A while back, I challenged any Puppy on Twitter to show that they really valued truth and honesty and factual reality as so many claim by acknowledging that the idea—widely promoted by Vox Day, including with a made-up quote—that David Gerrold had threatened the career of Brad Torgersen was not supported by facts. I asked them to either cite Gerrold doing so or label Day’s pronouncement a lie.
No one did. When pressed, one person said he couldn’t call it a lie because he felt that what Day had said was “essentially true”. He couldn’t cite facts or quotes, but it was “essentially true”. Its essence was true, or at least, it rang true to him.
Now, in fact-based reality, David Gerrold did not threaten Brad Torgersen. He did not imply that Puppies wouldn’t be welcome at Worldcon or the Hugos ceremony in particular, or that they would be treated discourteously as winners or losers. In fact, when it came to the ceremony, he laid down the law in the opposite direction: all are welcome, all are welcome. Connie Willis turned down a presenter gig specifically because she didn’t feel like she could abide that directive.
But if he didn’t do those things, the feeling among the Puppies is, he ought to have. It fits their worldview, their narrative, so much better if he did, so it doesn’t take much prompting from even a middlingly talented wordsmith to get them to believe that he did.
“If it’s not true, it ought to be!” could be given as a summation of it.
I’ve been calling Day out obliquely (as in, I’m not challenging him directly so much as pointing out what he’s doing) on Twitter for a while, whenever he engages in these lies. I don’t know if I’ve actually made anyone think by doing so, but I believe he’s afraid that might be happening. I mean, I don’t flatter myself to believe his blog post entitled Bi-Discoursality is entirely a response to me. Rather, I believe I’m a part of the general situation he is attempting to defend himself from.
Day’s supporters like to trot out “You don’t understand Vox, he’s a troll. He’s trolling. It doesn’t count.” when someone pins them down with something he said that is 1) too egregious, 2) too much of a lie, or 3) too egregious a lie for them to defend. This response ignores the fact that we do understand him, we know he’s a troll, and that’s irrelevant to the point at hand.
Well, Day is attempting to codify “Was trolling, didn’t count!” into a defensive shell against people calling out his lies. See, they’re not lies, they’re rhetoric, which is the only language those silly emotional irrational SJWs understand, you see? He has to use rhetoric to deal with, even though as a creature of pure logic and reason it’s such a foreign language to him that if he wasn’t also a certified supergenius he would never have been able to internalize its principles in order to communicate with us!
He would much rather use the reasoned method of dialectic to communicate with everyone, except he has to reserve that for those minds that are susceptible to reason and influence, you see, and…
Wait.
Wait.
Wait a minute.
Vox… Mr. Day… when you said “SJWs always lie.”, the example of a rhetorical statement that you put forth in that post, were you addressing us, those you call “SJWS”… or were you addressing your followers?
When you made your famous essentially true statements about David Gerrold, were you trying to convince those wily SJWs they were allied with a skunk, or were you trying to whip up your own base?
And regardless of your intention when you engage in these, ah, rhetorical flourishes… take a look around. How many of supposedly overly emotional, irrational SJWs that you claim to be trying to persuade with them wind up being persuaded? And how many of your own followers wind up repeating the lines and running with them like they’re God’s own truth?
God’s own essential truth, that is. The facts may not bear it out, but emotionally, the target of the rhetoric knows it to be true.
The post I’m referencing is itself a piece of rhetoric. It lays out no actual logical premise, no evidence, and no conclusion. It’s just a pre-emptive defense against anyone questioning his lies, wrapped up in hollow flattery towards his audience: you are so reasoned, so rational… and because I’m writing this dialectically, anyone as smart as you will understand that it is true! It’s a hedge against the day when the intellectual debt incurred by one of his lies overcomes the emotional investment his chosen audience has in agreeing with him.
He winds up the post by predicting that those who only speak rhetoric will see his post as nothing more than a man attempting to sound smart and then attack it. I suppose that, grade school gamer that he is, this is what he regards as a particular cunning trap and he takes this post as a sign that it worked. Or that’s what he would say, anyway.
In reality, it’s just another hedge. It gives his followers an out for ignoring any criticism. Don’t listen to the child who says the emperor is naked. The wise can totally see the clothes!
I remember when the cover of a book used to mean something. When you could look at the cover of a book and know exactly what you were getting. If you saw a gleaming chrome spaceship over the shoulder of an intrepid, chiseled explorer holding a ray gun, you didn’t even have to buy the book and read it because you knew exactly what the story would be just by looking at it. But you bought it anyway! And you read it, and liked it! Because that book was an objectively good book, and you knew it by looking at it.
