Beyond Selidor

My entire house smells like homemade chicken stock, which always feels like a cozy smell to me. I've spent most of the day reading — I finished one book, started another, and read and commented on everything that looked appealling in the Madness collection. I've been enjoying seeing people's Yuletide recs posts — it's always so interesting to me to see the sheer variety of people's tastes and fandoms.

I thought I'd gather some links to fannish resources/challenges here on Dreamwidth, even though I assume most people know about them.

The first is the comm recthething. The clue is in the name — it's a community focused on gathering recs for fanworks. I plan to share my Yuletide recs there after I've posted them, as well as to the yuletide comm.

Apparently Tumblr is up to its usual shenanigans, and there is likely to be an influx of Tumblr discontents joining Dreamwidth. I was reminded, in this context, of the existence of fictional_fans, which is intended to be a low-stakes space for people new to Dreamwidth (or returning here after a long absence on other platforms) to get a feel for the site, while also serving as a space for general fannish discussion.

And finally, I'm considering doing snowflake_challenge for the first time ever this January. I've never felt that I had enough time to do the challenge properly, but I've always wished I could participate, so I've decided that I will make the time for it. So ... expect fannish navel-gazing ahead.

Via nyctanthes and a couple of others in my circle, I discovered this fun set of fandom-related questions created by squidgiepdx. The idea is that you answer one question a day for the first twenty days of June, and that's obviously not going to happen in my case, so instead I will answer them in batches until I've done the lot.

I should also preface this by saying that a lot of the questions apply to an approach to fandom that's very different to my own — for various reasons I gravitate towards tiny fandoms, and once I'm fannish about something those feelings never switch off, so 'being in fandom' for me tends to be a) a solitary activity and b) a permanent state of being in which new fandoms are added, but they never replace old fandoms.

( Days 1-3 )

( The other days )

I've been avoiding Twitter for quite a while now, so I missed the latest instance of ghastly identity policing to have bubbled up on YA publishing Twitter, but the beats are as predictable as they are infuriating. As far as I can work out, a bunch of people decided to start calling out author Becky Albertalli for being straight, writing books about queer teenagers, and 'taking up slots' for the books of queer authors which might otherwise have been published. Albertalli, rightly upset by all this (for reasons which will soon become apparent), was thus forced into outing herself as bisexual not at a time of her own choosing, but in a way which was upsetting, and in the wake of harassment. (There seems to then have been a bit of subsequent goalpost-shifting by Albertalli's harassers, who, when they realised they now looked like awful people for bullying someone out of the closet before she was ready, started backpedalling and saying their issue with Albertalli's books had never been that their author was straight, but rather that they clearly weren't written by someone immersed in 'the queer community' — as if this were a monolith, and as if it were a universal requirement for a queer identity.)

I've been watching iterations of this play out in both transformative fandom and certain corners of professional publishing for at least a decade now, and I'm coming to the frustrated realisation that concepts such as ownvoices or writing certain tropes/pairings 'to cope [with trauma]' are reaching the limits of their usefulness. Ownvoices, which started out as a powerful tool to point out structural inequalities and ill-informed and harmful narrative choices and stereotypes, has become watered down at best into a marketing tool, as well as a shield publishers can wield to protect themselves from criticism. But at worst — and far more commonly, in my experience — it seems to be weaponised in instances of professional jealousy in the case of professional publishing, and personal jealousy in the case of fandom. The consequences can be awful: sourceland POC policing the experiences of those in the diaspora (and vice versa), people outed against their will, people feeling pressured to reveal mental illnesses and other invisible disabilities, people forced to make public past traumatic experiences to justify media they consume or stories they write, with the risk that these traumas are now known to their own harassers. I've been speaking in the general sense, but I have witnessed multiple concrete examples of every single one of the things I've described.

