Thorns

Two Collections of Links

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 11:39:23 GMT

(I already posted these to sqbr if you follow me there)

Tumblr:

Trans woman gets sick of transphobia on tumblr, tumblr CEO is awful about it

Worldcon:

Report on the leaked emails where the English speaking side of the committee cheerfully created political dossiers of the nominated authors based on their own projected ideas of what censorship the Chinese government might want, without feeling the need to talk to the actual Chinese people on the committee, do any real research, actually read the relevant books etc. There's been some criticism of this report itself being biased/inaccurate but I don't know of anything better with the same info.

Mary Robinette Kowal talks about similar bad behaviour she had seen from Dave McCarthy previously

Results rigged to exclude Chinese authors. This really underlines how ridiculous it is to blame literally everything on Chinese government interference, as some people still insist on doing. In what universe would they exert pressure to have less Chinese authors win awards?

Tangential but feels broadly relevant: How creators and works from New Zealand/Aotearoa were more subtly excluded at the Wellington Worldcon. This isn't equivalent to the outright censorship of the Chengdu Hugos, but it's an example of how this culture of exclusion is not a new thing or just a reaction to a "bad" foreign country.

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Female characters, genderswap, and the narrative

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 05:00:04 GMT

I was discussing with a friend the attitude that genderswapping male characters is not "celebrating female characters". Because it felt both true and false to me, and I think I've figured out why.
( Read more... )

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Wiscon panel: City As History/City As Liberator

Mon, 25 May 2020 10:54:57 GMT

This was a very interesting panel, even just watching a recording, but I was SUPER tired so just let it wash over me.

The only note I took on the panel itself was: the panelists described how Americans see themselves as farmers and frontiersmen when this is blatantly untrue for most people. This reminded me of Australia.

Under the cut: links and book recs I copied from the discord chat. Mostly about the US, including some discussion of Covid. Pretty sure I missed some.
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Decolonization in SFF panel at Wiscon

Sun, 24 May 2020 10:47:56 GMT

I am at Wiscon online! I posted about the general con experience, including how panels work, at alias_sqbr.

I didn't get to see this panel in person, but I watched the recorded stream and read back over the chat.
( Read more... )

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How we talk about the intersection of Corporate Art and Queerness

Sun, 26 Jan 2020 14:10:28 GMT

This is inspired by two flawed essays I read recently:

BaitWorks – How DreamWorks Engaged in Predatory Marketing Towards LGBT Fans

I Don't Wanna Grow Up (And Neither Can You)

Both make some good points about how media corporations manipulate fans with half-assed tokenistic gestures towards inclusivity. The second focusses more on how fans are complicit in this: the way bland, heteronormative blockbusters like the MCU get a free pass while messy indie queer women are attacked for actually trying to express themselves.

But they both also act like queer creators working within the corporate system to make moderately queer, if somewhat corporate art like Steven Universe or She-ra is exactly equivalent to entirely bland, heteronormative corporate works which only make tokenistic gestures towards queerness. Also they both erase the specific issues around non-binary representation and creators.

And I feel like this is part of a broader problem in how we discuss the intersection of Corporate Art and Queerness.
( Read more... )

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Fans vs anti-fans vs antis

Thu, 25 Jul 2019 08:31:36 GMT

Someone I follow linked Policing and woobiefication: two sides of the same coin by ljwrites and it's one of those posts where I started out nodding, then had some quibbles, and then the more I thought about it the more annoyed I got. So to avoid ranting at ljwrites or the person I follow, here is a long and largely unnecesary argument under a nice cut you can scroll by.
( Read more... )

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Signal Boost: This Week in Meta

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 11:30:21 GMT

thisweekmeta posted: 000. welcome & faq

This Week in Meta is a pan-fandom meta newsletter. It collects links from: Dreamwidth, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Twitter, Youtube, blogs, and anywhere else people may be writing and talking about meta. We do not link to locked or private posts, and will have warnings for NSFW links. We don't ask permission to link to publicly available posts, but we will give you a head's up that it's going into an issue.

I haven't actually read any of the linked posts yet, so can't say if I like their editorial style or not yet, but hooray for meta.

