A Lot Of Preps Stared At Me: My Immortal and Parafiction

What do we want the author of My Immortal to be?

"We're Still Friends Right?" Fanfictional Trauma and Captain America: Civil War

"Forty million readers follow the Gumps. ... If I could prove it I would say there are exactly 16,847,915 3/4 people writing to Sidney Smith, care of the Chicago Tribune, with suggestions as to what he should do with the Gumps next. And inasmuch as most of us take the Gumps seriously and expect to have our suggestions followed, the problem of these suggestions is a real one, after all."

--William Fleming French, describing an example of the problem of fannish engagement for newspaper comic The Gumps, quoted in Jared Gardner's Projections

There are really only two places you can have the villain of one major franchise sing a song from another major franchise. One of those places is in fanfiction.

But hold that thought while we talk about this image from Age of Ultron and what it can tell us about Captain America: Civil War.

Post Elsewhere: Why Character-In-A-Coma Theories Suck

[Evanescence plays unironically in background]

You find yourself in a beautiful garden, a garden lush with flowery growth, marble statues peaking through the verdant leaves. You shake your head, still sleepy from your nap. Where were you? Oh, yes, you were trying to come up with an idea for an article on your favorite show… Something shocking, something original, something that would really turn the setting on its head… But what?

You tap your chin with your magical quill and set it to the paper. To your surprise it begins writing, all on its own! Before your very eyes it spells out these words:

Sometimes I find that ideas for articles drop into my lap. Last week I happened to seea post on Tumblr that facilitated that sort of topic drop: a post about “coma” theories. Wait, wait, that’s the wrong link, hold on, ah here we go, a post about “coma” theories.

If you’re not familiar with that trope of fan analysis the concept is fairly simple to explain:

Take a show, movie, story, whatever. Preferably something fantastical and beloved. Ok?

The story is all some character’s dream while the character is in a coma.

Or the characters are all dead, or they’re all just imaginary friends, or the character is having a psychotic break due to some trauma or other, or… whatever. That mode of explanation for the fantastic elements of a story. All the kids in Ed Edd and Eddy are dead, Ash has been in a coma since episode 1, Steven Universe’s mom died and he’s imagining all the adventures and Connie is his therapist… whatever.

This kind of theory tends to be really... well... bad. When used in canon, it tends to come off as a bit of a bait and switch--you become invested in a narrative that has no meaning, where events have no impact. You get sucked into a story only to have it turn out to be utterly pointless.

This badness carries over to the use of the trope in analysis. Tonight, I want to get into why it’s bad, but also why it’s both kind of lazy and also, sadly, inevitably ubiquitous, but first I want to talk a little bit about the post that prompted my own article.

Hurriedly you cast the quill away from yourself and crumple up the paper. What is this strange writing that haunts you in your definitely real paradise? It has given you an idea, though, for what your amazing, groundbreaking fandom post should be like…

"Repent, Feminist!" Said the Wiki Man (Or: Deface Wikipedia Today!)

As I wrote the first draft of this article, a few months ago now (god help me), I took periodic breaks to look at my dashboard on Tumblr. Not because I was really reading any of the content but because I was skimming for instances of people taking advantage to the most recent site update to totally break the website's functionality. If you missed that exciting experience, let me tell you it was at times pretty breathtakingly disorienting, with various icons, text boxes, images, and so on, bouncing all over the screen. While they've caught the major bugs of that update a few more incredible little glitches keep popping up to trash the screen in exciting new ways, months after the fact.

I'm starting here because I think it sheds light, in the usual roundabout sort of way, on the recent clusterfuck over on Wikipedia. If you haven't been following the conflict, the long and short of it is that Gamergate, the violently misogynistic hate group ostensibly dedicated to "ethics in game journalism" but in fact dedicated to hounding women out of the game industry, has been gaming (ahah.) Wikipedia's systems for a while now in order to gain dominance over the article about them. A group dubbed the Five Horsemen has repeatedly opposed their efforts. Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee ("ArbCom") responded by handing down a decision that ousted the Five Horsemen along with a few gamergater burner accounts, patted itself on the back for a job well done, and effectively handed gamergate the keys to the kingdom. You can read about this on the blog of Mark Bernstein (and on his twitter), who broke the story and was banned and denounced in retaliation, or on Wikipedia itself in this editorial by user Protonk... who of course was ALSO banned and denounced in retaliation. Exciting times over on Wikipedia. The story's continued since then but those are the basic facts in the case that I think are worth relaying.