I really don't know what to suggest as a solution to this, because I believe it is right to point out structural inequalities in publishing (as it is in other fields), and I believe people are entitled to think critically about their own fannish, narrative, and tropey preferences. (I am slowly, however, coming around to the idea that outside of formal — by which I do not mean 'paid' — reviews and criticism, people need to take a step back from criticising or lamenting the fannish, narrative or tropey preferences of other people, or of fandom as a whole.) I certainly think we need to avoid falling into the trap of thinking of (marginalised) identities as monolithic, and we need to strive against linking purity, morality, experiences and identity from fannish, shipping, and narrative preferences. Of course certain stories and pairings and fandoms will resonate more than others — we are in fandom precisely because of these resonances — and sometimes that will be down to our own identities or experiences. I'm quite open about this when such things are true for me. But we don't owe those identities or experiences to anyone — we are entitled to choose how much of ourselves we make public, and no one is owed an explanation or justification for the fanworks we create, the professional fiction we publish, or the media both paid and fannish we engage with.

I'm diving back into Dreamwidth after a week away, and although I've read back through my reading page, I'm going to have to give myself something of a comment amnesty on most of your posts: there's just too much! (This is, to be clear, a good thing. I'm so happy to have such an active and verbose Dreamwidth circle!)

I'm really happy that my post on fandom and fannishness seemed to resonate with so many people. I always feel like an awkward person out of step with the way most people do fandom, so it was really nice to see that that isn't necessarily the case.

And now, two upcoming exchanges/challenges!

The first, chronologically, is waybackexchange. This is an exchange for old fandoms that haven't had new installments of canon for at least ten years. The exchange will open for nominations on 28th January. You can see more details about the exchange (including FAQs about eligibility for borderline cases such as adaptations of nineteenth century literature, different comics continuities and so on) here. All my fandoms are old, so this exchange is one of my favourites!

halfamoon is an annual challenge running for the first two weeks of February, in which participants create fanworks (fic, art, vids, meta, and more) in response to various prompts, about female characters. There are more details, including the prompts themselves in this post here.

I hope everyone's week has been wonderful.

The marvellous st_aurafina has set up a new friending meme over at Dreamwidth. Click on the image, and you'll be taken to the meme!

This week's post is a little early, as my partner's parents are in town and I have to grab whatever time I have to myself when I can.

I really liked this essay by Kari Sperring in Strange Horizons. It's ostensibly about Katherine Kurtz, but its broader point is that the 'women who made fantasy [and science fiction]' keep getting ignored, erased or forgotten in the genre's history.

In a similar vein, Renay has written at Fantasy Book Cafe about recommendation lists that contain no women.

Also by Renay, a review of The Lynburn Legacy by Sarah Rees Brennan for Ladybusiness.

This post by Tumblr user allofthefeelings is a reaction to a very specific fandom situation, but I feel it has broader applicability, given that it talks about unexamined preferences, narrative default settings, and representation (within texts, of fandom and of fannish culture and preferences).

I have a not-so-secret love of '90s teen movies, so this post on Tor.com by Leah Schnelbach and Natalie Zutter about teen movies that adapt or draw on Shakespeare's plays was right up my alley.

Abigail Nussbaum reviews Spirits Abroad by Zen Cho for Strange Horizons.

Here's an interview with Zen Cho by Sharmilla Ganeson in The Star.

My friend Raphael Kabo wrote this poem called 'Axis' for Noted Festival. He writes a lot about identity, alienation and place, which are themes very dear to me.

Still on the theme of poetry, Athena Andreadis shared an older post on Sapfó (Sappho) of Lésvos.

This is a raw, emotionally honest post by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz about the struggle to find her voice and courage after ill-treatment, silencing and the twisting of her words and judgement of her actions. I continue to be awed by her words, bravery and determination. SFF needs more people like her.

This post is brought to you by several recent events, and the memory of similar occurrences of the past five or six years. Consider, for example, the recent kerfuffle in Supernatural fandom which involved enraged fans harassing actors and CW executives over a storyline with which said actors and executives had no control. Consider YA author John Green ill-advisedly wading into discussions fans of Veronica Roth's Divergent series were having about its ending. Consider actor Orlando Jones' thoughts on his show Sleepy Hollow and how its creators interact with the fandom. And finally, consider seanan_mcguire's thoughts on being included in Twitter conversations with fans and reviewers of her books.

I'm having trouble working out where I stand on the creator-reviewer-fan interaction issue, and I think this is because of my own particular experiences. This got long, so bear with me.

I'm sure I've mentioned before that I started working as a newspaper book-reviewer when I was seventeen, and that I basically got my first article published because I wrote a snotty, entitled angry letter to the books editor of a major broadsheet accusing her of not having read The Amber Spyglass before reviewing it. (In other words, I behaved just as badly as the Supernatural fans.) Looking back, it was an appalling thing to have done, but it did get me into a line of work that I found extremely satisfying.