People used to know how to tell stories back then. They knew which plot was the good plot, and they used that plot. They knew what dialogue was supposed to sound like. Sometimes I buy a book today and the dialogue is different than in other books. People, if I wanted different dialogue, I’d read something else. Stop signs. Trees, maybe. I don’t know. Not books! Books are supposed to be one way, not another way.
The cover of The Monster at the End of This Book is full of false promises and overblown hype, just like a woman. I remember when if a book told you that there was a monster in it, you knew what you were getting. There would be a hero who didn’t make any namby-pamby wishy-washy apologies for being a hero. There would be a princess or dame or broad of some description and she would be beautiful and love the hero after saying many times that she doesn’t, because he loved her and love conquers any objection.
There wouldn’t be any of this pandering PC crap that people spout just to get cred with the in-crowd. I know we all hate that, right? Pandering, right? It’s awful, right, when people pander? When they just say what they know is safe and popular, just repeat what their audience wants to hear? Well, I for one have the guts to stand up in front of an audience of people who hate that, and say that I hate it, too, and I don’t care who in my intended audience knows it!
The cover of this book promises a monster, which implies there’s going to be a battle. But there’s no battle. There is barely even a monster! Just some blue gamma male wimp who begs and pleads with you to stop reading the book on every page.
Looking at the obviously inflated Amazon reviews I can only conclude that a number of weak-willed liberal readers gave in to this blue cuck’s loathsome SJW bullying tactics and stopped reading before the disappointing reveal. Of course this doesn’t stop them from lavishing it with glowing reviews. These people care only about politics and demographics, not merit or value.
Well, I read it all the way to the end. The last thing you want to do is tell this red-blooded American he mustn’t do something or shouldn’t read something because I believe in the first amendment and I will read whatever the hell I want.
So I can tell you that according to the last page, the blue wimp is the monster. Allegedly. Typical self-flagellating gamma male posturing. Don’t you know that ALL men are monsters according to the Feminazis? Agreeing with this sexist sentiment is the only way a pathetic gamma male like this “Grover” character (named after Demo(n)cRAT president Grover Cleveland, I suppose) has of getting laid. I got news for you, Quisling: your complicity will not save you. The foundation of all modern feminism is in gender abolition radical feminism.
I did some digging and it turns out this book was produced by an entity called the “Children’s Television Workshop” and now known as the “Sesame Street Workshop”. Well, if you consider that children are tiny people, you might get a better name for it: People’s Television Workshop. This indoctrination factory produces books and television shows and movies and games for your children using your tax dollars. They air their main shows on PBS (or as I like to call it, “Public BS”), in case you needed any proof of the socialist agenda that underpins this thing. They’re targeting your children The whole thing is straight out of a Saul Alinksy Rules For Radicals-style playbook.
Also, apparently this Grover character is a Muppet. A family entertainer like Jim Henson must be turning over in his grave to know that his creations have been turned to a leftist political purpose.
Misandry and the promotion of a culture of fear and illiteracy are what you get if you buy this book. Since I already have a copy, I’ve decided to give it to my kids just so they know what they’re up against. I am pleased to report that they have read it through a dozen times and show no signs of stopping now. They laugh when the blue gamma cuck tells them to stop reading. They laugh right in his stupid, weak face. You hear that, Saul Alinksy? Your little gambit failed! What was supposed to be an indoctrination manual for the left turned out to be a training ground for those who love freedom! We the living read what we want, and we don’t stop just because some emasculated Feminazi puppet-man tells us to.
The Puppies keep describing the enemy they imagine they’re fighting in Orwellian terms. Well, if you want to see an example of groupthink setting out to punish badthink in action, head on over to Vox Day’s blog. Actually, that statement could probably stand on its own at any random instance in time, but I’m thinking in particular of this post, where Day wants to contrast three reviews he says are by “Social Justice Warriors” with one that isn’t: http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/05/smells-like-success.html
He starts the post by saying that the first review “precisely underlines the central point made by the Sad Puppies campaign and single-handedly serves to justify it”.
Now, I’m not sure which central point it so perfectly illustrates, as the central point of the Sad Puppies changes from day to day. Is it supposed to prove that there’s a clique that judges books by demography rather than merit? Is that which central point Day is saying it supports? If so, I’d like to know how, as the critique is specific and refers to the text and not the author. Is it supposed to be a counterpoint to Brad Torgersen’s famous lament that he can no longer judge a book by its cover? If so, I would think the third review would serve better, as it points out that the ending of the story is explicitly spoiled by the title, Turncoat.
