Journal Games: Gendered Language and Character Descriptions

A couplethings that I should probably just stash all in one place that are all journal games:

Let's start with gendered language address: ( Gendered addresses )

Elsewhere, there's a journalmemes prompt, original by extrapenguin that asks about characters. Given a character, I am to provide:

• How I feel about the character
• All of my personal romanic ships for that character
• A romantic One True Pairing (OTP) for that character
• A non-romantic One True Pairing (OTP) for that character
• An opinion about the character [the original says unpopular, but I'm fandom-adjacent, remember, and therefore have zero clue what's popular and what's not.]
• One thing I wish would / did happen to this character in the canon
• One crossover ship with this character
• A headcanon about this character

You are much more likely to get a sensible response if you ask about a character in a work I have seen/listened/read/experienced. Which is sometimes a bit tough to know, but you could probably bang together a rough idea of things through looking at the interests page or the works page for my AO3 account, if you don't know. It's not perfect, because there's a lot I've seen that I haven't written anything for.

And the more standard material - July-August 02020

Greetings. Let's begin with the last essay of Congressman John Lewis, exhorting us to be the generation that finally achieves what has been long sought. Which will involve finding ways to center the BIPOC in the academy, regardless of what level of the academy they are in. That means there's a lot of work for white people to do. I'm less fond of the construction in this piece that is "White people, you have to stop oppressing. People of color, you have to stop using being oppressed as an excuse." Because that makes it sound like both sides have an equal amount of work to do, and that's a ludicrous proposition to entertain, as well as being an easy escape for someone who doesn't want to do the work on their side to start pointing fingers about a "culture of victimhood" or other such things to smugly declare that they'll do their work only after everyone else does theirs.

We continue with the problem of the emcee of the Hugo Awards for CoNZealand, first in that short form (and which contains help for me to pronounce the name of FIYAH magazine correctly from this point forward. Had I done more than seen the name around, I would like to believe that I would have picked up the right pronounciation from clues, context, or a pronunciation guide, but, I haven't engaged any more than seeing the name, so my own ignorance is my own fault) and then in more detail with the entirely-warranted idea that GRRM should be yote into the sun in terms of his prestige and pull for this particular debacle. The actual winners had great speeches, as did some of the presenters, which made the contrast between where the fandom is now versus the extended insistence that the time of fascists and exclusively white men in science fiction was preferable coming from the Toastmaster that much more jarring (and the mispronunciation of names, which a professional audiobook narrator points out was something that could have been easily avoided with asking and with practicing, neither of which said Toastmaster seemed interested in, from accounts).

All of this culminates in When The Toastmaster Talks Less, the CoNZealand Hugo Awards ceremony bereft of the part of the ceremony that was a paen to the old past where white men could be safe and secure in the understanding that they were the only people who would ever be allowed into science fiction.

It very much feels like this particular decision, such that it is, is in conversation with the continuing reluctance of large publishing houses and imprints to put out a lot of anything from BIPOC authors (with things discussed like "I couldn't bid on a really popular book because my publishing house said we already had our Black author") with not unwarranted speculation that GRRM, Silverberg, and the concom all put on a show that was an extended backlash at all the BIPOC who continue to win awards and use their platforms to talk about the problems of the past. Because as this year's Astounding Award Winner points out, being not white means having to deal with a lot of extra crap, getting harrassed, and only having specific things bought that reflect white prejudices, for a lot less money than a white author would get. Which is the same conversation as this year's Best Related Work Acceptance Speech from last year's Astounding Award winner that talked about the legacy of the person the award used to be named for and the message that sent to fans of the genre. It is, as one of the Hugo Award winner for Best Novel spoke about, a question of welcome, and who is welcome, and what being welcome in the community means, and this particular ceremony is bringing to the fore in unmistakable ways what had been underneath the surface. Much like the greater conversations around race, power, and systems of oppression that are happening on the surface instead of below it.

For more than a few people who have had the privilege of being able not to notice, of being surrounded by people like them who talked about what they thought of as acceptable discourse, they seem to think that the landscape of spec fic has suddenly changed to reflect our current times and problems, as if this were somehow novel and not exactly what speculative fiction has been doing all the time. The only thing that changed was that instead of reflecting a fairly narrow lane of perspectives about what the problems of the present are that get solved or projected into the future, there's now a much broader pipeline of people in the conversation, making and selling their own stories, both inside and outside of traditional publishing, and in different media that strictly prose or poetry.

There's also the context of the large amount of electronic bits spilled over the Archive Of Our Own Hugo win from 2019 in this mix, because transformative works are doing a lot of the things that don't ever make it to the Hugo nomination stage, even if they could be nominated, as the fan community were ever so patiently scolded. And AO3 is also in the mix, as a place where initial designs and ideas for the structure of the archive were in conversation with specific issues, and now there are more issues that need design decisions about, specifically to create a more welcoming environment for non-white creators. (Which are conversations that need to be and continue happening in the library and archives worlds so we can produce some best practices and some guides so that other people who are creating and working with archives can avoid making the same mistakes we did.) But the idea of fanworks telling stories, imagining alternate possibilities, recasting, filling in the things that were left out or only implied, that's the conversation of creatives, and a lot of that is the bailiwick of the speculative fiction department, to take what is and imagine what could be, or what might have been, but for things being a little different.

