly notorious fandom without encountering this kind of thing sooner. After getting a somewhat clearer sense of trends and fun conversations and persistent annoyances (at least on Tumblr), and after monologuing my TOS feelings, I still hadn't received any particular unpleasantnesses on a personal level, and was like ... well, maybe people are nicer now, even to someone like me. But mostly I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop, especially given that I'd found TOS in particular very different from what I'd expected via fandom and pop culture osmosis on many, many levels.

But it would have never occurred to me that my controversial TOS hot take would be "Spock's co-workers are racist to him a lot and this is the main vehicle for TOS's exploration of racism as a thing." But yup, I got anon hate about how "funny" it is that I'd been complaining about bad Kirk takes (specifically, I'd recently seen a conversation about how "TOS Kirk actually doesn't experience angst over anything but challenges to his authority" when I'd been very surprised to discover that a) TOS persistently returns to how lonely and fearful of being left alone he is, and b) TOS Kirk is a genocide survivor struggling with his options of "doing nothing" or "ruthless vengeance", and he was bullied in the Academy for being "grim" (no shit?), and that's not even the only massacre he survived, and a lot of his infamous romances are blatantly coercive towards him). See, it's funny because I'm so biased towards Spock that I don't even realize it and have said people are just always being mean to him.

(I don't think I said "mean." I said racist.)

Anyway, I was so utterly baffled by that of all things being my big controversial ST opinion that I read it to my housemates for shits and giggles, though normally I keep fandom drama away from RL. Since my BFF J is a massive Trekkie and Ash has watched a few TOS episodes with us, they got the context and J was just laughing his head off while a very confused Ash was like, "Has this person seen it?"

On the bright side, we had a whole conversation about the various desperate flailing attempts I've seen to defend the general racism against Spock within the show, or at least to suggest that it's no different from Spock's or Kirk's own behavior, and that ended up being actually interesting, so at least something deeper came of it! But I'm still baffled at how you watch something like "Balance of Terror" and come away thinking the point of Spock's experiences and Kirk's outrage is "Spock gives as good as he gets, though, so it's not REALLY racism."

On top of that, J and I had actually been talking days earlier about how there seems this strange fandom embargo on engaging with, particularly, McCoy's racism in interpreting his character, its function, and especially his relationships with Spock and Kirk. Not only "I prefer to headcanon something different" but indignation over anyone anywhere even acknowledging it's part of the show. J and I are actually really interested in the ways that TOS sets up this Spock vs McCoy tension in which Kirk is either the mediator or battlefield—or the tension rises because he's not there—but this is never really a balanced tension because both Kirk and the narrative itself so obviously favor Spock over McCoy. And Kirk himself is even more favored. There's a reason that Spock gets twice McCoy's share of the overall dialogue even though McCoy is chattier. J actually has a theory that a more balanced version of the triad might have been more effective in a lot of different ways (thematically, their relationships with each other and how those reflect on their individual characters, etc), which I do find interesting to consider, but there's so much defensive dogma about how they're all totally balanced and equally important and favored that it can be difficult to figure out where these interpretations are even coming from. Just about every conversation I've seen about McCoy in any capacity, or about the bigotry directed at Spock, becomes a very strange game of Telephone very fast.

She-Ra meets rambling (very rambling) personal/family angst:

So, I’ve mentioned that She-Ra was one of my first fandoms, for a loose value of “fandom.” I was too young for the original show itself (it came out a year before I was born), but my aunt wasn’t, and she gave me all her She-Ra books and figurines, which were the only superhero-ish things I ever loved. And I loved them with my entire five-year-old soul!

In fact, I loved them for several years afterwards, and only reluctantly surrendered the books/figurines when my aunt asked if I still had them. I wasn’t really ever a “now I’m Mature and the things I used to like are Cringy and Bad” person, so I retained a strong affection even when I was older and enjoying more advanced things.

As did my aunt, who is only five and a half years older than I am. She was like my cool older sister for a long time, even though we were very different people, and I vaguely associated this relationship with She-Ra in my head. Regardless, we played together, we shared clothes and toys, she taught me how to ride horses, etc, until we drifted apart.

That happened partly because five years was actually vast at certain ages, partly because my parents moved, but mostly because of our enormous differences in personality and interests. Still, I continued to think of her as Cool Big Sis until various things happened that led to her becoming much more insular and conservative, even for a pretty conservative family (my centrist parents are radical leftists by their standards).