No, taking the three “SJW” reviews in total, I believe the specific one of the Sad Puppies’ nebulous and ever-shifting “points” which Day believes is being proven is just the general idea that some people who are reviewing books (and nominating them for awards and such) are choosing to lie about what’s good and bad on the basis of how they feel about the author or other externalities.
This is not actually something that I’ve seen articulated by any central personality of Sad Puppies, but by those lurking in the comments and on Twitter. It’s more Gamergate thinking than Sad Puppy thinking, at least in its explicit form.
The shortest review and Day’s response to it really hammer it home.
The review reads:
“I hated Turncoat – compared to how Iain Banks, Neal Asher, Peter Hamilton write sentient battleships and describe space warfare it was unbearable, then there were lines like ‘the men who…’ versus ‘the people who’ really jarred against me – it felt like a story written about AIs written by somebody who has ignored any progress in fiction, computing and so forth in 20 years. The opening battle scene at the start of The Reality Dysfunction is better than Turncoat in every way, and that was written in 1996.”
And Day’s response reads:
“I found that to be rather amusing, considering how spectacularly boring Iain Banks’s space battles are. But considering that Daveon hates Sad Puppies and hates Rabid Puppies, how surprising is it that he – mirabile dictu – just happens to hate ‘Turncoat’ as well?”
The first line is great: “I found it amusing that you profess to like A Thing, when I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that A Thing is unlikeable!” Yes, Day has caught another lying liar in another filthy lie! SJWs are so dedicated to the cause they will lie and say that boring things are interesting!
Or, y’know, different people find different things interesting.
See, the actual central point of the Sad Puppies that Day proves with these four reviews—all of which seem perfectly fair to me, as they all are rooted in the specifics of the text and all seem to honestly reflect how the reviewer received it—is the new central point that Brad Torgersen pivoted to last week when he said there’s no such thing as an objective standard and that the Sad Puppies are about packing the Hugos with people whose tastes reflect his own.
Because that’s what these reviews demonstrate: differing tastes. And given that there are three of them where the story is not to the reviewer’s taste and one where it isn’t, maybe Day is right and this does prove the need for a Sad Puppies campaign, from the point of view of the Puppies.
I know that’s not what Day means, of course. His own commentary on the post reflects his inability to grasp the concept of differing tastes, differing yet honest opinions. Understanding those things would require Day to possess some shred of empathy or a working theory of mind, neither of which he shows any evidence of. I suspect that like many people who rely on being able to brag about what society has told them is an objective measurement of their superior mental ability, Day has never bothered much with actual mental development. Why not? The test says he’s already at the top. There’s nowhere to go except for down.
This puts me in mind of a blog post by Christian blogger slacktivist, which started off as part of a scene-by-scene sporking of the first Left Behind movie and digressed into a meditation on Kirk Cameron’s progress as an actor, contrasting Cameron as an actor who believed that he was at the top of his form as a child on a sitcom and had no more room for improvement with fellow sitcom actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, who has never stopped trying to improve himself.
And this brings me to one of the more curious things found at Day’s post, in the comments. One of the reviewers is quoted as saying that Turncoat reads like it was written by an AI that ignored the past decades’ worth of progress in writing. One of the commenters responds to this in part with, “Progress in fiction, HA!” He would like us to read a book published 24 years ago and concerned only with the shape of plots, which he considers to be not just the last word but the only word in what makes writing good.
Progress? Ha! This is what the Puppies represent: people who believe there can be no advancement in the state of the art of storytelling, because to them there is neither state nor art. No room for improvement, and nothing to be improved.
I know Vox Day has something of a fanboy’s interest in the history of Rome. If he ever gets past the “playing with tin soldiers” phase of things and looks into it a little more deeply, he might notice that there was a trend during the late decline of the empire of poets and authors who trafficked in little more than polite and politic rearrangements of what had come before. No new ideas, no new forms, no new shapes. Aldous Huxley might have been thinking of a grammaticus of this age when he had a teacher in Brave New World ask pupils if they thought they knew better than the World Consensus Textbook: “Do you think you know better than Virgil? Do you think you can do better than Catullus?”
Despite Torgersen’s latter-day admission that it’s actually a matter of taste, this state of art in decline is broadly what the Puppies (and their incestuously close ideological cousins the Gators) are fighting for: stability to the point of stagnation, based around a global consensus of what a story is allowed to be.
Oh, sure, the zealous believers in free speech found in both camps will wring their hands and say, “No, no, no! We want people to be able to both make and enjoy whatever art they want! It’s just the dishonesty of it all that we’re fighting against!”