(I posted this using this nice bookmarklet for signalboosting dreamwidth posts)

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Big ol' link spam

Wed, 08 Feb 2017 14:25:02 GMT

This has been building for like 8 months, which means I look back on the me who collected some of these with weary nostalgia. But here we are.
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On being a non binary femslasher

Tue, 24 Jan 2017 03:42:34 GMT

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only. Originally posted to tumblr.

Hi, I'm Sophie alias sqbr, a fic writer and fanartist, mostly into Bioware games, anime, and Jane Austen.

This post is basically just a bunch of thoughts about my personal experience, I would be really interested to hear from other people with different experiences. In a sense it's the third in a trilogy:
First, Why do we femslash?, written back in 2009 when I identified as a straight cis woman.
Second, Personal Experiences of Femslash Fandom as a Queer Space, written in 2013 after I started identifying as a bi woman.
And now we have this, written in 2017, now that I identify as a genderfluid biromantic grey asexual. I guess we'll have to wait and see where I'm at in 2021 ;)

So! I've been into f/f since before I even realised queerness existed (my childhood feels about Anne/Diana let me tell you them), and into femslash fandom for about ten years. I have always identified much more strongly with female characters than male ones, and while I enjoy m/f romance I get tired of it's ubiquitous heteronormativity. So when I find good f/f I really enjoy it, and I get a kick out of making it.

When I realised I was bi a lot of things made more sense. I was a bi woman, no wonder I identified with female characters and like m/f and f/f! But when I realised I was genderfluid it made things a little more complicated.
( Read more... )

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More thoughts on creating a better Discourse

Sun, 23 Oct 2016 02:02:10 GMT

Removing the allcaps because I find them hard to read, but I really agree with

the one thing both those positions share is fear of critical engagement with a person who disagrees with you, which is the one thing you absolutely need in order to progress a discussion past whatever stalled you in the first place.

from this post.

I think the only way to move past this is not just to criticise those we most strongly and angrily disagree with, but to seek out and acknowledge those points of view we disagree with but can respect, and to not act like everyone who disagrees with us is the same as those we disagree with most. Also to avoid uncritically promulgating the opinions of those who are “on our side” but engage in uneccesary cruelty, overgeneralisation or outright misinformation. And if you're afraid to voice your qualms about someone "on your side" because they might turn against you...they're not really on your side.

( And then I started rambling, nothing I haven't said before )

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Criticism and fanworks

Tue, 13 Sep 2016 05:38:58 GMT

Got most of the way through this before remembering I was going to put all my long tumblr responses on dreamwidth haha.

Post I am replying to:

There’s a post that appeared on my dash earlier... the tl;dr summary of said post is that fandom ‘isn’t required to be a safe space’. ... Fandom isn’t here to create a safe space for creators either: it is literally a community about sharing. And sharing is a two way street.

“It’s ok to criticise fanfic just don’t attack the person” shouldn’t be such a rare point of view, but here we are. Anyway, I agree in principle. I’ve seen pushback against excessive criticism which goes past “don’t send death threats” and even “don’t criticise racism” to end up at “don’t criticise plagiarism” which is something I thought everyone agreed was worth criticising.

I think a major problem here is a flattening everything from “has a pairing I don’t like” to “actual hate speech” into “problematic”, and flattening everything from sending death threats to saying you didn’t enjoy something into “criticism”.
( Read more... )

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The weaponisation of community norms in fandom

Mon, 29 Aug 2016 06:45:11 GMT

So, I've been in fandom a long time and have seen the overall values of various fannish communities shift and change. I've personally been involved in efforts to improve fandom's attitudes towards social justice. But unfortunately it seems like whatever values fandom has in theory, in practice fans tend to exhibit the same toxic behaviours, often entirely opposed to the values they are theoretically upholding. Seeing this happen with social justice has been especially frustrating, but it's always bad, and I'm not sure what can be done about it.
( Read more... )

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seeingcolorcomm: Characters of Colour Fic and Art exchange

Wed, 11 May 2016 21:15:41 GMT

seeingcolorcomm, currently open for nominations.

I haven't felt like signing up to exchanges lately but will definitely keep an eye out for pinch hits and treats.