The Bush administration kicked off around the time I started high school, and by the time I graduated, I was determined not to ever vote for any Republican for the rest of my life (I enthusiastically voted for Kerry in my first election and was baffled that so many people I knew hadn’t bothered or, worse, actually voted for Bush out of ~patriotism). End result: I’ve been a firm and reliable Democratic voter for sixteen years, while my aunt gets more far-right every year (…and day, it feels like).

And it’s like … she long ago ceased to be “cool” given that she’s become a raging bigot (by nearly all accounts more than she ever was before, so not just something I missed because I was a kid). She dismisses the racism my father experiences when she's not personally perpetuating it, she’s ~so much for the tolerant left~ about her homophobia (and I’m lesbian), she’s awful and goes off on these asinine screeds to my mother every. single. day. Like, she earnestly argued the other day that Kate Brown is an agent of Satan.

Meanwhile, back when the new She-Ra was about to come out, she heard about it and excitedly forwarded me the link. Whatever else our differences, it’s our thing!

( Read more... )

An anon said:

Why are you racist?? Do better.

I replied:

This might have more of the effect you’re going for if I had literally any context.

[ETA 4/19/2024: This was obviously a troll, but I've occasionally wondered why I don't receive nearly as much direct hate as other people in comparable online circumstances, even though I've never closed down my inbox and my rhetorical style is not exactly soft and cuddly. My operating theory has been that I don't read as vulnerable—I've been told so many times since I was a child—and people who go to the trouble of sending anon hate and various other terminally online behaviors tend to focus on attacking people they see as accessible, vulnerable, and responsive to them. But frankly it's also possible that I'm not a good judge of how much this happens because I simply wipe it from my memory if it's not unique or interesting, like this particular low-effort troll I'd forgotten.]

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 took a break from the dissertation to watch Princess Weekes's nearly hour-long video on SF/F and white saviorism. It's very good IMO. I shouldn't have read the comments, which include a lot of "well actually Paul Atreides is a criticism of white saviors, how dare" responses that are predictable and generic enough to have been produced by a dedicated bot farm (especially considering that she directly addresses Herbert's attempts to criticize the trope, at some length) & various ASOIAF/Daenerys stans who also ignore the more complex argument that Princess Weekes makes in the video itself.

I have really liked some of Princess Weekes's other videos, though she can be a bit hit or miss for me in general—she doesn't always give herself the space or time to get into finer details/relevant points of a potentially complicated argument (e.g., I liked her video on imperialism in cartoons like Steven Universe and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, but found it rather odd to talk about SPOP's depiction of imperialism without discussing the First Ones at all, esp given her argument about the levels of metaphor in the depiction of the greater Horde). But she gives herself the space she needs for this one and there's clearly a lot of research and nuanced thinking that went into it.

I've been interested for a long time in the way in which Daenerys, for instance, both is and is not racialized (in terms of her ethnicity/her cultural upbringing/her associations through conquest/the extremely white coding around the Targaryens) and it was really fascinating to see someone discuss that beyond snappy sound bites. I also thought she made a really intriguing point about the failures of subversion wrt white savior aesthetics, or even subtler complications of the narrative than outright subversion. The white savior aesthetic is the point for many fans and, regardless of the ultimate purpose of using a white savior aesthetic, deploying it gives a significant portion of the audience what they're after and they'll simply tune out the rest. (This seems akin to the old question of whether it's possible to successfully convey an anti-war theme via war films.) I also thought the connection with Haggard's Ayesha was an interesting insight; I read She in a sci-fi class during my PhD and was struck by how powerfully racist it was (even including the ever-fun "modern Greeks aren't really Greek because they're racially impure"), but I wouldn't have associated Ayesha with Daenerys.

Anyway! It was intriguing and quite good, I thought.

I reblogged this post of mine about Youtube's algorithm being bad and added:

like, really bad

????

????????????????????????????????

Tagged: #WHY #literally all i watch are atla/lok clips and writing videos #and it's like ... oh would you like to see ben shapiro's ranking of the sw movies?? #me: NO. NO I WOULD NOT

brambleberrycottage on Tumblr responded to this post:

I’ve not read it yet. What am I getting into?

I replied:

A lot, but especially a lot of racism.

Between my readings for the diss, I've been catching up with the f_fa discourse over the Cait Corrain thing and it's just like ... wow.

In fairness to f_fa (lol), the arguments mostly seem to be the result of a single the-only-war-is-the-class-war wanker who is also extremely pedantic (by my standards!) and uses ableism as a specter to downplay racist harassment. But still, whew.

Damn. I've had a follower who's been fairly unpleasant on ROP posts, but in a way that could be attributed to general purism.

...nope! Don't know the person's gender, but they reblogged MTG Aragorn from me to be a racist asshole. A quick way to know who to block, I suppose.