But when you define “dishonesty” as anyone who evinces an opinion that deviates from the accepted consensus… well… you wind up with things like this, where three reviews that independently arrive at similar conclusions, each making explicit reference to the text, are used as evidence that the reviewers are lying, which is used to justify a “revolutionary” campaign to root out such liars.
As I said, this is the triumph of “groupthink” over “badthink”.
Well, “triumph” might be too strong a word. It remains to be seen if the group is big enough to actually enforce and maintain their consensus reality, outside the carefully insulated protective aegis of their own spaces. Day likes to boast about his millions of monthly page views, yet when he was handing out numbered badges to his “minions” he ran out of takers in the low three hundreds. I suspect he has yet to learn the difference between browsing at someone and browsing with them. I’m also suddenly curious how many hits the Time Cube guy was getting at the height of its notoriety.
So, this post will contain some spoilers for Age of Ultron, which is why there’s a cut underneath this introductory blog is relatively new-ish and I have it cross-posting to a lot of different platforms to make it easier for my established readers to follow it wherever they’re used to following me. I’ve never hidden things beneath a cut on this blog before. My understanding is that the automated cross-posts will obey the cut. I’m going to be checking them out after I post this to try to catch them if they don’t. But in the event that some unwanted spoilers leak through and you see them before I catch it, sorry!
So, the past week saw both camps of Puppies, Sad and Rabid, evolving their narratives in significant ways.
Vox Day, over on his blog, made a post declaring that burning the Hugos to the ground is “now a sub-optimal strategy” for the Sad Puppies, which is a weird thing to say given that this was never stated as the Sad Puppies’ goal, but was associated with his own campaign, the Rabid Puppies.
But let that go.
What does our master gamesman see as the optimal strategy now? Ah, he sees it as a big win if no slate fails to have any impact beyond the nomination process because there are too many people involved in voting now…
It’s weird, I’d swear I’ve heard that before. Oh, right. In their more moderate moments, that what the Sad Puppies have claimed to be fighting for all along.
He’s declaring it a firm victory because he either believes or is depending on the cattle that stampede behind him believing that there is a powerful clique that the Puppies are a countering force to, so if no one controls the final voting this doesn’t mean the Puppies win, it means their invisible enemies lost.
But of course, part of his meta-strategy is to declare everything a victory for him. He keeps referring to this as a “Xanatos Gambit,” which is a term for when someone engineers a situation so that all possible outcomes ultimately benefit them. It’s named for a fictional mastermind, though, not someone who simply doesn’t care what actually happens as long as his followers still think he’s cool, so I’m not entirely certain it’s the most accurate application of the term.
But let that go
This is a significant shift from Day for two reasons.
The first is that it signals what he thinks is most likely to happen. He rode high on the sweeping fantasy vision of himself as a Roman general leading a slavering horde of berserkers across the frozen river to assault the well-fortified position of his enemies (note to self: suggest history lessons for Vox), but he has just enough self-awareness to know that his strategy of lying and repeating the lie could come back and bite him if he tried to claim a sweeping victory where none existed, so he’s starting the spin now.
The second is that—as mentioned before—the endgame he now endorses is something the Sad Puppies have claimed to have wanted as their ultimate endgame.
I will not speculate as to the extent to which Day worked with the Sad Puppies. It is apparent from the timeline that he either did not read all the works he nominated or he had an advance look at their slate, since he nominated the same works within a day. It seems likely that there was similar cooperation in coordinating the official campaign artwork.
But let that go.
As the strangely moderated Vox Day’s stance melds seamlessly with the more moderate version of the Sad Puppies’ stance, it’s no longer necessary to try to tease out how their origins may have intertwined, as they’ve ended up in exactly the same place. If Day has enough awareness to even be conscious of the fact that he’s now thrown in completely with the Sad Puppies, I have to think he imagines this some sort of complex flanking operation he’s just completed, or maybe a pincer maneuver where two columns come together to the surprise of… well, absolutely no one, in reality.
And then the two columns get lost in the mcHe’s declaring it a firm victory because he either believes or is depending on the cattle that stampede behind him believing that there is a powerful clique that the Puppies are a countering force to, so if no one controls the final voting this doesn’t mean the Puppies win, it means their invisible enemies lost in the crowd? The wargame metaphor breaks down pretty quickly, to be honest.
But let that go.
On the other side of the increasingly illusory divide, we have Brad Torgersen. In what looks like a Facebook conversation, he appears to have dropped the central contention of the Puppy campaign. That is, he’s no longer maintaining that there was an organized effort by “SJWs” to nominate works and authors for “PC cred” reasons or to reward members of a clique and that the Sad Puppies were conceived to make sure that the nominees and winners really deserved them.