Before I got into online fandom (or writing reviews online), I had already been working as a professional reviewer for five years, and I continued reviewing in parallel with my online blogging. Reviewing by its nature involves lots of interaction with authors and publishers - I frequently had to contact them to request review copies of books, and I also interviewed several authors, either over the phone or in person. To date, those authors are: Kevin Crossley-Holland (email interview), Garth Nix (in person), Shaun Tan (over the phone), John Marsden (over the phone), Jeanette Winterson (in person), Gillian Rubinstein/'Lian Hearn' (over the phone), Sophie Masson (in person) and Anna Broinowski, the director of the documentary film Forbidden Lies (over the phone). I have also interviewed sophiamcdougall for my blog; she follows me on Twitter and LJ and we are Facebook friends, so when I reviewed her book for the newspaper, I disclosed this.

I list all this to make the point that before I got into fandom, I was very comfortable interacting professionally with authors and discussing my interpretations of their work (with which, on occasion, they did not agree - I recall John Marsden shooting down a particular idea I had about his YA retelling of Hamlet. I stand by my interpretation and it didn't bother me that he disagreed with it). And since I've been in fandom/a review blogger, I've had extremely positive interactions with authors: it's how I got to know Sophia McDougall, Jo Walton has linked to my reviews of her work, Kate Elliott and Sarah Rees Brennan have done the same and participated in the discussion that such reviews generated, and I have participated in discussions on professional authors' or publishers' blogs without feeling unwelcome. Knowing that the authors were, in a sense, reading over my shoulder hasn't inhibited me in any way - in fact, it helped me to correct mistakes I had made (such as the time I wrote that Sophia McDougall's characters Delir and Lal were Christians, and she corrected me, saying they were Zoroastrians).

I think it helps, however, that the writers with whom I've interacted are neither hugely well-known (i.e. they're not at the J. K. Rowling level), nor are they unpleasant people. They are not going to go all Anne Rice on you all of a sudden if you 'interrogate the text from the wrong perspective'. In my experience, they've linked to my positive reviews and corrected me (as in the example of Sophia McDougall with the Zoroastrianism) when I made errors of fact, and stayed silent when I (to their mind) made errors of interpretation (that is, if I interpreted their writing against their intentions). Nor do they have vast armies of readers who organise themselves into opposing factions and attempt to recruit the authors into their battles of interpretation.

It's precisely because of these experiences (both as a newspaper reviewer and in my online interactions with authors) that I find it baffling, for example, when authors join in fan conversations about their works and are met with hysteria, accusations of 'inserting themselves into fannish spaces' and claims that their status as authors creates a power imbalance. I'm not talking about authors who go after negative Amazon reviewers or people who gave them only four stars on Goodreads. I'm talking more about instances when fans reblog authors' posts on Tumblr and then seem to get outraged that the authors respond. I like having discussions with authors, and if I tweet at them on Twitter, review their books on LJ or Wordpress or reblog them on Tumblr, it means I'm attempting to include them in the conversation if they want to be there.

At the same time, there are so many instances where authors have behaved like entitled brats when interacting with fans. This ranges from Anne Rice linking to negative reviews on her Facebook page and encouraging her fans to go after the reviewers to Ryan Murphy writing mockery of a subset of his fans who didn't like particular narrative choices into Glee. I remember a particularly irritating incident when Karen Miller (who writes Star Wars tie-in novels) went absolutely nuts at fans DARING to write fanfic of them in which 'her' characters were, shock-horror, gay. I'd never read any of her books, and was not in Star Wars fandom, but joined the masses, attempting to get her to see her own hypocrisy. (It didn't work.) Conversely, I have also seen fans act like entitled brats when particular stories didn't go their way (see: Harry Potter and Avatar: The Last Airbender shipwars, although the authors involved didn't help matters).

