#discourse.jes

[buriedinbaltimore]

Friendly reminder that people (and well written characters) are more than one thing.

Aaron has some homophobic beliefs; “if you’re gay you shouldn’t be proud of/broadcast it” being the biggest one that appears to me in canon, but probably others as well. AND he stands up for and supports Nicky. His feelings towards Andrew don’t change when he finds out he is gay. BOTH these things are true and exist at the same time.

Nicky sexually assaulted Neil, and has issues respecting other people’s boundaries. AND he deeply cares about Neil’s happiness and wellbeing as well as all of his friends and family. BOTH these things are true and exist at the same time.

Andrew takes his promises and deals of protection extremely seriously. He respects people’s sexual boundaries to a fault due to his history of abuse. AND he seems to feel as if once someone is under his protection he has a degree of ownership over them. (slashing Kevin’s chest/choking him, “don’t touch my things”, always being in control of what the cousins do/where they go.) He physically assaults multiple characters on multiple occasions. BOTH these things are true and exist at the same time.

Kevin is arrogant, single minded to the point of insensitivity, and dismissive of others he deems unworthy. AND he tells Neil to save himself and run, knowing it will cost him the season, which could probably lead to him going back to the Moriyamas. BOTH these things are true and exist at the same time.

Neil is a cut throat badass man who does whatever needs to be done to achieve his goals while accepting there may be collateral damage to others. AND he enjoys and craves moments of softness with his friends and lover and wants to protect them. BOTH these things are true and exist at the same time.

Even Riko, he was a horrifically abusive and cruel person who hurt a lot of people. AND he was a victim of abuse. BOTH these things are true and exist at the same time.

If you keep looking, you will find more things that may seem to be contradictions. People aren’t black and white, good or bad. Complexity and nuance are GOOD. Actions can’t cancel each other out, no amount of good deeds can erase the bad you’ve done, and vice versa. 

Try expanding your thinking! As Walt Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” Things get harder to define and to put into boxes, but they also get infinitely more interesting and useful!

[buriedinbaltimore]

Hey guys, here’s something that apparently people need to hear. You can disagree with Nora about the extra content or even canon without telling her to go fuck herself.

It really fucking boils my blood when I see people saying “Fuck you Nora, your character actually X”  when they can just say “Actually, I think this character X” and leave it at that.

Why do people feel the need to add the extra ugliness and cruelty? Especially since Nora went out of her way, when answering the questions that people literally asked her to answer, to say that she encourages everyone to have their own interpretations! Like on multiple occasions in the extra content she says “these are just my thoughts, and please feel free to have your own!” So why do people attack her? Don’t believe me? here are literal quotes.

When answering the question about when Andrew and Neil first say I love you, Nora prefaces her answer with:

I was a little leery of answering this question because someone already wrote a ficlet about this, but.

meaning, she supported the fic author’s interpretation and didn’t want to contradict it! But she did because people asked her for her version of the story! You can make Andrew and Neil say I love you and Nora supports that! She just doesn’t think it happens herself. source

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When someone asked if Andrew ever ties Neil up, she explicitly says

This is my take on the situation, but it doesn’t change anything. Everyone’s free to interpret the characters how they like and do with them as they wish!

I don’t know how much clearer she could be. source

There are more, but I’m going to leave it at that.

I personally like a lot of the EC, but I like to think Allison goes pro. So I do! And I don’t think Nora is a stupid jerk for not!

Even in canon, I think Renee is a lesbian and her interest in Jean was platonic. She saw a kindred soul she thought she could help, but is exclusively attracted to women. Nora thinks Renee is straight, she and Jean courted, and she ends up marrying a man. That’s cool! She created Renee! And she would probably support my headcanon!

So please please please, stop being assholes. Because Nora is not one. It really is all you.

[buriedinbaltimore]

I always see people talk about how aftg are bad books, and I won’t deny I’ve done it too. I was embarrassed to tell my family I was reading them, and dismissed them as like junk food, fun and yummy but ultimately insubstantial and bad.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize it's not true, and that that could also be considered part of their brilliance? 