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A decade in online fandom social justice

Tue, 10 May 2016 13:19:21 GMT

In which I try to tease some sort of narrative out of the ridiculously long and rambling unabridged version. It's still pretty long, and still very subjective. And I'm still open to criticism and other points of view! Especially since I'm as prone to subconsciously editing history as anyone else.

The tl;dr version is that fandom used to actively stifle discussions of social justice, and then slowly started caring about it. Unfortunately, when fandom cares about something it uses it to attack other fans with different tastes, and social justice has been no exception. I still think things are better overall.
( brief mentions of rape and abuse )

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Looking back on a decade in online fandom social justice: unexpurgated version

Sat, 07 May 2016 08:39:47 GMT

This is an incredibly subjective and personal account, with no clear moral or narrative, because that's how it wanted to come out. I then poked at things some more and wrote A decade in online fandom social justice: Abridged, which is a bit more structured and not quite as ridiculously long.

I've been inspired to write this by seeing other fans trying to sell their own, equally subjective narratives that contradict mine as The Objective Truth, and it annoys me. The most recent example is this deeply flawed essay by Franzeska. Here's some criticisms by POC: a thread on ffa wherea POC looks back on their own experiences of lj fandom and Fans Of Colour Are Not To Blame For Fandom's Erasures: A response to That Meta.
( brief discussions of rape, death, and abuse, lots of discussions of bullying, lots and lots and LOTS of words )

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The importance of power in discussions of media

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 05:14:34 GMT

I feel like I almost have a grip on this idea but lack the words to express it. Let's have a go anyway.

So! Fandom discussions have become very social justice tinged of late. In some ways I think this is great, I'm old enough to remember the dark wasteland of "why are you bringing race/gender/etc into it??" fannish dicussions before about 2006, and continue to be delighted by some of the positive changes I've seen in media and fandom over the last decade or so.

But! As is increasingly obvious there are some serious issues with the way social justice is approached in fandom, beyond the unavoidable flaws created by the conversation having people in it. And part of this is the erasure of the relative power position of the people being criticised. None of this is entirely new, but it's gotten worse. Nb I am primarly talking about online female dominated Western fandom, generally on dreamwidth and tumblr, but this happens other places too.
( Read more... )

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Disability Fest

Fri, 12 Jun 2015 08:38:52 GMT

Disability Fest is a tumblr for fannishness about canonically disabled characters, they have a fest coming up in July and some nice posts in their archive.

Going to see if there's stuff I can organise for it! You just have to tag it "disabilityfest" in the first 5 tags.

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All hail the mighty link post

Thu, 05 Feb 2015 04:12:52 GMT

Ancillary Conversation A conversation I was involved in at No Award about the Imperial Radch series.

Believing that life is fair might make you a terrible person As I said on tumblr: Now I’m thinking about the implications for effective activism. Should we be avoiding “this unjust thing happened to X marginalised group (or the environment)” signal boosting that doesn’t come with “and here’s what you can do about it”? That’s what my gut tends to say, but I guess there’s the implication that passing the information on IS doing something about it. And “just don’t tell people about unjust things that happened in history” seems like an unfortunate moral. HMM. I’m sure smarter people than me have thought about this.

Let's talk about category structure and oppression! Everyone is expected to relate to a cis straight white anglophone American man. We're all like them, they're just (default, category-central) people after all! But they're not like us.

THE CATEGORIES WERE MADE FOR MAN, NOT MAN FOR THE CATEGORIES A bit rambly but eventually about the way we define "man"and "woman".

The EntitleMen: techno-libertarian right wing sockpuppets of silicon valley This is a bit rambly but makes some interesting comments about facism, libertarianism, and tech.

Basic income paid to the poor can transform lives

Safe a safe space for People of Colour who have an interest in Sci-Fi/Fantasy. I'm sure I must have linked this already but it was on the list, so.

Everything is problematic Someone's path through some of the more unhealthy parts of acitivism.

France begins jailing people for ironic comments

And via anghraine, two examples of Korra fans turning "I don't like this" into "this is problematic", eg my least favourite kind of fannish "activism": anyone who likes Book 3 more is sexist, representation doesn't count if I didn't enjoy it.