Before getting back to Wikipedia though let's take a moment to talk about the culture of Tumblr and its attitude towards its leaders. Any time Tumblr's staff updates the site there's immediately a race to see who can figure out the best ways to break the new features, or at least do something truly bizarre with the new features. Some of this of course stems from the endless frustration that we all have with a staff that prioritizes trivialities over critically absent core features (a functional blocking system! a functional inbox!) but more broadly speaking I think there's also an attitude on the site that if something CAN be fucked with, it SHOULD be fucked with. It's a creative attitude, and an oppositional one as well, one that resists rather than encourages consensus.

It's this attitude, more than any other form of resistance, that feels to me like the right strategy for dealing with Wikipedia's increasingly glaring flaws. Wikipedia is an engine for generating consensus, so artistic interventions--more plainly, vandalism, or even more plainly, fucking shit up--are essential for disrupting that engine. If Wikipedia has failed to live up to its ideals, instead becoming mired in the dehumanizing mechanisms of a bureaucracy that only a plutocracy of technocrats can engage with, then it's time to stop thinking about incrementally transforming the system, and start thinking about a way of breaking the system in half.

There's a really obvious pun I could make here but I'll resist.

Fitzskimmons Lament Part 2: Satisfaction

Last week I posted my article, part one of this series, to the Marvel subreddit, mostly because I am a little shit and like to tweak the noses of overly fawning fans.

Before the article was predictably downvoted to oblivion I did get one comment useful not so much for its contents, which were predictably terrible, but for the interesting irony that it presented. This redditor simply dismissed my article as "the babblings of a patreon-begger." Interesting. The claim there seems to be that my article can be safely ignored because I'm merely out to grab cash off of Marvel's success.

True!

I'll own up to it proudly! In fact, I'll encourage you all to donate to my Patreon today! I'm absolutely shameless. In fact, it's a little off theme, but is it time to bring back the supervillain suit? I think it is!

I know what I am.

But you know, I'm no more shameless than Marvel and Disney are, and a whole hell of a lot more honest. If I'm a hood at least I'm an honest one, with no illusions about why massively successful franchises frequently turn out to be the subjects for my articles. They're the subjects because when I write about my real loves, like fanfiction of a children's trading card game for example, nobody reads my articles.

These are concessions I MUST make, to a certain extent, if I want to make this blogging thing work for me. Marvel is in no such position. Anything they do seems to turn into a megahit, even if it's, say, Thor 2. Marvel fans will even get a little bit smug about this, proclaiming that DC can't make a movie with a female lead while Marvel can make a movie about a raccoon and a tree in space.

Ay, Marvel fans? You know who else can't make a movie with a female lead?

Marvel Studios.

So let's take this week to talk about the various ways in which Marvel, a studio that seemingly can do anything, continues to do, in a myriad of ways, absolutely nothing to support its queer fans.

Fitzskimmons Lament Part One: Marvel and the Endlessly Straight Path

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a lot of things. Among them, the MCU is very, very straight. Aggressively straight. Obnoxiously straight, I might even suggest.

It's straight to the point where, after 11 movies and three-and-a-half-sum-total seasons of 45 minute episodes of various tv spin offs from said movies, the lack of any queer representation whatsoever has finally crossed the borderline from "minor stain on an otherwise remarkable record" to "holy shit this is indefensible and appalling."

Marvel and Disney apparently can make a movie about a talking raccoon and his tree friend but can't introduce a single queer character. Or make a movie starring a woman. But that's a rant for another day.