Hear me out; one of the biggest morals is that the concepts of “good” people and “bad” people are extremely flawed and humans are too complex to fit into such categorization. And that by forcing people into such categories we are perpetuating harm to others and ourselves. 

Bad things happen to people and everyone reacts differently. Society decides which reactions are acceptable and which are not. If you dismiss people based on that without bothering to get to know them better or understand what they’re doing, you're going to be missing out on a lot of good things. 

(Someone else could probably write this better, but hopefully you get the idea) 

So now let's think about literature.

What makes a “good” book? Why isn’t aftg “good”? What is it lacking, what is there too much of? 

Let’s look at what is there.

it's enjoyable to read (some may argue that this is not a requirement of “good literature” but it is a bonus)

it has nuanced and complex characters and relationships

it has a coherent plot (not a likely or realistic one, but it still makes sense)

it has a clear and consistent voice, message, and themes

it asks the reader to reexamine their assumed beliefs

Like, I agree that it could probably benefit from being looked over by a professional editor, but then again, does that mean it's “bad” because it's not pretty and polished and sanitized for the masses?

By dismissing it are we ignoring what it is trying to teach us all along? To please who? The intellectual elitists who determine our worth by the books we’ve read, whose power was built on patriarchal and white supremacist values in the first place? 

I want to say fuck them, let all call aftg a good book. But that still leaves it forced to stand up next to their standards and justify itself. So I can’t really end this with a call to action. Just some things to think about I guess.

[buriedinbaltimore]

I just saw some Nora appreciation posts and this has been in my drafts for a while and why not jump on the bandwagon? :)

Beyond Nora sharing these awesome books and characters with us, encouraging fans to make their own headcanons and fanfictions, and answering our questions and giving her own ideas of the Foxes’ futures, she did it all for very little in return? I am talking financially, and also a little bit referring to all the hate she gets from the fandom based on her books (but that’s not the focus of this post.)

The ebooks are only $.99 each AND the first one is free. So the entire trilogy is $1.98. Nora probably only gets like 25-30 cents total when someone buys tkm or trk. This year AFTG was the #4 book fandom on tumblr. So she has this crazy successful series that she makes hardly any money off of. She probably only gets 50-60 CENTS whenever someone buys the entire trilogy.

5,000 people follow the “aftg” tag, that's $2,500 approximately, not taking in to account that a lot of people download PDFs of the books and therefore don’t pay! Compare that to what other authors profit from their books. Like, I don’t know how much Maggie Stiefvater has made from The Raven Cycle, but it’s the #8 book fandom on tumblr and it’s definitely way more than $2,500! (I am a little confused about this though, because the raven cycle definitely has a much larger readership the aftg, and 39k people follow that tag? I guess AFTG really is just small and mighty!)

And then I was thinking about all the people selling fanart prints/zines/tchotchkes etc. and commissions based on her characters (and I’m not speaking against those, support fan artists/creators please!) But, if you pooled all the money other people have made off of her characters vs. what she has made I bet she’s made a lot less overall.

So this is a Nora appreciation post, since I cannot financially compensate her, and we don’t even know her real name or what shes up to these days (I don’t think). I know you’ll never see this but thank you for sharing all this with us!!! These books have actually changed my life, they inspired me for the first time to create my own writing, led me to meet new people, and also they just make me feels things. So really, thank you.

[buriedinbaltimore]

So people who actually know things, please correct me if I’m wrong, but I never considered Neil an unreliable narrator?

Like the whole point of his narration is that we’re experiencing the story from his perspective, which is obviously subjective to his experience? But he never hides anything from the reader or tries to mislead us? Like if he thinks Andrew hates him, that’s genuinely what he thinks, he’s not just saying that to get us as the readers to think that or even lying to himself without cluing us in that he’s lying to himself.

