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I’ve been spinning like a chicken on a spit ever since I heard about the whole ‘AI generated story places in renowned Commonwealth Writing Prize’ scandal and now has come the time to regale you with my Opinions™️ about the matter, because it’s hit on some thoughts I’ve had for a while re: how I approach writing, both fanfic and original fiction… and thoughts I’ve had as a reader. long read, strap in.
tldr scandal speedrun: story by Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir just won the Caribbean regional prize at the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize ie one of the biggest short fiction awards in the world (almost 8000 entries this year) and was subsequently published on Granta's website, as all regional winners are. readers start flagging that something is off, and it quickly becomes clear that the story is almost certainly AI generated, and obviously the press and wank started up, media coverage, and my all time favourite part: Granta editor Sigrid Rausing uploads the story into an AI to ask if an AI wrote it and then puts out a statement that pretty much says ‘probably, but guess we’ll never know!’ (SORRY THIS PART IS SOOOO FUCKING FUNNY TO ME LMFAO 😭)
much of the earlyish discourse has focused on the AI detection question, what does this mean for literary prizes going forward, how do we verify human authorship. some responses have been very good/interesting (the Africa is a Country piece especially). what I want to yap about is what the judges' response to this story tells us about how postcolonial writing is read by the institutions that gatekeep it and readers who dismiss it (and this puts it perfectly with Arundhati Roy as an example), what the judging panel’s language reveals when read as a critical object in itself, and why the failure mode here is so damaging. tldr: the story is dogshit and so clearly AI generated you can even see the AI’s ‘thought’ process, but the mainstream reactions are slagging off the wrong thing, and for reasons that have little to do with AI.
it has been actually infuriating to watch a significant chunk of the online reaction use this nonsense piece of writing as a launching pad for a much broader dismissal. someone posts the bench-men sentence or the sunrise-over-a-sink sentence as evidence of AI, and then in the replies someone else will say some shit like "well this is just what postcolonial writing is like" or "I've read prize-winning stuff that reads exactly like this". and suddenly we're not talking about Jamir Nazir anymore, we're talking about whether this entire mode of writing, postcolonial literary fiction, global south prose ‘in general’, varied and distinct language plays associated with everyone from Roy to Walcott to Kincaid, as somehow inherently gaudy, unmoored, purple, a performance of profundity that collapses under scrutiny. sheer vim against styles of writing unfairly and lazily judged as ‘florid’ and ‘overwrought’, ie people calling for the clinical manicuring of prose through a lens of anti-AI progressivism.
and this rage has very little to do with AI or this AI generated story, and a lot more to do with the epistemology of reading across cultural difference:
what assumptions are you making when you encounter prose that doesn't do what you're used to, and how do you distinguish between:
this is doing something I don't have the framework to follow/yet
and
this is doing nothing
the uncomfortable answer is that a lot of people, at levels high above the average reader mind you, being prize judges and all, don't make that distinction. they experience the unfamiliarity and name it as failure, as excess, as incoherence, as the literary equivalent of noise, without asking whether the problem is in the text or in the reading, or they fall prey to a manifestation of ‘trim the fat culture’ (good post on this).
this is not an accusation of bad faith reading necessarily; it is just what happens when you read without the relevant context and without the intellectual curiosity to notice that you're missing something and attempt to find it. telling, however, is how quickly that experience of unfamiliarity, in this particular case, became a generalisation. not "I find this story's specific metaphors incoherent" but "I find this kind of writing incoherent", as if “this kind of writing” is a stable category and not just something this AI slapped together. a sliding from the fraudulent to the traditional that happens with striking confidence, and one which you do not see applied with the same ease to, say, Western European modernism, where the response to difficulty tends toward "I need to read more Woolf to understand Woolf" rather than "yucky stinky Woolf is AI-slop”.
anyway. here is my favourite sentence from the shitty AI story:
"she had the kind of walking that made benches become men."
and like it’s my all time favourite sentence ever because like. what does it mean. what is it doing. why is it there. what decision was made in its construction and to what end? and I just could not come to a conclusion because the real answer is that no actual decision was made, because decision-making requires an engagement with the writing, requires a reasoning for the sentence to exist in the way it does, and this exists across all literary prose styles, from the sparsest to the lushest. the bench-men sentence is difficult to interpret, but not in a ‘this is difficult to interpret which makes the reward of interpretation sweeter’ way, it is difficult to interpret in a ‘there is nothing under this sentence’ way, and that is made very clear when even the slightest interpretative pressure is laid on the story.