So, it's in the context of a certain amoun of official acknowledgement and legitimacy granted to the fan creators (a domain stereotpically composed of women), the high-profile wins of BIPOC writers and their willingness to call out the racist and gatekeeping history of speculative fiction, most prominently the Astounding Award speech that spoke to John W. Campbell's legacy (even though that was already known, now it was being highlighted) and that lead to the dropping of Campbell's name from the award, that we have the decisions (or lack of decisions) made to produce this particular show, where the fandom and the voters continued to move in the direction of recognizing and rewarding people who would have been shut out of publishing and the Hugos not all that long ago and the face of the award ceremony waxing poetic about how great the racist, sexist, and fascist white men of the past were and their continuing relevance to the genre.

What could have been with this Hugo award ceremony, had the people running it been interested in nuturing and encouraging the wider perspective, instead of desperately trying to cling to a past that only privileges a few and tries to gatekeep the rest out.

It's going to be interesting to see what happens in 2021, The concom there has a pretty good blueprint to recognize which parts of this year's ceremony to keep and which ones to jettison entirely. It doesn't have to be perfect, but we are certainly hoping that the obvious mistakes can be recognized and rectified.

( There's Always More Inside )

Last for tonight, the concept of the beginner's mind in the guise of using play as a way of stepping around the stresses that come with wanting to do something well. Because I see a lot of advice on this matter about approaching things like a child, and being playful, and being able to let go of having to get it done perfectly so that you can get it done at all, and it doesn't quite stick the landing I think the people giving that advice does. It's why I tend to recommend the taste-skill gap piece by Ira Glass to people who feel stuck that they're not creating the works that they want to.

A person who is just starting is someone who doesn't know what they can and can't do, outside of learning what's entailed in the thing. Learning the rules and the techniques has a certain amount of forgiveness attached to it, because, well, you're learning the thing, and mistakes are part of the learning process. And then, there are experts on the thing, people who have done the thing enough times that they have the confidence of being able to continue doing it, and when something uexpected arises, can draw on their knowledge of having fixed or had to deal with enough similar situations that it's not something that causes them to crash or get stuck. It's that in-between state, the one where you see what the experts are producing and want to do the same, but the skill and experience available is not the same, and attempting to do that thing will result in something that's not the thing that's seen. That's where the discouragement happens, where the stress and the paralysis take form, because people have a pretty accurate idea of what their skills are and a pretty accurate idea of what's good, and they know that what they can do isn't what's up to their conception of what's good.

Ira's advice on the matter is to acknowledge the gap and keep doing stuff anyway, knowing fully that it's not yet going to be up to your taste. And I think it's in that middle space where advice like "go back to playing" has the most possibility of working, where trying to get back to the mind of the beginner is most useful, because it helps reframe things from "trying to produce a thing that's good" to "trying to produce a thing because you want to try and produce it." Down the path of "trying to do things that are good" lies the idea that hobbies should become side hustles, and the entire horde that is more than willing to tell you that what you've created isn't up to their tastes, either, and often times for reasons that are unrelated at all to the actual thing itself, not that the Hugo Award ceremony material at the top of this post is in any way related to this concept, not at all, and why would you think it would be related? (Narrator: Laying the sarcasm on a bit thick, aren't we?)

The transformative works concept of "Don't like? Don't read." is both "Don't waste your time raeding something you're not going to get enjoyment out of" and "Save your 'constructive' criticism of a work for a space that the creator isn't going to see." Because a lot of supposed concrit that I've seen has very little to do with the work itself and a lot more to do with the supposed relative social statuses of the critic (who believes themself doing a favor/service to the creator by pointing out how wrong everything is, often based on their own idea of what a thing should be) and the creator (who may have done the thing on a lark or has made very specific decisions about something and is extrapolating from there, and often comes with receipts about those same decisions). See Solnit's "Men Explain Things To Me" link above on how the pattern of critic and creator usually pans out, just with extra condescension or derision to the creator for failing to match what the critic's conception of everything is.

"Don't like? Don't read." is specifically acknowledging that many transformative works and creations aren't made with the primary goal of improving skills, but instead are in celebration of shared fandom, or interested in telling a story that should have been there and isn't, or in telling a story differently than the one presented. The secret, of course, being that every time someone creates a thing, they have practiced their skills, and possibly learned a couple others as well. And eventually, with enough practice, skill catches up to taste, and assuming they haven't been run off by jerkasses who don't understand the concept or who think that people who don't look like them or think like them should be ever allowed to create things that don't cater solely to their tastes, those creators become experts and create the stuff that comes from a whole lot of experience that might start someone else on the path toward gaining sufficient experience, and the cycle begins again. It's been going for particular populations for quite a while now, so now the work is in expanding it to everyone. (And in blocking and excluding the jerkasses who don't get it early on.)