“Gents, thing is, there is *no* objective standard. None. Pretense to the contrary, [it] is just that: pretense. […] Year after year, a great swath of SF/F’s audience watches as the Hugos parade off to works which leave that swath cold. […] Again, no objective standard. Just taste. If people with taste similar to yours can vote in sufficient numbers, then your taste prevails. If those with a different taste can vote in sufficient numbers, your taste does not prevail.”
I kind of doubt at this point that Torgersen is either honest enough nor self-aware enough to be consciously admitting that the Puppies were founded on a pretense, that the lines that have been used to rally up a small army of small-minded followers were essentially lies, but there you have it. Just as I’ve been saying all along, just as many others have been saying: different people like different things for different reasons.
No need to imagine a clique or conspiracy or cabal or collusion or whatever scary c-word you want to slap on it this time. It’s just differing tastes.
The post I’m linking to is already almost a week old, so I’d expect if this admission were to herald a serious change in the Puppy discourse we’d have seen it already. But why should they start being self-consistent and internally coherent now? The Puppies are an apolitical group, except when they’re not. The Puppies don’t care about diversity, except when they’re its true champions. What exactly they did and why they did it changes from day to day, and I’m not even just talking about if you ask different members of the effort.
That is because at the end of the day, what we’re dealing with is people rationalizing away an irrational response to their feelings at not having their tastes represented as best/most mainstream. When defending its own naked, ugly self-interest, the human brain can and will pivot smoothly from one position to another and just not acknowledge the contradiction between the two but not acknowledge that any movement occurred at all.
They love to throw around the word “Orwellian”, but the way the Puppies constantly shift and evolve their narrative would leave the Ministry of Truth dizzy. If today the Puppies are about subjective taste, then the Puppies have always been about subjective taste.
…I’ve decided I’m just not going to look at the notes on the Tumblr cross-posts of this blog. When I’m active on Tumblr, I do read the notes on stuff I post there, but somehow in making the jump from another blog to that platform, I think it kind of crosses the line from “This is a reply to me,” which I do read and engagement, to “This is people out on the internet talking about me,” which I don’t tend to read or engage with.
It’s not that I don’t still disagree with the people who commented on my spoiler post in that fashion. I do. It’s just, they’re doing their thing in their space, as I’m doing mine in mine. There’s no reason it has to be a literal conversation.
This is a post about trigger warnings and critical discourse in relationship to entertainment media. The intent here is to explain them to people who are under a mistaken impression about why people engage in these things. I don’t think this will do anything to sway the noisiest detractors, those who are less motivated by a quest for the truth than by a quest for a convenient political punching bag, but I think there’s probably a mass of people in the middle who don’t really understand what it’s all about, but they are definitely against censorship , so if someone claims to be speaking against censorship they’ll be inclined towards sympathy.
The thing is that neither trigger warnings nor critical analysis amount to censorship. If anything, attempts to scuttle them are closer to censorship. You can’t believe in the free exchange of information and opinions and fight against people freely exchanging information and opinions.
Anyway…
There’s a show I discovered on Netflix, after it was over and done with. It’s called Bomb Girls. It is a period piece about the workers at a Canadian munitions factory during World War II. I could say that I like this a lot and it would be a true statement, but I wouldn’t make a blanket statement of “I recommend this show, go watch it.” I would instead try to include some context and nuance to my recommendation.
There are reasons to do this for any piece of entertainment you’re recommending, because neither “quality” nor “enjoyability” are simple one dimensional objective quantities. Now, if you’re talking to a specific person or a specific audience where there are some broad things that are known or can be assumed about tastes, you don’t always have to spell out the specific nuance.
For instance, if I were to tell a family member or one of my best friends, “You should check out _____, I think you’ll like it,” I’m already taking on board what I know about them into the statement “I think you’ll like it.”
My older brother once told me, “I am not the target audience for anything described as a spiritual successor to The Sandman.” This was not a slam on The Sandman, just him speaking to his experiences with a certain swath of fantasy comics. He had tried enough of them and found that they weren’t for him that he wasn’t interested in sampling further. So, I take that on board when I’m making recommendations to him. If I don’t mention a comic to him because it fits that criteria, it’s not a statement on how much I appreciated it or what I think its quality is. I’m just taking into account his tastes.
Similarly, when I’m making general recommendations, I try to remember to relate them to other things that people might be familiar with. “If you enjoyed _______ and you’re looking for more things that _______ the way it did, then you might find this to be up your alley.” Stuff like that. I might also caution people, “If you’re looking for ________, you won’t find it here.” I don’t think I’ve ever said anything like,”If you’re getting bored with ________, this might not be to your tastes,” as that’s never been a major consideration for me, but I’m sure people have mentioned such in their reviews and recommendations.