anyway, turns out the judges of one of the world’s biggest literary competitions did not apply that pressure. caribbean regional judge Sharma Taylor described Nazir's language as "sublime — precise yet richly evocative — conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy" and like man this isn’t to dunk on Taylor personally but i think that sentence, in being a diagnostic object, is in itself a diagnostic object as to the whole scandal here: it’s evaluative language that doesn’t touch the text itself, a string of compliments whose terms don’t require a unique object. "precise yet richly evocative" is a sentence that could describe anyone from Chekhov to MT Vasudevan Nair.
what it cannot do is tell you what is precise about Nazir's objectively vague, dreary sentences, or where exactly economy manifests in a story that opens with three subordinate images somehow being unable to create even half an image. the judges either didn't notice or didn't give a fuck, and imo the honest interpretation there is that the evaluation was matching the text against a prior model of what this kind of writing is supposed to feel like, rather than what it actually does.
the main vulnerability of this kind of matching-against-model judging criteria is that it can only flag deviation from the expected shape, not absence within it. a story that inhabits the expected form, even hollowly, passes muster. a story that does something actually unexpected might fail on those same grounds, whether or not it's extraordinary. the AI machine got through to the prize list not because it fooled sophisticated readers into thinking they were reading a great work of literature, but because the reading operation in use did not require that experience of reading great literature to complete successfully. you just needed the vague shape, and the machines are good at making vague shapes.
what shape?
seemingly lyrical, lush, image-dense, located in rural poverty or landscape-as-metaphysical-weight, threaded with folk memory and unresolved grief, incantatory, myth-grabbing, rum shops, zinc rooftops, zinc-hair. what the AI has done is precisely what it is built to do: grab tiny scraps and fragments from actual prize-winning postcolonial stories and shoved them all together into an amorphous, senseless mass, knowing what it is supposed to do but not knowing how to do it. and so to me the most astounding/horrifying aspect of this scandal is how the judges who one can safely assume, based on their credentials, are very familiar with ‘world literature’, proved unable to tell the difference between a form inhabited and a form vacated.
and I really don’t like bringing up my literary/academic credentials (derogatory) etc etc on here anymore, because it at times positions me in an uncritical way I don’t intend or enjoy and I spent my early months in fandom realising just how very uncomfortable I was with the image I inadvertently curated as a result of coming straight from that sort of literary-academic space. so to put it very basically: I have spent my academic career broadly specialising in the very style and period of postcolonial literature that this AI story is attempting (badly) to emulate. my focus has always been south asia but i have also worked extensively with caribbean lit especially early on, and i’ve been taught/examined by some very well known caribbean writers and literary scholars, etc etc. ie i’m just trying to say that this post isn’t just me talking about a vague grievance with literary cultures but something i’ve been neck deep in for 10+ years now, ie i do know my shit and am not just knee jerk wanking, even though frankly i don’t think i should have to explain my background because way too many people are being way too confident with the ‘i have been writing for THREE BILLION years and they gave ARUNDHATI ROY THAT BITCH the booker prize’ atm…
anyway the reason I’m so brainrotted about this is because this exact literary-cultural problem was one of the things that led me to structure my longfic, Prayers to Broken Stone, in the way I did. the fic itself is totally irrelevant here so you’re not missing anything if you haven’t read it or are unfamiliar with the Silmarillion, I’m just referring to how the first quarter of that fic deliberately contains every single postcolonial miserycore cliché that appeals to a literary-prize, Western Anglophone, and diasporic audience’s ideas of what ‘Global South’ world-literatures should look like (and ngl I feel like I probably went too hard on this because so far I know at least 5 ppl familiar with the genre who justifiably almost dropped the fic before the mic drop because of the beginning being Like That… sorry guys. i will probably do it again 😭).
anyway after that, and very abruptly, the story takes a hard pivot to what it actually is, which is not an apolitical portrait of India, not diasporic literature about the Indian subcontinent, not even an Indian novel about Kozhikode, but a Kozhikodan novel about India, down to the style: my writing in general tends to lean on carnivaleque and incongruous tonal whiplashes between ‘lowbrow’ humour, abject tragedy and direct critical fourth-wallfucking commentary, but that whiplash is turned all the way up to 100 in Prayers and the humour especially is taken to borderline slapstick levels, and that style is evocative of Kozhikodan literary cultures (see—writings of Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, who is mentioned in the story in that Comrade Maedhros lies claims they are great buddies lmao), only that most writing from the region is in Malayalam, etc.
