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silveradeptThe fifteenth and final challenge for this year asks us to create our own challenge. The additional text is a bit tongue-in-cheek to start before settling into describing what's desired.
And there have been more than a few resources and recommendations posts, whether for canon, fannish and creative resources, tropes and their interpretations, communities, and fanworks recommendations. So the sorts of things that I might be able to sneak in with my professional self have also been mostly covered.
There are even a couple of posts about what someone wants to see in their lives, whether by setting goals for themselves, making wishes that others might fulfill, or by following the path of creation to its completion.
I'm fairly certain many of the other challenge responses to this will have practical things to do, like finishing WIPs, adding your stories to places like Fanlore, having a transformative works statement ready to go, cleaning your spaces, whether physical or digital, or to do the thing that you've been meaning to ask of this time but haven't felt like you have the skills or the confidence to do. (Mediocre white dudes do it all time, using their unearned confidence to make up for their lack of skill. So you can probably crush it with your skills.)
I also expect an amount of "support your local marginalized community" as a challenge. "Toss a coin to your [community]" will be one of the more common ways suggested for that, since a lot of people in the majority have spare cash to do this with. "Make support a verb" will be another, and that one is sometimes harder, because that means listening with the ear of learning what might be useful from the people who know, and being okay with the possibility of being wrong, not being invited into the space you want to be in, or finding that you have to advocate for others to your own group, rather than turning your focus outward.
One of the prevalent themes I saw during the wishlist challenge (and engaged in some myself) was around the idea of not feeding the trolls, not getting deep into the shipping wars, and otherwise trying to find the correct space between "treating the wank too seriously" and "bringing serious issues to the fore where they can be discussed and, if necessary, consequences delivered." Which may have a generational gap or two to contend with, as the Fandom Ancients that grew up in an Internet that let them hide and only expose as much of themselves as they wanted to (relatively speaking) are trying to contend with the gatekeepers that say their accomplishments aren't a Real True Hugo Award, advertisers that are trying to shrink their private space to nil (and other entities that will happily use that advertising and other data to spy on them), and an entire generation coming behind them that hasn't come of age on the same Internet and is, instead, trying to fight the next battle. Only the next battle looks too much like one of the battles the Ancients have already developed conventions and solutions for, and so there's enough talking about the same things to let them talk past each other and get aggravated about how the other side isn't listening to them.
anneapocalypse talks brilliantly about this phenomenon, and I am thrilled to be able to point people at this post, because it is brilliant.
We need throughlines that can link The Discourse to the meta already there, the articles and the rants and the things Fandom Ancients wrote during the Ship Wars. I had a pretty solid WTF about Ginny Weasley being Harry's love interest at the time. (I have an equally large one now about why Hermione chose Ron.) Now, of course, I can look at both of them and go "love is weird, so that's a thing that happens" and shrug, and also go "maybe Ron is Jaune to Hermione's Pyrrha, and the reason she kept him was because he was the only one who consistently saw her as something other than the brilliant Gifted Child that her narrative hat was." (That same logic has to shift slightly for Harry and Ginny, because Ginny is pretty explicitly a fangirl at first. But she does manage to prove to Harry that she's not only interested in him because of his fame and the potential prestige dating Harry would bring, so the underlying logic works.)
There's got to be many of those same kinds of essays floating about. I wouldn't be surprised if many of them have been orphaned or abandoned as things done in the impetuousness of youth, opinions tossed aside now that maturity has arrived and someone can see more clearly how much effort was wasted on something that was important at the time. (The endorsement of TERFs isn't helping, either.) Re-summoning ourselves from those times is painful, but if it can be done, the people we were might provide insights and clues into how things are working now, and what things might be effective ways of leading people out of the cave where the shadows are on the wall into the much harsher light and experience outside.
It feels like The Discourse is grappling with important things and, perhaps most crucially, there's a distinct lack of feeling of control over them as well. The platforms they are trying to express opinions and learn identities and otherwise figure out their ideals and not ones they can exercise fine-grained control over, nor are those platforms giving prominence and eyeballs to nuanced, researched, thoughtfully-considered posts. Hot takes, short takes, and takes devoid of context get better reactions, and the ease in which content can be shared makes malicious promotion as easy as beneficial promotion. With the amplifying effect of gathering mobs or using robots (even if there's a pretty robust block list in place), it's not difficult for a single remark to provoke an avalanche of response, right at the time where a person's brain development is telling them to go find social bonds and build a community that will support them through adulthood.
