The Hopeless Fic Writer

[sirenalpha]

I wish fandom would stop framing issues of content as policing and frame it as a matter of responsibility for content creators 

fandom isn’t some space where you can do whatever nor is it a space where you can actively disregard your fellow fans’ well being 

if you create content it’s your responsibility to be aware of what messages you’re putting out into the world and yeah you do have to deal with it if it’s damaging content 

if you create misogynistic content, it’s not policing when someone says your work is misogynistic 

if you create racist content, it’s not policing when someone says your work is racist 

and that’s just like super basic I would hope someone has learned to call that shit out shitty messages you can put into your content 

there are plenty of areas of grey and mires of shit you can get into but if you’re willing to say what you create for fandom is meaningful you have to take responsibility for whatever shit you create and step in and you need to be critical of what you do and what fandom trends you choose to be apart of 

have some respect for your work and fellow fans by not acting like someone just decided to shout at you when you stepped on their toes first 

plenty of sad and dark things are dealt with through creative content and maybe all you need to do so you don’t hurt somebody is tag

sometimes you need to realize that promoting or writing something in general is harmful to other fans and you need to not post or share your work publically

the things you create are not just fantasy things you put out on the internet and then have no affect on anyone and float about in a vacuum, they’re not fantasies if you’re sharing them as content, and they can hurt and offend others and you need to be aware of and responsible for the hurt you cause 

maybe a good rule of thumb is if you would criticize a published content creator for creating what you’re creating maybe you shouldn’t do it either

[misshoneywheeler]

Look, I get it. I do. There are things in fandom that I dislike. Things I find intensely disturbing. I get that feeling where you look at something someone’s written and just feel yucky. I do. The thing is: there is no one measure. We all use our own yardsticks for what is damaging and what is good, and yes, even what’s misogynistic or racist because there is no way to distill entire hierarchical, systemic concepts into single, individual actions or products. 

Let’s talk about what I call The Frying Pan Paradox. When Tangled first came out, some people found Rapunzel’s use of a frying pan as a weapon to be sexist, reinforcing women’s historical role. Other people found it feminist and empowering, taking an explicitly female tool used in a historically undervalued societal role and showing it to be powerful and useful. Neither of them is wrong or right, because this is not a question with an answer. This is a question with a discussion. There are a great many things that depend entirely on perspective or that read as oppressive or *ism-y more in a larger context than they do individually, and if removed from that larger context, might be unobjectionable or unremarkable. Oppression is a spectrum, with a relatively small area on the “unquestionably bad” end, and a relatively small area on the “unquestionably good” end, and a very wide, layered, complicated expanse between them. This is why we have intersectionality Female characters always being love interests: bad, right? Oh wait, except WOC are frequently relegated to background parts or niche films, so for a WOC character to be framed as worthy of love in a mainstream film is important and valuable, in a way that it isn’t for white female characters. Same with disabled female characters. Sane with fat female characters. Same with LGBT characters. And at a broader level than that, while the tendency for women to be constantly thrust into the love interest role is symptomatic of sexism and patriarchy, the answer is not removing all female love interests, because the point of art is to reflect, explore, and celebrate humanity, and women have relationships and partnerships and experience love. The single piece isn’t the whole puzzle.

So for you to say “it’s not policing when someone says your work is misogynist” or “it’s not policing when someone says your work is racist,” you’re starting from the premise that “misogynist” and “racist” are set, invariable things that no one could dispute or disagree on. You’re starting from a premise that a fanfiction, written by an individual who has been as subject to cultural conditioning as anyone reading their work, is the same thing as media created by professional entities comprised of multiple people over significant periods of time for mass consumption. You’re starting from the premise that the piece is the same as the whole puzzle, and it isn’t. And that’s not even getting in to the fact that a lot of the time, it takes only a tiny bit of scratching to dig through the cries of “Racism! Misogyny! Disgusting perversion!” to see that those objections are the thinnest veneer on good ol’ fashioned stan wank and ship warring (an easy way to tell this: when people get angry and scream about certain things in regards to one character, who just happens to be their favorite and frequently also their lust object, but couldn’t give less of a hang about those things in regards to characters they don’t care about or who aren’t part of their OTP).

Which is not to say there aren’t racist and misogynist things in fandom, because oh boy, there really are. But it’s a lot more complicated than what you’re presenting, and at a certain point we all have to accept that fandom is a microcosm that reflects society, with all the warts society has, and those warts aren’t going to be cured by the time someone updates with chapter 73 of [Halsey lyrics title here]. We are a work in progress. It’s best to get comfortable with that, otherwise we’ll all burn out real fast.

There’s also personal responsibility to speak of, which isn’t just for authors. How can fanfiction “step on someone’s toes,” as you put it, when reading fanfiction is by definition an opt-in experience? Fanfiction is not a fact of life. We inhabit a tiny cove in a great big ocean that most people don’t even know is there, let alone find their way to. If your toes are being stepped on, it’s because you put them under someone else’s foot. You are fully entitled to dislike what someone else likes. You’re entitled to think it’s weird and gross and all kinds of things. That doesn’t make you correct, and it doesn’t make it wrong for them to continue on doing what they want to do. The most anyone can ask is that things are tagged appropriately and that people are receptive to good faith discussion and criticism, particularly when posting things that will obviously have some degree of transgressiveness. And there will always be some people who will not do that, and that’s something everyone needs to find their own way of navigating, because the internet is a wild frontier, and fandom is just one Western town in the middle with a constantly rotating cast of Sheriffs and only our sketchy history of general cooperation to govern us. The only person who can fully, truly protect you is yourself. That this is unfortunate does not make it any less true.

“sometimes you need to realize that promoting or writing something in general is harmful to other fans and you need to not post or share your work publically” 

Why? If the work is posted and tagged appropriately, why? Does the presence of harmful things in the world mean those harmful things can no longer be spoken of? Where’s the line between okay-to-post and too-harmful-to-post? Who makes that determination? If there’s someone who would find value and comfort in reading said work, who are you to tell them there’s something wrong with them for that? There is literally no way to codify this that’s better than the system we have now, where people make good faith efforts to tag and warn, and we allow everyone to make their own decisions about what they consume, knowing that there’s going to be a lot of stuff out there that they don’t like and some portion of it that offends them or makes them feel gross. I do not need to be protected from someone else’s idea of “harmful.” Everyone here is old enough to make their own choices. 