For a while now I've been lamenting the effect that's had on a number of my ships in the MCU--ships being fan parlance for preferred romantic relationships. I tend to gravitate towards queer ships because, well, in our modern media landscape they just don't happen that often in canon, so I have an inclination to stubbornly ship everything queer, which just results in me getting more irate when none of my queer pairings become canon, which just causes me to be more obstinate, until the next thing you know I'm up at three AM reading Draco/Neville/Hermione BDSM fanfic instead of writing Storming the Ivory Tower articles.

In fact that's precisely where I've been for the past eight months!

But no ship has suffered quite as much as Fitzskimmons, the ship that put the "One" and "True" and "The Numeral Three" in OT3, my one true poly triad, the relationship of my dreams. This is a ship that joins the Agents of SHIELD characters Fitz, Simmons, and Skye into a beautiful poly trio.

It will never happen, and I know it will never happen, but by god I can write an entire article lamenting the fact that I'll never see this group get together.

Pictured: more like GAYgents of SHIELD

That's what this article is in the broadest sense: a lament for Fitzskimmons. But I don't want to just sit here and babble about how great they'd be together (even though they would be) or how much more heartwrenching the events of season 2 are in the context of a poly romance between the three characters (though wow can you imagine it?). Ultimately this isn't about the worthiness or unworthiness of one particular ship. It's about the wider way in which the compulsory heterosexuality in an entire serialized and shared fictional universe leads to sub-optimal story decisions and lost opportunities.

It's about how restrictions on the range of possible relationships leads to bad writing.

The Image of the Body: Ferguson, Agency, and Leftist Appropriation

Photo of Twitter user @eyeFLOODpanties taken by Robert Cohen

I want to center this week's article in a somewhat odd way--around a bibliography. I'm doing this for ethical reasons--as a white person writing about the murder of Michael Brown and the resulting protests and violent, militant police repression of the people of Ferguson, MO, events that are fundamentally a product of racism both systemic and individual, I want to do my best not to co-opt the events for the sake of an abstract academic argument. This is particularly important in the context of the specific ideas I'm going to attempt to grapple with, since I want to talk about issues of agency, the use of images and signs, and the political transformation of people into signifiers. Centering this article upon the bibliography of information I drew upon in writing it is, in part, an attempt to avoid the behaviors I'm trying to call out.

First, for the background details of what's happening in Ferguson, I'd recommend the article Ferguson is Fighting Back from Socialist Worker, which, unlike corporate media outlets, recounts the story from the perspective of the oppressed rather than the militarized police that have been terrorizing a small town for over a week. In particular, it is worth considering this quote from the article:

"Eavesdropping on questions asked of residents by the mainstream media was instructive. Again and again, reporters wanted to know about "looting" and "violence," entirely missing the main point of what was unfolding before them: every resident, if asked, could have told them about the routine police violence they've experienced." --Socialist Worker: Ferguson is Fighting Back

Instructive indeed. That framing is important to the questions I want to consider about the way this is not merely a war waged materially but waged with symbols. This is a battle of words, and corporate media has sided with state terrorism in this battle.

I also want to highlight the ongoing commentary from blogs Gradient Lair and This Is Bobby London, without which I could not have composed this article. In particular, it's worth reading over Bobby London's piece which frames looting not as a random act of greed but an act of political resistance and rebellion (particularly relevant now that we're seeing reports of people breaking into McDonald's in order to get milk to sooth the suffering of civilians who were assaulted by the militarized police with chemical weapons), and three pieces from Gradient Lair, one on avoiding the consumption of black bodies in discourse about events like Ferguson (which I've tried to take to heart here), one on the transformation of black bodies into metaphors for other forms of violence elsewhere in the world, and one on the history of the terrorist/psychological warfare of lynching and the way the treatment of Michael Brown's body fits into that history.

In the interests of contextualization, it's worth taking note of a few other stories about images, image sharing, and the desperate iconoclasm of the militarized police. From Tech Dirt comes a story of a police campaign in Washington to (incorrectly... illegally?) get people to stop filming them with a remarkable statement about responding to smartphones the way they respond to guns; from Z-Net comes a story about Apple's new patent to kill cell phones automatically, because hey, another week, another instance of Apple or Microsoft furthering corporate fascism, and lastly, from Medium, comes an excellent analysis of the way Ferguson represents proof positive of the dangers of a non-neutral Net, as Facebook algorithms systematically sank information about the atrocities being committed against civilians while Twitter sank the #ferguson tag in the US despite it trending globally.

