(no subject)

[olivermoss]

* I haven't written much in the past few days because I still have this migraine. It sort of comes and goes. I can do things like organize data and going for walks actually helps, but the focus needed to write just missing. blerg. Still, trying to make the best of it and do what tasks I can. I actually just stuck a fork in a loooong incomplete project that I may or may not post about. Either way, not right now.

* I am somewhat tempted to do a second Snowflake Challenge #3 talking about people saying 'Well, I can separate art from the artist' like it's a mark of maturity or a good thing. All art is political and a product of the artist. You can't separate the two, you can only choose to be mindful of it or choose not to care. Obviously, there is a big difference in studying the brushstroke techniques of a portrait artist or listening to instrumental music and playing a video games or reading a book. In some art the politics are very ephemeral, but in books and video games you are soaking in it.

Also death of the author does NOT mean separating the two, it means when J R R Tolkien says that nothing in LOTR is an allegory for his time in WW2 we laugh at him.

* Princess Weekes' video on Why Are There So Many Confederate Vampires pretty much explains why I felt so alienated by a lot of the genre media that came out around 2010 and why I felt so weird at cons during that time this was a big thing.

* FandomTrees revealed delayed to the 11th if anyone wants to look at the needy trees list.

* I some short photowalks this week. While walking helps I still didn't want to push things so I've netted maybe 2 pictures this week.

Comments

[muccamukk]

Despite my youtube side bar insisting I should watch it, I hadn't gotten to the confederate vampire video yet. It was good! Though funnily enough the only example I'd seen was Firefly, and a much stronger impression was left by "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter"!

[olivermoss]

I tried with True Blood a few times because it was huge, it was all over conventions and people kept telling me that it was progressive and had LGBT characters, etc. I kept noping out so fast.

Also, that is what Leverage was in it's initial run and fandom didn't take to it until after cancellation. No one in the fandom / genre / geek scenes wanted to hear about it. I felt so much like I just was no longer a geek.

I liked Firefly, but I remember those other examples and was was just like 'no'.

[mistressofmuses]

Ugh, I'm so sorry the migraine is lingering.

Oh, the art/artist divide, my beloathed perpetual wank.
I understand the ways in which it can be a struggle - it sucks to love a book/movie/album and find out that the person behind it did shitty things.
Demanding perfection will always be a losing battle, and deciding that we're only allowed to like the work of someone who is a perfect paragon of exactly-right-all-the-time thought and behavior is ridiculous. But pretending that an artist's beliefs have no impact on the art, or that their actions can never matter? Also ridiculous!

Hmmm, I'll have to take a look at that video, too.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, it's inherently messy. But the world is messy and we need to live in it. Putting people on pedestals is bad and so is acting like their art is sooo important that it outshines them... it IS them.

I get if people need to stick their head in the sand a little as a cope, but they need to realize that 'Well I can separate art from artist' is just that, it's a cope. It's not maturity, it's not look intellectual detachment, it's a cope.

[mistressofmuses]

Exactly. It's messy, and pretending it isn't messy does no favors!

And yeah, you probably can't purge your media consumption of every Bad Thing Ever, because people are messy and imperfect and sometimes very bad at times!

Yet... wrestling with it is GENUINELY the more mature and intellectually honest position. Not that everyone will come to the same conclusion regarding whether they still find value in art produced by a shitty person... but putting thought into what that means requires engaging so much more authentically than "Oh, I just ignore that!" Pretending "I just ignore all the things that make me uncomfortable" is the "intellectually superior" or "mature" option is... the opposite of the case, imo.

[olivermoss]

People are messy and imperfect and there is a world of difference between had some shitty opinions ten years ago and, uh, other stuff. But that is just not a convo it's possible to have in most online forums. So, I just don't.

I hate rampant mis-information, but I've made my peace with not even getting involved in some things.

In one fandom I'm in people regularly conflate two people. Person A had a consensual relationship but didn't fully get the power dynamics of having fans and has regrets. Person B fled the country just ahead of multiple CSA charges being filed. I like Person A, but I don't mention him in fandom any more and my fan art of him is fully offline. People act like A and B did the same thing.

A writer I like has absolutely done at least 2 shitty things. Not Me Too things, but shitty. I am fine having a conversation about it, but fandom puts this person on a pedestal and discussing it is not allowed.

I just don't talk about any of it and even when I see objectively wrong things float past me I just ignore it.

Actually, a few people who I've followed closely and enjoy used to do shit things. Again, not Me Too, but shit. How they've changed and how they treat past actions is part of why I like them. I read an interview with Schaffer The Darklord where he was all "**** this I'm a different person now stuff. I did bad things. I can change, but I can't change the past. I can't unhurt the people I hurt. I am the same person and the least I can do is acknowledge that instead of pretending I'm not' At live shows he does a 5 minute song where he basically calls out his past self for being a shit.

[mistressofmuses]

Exactly. The line between "I am willing to look past this action" and "this is utterly unforgiveable" may fall in different places for different people, but... "Made a slightly tasteless joke ten years ago" and "actively a bigot who financially and politically supports bigoted causes" are actually super different things, and flattening it to "all sins are equally bad/unbad" is manifestly unhelpful.

But asking for nuance on the internet is a losing battle.

Ugh. I HATE the way that things like that example with Person A and Person B play out. I can think of several VERY similar situations. Conflating those two actions and behaviors is so deeply shitty... both because deciding that Person A can never ever be forgiven by anyone, despite expressing genuine regret and intent to change is shitty, and because it winds up SHIELDING behavior from people like Person B, because they have such a smokescreen to claim their own behavior was "really" something minor that was blown out of proportion.