Another note: stop and think for a moment what kinds of things would make “harmful” content something someone would want to write about or explore. Consider what it is about women’s history of oppression particularly in regards to sexuality that would make the sublimation of active desire into passive participation appealing (hint: it frequently stems from women’s active sexuality being framed as wrong, immoral, deviant, unladylike, slutty, abnormal, and a hundred other nasty adjectives, something that tumblr’s younger members may not remember or have experience with but its older members definitely do). Consider why someone who has been assaulted or raped might have interest in rape-play fics or fuck-or-die or what have you (hint: it may be a way of regaining control of a traumatic experience in which they had none, or a way to harness and control anxiety and fear of possible future assault). Consider why the intensity of familial relationships could be appealing to someone as a heightened version of the typical shipping urges anyone might have about two characters, and how someone with past familial abuse might find personal value in a similar relationship in which both partners actively consent as they themselves couldn’t do or even felt guilty for doing. Consider why fantasy allows someone to explore things they would never want to do or experience in real life. Consider how fiction lets us step outside ourselves and be anything we may not be in real life, whether that’s good, bad, brave, shameful, dirty, pure, adventurous, passive, depraved, or anything else. Consider that human beings have, since time immemorial, written both academically and salaciously about rape, incest, violence, trauma, and sexual taboos, and sometimes those works are lauded (Lolita), shamefully enjoyed (anything written by V.C. Andrews) or even worshiped (the Bible), but that there has literally never been a single study showing that potentially harmful fictional content increases that particular harm in reality. Consider that working out any of these issues and more via safe, personal, contained fanfiction is vastly preferable to trying to work them out in unsafe, impersonal, uncontrolled reality. If you want to be concerned about people being harmed, preventing them from exploring unsafe things in a safe space is precisely the wrong way to go about it.

Fanfiction is scratching an itch. It’s purging something dark. It’s embracing something light. It’s reveling in words or feelings, it’s testing boundaries, it’s playing. Fundamentally, at its core, fanfiction is PLAY. It is not society. It is not reality. It does not cause reality or influence reality, no matter how much hand wringing people want to do about it. The ills of society will exist whether someone writes underage Wincest sex pollen fic or not. To put equal responsibility for those ills on the shoulders of a single author writing to scratch their own itch is not just illogical, it’s unfair. After all, if people can be damaged by reading fanfic, the author could have been just as damaged from something or someone else. Suggesting that someone should be both responsible when it comes to others but immune when it comes to themselves is inconsistent and, when it’s applied so constantly and ruthlessly to women expressing and engaging in their own sexuality far more than to anyone else, it’s cruel.

[realsocialskills]

The rules about responding to call outs aren’t working

Privileged people rarely take the voices of marginalized people seriously. Social justices spaces attempt to fix this with rules about how to respond to when marginalized people tell you that you’ve done something wrong. Like most formal descriptions of social skills, the rules don’t quite match reality. This is causing some problems that I think we could fix with a more honest conversation about how to respond to criticism.

The formal social justice rules say something like this:

You should listen to marginalized people.

When a marginalized person calls you out, don’t argue.

Believe them, apologize, and don’t do it again.

When you see others doing what you were called out for doing, call them out.

Those rules are a good approximation of some things, but they don’t actually work. It is impossible to follow them literally, in part because:

Marginalized people are not a monolith. 

Marginalized people have the same range of opinions as privileged people.

When two marginalized people tell you logically incompatible things, it is impossible to act on both sets of instructions.

For instance, some women believe that abortion is a human right foundational human right for women. Some women believe that abortion is murder and an attack on women and girls.

“Listen to women” doesn’t tell you who to believe, what policy to support, or how to talk about abortion. 

For instance, some women believe that religious rules about clothing liberate women from sexual objectification, other women believe that religious rules about clothing sexually objectify women. 

“Listen to women” doesn’t tell you what to believe about modesty rules. 

Narrowing it to “listen to women of minority faiths” doesn’t help, because women disagree about this within every faith.

When “listen to marginalized people” means “adopt a particular position”, marginalized people are treated as rhetorical props rather than real people.

Objectifying marginalized people does not create justice.

Since the rule is literally impossible to follow, no one is actually succeeding at following it. What usually ends up happening when people try is that:

One opinion gets lifted up as “the position of marginalized people” 

Agreeing with that opinion is called “listen to marginalized people”

Disagreeing with that opinion is called “talking over marginalized people”

Marginalized people who disagree with that opinion are called out by privileged people for “talking over marginalized people”.

This results in a lot of fights over who is the true voice of the marginalized people.

We need an approach that is more conducive to real listening and learning.

This version of the rule also leaves us open to sabotage:

There are a lot of people who don’t want us to be able to talk to each other and build effective coalitions.

Some of them are using the language of call-outs to undermine everyone who emerges as an effective progressive leader. 

They say that they are marginalized people, and make up lies about leaders.

Or they say things that are technically true, but taken out of context in deliberately misleading ways.

The rules about shutting up and listening to marginalized people make it very difficult to contradict these lies and distortions. 

(Sometimes they really are members of the marginalized groups they claim to speak for. Sometimes they’re outright lying about who they are).

(For instance, Russian intelligence agents have used social media to pretend to be marginalized Americans and spread lies about Hillary Clinton.)

The formal rule is also easily exploited by abusive people, along these lines:

An abusive person convinces their victim that they are the voice of marginalized people.

The abuser uses the rules about “when people tell you that you’re being oppressive, don’t argue” to control the victim.

Whenever the victim tries to stand up for themself, the abuser tells the victim that they’re being oppressive.

That can be a powerfully effective way to make victims in our communities feel that they have no right to resist abuse. 