If you want to get involved in pushing back against the militarization of police and the state terrorism on display in Ferguson, here is a list of resources (updated 4:08 Eastern 8/19):

• This Tumblr post provides a list of ways to get involved and spread information
• This petition requests that Obama actually do something leftist for once in his life and work towards enacting federal anti-police laws.
• Similarly, this petition involves having police wear cameras, and while it's on the ridiculous pseudo-democratic site We The People you might want to sign that too. You know, in case you want to get a limp, Good Liberal, noncommittal placatory response from some aide you've never heard of.
• This petition, in contrast, involves demanding a special prosecutor to investigate Mike Brown's death, as the current prosecutor has demonstrated bias in favor of the police.
• And this bill would put a stop to the military's sale of equipment to police. Keep an eye on this; it'll be worth raising some hell with our representatives over this.
• Anti-State STL is raising money for bail for the Ferguson protesters. I have no idea how I'd begin going about vetting this organization, but this is a way to get involved.
• Similarly, no vetting here but someone has set up a wishlist for getting supplies to the protesters via Amazon.
  
  Updates:
• Here's yet another post with various other links that might be useful to you (there is some overlap between this and other lists obviously)
• iwriteaboutfeminism has been covering the events in Ferguson extensively, largely by pulling from Twitter, which is useful for those of who who, like me, find the flood of information on Twitter to be utterly overwhelming.
• Twitter user @SheSeauxSaddity has been tweeting information about how you can get involved, and among other things seems to be leading an effort to sell t-shirts to raise money for the protesters under the name #OperationHelporHush
• As school has been cancelled in Ferguson, a Ferguson teacher put together a funding site to get food to the kids who depend on school lunches.
• Feel like supporting the community at large? The Ferguson Youth Initiative is one place to start.
• And perhaps most importantly, the gofundme campaign for the Brown family is still live. Although they've reached their goal, I can't imagine that they WON'T have a use for more money, and in a country where the law is determined by the free market by way of lawyer fees, justice might very well depend on every extra bit of cash the family can get.

Since I'm adding links, I figure it's worth making a point of mentioning the way in which I'm curating this. I can't vet every one of these donation drives, because I'm honestly not sure how I'd even begin doing so, so that's a limitation I have when I'm posting links. But one thing I can do as a curator of these links is vet the voices being heard. And a great way to make sure you DON'T get included on this list is to post shit about how everything would get better if the left and right would just listen compassionately to one another, or how Obama's hands are tied and he's just doing the best he can politically, or any of that other weak Liberal nonsense. Last I saw, it wasn't the Left lobbing tear gas at civilians. The point here is to boost voices that are drowned out by the corporate media shit show.

With all that said, let's get to the secondary content of this post. Let's talk about the man in the photo at the top of this post, that photo, and its use.

I want to frame this discussion with these three tweets:

Please consider not purchasing shirts of my image. None of that money is going to me or the #MikeBrown family.
— Your New Friend (@eyeFLOODpanties) August 15, 2014

Salute to @eyeFLOODpanties for being practical AND political. We don't waste lives or chips. That shot of him is EVERYTHING.
— Princess of Zamunda (@Artemis_J) August 15, 2014

Yo @eyeFLOODpanties ----> the new Captain America. I thought of this when I saw your pic. #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/2si2t8V4k5
— dj spydermann (@djspydermann) August 15, 2014

Queerness in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL: REPLACE EVERY MENTION OF “MAGIC”/”MAGICIAN” WITH “HOMOSEXUALITY”/”HOMOSEXUAL” AND YOU MAKE ANY POTENTIAL READER INTO A GIGGLING MORON BECAUSE IT TURNS IT COMPLETELY INTO A SUBVERSIVE COMEDY --Tumblr user Drethelin

Susanna Clarke's 800 page doorstopper Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell, a tale of two magicians who attempt to bring practical magic back to England during the time of the Napoleonic Wars, is getting made into a mini-series by the BBC.