How can his perspective of his own experience, which is the story we’re reading, be unreliable? Is the meaning of unreliable just ‘not omniscient’? Cause I thought there was more to it than that, like they had to be mentally ill or just flat out lying... and I did search this before posting and that’s what I’m getting from the internet, but like so many people claim Neil is an unreliable narrator, and I’m really curious where that comes from?

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk, if you have a degree in literature or just know what the fuck you’re talking about and want to clue me in, please do!

[buriedinbaltimore]

Something I’ve just seen people criticizing canon for, that I actually really like, is how characters do things that seem “out of character” for them.

For one thing, if something is written in canon my brain will usually accept it and try to make it work with the character, because like, the character just did it so... it is now “in character” for them. 

Like usually it’s just something new I learned about the character, not something that invalidates who they were before it happened? 

And the reason I love it especially in AFTG is because it’s showcasing how people are not just one set of descriptors that never change. Especially for these kids who have been labeled as useless losers before.

For example, if I have this idea of who I am and who I want to be that I work hard everyday to uphold, there are still times when I’m not working hard enough and I fail without even realizing. And I won’t realize until someone points it out or it comes back to bite me. Or I do realize right away but I don’t have the energy to fix it right away. Or my idea of who I am has changed and now my behavior changes to, but like just for an hour till I change back, or into something new again. 

Idk to me, all the characters in AFTG feel so real and complex. I don’t think I could pick and choose which actions are in character vs. out of character for any of them. 

(this is not to criticize people who see things in AFTG as out of character, or to tell them that they are wrong, it is just a different interpretation that I wanted to share)

[buriedinbaltimore]

congrats on 100 followers!!!! i'm really interested in hearing ur opinions on racism in the aftg fandom or the plot point u wont accept :)

Thank you so much!! So here is the draft about racism in the aftg fandom, 

So this is directed mostly at white people in the AFTG fandom...

Something I’ve seen around that bothers me is people saying that all the foxes (sans Nicky) being white is unrealistic because of their backgrounds. I don’t know if the comments are intended to come off this way, but I read them as people saying because the foxes are poor and traumatized they must be POC, or it is much more likely that they would be POC.

This kind of thinking feeds into harmful stereotypes, and people should try to be more aware of how they talk about it. I have seen posts where people bring this up in regards to Seth specifically, where a lot of the fandom has head-canoned him as black because of racist stereotypes, but I think it goes beyond just his character.

Looking at the overall Child Population by Race in 2018, 50% of children in America were non-hispanic white. If we look back at 2006 its 57%. Yes, there are higher rates of poverty, incarceration, and being in foster care for POC, especially BIPOC, but there is a similar number of white people living in poverty/incarcerated/in foster care as POC because there are more/an equal amount of white people in America overall.

(The reason I bring statistics into the discussion regarding poverty, incarceration, and foster care is because those are all societal issues that are affected by racism. I didn’t mention sexual abuse, physical abuse, or drug abuse because those are all issues that are universal and not worth looking up statistics on. People of color are more harshly punished and policed for using drugs, but white people use drugs just as much. Many times different forms of the same drug (e.g.crack and cocaine) are policed differently because they are used by different populations. The same is to be said of sexual and physical abuse.)

To clarify, I am specifically calling out white people who’s conceptualization of the foxes’ races is basically racialized trauma/tragedy porn, and who end up reducing the characters to a stereotype, not the people who are thoughtfully trying to add diversity and representation to the story. I am not saying that the foxes are or should be white. I am saying that maybe look harder at why you’re thinking of certain characters a certain way, especially if you are spreading your interpretation to other people in the fandom through your writing/art.

Also if you want check out this post https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/post/155450813377/stereotyped-vs-nuanced-characters-and-audience

on Stereotyped vs Nuanced Characters and Audience Perception, and the whole blog in general is really helpful.

The reason I didn’t post it initially is because I am white and I worry that people will interpret this as me saying not to think of the Foxes as people of color, but I hope the actual message is clear :)