This can also prevent victims from getting support in basic ways.

Abusers can send victims into depression spirals by convincing them that everything that brings them pleasure is oppressive and immoral. 

The abuser may also isolate the victim by telling them that it would be oppressive for them to spend time with their friends and family, try to access victim services, or call the police. 

The abuser may also separate the victim from their community and natural allies by spreading baseless rumors about their supposed oppressive behavior. (Or threatening to do so).

When there are rules against questioning call outs, there are also implicit rules against taking the side of a victim when the abuser uses the language of calling out.

Rules that say some people should unconditionally defer to others are always dangerous.

The rule also lacks intersectionality:

No one experiences every form of oppression or every form of privilege.

Call-outs often involve people who are marginalized in different ways. 

Often, both sides in the conflict have a point.

For instance, black men have male privilege and white women have white privilege.

If a white woman calls a black man out for sexism and he responds by calling her out for racism (or vice versa), “listened to marginalized people” isn’t a very helpful rule because they’re both marginalized.

These conversations tend to degenerate into an argument about which form of marginalization is most significant.

This prevents people involved from actually listening to each other.

In conflicts like this, it’s often the case that both sides have a legitimate point. (In ways that are often not immediately obvious.)

We need to be able to work through these conflicts without expecting simplistic rules to resolve them in advance.

This rule also tends to prevent groups centered around one form of marginalized from coming to engage with other forms of marginalization:

For instance, in some spaces, racism and sexism are known to be issues, but ableism is not.

(This can occur in any combination. Eg: There are also spaces that get ableism and sexism but not racism, and spaces that get economic justice and racism but not antisemitism, or any number of other things.)

When disabled people raise the issue of ableism in any context (social justice or otherwise), they’re likely to be shouted down and told that it’s not important.

In social justice spaces, this shouting down is often done in the name of “listening to marginalized people”.

For instance, disabled people may be told ‘you need to listen to marginalized people and de-center your issues’, carrying the implication that ableism is less important than other forms of oppression.

(This happens to *every* marginalized group in some context or other.)

If we want real intersectional solidarity, we need to have space for ongoing conflicts that are not simple to resolve.

Tl;dr “Shut up and listen to marginalized people” isn’t quite the right rule, because it objectifies marginalized people, leaves us open to sabotage, enables abuse, and prevents us from working through conflicts in a substantive way. We need to do better by each other, and start listening for real.

[pattheflip]

Don't confuse critical thinking with dogma (or: the new progressive religion)

I spend more of my time and energy talking about politics to strangers on the Internet than I ever thought I would, and over the last few years of participating in the events and conversations around Occupy, Ferguson, GamerGate, Baltimore, and every other flashpoint in this on-going culture war, I’ve noticed a problem.

Specifically, I’ve noticed a problem with the way the left-to-far-left folks – you know, the vast and contradictory coalition known as “progressives” – engage in political discourse online (and probably in person, too, though I can’t say I’ve noticed this as much). The problem starts, I think, because we often place too much emphasis on highlighting the fucked-up things people say or do, and demand that blood and sanctions be exacted upon the person who fucked up.

This behavior has yielded plenty of thinkpieces coming from across the political spectrum indicting the modern “call-out culture”, which leaves people afraid to make mistakes publicly or say the wrong thing for fear of being pounced on by the people they thought of as allies.

Thing is, I don’t think the problem is actually the call-out itself; I think that is a powerful tool in identifying our own problematic behaviors and becoming better people.

I think that the problem isn’t calling people’s behavior out so much as the lack of intellectual humility that I have been seeing in the execution of the public call-out. I feel like many times I see someone tweet about A Horrible Thing Someone Said with a slight sense of glee lying beneath a pious veneer.

I see people accumulating political capital – typically by accumulating masses of followers and influential retweeters to build their capacity to influence online discourse – by drawing attention to shitty things that people do and say. They’re consciously performing as a Good Person On The Internet, and people follow them so that they can also feel like Good People On The Internet.

That makes me feel super weird and uncomfortable for all kinds of reasons. We end up seeing Good People On The Internet disagree, and the conversations end up polarizing between two camps united behind personalities, not critical analysis. People aren’t arguing about whether X message or Y action was racist or sexist, they’re arguing about whether they think Person A is a better human being than Person B.

It’s demagoguery, not critical thinking, and it leads us to start reducing political ideologies down to factions and figureheads. What’s worse, we often end up reproducing the same damn privilege structures we’re fighting against in our own movements, as the influence and political capital ends up going to privileged allies who get to feel like they’re The Good People. (Just think about how much attention and fawning white dudes get for tweeting about social justice-y stuff.)

Hopefully if you’ve read this far, you should start feeling a little bit prickly. You’ve probably engaged in some of the same public performance of Good Personhood, or blindly retweeted an opinion by a known Good Guy just so you can make sure everyone knows you’re On The Level, or something like that. Good! That’s exactly how you should be feeling.

Learning to be good people

I originally titled this essay “The New Progressive Religion” because, from my outsider’s perspective of religion I see some parallels that might better help explain the issues I’m talking about.

I grew up in the Bay Area – born in San Francisco, moved to Oakland when I was about 14. I wasn’t brought up to be very religious, though my family on both sides were Catholic. I never quite understood what grown people got out of practicing religion as a kid, but as an adult, though, I think I get it: I want to be with people who have similar ideas about what it means to be a good person (and to be good people to each other) as I do, so if I can find an ideology that accurately captures this, all I need to do is find people who share that ideology and I’m set.

Both religion and politics are trying to answer an old question – “How can we be good people to each other?” – typically by laying out a system of ethics and then prescribing behaviors and rules based on those ethics. Organized religion tries to answer this question with texts that we use to parse a divine being’s will; intersectional feminism tries to answer the question by analyzing how our individual relationships to other people are mediated by power we wield over each other but don’t fully understand.

Now, when you start incorporating ideological teachings into the way you live your life, there isn’t really a lossless copying method. There is no perfect follower of Christ, just as there is no perfect feminist; practicing either is a constant process of study to figure out how to interpret ideology into action, and then learning from the results of the action to better clarify or refine the source ideology.