I feel like a good rule of thumb for creators might be to stay offline entirely unless they are comfortable reading criticism of their work. And I feel like a good rule of thumb for fans might be to refrain from posting material visible (or Googlable) to creators unless they're comfortable with the creators reading and potentially responding to their material. (And seriously, Teen Wolf fandom: don't engage the creators about Sterek unless you're prepared to hear any answer. Same goes for Dean/Castiel fans and Supernatural.) The vast majority of creators don't respond, in any case (Kate Elliott, Jo Walton, Sarah Rees Brennan and Sophia McDougall are the rare exceptions among the hundreds of creators whose work I've reviewed and talked about).

The internet is not going anywhere, and over the years I've been online, I've seen the fourth wall slowly dismantled. It's not going back up. Some creators are going to be good at interacting with fans, some are going to be bad, and some are going to be Ryan Murphy. Some fans are going to be good at interacting with creators, some are going to be bad at it, and some are going to Tweet porny fanfic at actors (seriously, please, please don't do that). My conclusion is that I have no absolute conclusion: I personally enjoy interacting with creators as a fan and reviewer, but can understand why some people don't. Ultimately, I think we are going to have to take each set of interactions on a case by case basis: some will be positive, some will be neutral, some will be awful due to the fans' actions and some will be awful due to the creators' actions. Interactions, like the internet itself, are only as good as the people involved in them.

What are your thoughts? I'm particularly keen to hear from those on both sides of the creator-fan divide.

It was the post about tags, an innocuous, one-sentence affair that had got tens of thousands of notes, that finally did it for me.

'People who put their comments in tags instead of in the comment section are my heroes,' the post proclaimed.

It confirmed to me, once and for all, that Tumblr is not for me, its culture is baffling, and its platform ill-suited for the kind of communication that I want to have. Lest anyone misunderstand me, I want to state unequivocally that what I am talking about relates to me only, my problems and issues are my own, and I'm not seeking any kind of universality in this post. If Tumblr works for you, if you enjoy it, I'm very happy for you, and keep doing what you're doing! I'm talking about myself alone (and whingeing about Tumblr as a platform, to a certain extent).

The background
Although I've been using the internet since the mid-'90s, I don't consider myself to have 'been online' until 2007, when I was 22. My main online hangouts, since then, have been three forums, Dreamwidth/Livejournal, the comments sections of various off-LJ/Dreamwidth blogs, and my own Wordpress blogs. The off-LJ/Dreamwidth blogs (my own included) are entirely public, tend to have a narrow thematic focus (books, pop culture, publishing, feminism, author blogs). Interaction there is entirely based on having a conversation in the comments section about whatever the blogger has been discussing.

The first forum I joined is a (relatively) small fansite for a closed canon (although the author has claimed to have been writing a spin-off book for the past ten years or so). Because it's a closed canon, there is very little discussion of the source material, and the more active threads tend to be about the other interests of the posters. There is also a section of the forum that is invite-only, and hidden to those not invited. The people I know from that forum (about 45 people) are also Facebook friends of mine, I've met most of them in 'real life', and when they have blogs, I also follow those blogs. We also have a dedicated IRC channel, where we talk about anything and everything.

The second forum is also a small fansite, but its canon isn't closed. Because the source material is Australian, and for a variety of other reasons, the membership skews very heavily Australian, and female. Unlike on the first forum, where people are much more open about their lives and identities, the boards on this second forum tend to be much more focused on its source material and other texts, and the mods are very opposed to people revealing anything to do with their 'real life' identities in the public sections of the forum. It also has a hidden, invite-only section. Again, I'm friends with a lot of people from this forum on Facebook and other social media, and have met many of them in 'real life'.

The third forum is concerned with fundamentalist religion, especially US-based isolationist, fundamentalist Christian patriarchy. Because of the sensitive nature of its subject-matter, most of it is hidden unless you're a registered member, but it also has off-topic sections. Because I'm a lurker here, my participation is much more superficial, and I don't know any of the posters in any other context, but I know that it has much the same culture as my other two forums - that is, people are friends off-site, and have had 'real life' meet-ups and stuff.

I joined the LJ/Dreamwidth world as a uni student, initially because all my high school friends were doing the same as a way to stay in touch. Over the years, my LJ/Dreamwidth friendship group expanded with the addition of the aforementioned forum friends, and later with people I'd met through specific communities, friending memes, or just by searching through interests and introducing myself to people who shared similar obscure interests. LJ/Dreamwidth culture makes a lot of sense to me, because it distinguishes between locked and open posts, conversations unfold in a logical manner in comment sections, communities can define their scope as broadly or as narrowly as they like (e.g. they can deal with a whole canon, or just one ship within it, or they can deal with, say, a whole city, or one subculture within it).