the reason i mention the fic here is that objectively speaking, those first few chapters, the ‘series of clichés’ ones, are the ‘clearest’ part of the story when it came to writing it. those chapters were written to directly evoke the vague shape of ‘prizewinning postcolonial giants’ of South Asian literature, both the brilliant and incisive writers and the floggers of diaspora-gaze miserycore, providing a series of aesthetic signals to those texts: the joint-family ‘madhouse’, the separated twins, the daddy-issues-as-father-of-the-nation-issues, the family-as-country, the dried rivers, the symbolic heirloom bangle, the utopian pre-imperial regional historiography, the diasporic returnee, the rotting house, the familial disconnect. Roy, Rushdie, Mistry, Lahiri, Desai, Seth, Ghosh, rinse and repeat.
do I personally enjoy every single one of these authors? no, I would probably cagefight two of them at least. what I am saying though, is that that their writing isn’t some kind of incomprehensible mess that nobody aside from their little tiny id-group can understand, not amorphous or vague or too overwrought to comprehend. their prose, all differing styles, can be rich, lush, playful, meandering, yes. but they are not unclear: they’re so clear that the positionality of the authors, their class and caste backgrounds, their educational and migratory trajectories, are often painfully evident (hence the cagefighting). the reason i used those aspects in my fic to signal towards a particular kind of globally lauded postcolonial literature is because those signals are clear, not confusing.
ie it is not a case of ‘global south’ writers being incomprehensible, it is a case of readers walking into a garden with a few flowers they haven’t seen before and immediately going ‘damn, look at this jungle. can’t navigate it but i’m sure it’s great, ok bye’ then turning the fuck around and writing the travelogue anyway. which is to say, applying a colonial reading practice to postcolonial writing.
and there’s a similar, though differently approached, aspect in globally renowned caribbean anglophone writing: a history of deliberate formal difficulty. where the difficulty isn’t some ambient mystery or marker of ‘serious’ literature but a formal consequence of a model of storytelling. eg. Selvon's Creole narration in The Lonely Londoners was a decision with costs+purposes about what it would mean for Moses Aloetta's interiority to be rendered in standard English versus in a voice that had not been, at the time, admitted to the Anglophone literary canon, rather than being the inevitable default of a Caribbean writer. Harris's dissolving frames in Palace of the Peacock are not difficult because Harris was apathetic to comprehensibility but because the Guyanese historical consciousness the novel examines does not easily resolve into stable subjectivity.
form is so often part of the argument across literature, across the English canon itself, and normally in literary criticism, ‘difficulty’ is approached epistemologically alongside aesthetically. this is common knowledge yet the first part is something that appears to be hard to grasp for people reading and commentating on ‘world literature’.
what is this form doing that another form cannot?
you can answer that question for Harris and Selvon and Ghosh and Roy and man, I think he’s so fucking annoying sometimes, but you can even do it for Rushdie. you cannot do it for "coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all". and this impossibility has nothing to do with foreignness or excessiveness but because the question, when applied to this AI generated piece of writing, has no answer.
and like… what does that tell us about what the judges were evaluating? imo it tells us they were at least in part evaluating surface-level compliance. compliance with recognisable genre conventions and an expected register, and so with the right signals of “authenticity”. and in the case of ‘Global South literature’, these conventions include an emphasis on the rural, the embodied, the rooted, the mythical.
an AI is very good at compliance because compliance is, quite literally, what AI does: every LLM is trained on the corpus of what has been rewarded before and thus it reproduces the patterns of that reward. if the judges were themselves rewarding compliance with a known type, then of course the AI passed with flying colours, because they were, in effect, running the same operation as the LLM model: matching input against a predetermined template instead of engaging with the work itself.
not to use my favourite cliché, but this specific scandal having played out in the way it did pretty much evidences how these two things, the upper echelons of the global literary prize circuit judging panels and generative AI, are less ‘warring factions’ and more ‘two frat bros fisting each other while saying no homo bro’, ie comorbid counterparts.
and so imo the question that should haunt every future Commonwealth Prize shortlist is not "did an AI write this?" but "what model of literary value are we using to judge Anglophone literature?”, and “why the fuck are we doing that???”