So, with religious folks, you get some people who put a whole lot of work in studying and analyzing, and you get some people who go to Church once a week and listen to the teachings because that’s what everyone in your city does. In my experience, the people who put more work into studying their religion are the ones that tend to be the most accepting and open-minded and are pretty good at Being Good People, while the people who treat the learning process as one-way end up holding a set of rules as sacred even when doing so seems contrary to the end goal of Being Good People.

This is what I’ve been seeing in progressive spaces: There are people who study and critically interrogate their practice of their ideologies, and there are people who treat Progressive Social Justice Politics Stuff as a dogmatic set of behaviors and attitudes and use their adherence to and others’ deviance from to define themselves as Good People.

Which is ridiculous, because the experiences and ideologies at the core of that Progressive Social Justice Politics Stuff are constantly being challenged, iterated on, and added to, so the idea that anyone could be dogmatic about it seems kind of bizarre.

The need for intellectual humility

I never felt a strong need for religion in my life. I think this is because when I was in college, I started being actively involved in my campus Asian American community, working in both social and political organizations, and cultivating my knowledge of intersectional feminism through study and practice. It was kind of funny, actually – I majored in Philosophy and generally felt like all the ethics stuff we studied was more of a logician’s circlejerk, while the electives I took in the Asian American Studies department were directly relevant to giving me the tools I needed to start trying to make sense of the world and How To Be A Good Person.

One of the side effects of studying this kind of thing in school is that our professors did a great job impressing upon us that this field of knowledge is incomplete. The words and theoretical frameworks they gave us so that we could begin to describe the experiences we shared but couldn’t name were still works in progress. The academic roots of ethnic studies, like any other political theory or philosophy work, came from intelligent people finding ways to understand the people around them. We were just testing the waters. We read selections of the core texts, but never the full texts, or perhaps never all the texts. Not that you need to find this in school, mind you – but for a guy like me who is prone to thinking he is smarter than he actually is, it sure fucking helped.

This inculcated in us a certain kind of ideological humility. When you see thinkpieces explaining why X action is actually kind of racist, the part that explains why it’s racist isn’t handed down from a monk on a mountain; it’s the intellectual outcome of applying a theory of power that helps us understand how we can unintentionally hurt or suppress each other. This theory is constantly being challenged, iterated, and refined as people continue to build this body of knowledge based on contributing their experiences and understandings to the pile. Being Good is not a solved problem.

So we continue to study, and we continue to practice our politics expecting these theories to change – expecting someone smarter than us to come by and explain to us that we’re wrong, that we missed something.

And when it comes to applying the knowledge we have of How To Be Good People to criticize each others’ behavior, we should strive to do so knowing that our understanding is imperfect and we are seeking to improve upon it, not to draw battle lines between mini-celebrities or jockey for social and political position.

Here’s the thing, though: I arrived at my current political beliefs by taking a bunch of really great college classes with a bunch of really great (and endlessly patient) professors, and then taking than knowledge and working through it in daily life with my friends, family, and loved ones. It’s a painful process, and near as I can tell, it never stops.

And when I see people tweeting up a storm about some fucked up shit, it sometimes comes off as though that speech isn’t coming from an ideological base that is carefully cultivated, but from a set of internalized rules. Kind of like the guy in your local health and fitness forum who spouts off all the “right” advice for lifting and dietary regime but couldn’t actually tell you how it works (and where it might not).

People go to school specifically to study this kind of thing!

People who haven’t even been born yet are going to go to school for this shit, and write some amazing books that will make everything we know about being Good People look as hopelessly barbaric as slavery does now!

Some people don’t really have to go to school for this shit because they live it every day!

We’re all complicit in interlocking systems of oppression that ruthlessly fuck over our fellow human beings and we’ll probably never in our lifetime manage to be even net-neutral in terms of our impact on other people!

Forget being a Good Person – the best we can hope for is probably “Less Shitty People Than Everyone Around Us”!

None of the above factors should stop anyone’s desire to be a Good Person in the slightest – but it should put our own efforts to do work on ourselves in perspective, I think. Especially when we choose to take on the responsibility of pointing out how someone else could be a Good Person.

Asking people to change their lives super hard and we should treat it as such

I think that one of the hardest things to do as a person is tell someone that you know how to live their life better than they do. It’s a pretty bold assertion, and we shouldn’t do it lightly! But it’s kind of what we’re doing in a call-out.

When we call out shitty behavior, we are trying to communicate that a certain action caused injury: Hey, you said this thing and it was pretty hurtful for Reasons, and if you are trying to be a Good Person, I think it would be a good idea to make amends and not do this thing again.

But it’s very easy for that call-out to become something sinister: Hey, you said this thing and it was pretty hurtful for Reasons, and I want people to know that I am a Good Person and you are a Not Good Person.

One comes from a place of desire for mutual improvement; the other comes from a desire for personal validation at another’s expense. One is productive; the other is not.

What’s more, I don’t actually think it’s easy to tell in the moment how much of a call-out is motivated by selfish vs. selfless reasons. These are a few questions that I often ask myself, though, and they might help you as well:

Are you publicly broadcasting your call-out because you want the attention, or because you feel like your call-out’s success depends on others’ signal boosting?

Are you privately communicating your call-out because you think it’ll be more helpful for the recipient, or because you want them to save face?

Are you using your voice instead of amplifying others’ because you want the spotlight, or because you want to put yourself on the line as a visible supporter?

Are you signal boosting someone else because you want to amplify marginalized voices, or because you don’t want to stick your own neck out?

Are you being witty because you want your hot take to be the one that wins Twitter, or because you feel like your wit serves to better illustrate the damage done?

Are you as vocal in sharing the good as you are in calling attention to the bad?

Are you holding strangers on the Internet to higher standards of behavior as you do your friends?

If you have your own suggestions on ways to keep yourself honest, I’d sure as hell love to hear ‘em.