The point I'm making with outlining all these different communities that (pre-Tumblr) together made up my online world is that they were set up for conversations. It was up to you to choose how you wanted to converse - whether you wanted everything to be public or not, or whether you had a mixture of public and non-public conversations. If you wanted a more private or ephemeral conversation, you took it to IMs (IRC, I love you forever). It was perfectly possible to lurk and not participate, but if you wanted to say something, it was expected that you participate, to whatever degree you felt comfortable with. To participate in threads on a forum, you had to say something. To participate in a blogging platform, you had to post something, or comment on something.

Tumblr culture
To do so on Tumblr, you have to work a lot harder, and, to my mind, use the site counterintuitively. This is, in part, due to how poorly designed the site is as a platform for communication and conversation. You cannot reply to replies (which are essentially comments). Instead, you must reblog someone's post and add your response to it. This quickly leads to popular posts being reblogged with comments by multiple people, leading to multiple reblogs, each with their own separate series of comments, rather than one original post with all the responses unfolding underneath it. If you submit an ask to someone, that cannot be replied to or reblogged at all, leading to a discussion that is essentially limited to one question and one response. (People find ingenious ways to work around this, usually by taking screen shots of replies or asks and reposting them as pictures.) I cannot imagine, for example, hosting a friending meme on Tumblr - how could you, when by its very nature, a friending meme requires people to reply to replies?

Secondly, Tumblr is entirely public. I think this has led people to be much more cautious about what they post. (There's nothing wrong with this. This is a sensible reaction.) And because of the lack of facilitation of conversations, you end up in a situation where you barely know most people with whom you interact. My Tumblr friends (excluding those whom I know 'in real life' or from elsewhere online), are people who I followed because their interests/the theme of their Tumblrs align with my own, or because people I know kept reblogging them and they seemed interesting. But beyond reblogging their posts, I don't interact with them at all, and I don't know how to even begin doing so.

I feel that on forums and the pre-Tumblr blogging platforms, the 'rules' which governed communication were much clearer. You talked to people about whatever was being discussed, you didn't link to or quote locked posts, and it was up to you how much you participated. Participation was entirely within your control - you either made posts and comments, or you didn't, and you either locked/filtered your posts or you didn't.

And then you come to Tumblr, where apparently it's not okay to add your thoughts to the body of a reblogged post, but instead you should confine them to your tags, where only you and your followers can see them, unless the original poster or some later reblogger should click through to your post and read it, and in any case they wouldn't be in a position to respond because no one can reply to replies anyway. If that's not killing communication, I don't know what is.

And I know this is the fault of Tumblr as a platform, but platforms shape the culture of a community, and I can't help but feel that something is being lost. I know Tumblr works for some people, but for me, what the internet meant, what it means, is communication, an ongoing conversation, a way to deepen friendships and engage with people with whom I share interests. And I just cannot see how posting reaction gifs and replying to asks which swiftly disappear in a tide of REBLOGGING FOREVER is a way to do that.

Fandom, I love you to bits, but do you think you could manage, just for once, to acknowledge that female characters exist?

Sincerely,

Ronni

This post is brought to you by Fandom A, which seems to have reduced its most awesome female character to being a sort of cheer squad to the main slash pairing, Fandom B, which alternates between ignoring my favourite character and blaming her for the stupidity of her husband and son and only mentions my second-favourite (teenage) character when discussing which creepy old man to pair her off with, and Fandom C, which prefers incest pairings to writing about female characters (admittedly, the canon is horrible in this regard and tends to kill off every female character as quickly as possible).

This post is also brought to you by the knowledge that if people wrote fic for my favourite mini-fandom, it would all be angsty incestuous pairings of the (male) Imperial family members, with a side order of woobiefied (male) villain.

Bonus points if you can guess the fandoms.

PS It's not so much that I want people to stop writing fic, making art and producing meta focusing on male characters. It's that I wish it could be supplemented with equally good amounts of fic, art and meta about female characters. I wish female-centric texts would become as popular as male-centric texts.

I seem to be on a bit of a blogging roll right now, so here's a post about three things I've been musing about in relation to various things I've been reading in recent times.