This is great news, because it means more folks will get exposed to the book's weird and delightful mix between Regency romance and high society politics, historical accounts of a medieval and renaissance tradition of magic in an alternate England, and the strange and often unsettling or even horrific world of fairytales.

But unless some of the subtext within the book is toned down to a remarkable degree, it also means that we're going to have The Talk again within fandom culture about queer baiting and the presence or absence of queer characters within fantasy narratives. This isn't a bad conversation to have at all, of course, but it's sometimes difficult to pick through the particular contexts surrounding a text in order to really get at whether a text is... well, let's say ethical in its treatment (or lack of treatment) of queerness.

That's getting a bit ahead of things though, so let's talk a bit about Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, queerness, representation, and how context fiddles with our understanding.

Heywoood Jabrony, or, Notes from the Center of a Fandom's Implosion

There's nothing like a continuous ongoing storm vast enough to dwarf planets to really make a place inhospitable.

This is why I have begun to reconsider my decision to relocate this blog to the center of the Great Red Spot.

It's also why lately it's been harder and harder to shut out the noise and just enjoy My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Because the raging storm surrounding Bronydom has gotten so loud I can even hear it over the icy winds of Jupiter.

Pictured: countless, countless terrible decisions.

Things have gotten particularly bad lately, in part due to the shutdown of the heinous rape-joke blog Princess Molestia by Hasbro, and the reactions from within the fandom and without to that event. However, the storm's been raging for quite a while now, largely involving the question of male roles within the fandom, feminism, the systematic suppression of female voices, the relationship between Bronydom and wider questions of women's involvement in geekdom, and the rise of a horrifying reactionary sect of bronies that have positioned themselves as staunch supporters of the masculine supremacy movement that seems to have infiltrated countless web spaces. (See also: fedoras.) The interference of outsiders who condemn the fandom as a whole whipped those winds further into a tempest, resulting in a complex interweaving of zephyrs that make navigating the various problems difficult. It's hard to sit back and assess the problems of a community when you're being buffeted by howling winds of outrage from multiple sides, and no group involved in this ongoing conversation seems inclined to howl less loudly.

I feel compelled to navigate the tempest, though, in part because I want, somehow, to find my way back to a show that I still love but am increasingly alienated from, in part because I feel loyalty toward a show that helped nudge me towards an internal acceptance of my identification as a genderqueer person, and because... well...

Let me put it this way. When the show first came out and Bronydom became a clear, persistent subcultural group on the 'Net, some people thought that, as Tumblr user Rincewitch puts it, "maybe the wider than expected demographic appeal of my little pony is a bellwether for the destigmatization of femininity."

Well, I didn't just think it.

Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote a whole god damn article proclaiming that it was the case, and that My Little Pony would open up a new golden age for feminism as traditional gender roles collapsed like the houses of lies they were!

WHOOPS.

This is, without a doubt, the single biggest critical blunder I've ever made. Worse than that time I accused Sequart of editorial gender bias, without knowing that their archives had crashed prior to me writing my article, resulting in most of the articles (including all of the ones written by women) being lost. Worse than the time I tried to persuade the Lovecraft subreddit that Cthulhu was boring and overused. Worse than my attempts to shoehorn references to Lord Humongous into all my writing.

I literally could go back in time to the middle of the Somme Valley in 1914 and cheerfully proclaim “This will just be a nice summer war!” and in 1919, as we travel to his place of exile, Kaiser Wilhelm will look me in the eye and you know what he’ll say? You know what he’ll find most pertinent to bring up, what he’ll take the greatest issue with?

He’ll say “Man you sure were dead wrong about Bronydom being a bellweather for the destigmatization of femininity, weren’t you?”

So, all of this in mind, I feel a certain amount of responsibility for the clusterfuck that the tempest within the fandom, and the wider climate instability between the fandom as a whole and its detractors, have become.

In honor of the memory of what the fandom could have been--and, frankly, still is when it's at its absolute best!--I want to try to navigate the storm and provide something like a history of how the fandom foundered, what its challenges were at the outset, and where we might go in building a better fandom.

Trigger warnings for sexism, rape culture, and homophobia.