Be excellent to each other

I know there are some people reading this thinking, “Patrick, you jerk, you just wrote this thing so people will think you’re a Good Person. You’re performing Good Person just like everyone else.”

I can see why you would think that way! I used to be much more invested in the idea of appearing like a Good Person than actually behaving as such; it’s a thing I am still working on.

Believe me: I don’t like getting in Twitter fights with people because I think it’s super hard to actually change people’s opinions most of the time, and so it just becomes mutual public grandstanding in order to appeal to and broaden your follower base. I don’t think my opinions are anything special, and I wish people would pay attention to me for the neat stuff I would like to someday make or the stupid jokes I write on Twitter, not this post. And when I do call something out, I have a sinking feeling of dread in my stomach as it starts to spread around the Internet, because I know that there are lots of people out there smarter than I am about this stuff. If you see me grandstanding, tell me.

Let’s stay humble, be excellent to each other, and…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0uVwVUVsbY

…you know the rest.

–patrick miller

[zerrehmael]

As more and more people from non-Western nations and cultures gain internet access, it is also an increasing point that the person who said X might be from a totally different place, religion and/or culture. When you 'call out' someone, are you asking them to see things from the perspective of a culture that is entirely different to theirs? Must an Korean boy and Egyptian woman be called out for not knowing Western Feminist/Queer/Pagan/African American history and pain? Are they deserving of hysterical flames and death threats because their lives resulted in different perspectives and blind-spots and they dont immediately prostrate themselves in apology?

I remember when my angry feminism collided with women whose experience was different to mine. Different country, values, religion, culture, experience. It was a valuable lesson in humility. In assuming they understood my world and my anger was relatable to them, I was ignoring the need for a shared context. I was priviledging my experience, pain and battles above what was important to them... and when I looked at myself, I found that was not the kind of person I wanted to be.

Its easy to jump to the call out, harder to stop and look at that person's context. Sometimes the call out is still an appropriate response, but the more diverse the online world gets, the more important it becames to look before leaping to condemnation.

[ruletogether]

“But why do you ship a hero with the villain??! Its so problema-“

“For the angst Karen. I need some drama before they fuck. It aint that deep.“

[zerrehmael]

Some ships are for the smoochy fluff.

Some ships are for the glorious curtain fic.

Some ships are for the star-crossed soulmates.

Some ships are for the angst and hate-sex.

[fagdyk]

Shuri being able to cure Bucky of his Hydra mind control is official proof she is smarter than Tony Stark

[zerrehmael]

Who made Tony into a psychologist with extensive indepth knowlege of brainwashing, mental trauma and deprogramming? Lots of people would have a better chance of fixing Barne's mind than Tony Stark!

I mean, Shuri is definitely smarter, but being able to do the above is hardly proof. If anything, it is the weirdest acheivement marvel has given her. Isnt she supposed to be a tech/science person? Why would she be spending time on psych stuff that isn't even going to benefit Wakanda? She can do far more cool stuff than that!

[zerrehmael]

My 10 Steps to Writing Fanfic…

1) Get an idea. (Source: rewatching canon, fic I like, fic that has annoyed me, fic that has made me mad, fic that has made me cry, looking in the fridge, reading meta, being stuck in traffic, my crazy subconscious)

2) Have my brain pounce on idea and scream “OOOH SHINY!”

3) Daydream about idea because my brain is still stuck on “OOOH SHINY!”

4) Sit in front of computer and squeeze out rambling bits of prose and plot and one-liners and typos.

6) Try to work on a proper Work-In-Progress.

7) Get distracted by Necessary Research for SHINY on the interwebs.

8) Nearly screw up something because my brain will not let go of SHINY.

9) Stay up until 3am to hack words from step 4 into something vaguely coherent.

10) Put up an insomnia-post it to see if anyone else liked SHINY or shove it in an electronic drawer to keep company with other raggedy scraps.

[mosellegreen]

Young children’s sense of self is similar to that of older kids and adults, a team of psychology researchers has found. The results show that our ability to reason about our self-worth as individuals develops early in life, but also suggest that failure can instill discouragement sooner than previously thought.

“Young children’s self-concepts are not qualitatively different from those of older children and adults,” explains Andrei Cimpian, an associate professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology and the study’s senior author. “Young children can think of themselves as possessing abstract traits and abilities, and they can also reason about their self-worth, which has implications for self-esteem.

"However, this level of maturity in reasoning about the self also means that young children can become dispirited in the face of failure and are not the undaunted optimists that previous theories have described. In light of this new work, we need to think carefully about, and investigate, ways of supporting young children’s motivation and engagement with important – but often difficult – activities such as school.”

[zerrehmael]

Two of my daughters are identical twins. They (both) regularly struggle with seeing themselves as failures for not accomplishing something their twin has, however trivial and this has been going on since they could talk. 'Undaunted Optimist' is a personality trait, not an age group.

[mosellegreen]

Dammit. I just realized, thanks to a comment someone left on one of my fics, the real reason Odin didn’t murder Loki at the beginning of TDW.

It wasn’t because Frigga nagged him out of it.

It was so that when Thanos showed up, Odin could offer to hand Loki over to be tortured and killed in hopes of placating him.

I hate it when I figure out new things about these damn movies.

[zerrehmael]

... which leads to the possibility that Odin knew Loki wasn’t dead and was being tortured but didn’t care. Could even spin that into Thor knew he wasn’t dead well before he showed up on Midgard, hence Thor’s lack of surprise about Loki’s survival and focus on just getting the glowy cube toy.

[zerrehmael]

Little Princess Thor

I barely noticed this particular moment in Thor, because it really was a blink-and-forget moment given how it was followed by a big ass fight scene.

But I was reminded of it and it started nagging at me. Because really? The insult worthy of starting a fight that nearly gets you and your friends and brother killed, could cause a war and leaves lots of otherwise minding-their-own-business jotnar DEAD... is being called a girl.

How delightfully nauseating.