1. I still find Buffy empowering, in spite of everything

Let's get this out of the way. Buffy fails on numerous occasions in matters of race, sexuality and even the feminism which its creator, Joss Whedon, claims. I personally think its storytelling is excellent, but I know numerous people who find it deeply problematic and even hurtful, with good reason. It is, to me, an example of a flawed story that nonetheless never fails to speak to me, and I know that I have in the past excused or failed to recognise its flaws due to ignorance.

Chief among these flaws is one that feminists often raise in relation to all of Whedon's work: he ostensibly writes stories about 'empowered' women whose source of empowerment is overcoming some kind of trauma, usually a literal or metaphorical rape.

And yet, for me, as a teenager and young woman, I found that particular story, especially as it was told in Buffy, extremely empowering. Despite having a relatively calm adolescence, with nothing worse than low-level bullying, I always felt broken (and indeed in my early 20s actually sought out situations that would give me an excuse for this brokenness). As such, the idea that out of brokenness came strength was incredibly empowering for me. I know now that we need stories about women whose strength is not simply an act of revenge, a side-effect of abuse or destruction, but back then, Buffy's was a story I needed to be told.*

2. Leave Twihards alone!
On a related note, I think the bashing of Twilight fans needs to stop. This is not because I think Twilight is a wonderful story, or that it's a terrible story but this somehow doesn't matter because it's 'light, fluffy entertainment' (nothing is 'just a story', and nothing is above criticism). It's because if I had been twelve, or fourteen or even eighteen when Twilight came out, hell, I would've been a fan too, and I think those of us who were introverted and 'only ever fell in love with fictional men' need to show a bit more empathy and compassion.

You know how I said I felt 'broken' as a teenager? Well, I used to think the solution to that 'brokenness' was an all-consuming, all-sacrificing, transformative love. I read just the kinds of books to feed my rescue fantasy, and I thought if the right guy (always someone 'dangerous' and 'damaged') would walk through the door, all my troubles and angst would be over. As a fifteen-year-old girl, it's a powerful idea: that true love is obsessive and dramatic and will cause you to change completely, and Twilight simply taps into that idea. As a teenager I was reading Cecilia Dart-Thornton and Sara Douglass and Juliet Marillier and a whole host of other female romantic fantasy writers who fell under the umbrella of 'Celtic-inflected historical fantasy', and who am I to say that they were any less damaging to my ideas about romance and relationships than Twilight?

I'm not saying that we should throw our hands in the air and give up criticising Twilight. No, we should criticise it until Stephenie Meyer is no more than a distant spot on the horizon of the YA corpus. But we should stop thinking of Twilight fandom as a new phenomenon and recognise that many of us read equally problematic books as teenagers, and gained equally disturbing beliefs about relationships because of them.

3. Hufflepuff and proud
I'm a self-sorted Hufflepuff, and actually only want to join Pottermore so that I can have this sort of officially confirmed. (I'm sad, I know, I know.) And while I know I'm overinvesting, it does make me sad (even though I know it's all done in humour), when people like The Last Muggle persistently bash my beloved house and the qualities that it epitomises.

This criticism does have some validity. After all, loyalty - the key Hufflepuff trait - does have a dark side, as one may be blindly loyal and supportive where he or she should be constructively critical or antagonistic. But I think that kindness, compassion, hard work, fairness and loyalty are unjustly underrated, and that these are qualities (kindness in particular) that we ought to demonstrate, not mock or belittle.

In any case, it seems to me that the whole Potter series is, in fact, arguing for a less rigid separation into houses, since people don't tend to only embody the traits of one House, but rather possess them all in varying proportions. Ultimately it takes representatives of all Houses, and the utilisation of the myriad traits they embody, to destroy the Horcruxes, not Gryffindor bravery alone. We are composite beings.

But then that's probably just me being earnest like the Hufflepuff I am.

_________________________
*Also, I rewatched Season 6 - not a fan favourite - at a time in my life when I really needed it, and I seem to be alone among fans in thinking that it was a well-executed season whose story perfectly matched where the characters were in their lives. (I do recognise, however, that many queer fans found the Willow/Tara storyline distressing and a betrayal, and, though they don't need my validation, I think they have a valid point.)