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.
idk man not to sound like a cartoon hippie but if your entirrrrre blog and dash is about how the world sucks and everyones bigoted i think you are going to give yorself brain worms
The thing I’m learning is that the more you love, the more it can hurt you, but the more you love, the more it’s worth it.
So you can either be safe forever, or turn yourself into the kind of person who’d rather not be.
If you care about something, anything that hurts it hurts you. But if you don’t care about something, it brings you no joy. Caring is suffering, and apathy is death. The only way to survive is to protect what you love, and to love as much as you can. And who among us asked for this? Who among the living came into this knowing our options? Nobody. But we still have to choose
if you have to rely on specific scripts or turns of phrase to socialise that's totally fine, but you must NOT reveal them to your friends while slightly drunk. it's like showing how the magic trick works, you can't do it in front of them afterwards
i like dogs a lot but i can never remember the differences between breeds (apart from the few types i've actually owned/interacted with). but i know people looove their dogs and love talking about their dogs, so whenever im talking to a dog owner i'll ask what breed it is, and no matter what breed they say i'll say "oh! i've heard they have a really nice nature :D" and they always go YESSS THEY'RE GREAT and start gushing about their dog and we have a nice conversation and i build social credit with this person. anyway i told my friends about this script a few weeks ago when slightly drunk and now every time we're in public together and a dog goes past they turn to me and ask "does that one have a nice nature?" im in a hell of my own making
you can't say "hey has anyone noticed that M/M fic outnumbers F/F like 100:1” or “it feels racist that only 3/202 characters on the ao3 top 100 ships list are Black and two of them are Alastor HazbinHotel” bc some ppl will start going like “oh so you think we should FORCE people to write about things they DON’T CARE ABOUT for WOKE????” and you’ll be like “no, i’m pointing out that the conditions that created this disparity are informed by racism & misogyny” and ppl will say “it’s not BIGOTED to only care about WHITE MEN” and then the gargoyle king appears
i think people really under sell the physical side effects of mental health disorders sometimes. like sure the depression and anxiety may be 'just in your head' but when what's in your head happens to disrupts your sleep schedule and prevent you from going outside regularly and eating consistent meals and exercising and generally taking care of your body. well it sure takes its toll huh.
the phrase "but i didn't mean to!" in the context of causing harm is kind of redundant to me, because almost nobody means to cause harm. most of us just want to do the right thing. and i don't mean that in a wishy-washy "oh, we're all good deep down" way, i mean that even people who regularly do the most heinous shit imaginable will have a way of justifying it to themselves. the world is not populated by hollywood sadists and psychopaths.
actually i have been thinking about this some more and i want to add on to it:
abuse in caregiving professions (like teaching or nursing) is not solely a result of power dynamics. it's also because people who go into those professions often have a idea of themselves as Good People, and are consequently incapable of recognising or acknowledging when they've hurt someone else. instead, they mentally put 'people who have inconvenienced me' into the Bad People box so they can freely abuse them while maintaining their moral high ground.
i read ross greene a lot when i was working with "difficult" or "behaviourally challenged" children. his refrain is "kids do well if they can" - meaning, in short, that most kids act out only when the demands of a situation exceed their capabilities. punishing them for this is not only cruel but also completely pointless, because they also don't want to be doing what they are doing.
a teacher who believes that there are two categories of people - Good People who Mean Well, and Bad People who Cause Problems on Purpose - is not going to see it that way. they're gonna put themselves in the first category, and the misbehaving kid in the second category. and once they have effectively depersoned the child and placed themselves on a pedestal, the world becomes simple again. because abuse is something that only Bad People do.
So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.
Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.
The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).
The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.
But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.
partially-managed mental illness is so fucking funny i'll be sitting around doing my job and suddenly think "wow i hate myself" and immediately get confused because, like, that's not TRUE! i love myself so much. who are you to talk to me like that
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