[zerrehmael]

Barton’s Target Practice

Snippet of fic set post Ultron, Loki is hanging around the Avengers in kitty-shape, sans most of his magic. Clint is indulging in target practice. It’s therapeutic.Not quite a traditional drabble (100 words) but close.

He knew the moment the arrow left his bow that his shot was perfect. It would nail that kitty-cat tail to the wall, interrupt that mocking arrogance and… the arrow hit the wall exactly where it should but the kitty flickered and vanished.

Another illusion.

The sleek black kitty ‘reappeared’ and Clint nailed it with another arrow. Again, it flicked into nothing before reappearing and taking off: a high speed, moving target and a worthy challenge. By the time Clint had used up all his on-hand supply of arrows, he’d ‘killed’ Loki a satisfying number of times.

After all, if he had to put up with the bastard hanging around the compound, he might as well make proper use of him.

[zerrehmael]

Barton & Natasha = Abandoned Satellites

So, having enjoyed the characters as shown in IM2 and Avengers 2012, what the hell happened to them to get to where they were at the end of CA:CW?

... thinking ... thinking ...

Well, they lost Coulson. Then SHIELD. So they lost the person and then organisation that had kept them in line. When I consider them and their personal backgrounds, there is no way they could be considered independently mentally healthy. So to keep them as useful agents, I'm guessing their handler (who I believe was Coulson?) was a major factor in keeping them stable. Like a satellite in orbit; once in place, only tiny nudges are needed to keep it on course. But what happens if those little corrections cease? Well, the satellite will appear ok at first. But its orbit will inevitably start to decay. And eventually, it'll crash and burn.

Just like Barton and Natasha's characters did.

[zerrehmael]

Kitty Loki Ultron fix-it

Y’know how Loki has lots of abilities that were totally missing in Avengers? Including the ability to shapeshift?

Well... some fics suggest the sceptre has something to do with this. And Kitty Loki is cute, and I do think Loki would appreciate Tony’s smarts and be a little sensitive to unjust accusations, especially from Thor. Hence this ficlet.

Maybe I’ll  clean it up and extend it and make something of it one day, but I really don’t know when. It’s that scene where Thor grabs Tony in their upset over Ultron’s existance.

Loki did not like the sight of Tony being half strangled. Four legs have an advantage over two – one of the few benefits of this shape – and he hurled himself at Thor in a black streak of yowling fury.

Sharp claws and teeth make fine built-in weapons and Loki took vengeful pleasure in scratching every piece of Thor he could reach. Which, since he knew exactly how Thor’s armor was constructed, was a lot. Naturally, Thor dropped Tony and at the pained yelp when Tony landed on the floor, Loki applied one last swipe and jumped down to Tony’s lap.

Thor staggered back, his hands plastered to his bloody mess of a face and stared at the pint-sized and green-eyed black kitty standing atop the dazed genius. Even with it’s fur puffed out, its tail bristling and a hiss-yowl bigger than Tony’s ego, it was a ridiculously small thing. A mighty Asgard warrior like himself should not be so intimidated. Should he?

“What the hell?”

“Thor!”

“Is that a cat?”

“Tony when did you get a cat?”

“I didn’t!” Tony’s yell broke through the sudden babble. “It just showed up.” At this point, the creature ceased hissing and hopped off him. “At the door, yesterday. DUM-E liked it. JARVIS -” his voice cracked “- JARVIS said he would look for it’s owner. I don’t -”

“Tony,” Bruce interrupted gently. “Look.”

Having finally diverted the idiots from blaming Tony, Loki had made his way to one of the screens and activated a holographic keyboard to tap out a message.

TONY != ULTRON.

HYDRA + EVIL SCEPTRE + DUMB BLOND’S HAMMER = ULTRON.

Amidst the new babble as everyone thought aloud, Thor lowered his hands. The scratches, while still tender, were already half healed and there was something tugging in the back of his mind. A very old memory in fact. Black fur. Green eyes. “Loki?”

Loki pinned his brother with one of his most exasperated glares. Being in cat was no hindrance to that.

FORBIDDEN TO DIE. SCEPTRE STEALS MAGIC.

“That cat is Loki?”

SHAPESHIFT MAGIC STOLEN. AM STUCK.

[zerrehmael]

Tony, Bucky, FicFragment

This is not a fic. This is... just... I don’t know, the result of spending too much time over Christmas with family, one of whom decided to poke the bear in the form of bad mouthing Cap in CA:CW to a Team!Cap cousin and you know, last year I would have totally ignored it because I wouldn’t have understood a word but this year, I know too much.

I haven’t seen the Cap movies in full yet, but I did find myself keeping company with someone who wanted to watch IM, IM2 and IM3 in one day. Which was cool, because hey, Tony is, well, Tony.

So what is this? I guess it is a scene from a fic that I am not sure I will ever actually write, about how they could get from that awful awful place where CW ended to somewhere they could conceivably work together to save the world. Note, I don’t believe they could be friends again. 

More explanation plus the fic-fragment under the cut.

At this point, this scene is several years after CW. Bucky has been defrosted and deprogrammed and is basically in a probation/rehab state, working with an EU based team. You could say he’s working on the red in his ledger except that he knows it can never be wiped out, but it’s still better to try than not because underneath, he is a good person and he can’t live with himself not trying. Ironman is mostly retired, kinda? He’s had a long road to recovery from the events in Siberia and he isn’t, can’t be what he was before. He still steps up when he’s needed but he spends more time mentoring the next generation than actively heroing.

So supers were needed, they went in, had a battle, they’re mostly done when Tony and Bucky have to be in the same place for the first time since Siberia.

Tony worked as fast as he could but the chomping-drone-bot-thing that had latched onto his leg had had really nasty teeth. Ten minutes to restore the suit’s flight capability… maybe…

“Ironman, I’ve only got one option to watch your back on the ground. Everyone else is too far away.”

“I got it, I got it.” Tony muttered. “Who…” The word died on his lips as James Buchanan Barnes appeared silently.

Barnes held Tony’s gaze only for a moment before openly turning his attention towards their surroundings. The dark trees, mists, ancient ruins, rocks and moss of this barely inhabited Scottish island held innumerable places for the football-sized hostiles to hide.