bc if your aesthetic criteria are vague enough that a sentence like "the grove isn't a ledger; it's a mouth — it closes only when it's satisfied" reads as "vivid, lush imagery" delivered with "quiet authority," then your judging criteria is less criteria and more vibes. you are literally just playing a high-stakes vibes-based game of Pin the Tail on the Mango whilst wilfully ignoring how vibes are precisely what AI large language models are the best at faking.
anyway, like I said in my intro, this scandal is already sliding into a secondary discourse in which ‘Oriental™️ opacity/incomprehensibility’ is being treated as the general category, of which this AI-generated confusion is just the most recent instance. you can watch it happening in real time, unbearably prolonged: people who rightly found the Nazir story incoherent, reaching way too easily for other examples of postcolonial prose they also apparently found incoherent or “purple”, prose that is, in fact, doing things they just didn't know how to follow. the AI story has handed a lazy, sneering and dismissive reading practice the veneer of clinical diagnosis.
that is the horribly ironic thing here. reader after reader, openly admitting to doing the exact same lazy, apathetic reading of postcolonial literature as the literary prize judges they are (rightly) criticizing have done with this AI story, have been doing for human-writing from the global south for all this time. “ewww this is what that writing looks like when a machine does it" (correct) is sliding so so so easily into "ewww this is what that writing looks like" (not correct). dog after dog, chasing tail after tail.
and that slide, from a machine having ‘successfully’ impersonated prize-winning prose, to a panel of judges who clearly weren't really reading, to the genre itself being defined as imitable machinery, is imo the most damaging thing to come out of this whole affair, and the people most hurt by it are the writers who have fuck all to do with Jamir Nazir, who is clearly just a chancer who fucked around and found out.
because somewhere in those 8000 entries, there is a writer, possibly many writers, who solved their riddle, who knew what every sentence was doing, who had made the thousand small decisions that constitute a story, and whose difficulty (if their story was difficult: difficulty is subjective and not a default, as we have established) could easily be accounted for. that writer did not win, because the judges were not looking for them. and now, in the aftermath, the interrogation of the incident continues to refuse to ask the questions that would have found them.
I first thought it would be blowing smoke up my own ass to finish this post with a quote from my own story. and then I remembered that this is my circus and you are all my monkeys, so I will indeed be ending with a (spoiler-free, context-unnecessary) quote from the final chapter of Prayers, from one of the fic’s multiple fourth-wall breaches, this one explicitly addressing both the character of Maedhros, a gay Muslim man in postcolonial India, as well as the attritional impact of global Anglophone prize cultures on ‘national literatures’, explaining the structure of the story and touching on the reading-practice I talk about in this post, this cold, dismissive flattening based on the reader’s refusal to comprehend the unfamiliar. Emphasis obviously made just for this excerpt:
Humanity has tried many times, with fanfare and floodlights, to hold the great white shark within glass walls. When a young female was placed in the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, its keepers marvelled for a day, two days, then watched as she rammed herself against the tank walls, snout bloodied and refusing food until her body yielded to exhaustion. In San Diego, one was found dead within two weeks. More recently, in a public aquarium, a six-foot juvenile circling its tank like a condemned spirit, colliding with the corners until its skin peeled raw, was released after months only to die on the way back to the sea. Each attempt ended the same: a slow unravelling, a remarkable animal’s vast strength curdling inward, its shimmering blue-mapped body drifting in a pale echo of the life denied to them.
I do not deny they are vicious creatures. But it is not viciousness that makes it impossible for them to survive in the aquarium. The old fables and new films, the man-eater, the blood-frothed wave, the lurking fin, have all mistaken the matter entirely. The thing that kills the great white shark in captivity is the billowing cage: the narrowing circle of water, no current to guide their gills, the confiscation of the horizon. In captivity they turned to self-excoriation, scraping themselves to ribbons on the glass, starving in protest, dragging their bodies into stillness. As if potential had been so thoroughly written into their marrow that the denial of it was a kind of murder. What we mistake for noble resilience is in fact the beginning of a long derangement. A creature built to know the endless universe, driven into madness by the closing-in of incomprehensible walls.
And so we, in our hunger for marvels, have reduced an oceanic immensity to an ornament, a sole symbolic bangle on a slender wrist, a riddle turned spectacle. In that act of enclosure, the essential vastness of the creature is stripped away, its thousand-mile wanderings and salt-scored pilgrimages compressed into a parody of itself in a ghost story projected on glass.