Australia:

SUPERMARKET MONSTERS Coles, Woolworths and the price we pay for their domination

Hmmph. The article I linked to about it has vanished, but here's the petition to revoke Adam Baldwin's invitation to the con Supanova

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Rambling about ffa

Wed, 06 Aug 2014 14:55:16 GMT

Man I'm still never entirely sure what I think about ffa (fail_fandomanon) I've been thinking about it recently after a friend of mine had to leave because the incredibly nasty things people say there about a group she's in were bringing her down. I wish there was somewhere I could go for active fannish conversations that was less likely to randomly dissolve into intense ableism/transphobia/whatever and that didn't assume anyone there was, by definition, "anti-sj". (I mean I am against "sjw"s by the definition of "bully or abuser who uses social justice terminology". Because I'm against all bullies and abusers! But there are plenty of people there who are against any serious attempt at social change, and/or whose definition of sjw includes me and many of my friends)

It took me a long time to learn to recognise the difference between trolls who don't represent the average views at all and more mainstream opinions. It's not fair to hold up the worst of the group as representative of the whole, and there's a pretty wide range of opinions even once you exclude the outliers. But (a)Knowing someone's a troll doesn't always remove the sting of what they've said and (b)The mainstream opinions can still be pretty awful. And that's just on abstract topics, once they start talking about individual fans it can get nasty, hypocritical and just WRONG (the reactions to my own meta haven't been too meansprited, but they tended to miss the point or focus on trivialities. Which admitedly can in part be blamed on my own lack of clarity)

Urg, I'm tired, I'm not expressing this very well. Guess I'm not up to much beyond reading ffa and feeling weird about it :/

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On being a white feminist anime/manga fan

Thu, 06 Mar 2014 02:34:44 GMT

There's been some discussion on tumblr of the culturally ignorant and thoughtless way white feminists often talk about anime/manga:
the original post, with my transcript, some following discussion.

This is something I've been thinking about for a while, I'm really uncomfortable with the combination of fetishisation/othering and erasure that's applied to Japanese culture in most anime and manga discussions I encounter, and would like to do better. So here are some thoughts on that. (Yeah, I know, ANOTHER WHITE FEMINIST POV /o\)
( Read more... )

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Linkspam wants to be distracted from Australian politics

Sat, 07 Sep 2013 12:46:32 GMT

These have been building up for a while (since May? Really??), in some cases I'm just taking a rough guess as to why I thought a link was worth saving.

( Lotsa links! )

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Personal Experiences of Femslash Fandom as a Queer Space

Sun, 11 Aug 2013 12:24:53 GMT

I've seen a lot of people talk about slash fandom as a queer space, but I'm not sure I've seen anyone talk about femslash fandom as one.

When I started out in online fanworks based fandom I identified as straight and had extreme difficulty finding femslash for anything I was interested in. Figuring out where the femslashers are at and figuring out my sexuality have to some extent gone hand in hand, and hanging out with other femslashers has been a hugely positive experience.
( Read more... )

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Focussing on internalised misogyny is counterproductive

Thu, 11 Jul 2013 13:02:45 GMT

So: Internalised misogyny exists, and does harm to the woman herself and the women around her. All women have it to some extent and it's something we should be aware of and try to work against.

However. Pretty much every time I've seen fans in female dominated fannish spaces talk about other women's internalised misogyny the argument would have been much better without it.
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One Lazy White Artist's Guide to Drawing Dark Skinned and POC Characters

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 07:05:45 GMT

So! A few years ago I realised that not only did I pretty much only draw white people, but that I wasn't sure how to draw anything else. There is a long history of dark skinned people being made to look pale and POC being made to look white in order for them to be more palatable to pale white audiences. So there are ethical as well as artistic reasons to try not to screw this stuff up. I made a post poking at the problem, what have I learned since then?
( Read more... )

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In defense of m/m

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 13:14:19 GMT

Yes, really.

Because while I may not be into m/m much most of the time, and have my own Issues With Slash Fandom, I've seen a few posts pop up on tumblr recently (here's the most recent) which have been taking the very simplistic line that slash's popularity is purely a result of misogyny, and that writing m/m is equivalent to only writing about white people. These posts also act like het is this POOR OPPRESSED MINORITY which, no.

It's nearly 2013, fandom, have we still not moved beyond this? Can't we argue about something else now?
( Cut for those as sick of it as me )

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