“Sorry, Tony. I know we’re down to cleanup mode but I’m not about to face the music if you, not just Ironman, get your ass bitten.”

“You’re so motivated.” Tony bent his attention back to the problem of fixing the damage and did not look up for precisely four minutes and forty-two seconds, which was the moment Barnes fired his gun. He tracked the falling drone, observed it’s status (dead, not playing possum) and calculated it’s trajectory. It should slide all the way to his… “Damn.” One stray chunk of 9th century masonry and the drone went skittering off towards a muddy puddle.

He could ask Barnes to fetch it.

Tony put down his tools and went and got it himself.

*** THUNK ***

Tony studied the effects of his dead-drone-hammer and whacked the recalcitrant suit-section again. Satisfied with the result, he noted the drone showed no dents; he’d have to take one home to tinker with.

Another minute and he carefully lifted his hands away. The STEG (Strictly Temporary Emergency Glue) he’d just applied to the wires would take 69 seconds to set. Then he just had to reassemble the directional control segments and he’d be able to get out of here.

64 more seconds to go.

He scanned for any more drones nearby.

58 seconds to go.

He considered how to avoid a similar attack grounding him in the future.

46 seconds to go.

He counted the trees.

45 seconds to go.

Barnes walked between him and the trees.

Tony did not want to look at Barnes’ face but he couldn’t quite not look at his left arm. Tech always caught his attention, no matter how short the time he needed to mentally dissect it, improve it, rebuild it. The arm was a far cruder prosthesis than the one Tony had destroyed. At it’s best, it would have an exceedingly limited range of movement and the simple grab-claw was no substitute for a hand. Tony flicked through a list of problems, it’s lack of use in a fight, the difficulties (or not) of upgrades and the near infinite improvement to be gained if it was just tossed away and a new one built from scratch.

43 seconds to go.

“That’s a pretty basic arm there.” Tony wished the words unsaid a moment later as the other man shot him a startled glance. He didn’t want to talk with Barnes. Ever.

Bucky did not expect anything from Tony Stark. When he’d found out IronMan was they only option for critically needed air support on this op, he’d asked his leader if he should sit this one out. But no; they were already down three (including their regular fliers) and Bucky was needed. When he’d been ordered to locate and defend while Tony made emergency repairs to his suit, he had done his best not to intrude. A conversation hadn’t crossed his mind. “It suffices,” Bucky answered after a little consideration.

32 seconds to go.

“It can’t even hold a gun.” Why was he talking? Well, the alternative was watching STEG dry. “There isn’t enough power in those servos to knock over a wet noodle.”

Silence.

21 seconds to go.

Watching STEG dry it was.

7 seconds to go.

“It suffices,” Bucky repeated softly. “It’s enough help to do up buttons, hold a fork.” He spared another glance at Tony, one filled with wary, weary stoicism. “The rest of me… it’s all been used… this arm… it hasn’t killed anyone.”

0 seconds to go.

Tony gave the STEG one more second for safety then slapped the connectors back into place. He didn’t need to think about what he was doing as he reconstructed a working microjet from salvaged piranha-drone chew-toys and scavenged components from the other leg. He was reducing the redundancies and cutting the safety margins much closer than he preferred but it would suffice until he got out of here.

I cannot ship those two but there is something about their tragically connected histories that makes me want to explore how they could contribute to the other finding peace with what happened. If they can find peace that is.

Maybe I’ll manage to write some of the other scenes that are lucking in the shadows on my mind for this particular fic, about where all of TeamCap ended up and just how much they are enjoying themselves. /sarcasm.

[zerrehmael]

Random musing on my first watch of Thor 2011

2011 wasn’t a good year for me, for a whole range of reasons, but it dropped my usually lowish interest in movies down to near zero. So the very existence of Thor never impinged on my world.

Of course, I have been involved in fandom since the 90s. I’ve dipped into those waters for a range of canons - Star Trek, Blakes7, Wheel of Time, Dragonriders of Pern, Jane Austen, Stargate and others that have been lost in the mists of time. So, when I wandered back to my Wheel of Time love in recent months, I idly noticed quite a few people who had interesting WoT stuff also had stuff about Thor (and Loki!) ... and damn but those two are pretty.

So I found myself with a couple of theoretically free hours and sat down to be entertained. And hey, it was fun!

But while I liked Thor and enjoyed watching him, it was Loki who took the movie from light entertainment to a wow. Because Loki (aside from the pretty) kept me guessing as to his plans and motives from start to end. He wasn’t the bad guy or the good guy but danced on the line between them. Thor was a standard Hero really, a type that is fairly easily found in media of all kinds. Loki, the trickster, is another archetype of course, but modern stories usually treat the Trickster with a heavy hand or ultimately can’t bear to let someone stay outside the GoodGuys|BadGuys binary.

But Loki.... kept on skipping over the line in both directions. And that is fascinating, much more than any standard Hero.

Of course, I have long had a fatal attraction for the non-heros. Avon in Blakes7. The Crawfords of Mansfield Park. The Tok’ra in Stargate. Mazrim Taim in Wheel of Time. All anti-heros in a way, all examples of people or characters who could be Heros but are fundamentally hamstrung by personality/backstory/plot needs. And the collision of potential with (story) reality offers complexities that just don’t exist in the GoodGuy|BadGuy binary.

... on the other hand, damn but I could watch Thor and Loki way more than I have time for. So much pretty!

[zerrehmael]

The Black Tower: Day 4

More Taim. And Flinn and Grady. It’s only a snippet though, sort of a bridging bit. 

Compared to transforming a ragged bunch of farmers, glory-dazzled boys and disillusioned soldiers into the army that had brought Davram Bashere to his knees, creating order out of the chaos of Al’Thor’s would-be saidin wielders was not a challenge in and of itself. Flinn, as a former guardsman, needed only the slightest nudge to take up the role of sergeant and the military experience Taim shared was enough to give them common ground. The domestic reins were taken up by Mistress Grady – not that she waited for Taim’s permission and not that he was fool enough to battle her for it.