What is offered to the crowd is no shark but the space where a shark once was: a wonder gutted and repackaged, its enforced silence masquerading as our unspoken understanding even as a scream writhes in every bubble.
As we behold the captive great white shark, Arwen, we do naught but applaud its absence in our lives, gild the blade which vanquished its truth, and heave a sigh of relief for the barrier between ourselves and the beast. We build shrines to the wonders we swallow whole. We raise gardens tomorrow from the cities we raze today.
But perhaps there is light on the horizon for humanity. Perhaps one day, we will learn how to keep the great white shark in a cage. And in turn, maybe it will learn how to rasp itself down for the onlooker and pace circles into borrowed water, each turn narrower, each wall closer than the last. What is witnessed is not the beast but its mutilation, a spectre stripped of horizon and turned inward on itself, a hollow spectacle mistaken for a radiant life.
The tank allows for neither possibility nor invention, and so the tale of the great white shark contracts into a pattern of bruises, the persistence of a body against limits it was never meant to know. The water becomes a neverending sentence, telling the story of a ruin that can only end in its own undoing. I wanted to be a writer, Arwen. I have always wanted to be a writer. You know that. You have always known that. And yet anything I ever write will only ever be an un-writing of the things other people have already written of me. Even my letters to you.
It is amazing, now that I think of it, what desperation can do to a story.
I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.
it’s like you spawned in my notifs lollll but i think my firstttt memory was thinking “oh! i have a shirt of that pfp!! a shirt that i’m literally wearing right now!!” because i have a shirt of your pfp lolllllll
I’m going to level with you. I have listened to The Devil Went Down to Georgia for most of my life. We were a country music household, this was a staple of my childhood along with Johnny Cash, Garth Brooks, and that one Chipmunks country album.
I have no idea what “Fire on the mountain run boys run/The Devil's in the house of the rising sun/Chicken in the bread pan picking out dough/Granny does your dog bite no child no” means and at this point I’m too scared to ask.
this is the key part of the song, that a lot of people miss. people have this misconception that the contest between Johnny and The Devil is about who is the better fiddle player. but it isn't. its about who is the better fiddler.
in a time before things like radios and record players, every time you heard music was because there was somebody in the room with you playing an instrument. and many, many, many social events involved dancing, which requires music. so, if you're planning any kind of gathering in the american south or appalachia, you need to find a fiddler. and the fiddler's job is to play music that everybody knows and likes and can dance to.
the mistake The Devil makes in his bet with Johnny is that he misinterprets the contest as being about technical ability, so he has this big flashy song. he plays fast and impressively with a band of demons playing unfamiliar instruments in unfamiliar rhythms. he's definitely more skilled at playing than Johnny, and thinks he has it in the bag.
but Johnny wins because the contest is about being the best fiddler. the song uses these lines mentioned above as a shorthand for saying that Johnny is playing these songs. Johnny launches into a set of the most popular songs, played well, and that's what gives him his big win. A good fiddler knows all the hits, and can read the room to know what to play next. The Devil loses because he completely fails to read the room, and doesn't know the right songs.
I'm headcanoning that the Devil invokes something like Dream Theater from the future, and they are there, all technical and wanky, while the audience is absolutely confused about their weird sounds and comically long solos.
one big thing i think people outside fandom (like, all fandoms, fandom in general, not any particular one) tend to misunderstand is they know it's a subculture of people who are weirdly deeply invested in fictional media, and they hear about drama caused by people in those subcultures being unhinged in not-fun ways, and they think the unhingedness comes from the fact of being overinvested in works of fiction.