And agreed. While I don't think that anyone specific is ever REQUIRED to forgive someone or the like... I personally LIKE to see growth and change and people deciding to be better people and recognizing things they did or said that were fucked up and wrong. If we (general we) decide that NO ONE is capable of change, and that having done or said shitty things at any point makes you unworthy forever... then what's the point? What's the point of trying to be better? (Yeah, sure, don't "be better" in the hopes of other people liking you, do it because it's the right thing to do, but... that matters, too.)

[olivermoss]

Yeah, boundaries between no big deal, I need to be mindful this happened and holy holy hell are going to vary for everyone. But, rather than deal with that fandom just flattens it all to make it simple and so it's easy to be 'right'. For me, a lot of whether I still like/consume stuff from certain people has a lot to do with how to talk about their past behavior, whether then own it or all 'I'm a different person now, I've moved past that and so should you'.

And when they can't stand putting a person in the bad column, they do copes like separating art from artist. I don't think JK Rowling was full TERF and racist when she started writing Harry Potter. I think she got isolated by wealth and fame and then got love bombed by certain people. But by book four the themes are there and not in subtle ways. You can't separate out JK's blossoming bigotry out of the books. You can make new stories, but the books are books are not salvageable. You can only choose to ignore what it.

And yeah, that way people punish people for growing and changing is insane. I don't buy apology tours or BS like that, but people who really have done the work tend to have POVs and understandings that I find interesting.

[mistressofmuses]

That's exactly it, the flattening of "all bad things are the same" is such a crap cop-out to actually dealing with it. It becomes another purity test, of "shun anything bad" so that you can choose the "right" reaction... except flattening those "eh, should have been more sensitive to that issue" people and those "HOLY SHIT THEY ADVOCATED LITERAL GENOCIDE" people to the same level is just... not beneficial at all.

"I just separate art from artist" is ALSO a cop-out. It's a way to refuse to engage. I'm inclined to agree with that interpretation of JKR and how she got radicalized into her beliefs. But there ARE some sketch aspects of the books, even if her worst-of-the-worst behavior came after the main series ended. I can't tell any one person that they aren't "allowed" to read the books or whatever... but you can't erase those themes (and who JKR was and is as a person) from the works that she created. Pretending that you can is super dishonest - it is a choice to ignore those themes, not actually making those aspects suddenly NOT exist in the works themselves.

Same. No one is obligated to forgive anyone else, but... Idk, I've also seen a lot of discussion around how "you have fucked up and therefore are DOOMED AND SHUNNED FOREVER" is just sort of reenacting ideas of sin and damnation, when it's actually working toward a better world to allow people to fix themselves and make amends and move forward as better people.

[olivermoss]

IIRC it was in Book 4 of Harry Potter than a lot of the troubling stuff started showing up very blatantly. She started her descent into serious bigotry while writing the books. But then, yeah, after she got worse... and worse...

[mistressofmuses]

I think Book 4 started to feature a few of the long-term "minor" problems more prominently, though I don't remember any of the more extreme issues, but it was Book 5 that started very much losing my interest, and I remember some iffy shit in there. Then again, it's been more than a decade since I read it, and I'm not going back to check, lol.

But yeah, there were definitely some early signs. Some are more like just... the cluelessness of someone not realizing how something comes across, an unwillingness to examine a bias. But as the series went on, there were bigger and bigger Unfortunate Implications in how the whole overarching conflict worked. And then... yeah. Worse. And worse. And worse...

[olivermoss]

It's been forever since I read them, too. I could easily be misremembering which book. But yeah, the people who latched onto her and drew her into their circles of hate didn't start from scratch. They saw the potential to pull her in.

[mistressofmuses]

I think the cracks started to show before a lot of people were aware of it at the time, and some of the stuff that seemed more clueless than malicious ("Cho Chang" sounds Chinese, right? Why bother looking up actual possible names?) became more prominent parts of the story in Book 4.
But again, it's been a minute since I read any of them, and it's very possible that I missed bigger issues when I was a teenager that are more obvious in hindsight.

It sucks that she was radicalized by the TERFy lovebombing, rather than better circles that would have steered her toward "overall you mean well, and some of this is stuff you may never have really considered fully, so here are ways to improve". But yeah, as mentioned, unprecedented levels of wealth and fame tend to really detach people from reality and so made it easier to target her... ESPECIALLY when the seeds were already there.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, and a lot of people assumed she was going somewhere with the SPEW plotline and not just making fun of Hermione for caring about social issues. People were willing to give her a lot of the benefit of the doubt for a while that she was uninformed or had 'written herself into a corner' on some things. And that's a reasonable reaction to have at first.

[mistressofmuses]

Oh god, 4 was the book with the SPEW bullshit, wasn't it. Ugh. I HAD forgotten that specific shitty plotline. Yeah, that whole thing was pretty gross (activism is stupid, okay kids?) but seemed like hey, of course it's going to go somewhere and end up mattering! Or not.

I think there was a lot of "ah, she clearly means well, but just doesn't understand some of the implications here!" I'm generally very much in favor of giving people the benefit of the doubt... so it sucks all the more when someone later proves that nah, they don't care to learn more about those issues or do better in the future, and will in fact double-, triple-, and infinity-down on their hateful shit.