The thing is, I don’t think anybody would reasonably look at things like these and conclude that there’s some kind of censorship at work or that anybody’s trying to influence/restrict the allowable content of work by praising things conditionally in ways that center on these specific elements.
To bring this back to Bomb Girls… well, I’m about to post a video that is one of my favorite scenes in the series. It’s a powerful scene. It’s not a scene I can recommend without nuance or context, though. See, it’s actually the juxtaposition of two different scenes, one of which includes homophobic violence directed at a lesbian couple. (Spoiler warning: They do survive.)
I know people who have experienced that kind of trauma and cannot have it shoved in their faces without a warning and the chance to either prepare or choose not to experience it without being triggered. Even if I didn’t, I know that there are such people.
I also know people who just… don’t want that sprung on them. Or don’t want to see it. They’ve seen too much of it in reality and in fiction and they either have to be in the right mood to see it, or they’re just done with it. Too many queer tragedies, not enough happy endings. They’re just not interested.
Now, the thing is, no one would look at a dude saying that he’s seen enough would-be successors to The Sandman to know that giving his time and money to others in that line would be a poor gamble and conclude, “SO YOU’RE SAYING THAT BECAUSE YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THIS, NO ONE SHOULD MAKE IT?” No one would look at me making a review/recommendation that acknowledges that not everyone wants to see that and say, “SO YOU’RE SAYING THAT NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO LIKE THIS?”
Some contrarian troll might crop up with, “But by writing off an entire sub-genre of work on the basis of a perceived association with another work, you are being close minded and might be missing out on works that deserve your attention!” or some such nonsense, but there wouldn’t be much vehemence to it.
But if I were to just post the video I’m talking about without this preface and preamble, only the words: “TRIGGER WARNING: HOMOPHOBIC VIOLENCE” in front of it… well, I’d get all that and more.
Even though the point of posting the video would be to say, “This is a really cool, really powerful scene in a show I really like,” the fact that I added this particular bit of nuance and context would be taken as a sign that I’m trying to censor or control the content, trying to control what people are allowed to make and what they’re allowed to like.
Here’s the video, by the way:
(If this doesn’t show up in a crosspost, click the source link for the original post.)
This is the actual use of Trigger Warnings: to respectfully allow people some choice of what content they will engage with, when, and on what terms. It’s not an act of censorship. It does not take control away from the creators of content nor the consumers. Rather, it allows the consumer to make an informed choice.
Arguments against them like “There are no warnings in real life!” are both wrong and wrong-headed. There are warnings in real life; they’re somewhat haphazardly implemented, but they’re there. We make an effort to warn people about everything from dips and bumps in the road to the level of violence and adult situations in a movie, not because no one should ever drive down an uneven road but because if you know the ups and downs are coming you can pass through them more safely.
That’s all a trigger warning is. Some people need them because of literal PTSD triggers. Some people simply use them to make an informed choice.
Now, let’s move past trigger warnings and talk about critical discourse. I like this show. I actually love it. But there are things about it that frustrate me. The fact that there’s only one character in the core ensemble who is The Gay Girl (e.g., tokenism) is part of that. The fact that her romantic attachments are mired in tragedy is part of that. The fact that a character who seems to be set up as gay in the first episode and who the canonically gay character Betty spends the series pining for to the point that Betty makes huge sacrifices for her happiness is part of that. The fact that these kinds of stories are told over and over and over again, without a lot of counterexamples, is part of that.
If I were to talk about this, as I’m doing now, I might be told, “But that’s realistic! You can’t complain about this because that’s the kind of thing that really happened! Queer people were forced to hide and subject to violence and legal penalties and bigotry and job discrimination! And Bomb Girls isn’t some fantasy wish fulfillment story! It’s about how hard life was during wartime for everybody! Everybody’s plotlines were full of hardship.”
And the thing is that not one of those points is wrong, per se, but none of them actually address what I’m talking about. It also ignores the fact that just because a tragic plotline is realistic doesn’t mean a happy plotline would have been unrealistic. Bad things happen in real life, but so do good things.
And even if you believe that Betty’s plotline was artistically exactly what the show needed to do…
What does that have to do with whether a person does or does not want to watch another retread of the same tragic lesbian tropes? Nothing, no more than someone who doesn’t want to read any more “mythic” style fantasy comics is a statement on the merit of those comics.