which is a natural assumption, but in my experience that's not really the case? like in my experience the drama llamas in fandom are usually not the ones who are just genuinely very deeply into the fiction. i've known people who are basically thinking about star trek or x-men comics or supernatural pretty much 100% of their free time and ime that type of person is usually very nice and surprisingly functional in their regular life. when someone's a constant nexus of fandom drama it's usually not that they are obsessed with the actual work of fiction the fandom is about, it's at least one of the following:
what they're obsessed with is not the source material but their unhealthy parasocial relationships with one or more of the people who created it
what they're obsessed with is not the source material but some elaborate shared-universe subset of fanfic about it that's only barely related to the original at this point, and/or an esoteric reading-against-the-text reinterpretation of the source material (often if the canon is active and ongoing this leads to becoming actively hostile toward it for its inevitably increasing failure to conform to their preferred fanon)
what they're obsessed with is not the source material but the fandom itself and gathering clout within it, so that the source material basically only exists to them as a tool for scoring points in increasingly arcane fandom disputes
and very often you get the same person doing 2 and sometimes even all 3 of these, and that's where the trouble really starts
1. Eating meat is morally neutral 2. There are many ethical ways butchering has been practiced for a long time 3. factory farming is unethical due to the abuse faced in the animal's life, not bc it results in the animal's death 4. Ethically raised and sourced meat is expensive and/or hard to find in many places 5. *there are people who CANNOT subsist on a plant based diet* for varied reasons, largely disabled folks - (allergies/GI disorders that already limit what a person can eat, people in recovery from restrictive eating disorders, people with ARFID and other sensory processing disorders) and people with little money and time on their hands to cook. 6. Vegans who are adamant about animal rights often have a major blind spot as to human rights abuses; the meatpacking industry is terrible for those who work in it, yes, but people are laboring hard for your grains and produce too, often in unethical conditions and for little pay, and Vegans will treat you like you're doing some kinda "gotcha" and spit vitriol at you whenever you point this out 7. It is not Wrong to eat only plant based certainly but when people start acting like it gives them a moral highground it shows starkly how little regard for fellow humans these people have 8. Just because YOU are disabled/broke/etc and can sustain veganism does not give you permission to harass somebody who says their disability or finances prevent it 9. The most ethical way to eat, if you can achieve it, is by buying things with a short supply chain that were grown locally by properly-paid laborers
it's so funny when there's a fandom you've only seen from the outside and suddenly you see a gifset someone made of The Women Of This Work and you've never seen any of them once in your from the outside view at all. you didn't even know this work had enough women to populate an entire themed gifset. how does this happen all the time? it's a mystery.
so astonishing how Shows turn out to have women in them and sometimes even non-white characters! and you'd never know from looking at what their fandoms focus on
put that woman into a Situation now. i'm serious. drop that sad whiteboy you've been chewing on for the last three hours and just try chewing on the Woman. it's so much better out here. the world is beautiful. you are putting yourself in a cage. take my hand and come with me. put that woman into a Situation
Fandom is weird now. It’s becoming less trusting and friendly, and the Orwellian surveillance issues that are currently running rampant in the USA and UK have bled over into fandom spaces.
I’d read the articles that young people have no privacy and have become so accustomed to it that they enact on themselves. Abstractly I knew this and had accepted it, but it’s only now that I’m seeing it become a major issues.
Obviously part of the problem is I need to become a trusted member of my new fandom. But fandom in general is becoming far more hostile to privacy than even just 5 years ago.
I’ve had to leave 3 servers that want to do age verification. And this is new. Not even 5 years ago when I started zines ppl just turning 18-20 were far more receptive to the ideas espoused by us older folks about not being surveilled. But now it almost feels like they *want* to be surveilled.
They’ve become so used to it from tiktok and their government that they crave it. I’d write a dystopia about it but unfortunately what even is there to say that hasn’t already been said?
If you’re 18-22 now and you’re reading this and willing to listen without immediately calling me suspicious: this is not normal. Age verification will not keep you safe and will not keep minors safe either. It will only lead to the normalization of further surveillance and erosion of your privacy.
I know it can be an unwieldy text especially if you’re not used to reading academic sources, but go read The Panopticon. Watch V for Vendetta or read the comic, read 1984. Watch The Lives of Others and understand the ways this modern era is not so different from the Stasi in the film.
Please.
I don’t want to see a rerun of the surveillance state anymore.
Peer reviewing this reply because it’s exactly how I feel
The issue is the persistent need to diagnose things that aren’t clearly symptoms of certain conditions, and the idea that any kind of deep interest or passion or eccentricity needs to be medicalized
Let people have interests without immediately jumping to diagnose them! Yes, even specific or obscure or very deep interests!
It just always annoys me when people try to diagnose me with stuff just because I mentioned having a deep passion for things like fashion history or for being interested in random things like types of barns
can you give some examples of the cozy colonialism trope from your previous post? i just feel like i haven’t encountered it anywhere but wondering if im missing it!