Taim watched. The original five men had become nine, all wanting to channel, all sitting with their eyes shut as they – hopefully – went through the mental exercises that would bring them to the state of mind where they would sense the true source. The memory of last time he’d been in this position tugged insistently on his thoughts: just one man, or boy really, weeks of guidance that left Taim wondering what he was doing wrong until finally, his student sensed saidin. More weeks of repetition, of fumbling and frustrations before Rhashen finally seized the power. The memory shattered when he felt someone suddenly awash with saidin. Taim was at his side in a moment, a hand on the other man’s shoulder to steady him as he now told Grady how to release the power and repeated the simple instructions until Grady managed to follow them.

It was a fraught moment.

“Oh Light,” Grady whispered, his face pale and tinged with green. “The taint...” Horror and nausea warred with reverent bliss and bone-deep craving in his voice as he shuddered.

Once touched, the power would never release it’s hold on a man’s soul. Taim had gone nearly seven months without it and he’d long since determined he would rather die. “You get used to it,” he said curtly. “Go; get your chores done and report back to me by the time I’ve finished with the rest of this class.” Before Grady had reached the door, Taim had already turned a glare back to the remaining eight. “Do you have permission to let your wits wander? Focus!”

Three days. Taim would have scorned anyone who said anything would happen so fast.

[elan-morin-tedronai]

Hi. I'm trying to construct a timeline of Taim's life before he shows up in Caemlyn, and I was wondering about his capture by the Aes Sedai. I had thought it happened at the time of the Falme incident (end of tGH) but checking Steven's timeline at stevenac wotchron tells me it is _199_ days between Falme and the Amyrlin getting news of his escape. Then it is another _142_ days before he shows up in Caemlyn. Thoughts?

Hi!

First of all yes, Taim’s capture happened when Rand formally declared himself the Dragon Reborn in the sky above Falme. That’s when the Pattern went “we have a winner here! no more need for false Dragons!”

I’m not sure if I’m reading you right here, because the timing of the Amyrlin getting word of his escape doesn’t actually contradict the timing of his capture at all.

We don’t know how long he was held captive by the Aes Sedai, because we don’t know how fast the word of his escape travelled back to Tar Valon, but we know the escort was still in Saldaea when it happened so we can make more or less educated guesses based on travel times and such. I assume the escort would have moved fairly slowly, at least if he was being carried in a massive wagon like Logain, whereas on his own he could have made a fairly good time if he managed to steal fresh horses at regular intervals. 

Note that the 142 days is not Taim’s travel time from where he escaped, to Caemlyn; he’d already have been travelling hell-for-leather for however long it would have taken for the word to reach Tar Valon.

I’m afraid I can’t get more precise than this, but if any of my followers feel like chipping in, feel free~

[zerrehmael]

From The Shadow Rising, chapter 17: (Siuan has just gotten a couple of pidgeon messages)

Leane ... "Mazrim Taim has escaped." "Light!" Siuan barked. "How?" "This only says he was taken away by stealth in the night, Mother. Two sisters aer dead." "The Light illumine their souls. But we've little time to mourn the dead while the likes of Taim are alive and ungentled. Where, Leane?" "Denhuir, Mother. A village east of the Black Hills on the Maradon Road, above the headwaters of the Antaeo and the Luan."

... That doesn’t sound like he was still in Saldaea when he escaped? Also, given Siuan got the news by pidgeon, I assume it can’t have been very long after the event.  

I rechecked Fires of Heaven when Bashere arrives and he only says the White Tower allowed Taim to escape and Bashere had been dispatched to hunt him down. It is inconclusive as to where Taim escaped from.

Looking at those day numbers, they feel like strangely long stretches of time to me, but I struggle to to grasp travel times in Randland. 

[zerrehmael]

The Black Tower: Day 1

Just a little bit of Taim after Rand dumps him at the farm. 

Taim stood silently as the Lord Dragon stepped through his gateway with his Aiel and it snapped shut behind him. He had imagined so many scenarios for that first meeting with Al’Thor and none had come anywhere near reality. But… he was free. Free from Aes Sedai, free from Bashere’s pursuit. It was an improvement, he supposed. Walking slowly back to the wary group of men and boys who had yet to be tested, Taim pushed away his frustration and surveyed them thoughtfully until his gaze fell back onto Damer Flinn - the first student. “You,” he said shortly. “I will need a study, or at least, a room with a desk and writing supplies. Arrange it while I test the others.”

Dismissing Flinn from his thoughts as the man bowed his head and headed for the farmhouse, he turned to the uneasy, would-be channellers. It took longer than he liked to test all of them but he found four more potential learners. None would be as strong as Flinn but none would be hopeless either. The failures he dismissed, ordering them to pack and be gone before sunset.

He studied the little group, watching them shift their feet and look anywhere but at him as the silence stretched out. They would learn. “Come,” he said at last, and led them towards the house.

Flinn met him at the door and pointed him to a small room off the narrow entrance hall. “It’s small, m’lord, but I’ve made sure there’s paper, ink and pens.”

“Did the Lord Dragon leave any records, instructions, notes – anything?” Taim inquired. On receiving a negative answer, he could not say he was surprised. But he was not impressed. Settling into his new study, he spoke to each new student individually, recording their names and a handful of other details. Unsurprisingly, none gave a name of anyone to be notified in the event of his death, although two had dependants with them, a wife and son in one case and a younger sister in the other. Tucking the notes into a folder, he slipped it into a drawer and warded both folder and drawer.

Questions crowded his thoughts, both the unanswerable – anything to do with Al’Thor – and the more mundane practicalities of this task Al’Thor had dropped on his shoulders. Taim sat for some minutes with his gaze on the empty space between him and the closed door, sorting through the latter. With a grimace, he finally took some more paper and made more notes. Shelter, clothing, food – what resources did they have to obtain all that? To expand if – when! - more students arrived? What was their water source?

Taim saw many ways to fail at this. He would not fail.