So often the reception this kind of critical discourse gets by people who don’t engage with their media like this amounts to, “YOU DON’T LIKE ANYTHING AND YOU DON’T THINK ANYBODY ELSE SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO LIKE ANYTHING! YOU DON’T THINK [WOMEN/QUEER PEOPLE/ETC] SHOULD EVER BE ALLOWED TO BE SHOWN SUFFERING ANY ADVERSITY WHICH MEANS YOU THINK THEY’RE PRECIOUS FRAGILE SNOWFLAKES WHICH MEANS IT IS YOU WHO IS ______IST!”
But, man… even if somebody started watching Bomb Girls, saw which way the wind was blowing, and declared the show to be absolute trash (and I’m sure there are people who did this), that’s not actually what they’re saying. At all.
And it’s certainly not what everybody is saying, whenever they deal in a nuanced, contextual analysis of the content of a book or show. The idea that anyone who grapples with this kind of thing is inherently anti-fun or anti-art is just so strange to me, especially because the people who bash on this kind of criticism say things like, “I watch TV/read comics/play video games for ENTERTAINMENT. I don’t want to have to deal with a bunch of real-world issues every time I do that! It’s supposed to be ESCAPISM!”
Yeah, we get that.
So, can you understand why someone who deals with violence and discrimination and fear and isolation for being queer might not want to have to deal with those real-world issues when they’re just looking to be entertained?
…that when I write a thing on my blog talking about how I feel about a thing, I’m on my blog, talking about how I feel about a thing.
I say this because earlier today I wrote a post that was mostly just how I feel about spoilers. It concluded:
It’s true that I’ll only see a movie the first time once, but I also generally only see movies on the big screen once. If I want to get the most out of that opportunity, I believe I’m best served in most cases by having read a fairly detailed plot summary. I don’t want to know all the twists. I don’t want to know all the jokes. I don’t want to know all the background details.
But I want to know the story, in the same way that an ancient Greek crowding around a poet singing on the street corner would know of the rage of Achilles.
I feel like that’s pretty clear that I’m talking about me there, and that I’m not speaking in absolutes in any sense of the word. E.g., “I believe I’m best served in most cases by having read a fairly detailed plot summary.” There’s no value judgment attached. No exhortation towards others. Not even an invitation to join me.
I guess I can see people reading the middle part, where I wonder if the anti-spoiler part of geek culture isn’t related to what I call the “Canon Keeper” part of culture, as being prescriptive. Perhaps I should have spelled out more explicitly that I don’t see the link as being what you might call inherent or direct. That is, I didn’t say, “The only reason anybody could think they don’t want spoilers is they approach canon like this way, and that’s wrong.” I wondered if there’s a link, at the cultural level.
And to explain what I mean by that: even after I started actively seeking out spoilers for some things, I still felt… weird about that. Like I was doing it wrong. I would sometimes be apologetic about the fact that I’d spoiled myself, or downplayed the extent to which I did it… because Everybody Knows That’s Not How You Do It, right?
If the post had a larger point, it wasn’t “Look at me, I made the correct choice, don’t you wish you were more like me?”, it was, “This is where I am right now on this. This is why.”
The weird thing is that even though the criticism of it cropped up on the Tumblr cross-post, I have a feeling that it wouldn’t have happened… or wouldn’t have been so pointed… if I’d made the post on Tumblr to begin with. If my critics see this over there, they might take exception to that, and it’s certainly not something we could prove one way or the other without being able to peer into adjacent alternate realities… but I feel like maybe people read a more prescriptive air into things they see as an “article” on an external site rather than a “post” on a personal blogging platform.
Well, this is still a personal blog. The name in the address bar is mine. The posts here aren’t pieces for some clickbaity online magazine. I’m not sitting here dispensing the wisdom of Solomon when I’m talking about my life, even if I do have a weird philosophical aside in the middle of a post.
The next time I notice that kind of snark in the Tumblr notes, I’ll probably ignore it. I certainly won’t make a policy of responding to it every time. And I’m not going to change how I blog.
Last year, I finally gave up on what had previously been my main criteria in a cell phone: a physical keyboard. As a result, I got a newer and spiffier phone than I’ve ever had before, and one of the things I noticed when playing around with it was that it made for a far better recording device than the headsets or built-in mics I’d used before.
I quickly tried to make use of this with a few small, side projects that I used as incentives for miscellaneous crowdfunding, but I started to run into a snag pretty early on that has just gotten worse: while it performed flawlessly in my initial tests, it seemed like the more I tried to rely on it, the more it would tend to skip and distort the recording at odd moments.
The problem has only been getting more pronounced. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s really affected my Tales of MU worldbuilding podcasts, which were supposed to be a quick and easy thing that would answer some reader demand and then move on from. Because I can’t tell when and where it skips until I play it back, I often have to throw out entire takes as unusable.