Tagging @mytly4 who also asked about this:
The problem comes from the fact that a lot of traditional SFF tropes—the invading orc hordes, the uninhabited exoplanet to settle, the adventurous archaeologist, the ancient aliens, the Lost World, the scary untamed wilderness—are rooted in colonialist adventure stories and attitudes from the 1800s and 1900s, and if you don’t really know what you’re doing with them it’s way too easy to accidentally just replicate their underlying colonialist and orientalist basis. Stargate is a famous example of this, but it’s missing the other half of the equation here: the desire to write something cozy, queer, uplifting, nice, and hopepunk.
When these two things crash together it can create some deeply unintended implications.
The problem with indie work in this space is that it has a tendency to be pretty conflict-averse, and it accomplishes this by presenting a protagonist or protag group who are nice as their primary defining characteristic. They’re nice, they’re good, they have correct and progressive beliefs, and narratively everything they do is framed as nice, good, and correct.
I wanted to contextualize what I’m talking about before I name specific works, to make it clear why I see this as a recurring issue. Links below go to more in-depth discussion of each example.
The exoplanet colonization audio drama This Planet Needs a Name is probably the purest distillation of this (from the title itself you can guess which direction this goes in). The short story “Dracanmōt Council of Human Study Report, Compiled by Usander Greystart” published in the queer SFF anthology Common Bonds was clearly TRYING to have a theme of “colonialism is bad” but what was actually presented was a replication of a shocking number of racist tropes about Native Americans, applied to marauding orcs.
Tradpub isn’t immune either, though. Becky Chambers’s novella A Prayer for the Crown-Shy contains no depictions of colonialism directly but draws unthinkingly from some deeply colonialist attitudes about nature, humans, wilderness, and religion, thereby presenting some bizarre and occasionally disturbing scenes that are supposed to be moving and gentle and sweet. I haven’t personally read The House in the Cerulean Sea by T. J. Klune but I have heard the controversy about its origins; admitting that your cozy fantasy book where inhuman/monster children are taken away from their families and raised in a state-run foster home by a state agent who Understands them and Cares about them better than anyone else was inspired by the Canadian policy of taking Indigenous children away from their families to place them with white families who would raise them “better” sure is indicative of some underlying assumptions about how the world works.
My favorite example, though, is Season 1 of the audio drama Travelling Light, which had a theme of “artifact smuggling is a victimless crime and really it’s about the friends we made along the way.” The writing team brushed me off when I raised concerns about this, basically telling me “you are the only person who cares about this” (which was evidently true tbh) and then blocked me on tumblr, then apparently sat on this, considering it, writing a behind the scenes blog post explicitly using my term “cozy colonialism” without actually citing me because I was still blocked on Tumblr, then doing a complete 180 in season 2 where the main character learns that artifact smuggling is not a victimless crime actually. Also, I’m pretty sure they wrote me into the show as an antagonistic character who repeats all the points I made to the protagonist and the protagonist hates him for calling them out, but begrudgingly eventually agrees that he’s kind of right. SUCCESS. Also, the official tumblr unblocked me at about the same time, making me think that this is related.
Every single fic update there is an author trying frantically to find the right balance between a nonchalant aside of "leave a comment if you enjoyed =)" and clinging desperately to the coat tails of a random stranger, dragging along behind them on the street wailing "Please, please! I have to know what you thought! I'm desperate to talk to people about this! Ask me about the alliterative repetition! Ask me about the symbolism!"
I keep saying I'm not interacting with anything Racist Digital Circus related or with people trying to argue with me about it. And they still keep showing up anyway. I'm going to keep blocking y'all. 🤷🏾♀️ How can you not recognize where I stand here, on a page that discusses antiracism and Blackness in media and media comprehension 😅 The instant you feel the need to debate me, save us both time, block me and move on. You're not going to change my mind. Go make your nigga-adjacent joke excuses elsewhere, make the joke in person to some real life Black people since it's not that serious, I Do Not Care.
Tbh, the TV show itself and even the voice actors in question, I could have maybe found some grace for if the most annoyingly racist people on the planet didn't keep coming into my notes. If I were going to make room in my heart, it went out the window. I swear I've told you before I'd rather be called an outright slur by someone I know hates me, than I would dealing with a bunch of covert racists who think they're "not racist, just logical". And God knows they have proven to be the latter 😭 truly just go away. You will not find a space to argue here.
I said this in my most recent lesson and I stand on it: it's a defense mechanism. People defend racism not because they're wholly invested in the people who commit it, but because if THEY can be held accountable, so could YOU. And that's frightening! But instead of... Idk, growing and reflecting, we just get white fragility, performed. Just take it up with anyone OTHER than the Black people affected.
