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...but am too tired/cowardly to admit to on Tumblr right now:
(Cut for social-justice discourse that I think could do with a bit more nuance, mention of pedophilia)
1. Pedophiles get off on depictions of adults having sex with children or adolescents. That fic in which there’s a relationship between a 28-year-old and a 40-year-old; or two 25-year-olds but they were teenagers in the original series and this is set eight years later after they’ve been to college; or two adults who’ve known each other since childhood because they grew up in a small town, is not a clever ploy by a perverted author to sneak kiddie porn past you by (checks notes) not actually writing scenes involving kids.
And even if some reader somewhere is drooling at the idea that “aha, but these characters were kids at one time,” they could be thinking the same thing about any characters. There's really nothing you can do about other people's headcanons.
2. “The Thermian Defence” is worth countering, but I’m unsure if this scales to every aspect of a story, such as character death. To me it still feels different for a character to actively die in battle, or sacrifice their life for a good cause** than it would if the same character was taken unawares and murdered by the villains, even though in all cases, yes, it’s the author who’s killed the character off.
3. People who’ve figured out they’re oppressed workers and not temporarily-embarrassed millionaires, but are posting takes like “if you can afford to live in a two-story house, you don’t deserve the COVID vaccine” are doing the lefty version of “cut all welfare programs because some people on assistance have phones and are therefore faking their poverty.”
Like, yeah, if someone owns their own home they should realize that they’re privileged on that axis, but this is still people fighting their neighbours over a single cookie while the billionaires look on in amusement and munch on the rest of the box. Also housing costs can vary depending on geographical area. Also I want everybody who can physically tolerate the vaccine to get it, because THAT’S HOW YOU GET FREAKIN’ HERD IMMUNITY.
In other news, I may need to stay off Tumblr for a few days, even if I’m probably overestimating how many mutuals I have and how many would consider the above fightin’ words.
*The Thermian Defence (named for the alien race in Galaxy Quest whose ship contains some unnecessary dramatic-devices-turned-physical-devices because they were in the fictional show that inspired their technology) goes “It’s not sexist that the heroine wears skimpy clothes all the time, she has solar-energy superpowers and needs to expose as much skin as possible.” It has an obvious counterpoint of “Yeah, but the author could have given her equally-cool superpowers that didn’t require nudity.”
**Obviously there are issues within this too: the difference between self-sacrifice by an able-bodied character vs. the same by a disabled one; or whether a repentant villain who dies trying to undo their actions was allowed to take the easy way out by doing so, etc.
(Cut for social-justice discourse that I think could do with a bit more nuance, mention of pedophilia)
1. Pedophiles get off on depictions of adults having sex with children or adolescents. That fic in which there’s a relationship between a 28-year-old and a 40-year-old; or two 25-year-olds but they were teenagers in the original series and this is set eight years later after they’ve been to college; or two adults who’ve known each other since childhood because they grew up in a small town, is not a clever ploy by a perverted author to sneak kiddie porn past you by (checks notes) not actually writing scenes involving kids.
And even if some reader somewhere is drooling at the idea that “aha, but these characters were kids at one time,” they could be thinking the same thing about any characters. There's really nothing you can do about other people's headcanons.
2. “The Thermian Defence” is worth countering, but I’m unsure if this scales to every aspect of a story, such as character death. To me it still feels different for a character to actively die in battle, or sacrifice their life for a good cause** than it would if the same character was taken unawares and murdered by the villains, even though in all cases, yes, it’s the author who’s killed the character off.
3. People who’ve figured out they’re oppressed workers and not temporarily-embarrassed millionaires, but are posting takes like “if you can afford to live in a two-story house, you don’t deserve the COVID vaccine” are doing the lefty version of “cut all welfare programs because some people on assistance have phones and are therefore faking their poverty.”
Like, yeah, if someone owns their own home they should realize that they’re privileged on that axis, but this is still people fighting their neighbours over a single cookie while the billionaires look on in amusement and munch on the rest of the box. Also housing costs can vary depending on geographical area. Also I want everybody who can physically tolerate the vaccine to get it, because THAT’S HOW YOU GET FREAKIN’ HERD IMMUNITY.
In other news, I may need to stay off Tumblr for a few days, even if I’m probably overestimating how many mutuals I have and how many would consider the above fightin’ words.
*The Thermian Defence (named for the alien race in Galaxy Quest whose ship contains some unnecessary dramatic-devices-turned-physical-devices because they were in the fictional show that inspired their technology) goes “It’s not sexist that the heroine wears skimpy clothes all the time, she has solar-energy superpowers and needs to expose as much skin as possible.” It has an obvious counterpoint of “Yeah, but the author could have given her equally-cool superpowers that didn’t require nudity.”
**Obviously there are issues within this too: the difference between self-sacrifice by an able-bodied character vs. the same by a disabled one; or whether a repentant villain who dies trying to undo their actions was allowed to take the easy way out by doing so, etc.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-18 11:48 pm (UTC)From:1. I have seen this argument tried even in non-fannish contexts (it blew up around the age difference in Call Me by Your Name (2017) because the younger of the two lovers was seventeen and the older one was twenty-four and obviously this was GLORIFYING PEDOPHILIA and GAY MEN BEING PEDOPHILES and BAD REPRESENTATION BY THE STRAIGHTS and I wanted to set it on fire, not least because considering James Ivory one of THE STRAIGHTS means you are an idiot) and it continues to look like bad-faith definition creep to me.
2. I tend to see this argument invoked as part of the idea that no marginalized characters should die in a narrative ever, which as a person on a couple of marginalized axes myself I do not agree with. The amount of narrative contrivance is a major factor in my reaction; another is how much it feels like the character/s in question is/are being singled out. My go-to example in these discussions has become Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire, in which any number of queer characters die, but since the cast is wall-to-wall queer to begin with, it does not feel like burying gays but rather the statistically unavoidable consequence of existing in an eternally warring authoritarian state which runs its magitech on human torture and sacrifice, and in the meantime it is just as textual that any number of queer characters live. It is true that fiction is a set of authorial decisions. It is also true that nuance—and what different people want or need or enjoy out of a story—exists.
3. That's just unconscionable. Not to mention bad science. But also unconscionable.
In other news, I may need to stay off Tumblr for a few days, even if I'm probably overestimating how many mutuals I have and how many would consider the above fightin' words.
If the above is the caliber of content you're running into on it, that sounds like a self-protective decision to me.