Well, the good news is that I don’t have to wrestle with this anymore. Through an act of reader generosity, I now have a decent USB condenser microphone. I’ve been testing it this early afternoon, figuring out things like optimal distance and speaking volume. I haven’t quite worked out how the accompany mic stand is supposed to work, as there are no instructions for its assembly/deployment and I’m a bit reluctant to just force it. I’ll probably look for any demo videos/reviews on YouTube after this that might show it in action.
This is going to be a huge deal in getting more worldbuilding podcasts up, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a number of things I started last summer when it seemed like my phone was going to be a serviceable recording solution which I left off in the middle due to frustration (and then forgot about the frustration and committed to doing the worldbuilding podcasts).
So, in the near future, expect more of the MU podcasts. In the slightly beyond that future, expect more filk, satirical relaxation tracks, et cetera.
The State of the Me
Doing well. In addition to the gift of a microphone and webcam, I also was gifted some art supplies and vitamin supplements yesterday. In addition to the practical value of these gifts, it just makes me feel good about myself that people cared enough to do this.
Plans For Today
Man, you have no idea how much I want to say “play around with microphone”, but I have a bunch of writing I need to do.
State Attorney Marilyn Mosby stood up today and announced that the six officers involved in the homicide of Freddie Gray of Baltimore will be charged with this crime. Among the findings she revealed is the fact that an illegal “switchblade” that he reportedly carried was in fact a perfectly ordinary and perfectly legal knife, and was not found until after he was detained (thus cannot constitute probable cause for a search or arrest).
I’m seeing this fact and a few other key points being touted about the Twittersphere as an important aspect to the case, and I agree. It is important to document when officials charged with public safety and blessed with public trust lie to the public to protect themselves and each other. It is important to document deliberate falsehoods in this case as they indicate deliberation, if not premeditation for the crimes. It is important to document these lies because the truth is important.
But I worry.
I worry that the narrative will become—or perhaps in some corners is already becoming—“See? Freddie Gray did not deserve this treatment! This proves he died for no reason!”
No, in point of fact, it does not.
Because even if Freddie Gray had been carrying an illegal weapon, he did not deserve this treatment and he died for no reason.
He was arrested a mere five blocks from the precinct house. Less than half a mile. He was savagely beaten and then thrown into the back of a van with no padding, no safety restraints, no protection of any kind and taken on a forty minute joyride which served no other purpose except to slam him around inside the hard metal confines of the vehicle.
If his attackers did not intend to kill Mr. Gray, they certainly intended to injure him and they certainly displayed a gross disregard for his life.
In cases of police violence, we are told time and time again that we cannot judge officers for taking steps to protect themselves, for making life-and-death judgment calls in the heat of the moment. If we point out all the cases where suspects who fit one profile are taken in safely despite being heavily armed and belligerent versus the cases where suspects who fit another profile are shot repeatedly at the first sign—often imaginary—we’re told you’re not there, you can’t know what’s in their head.
Well, that hardly applies in this case. Half a dozen men against one man, broken, bleeding, and in handcuffs. Even laying aside the question of whether the force used to subdue him could be said to have been warranted (and forgive me for being dubious, given everything else we know), there is no “safety” or “in the moment judgment” that can excuse or justify what happened next.
So if we say that Freddie Gray didn’t deserve this brutal execution because he wasn’t carrying an illegal weapon, what we are saying is that people—at least certain people—do deserve this treatment for carrying an illegal weapon. That the actual rule of law, which prescribes that persons accused of a crime be detained, charged, and tried before punished, should not have been applied if Freddie had been breaking this law.
I’m going to say something that should not be controversial:
Beating people suspected of a crime into a pulp then throwing them into a metal box and slamming them around for upwards of half an hour to see what happens is not a legitimate function of a police department. It is not a legitimate function for a democratic state power to execute. It is not something that a nation that aspires to the loftier ideals espoused by the United States of America should be doing.
It doesn’t matter if the victim of a crime is also a criminal. The law does not and should not care. We should all be terrified of the idea that government agents can decide a person is a criminal and then decide that their rights are suspended on that basis.
Yet it happens.
It happens every day.
And a lot of us don’t notice, if only because our own knee-jerk judgments of who is and isn’t a criminal happens to match the determination being made by the police.
We have ways for determining criminality and processes for dealing with criminals. They are not perfect. They are not themselves perfectly free from brutality and bias at any level of their operation. But they are there, and they should not be ignored by people who are touting the concept of “rule of law”.
Freddie Gray didn’t deserve what happened to him, and he was killed for no reason.
This is true not because he was innocent, but because he was a human being and endowed with certain rights.