There's a problem with setting a challenge like Engage, though, and it's that so many marginalized people are already doing it because they don't have a choice. Whether they're seen as The Exception, or The Educator, or the Token Minority, plenty of marginalized people are already stretched pretty thin on resources, patience, spoons, and willingness to put up with the bullshit. So exhorting everyone to engage more isn't fair to them. Beyond that, more engagement is not necessarily better engagement, if people aren't listening and thinking and otherwise trying to produce the best outcomes with their engagement. It's no good to reinforce an awful status quo if the goal of transformative works is to change the things that aren't great or otherwise provide an alternative in the what-if scenario.
So maybe I could instead make a suggestion for everyone to Forgive, but that also has the same issue as above regarding who would be expected to forgive more, despite being the ones who are wronged more often. Plus, places that take their cultural cues from Christianity have an interesting relationship to forgiveness. The Catholicism I was raised in used a form of the Nicene Creed that said "forgive us our trespasses / as we forgive those who trespass against us". There's a slightly more poetic and different form of that statement in style of the hymns that was "forgive us our faults / as we our faults confess" In both cases, forgiveness is conditional on either our own willingness to forgive others or our willingness to admit to our faults. (There's probably some interesting comparisons to be made between this idea of conditional forgiveness in the Christian Foundational Writings versus the jubilee / amnesty ideas expressed in Tanakh.) The problem with this conditional forgiveness conception is that it can very easily be transformed into an obligation or a transaction where the person doing the wrong demands the forgiveness of others because they've fulfilled their end of forgiving others or admitting to their role in the issue. Forgiveness, of course, can only be offered, not required, but that doesn't stop various outlets and structural cultural pieces from putting pressure on the person wronged to forgive the person who made such public confession or who has already been punished by having their livelihood temporarily disrupted by the outrage generated by having their behavior brought to light. (Or, in those rarest of cases, they actually are punished with jail time for their transgressions.)
Which makes it look a lot like grand philosophical challenges aren't going to work all that well, because there are more than enough mitigating and complicating circumstances to make them less universal. I would really like to have something more meta than immediately practical, since this is the last challenge, but that can have immediate and practical applications all throughout the year. Because my ego is apparently unsatisfied with simple, practical things. (Quelle surprise. It probably stems from a multitude of Gifted Child related issues, but one that is particularly relevant right now are the people who, upon hearing that I was competing in impromptu speaking, said something to the order of "Oh. So, I'm the person on the other end of the phone and I'm telling you I'm going to do something terrible. What do you say to stop me?" And then sat in expectant silence waiting for me to say something on that topic, even after I had immediately said that this thing and the thing I was doing were not related at all to each other. Or the boys who taught me early on what arguing in bad faith looked like, along with the crows of "victory!" that would ensue from them when I refused to engage, having figured this out, even if I didn't have the words to articulate that at the time.)
So I guess I land in a space where the challenges I might give sound trite and cliché. Perhaps because they are small, seemingly doable, possibly even easy, and yet we don't do them as consistently as we might want to, or as we might want others to. (So maybe they are more of a challenge than they could be.)
Make art from your own experiences. Include people whose experiences are different in your art and portrayals. Do the research on different experiences from people whose experience it is. If you can't find it, or they refuse you, find something else. Try to consume a lot more art from people who are creating their own experiences than from people who aren't. Recommend the good stuff for everyone to enjoy. (If you can't find enough good stuff, examine in yourself why you think that. Then expand your horizons or change your assumptions.) Leave good comments for the creator, if you can.
When you mess up, own up to it, apologize for it, and repair the damage, if you can. (For all those things, remember ring theory, and that if you've messed up, you're not the center of the rings.) Talk frankly with your own circles when someone in those circles messes up. Figure out what you can learn from their mistakes, and change accordingly.
Believe marginalized people. Even when their experience is different than yours. Especially when their experience is different than yours. Understand that marginalization on one axis doesn't mean marginalization on all axes, and that the intersection of where someone is with regard to their marginalizations and privileges is almost certainly unique to them. Recognize the interactions between those axes means all sorts of things, where someone can be right for their experience and wrong for everyone else's in the same sentence.
Call people by the names, pronouns, and forms of address that they have chosen for themselves. If your systems cannot accommodate these things, demand and/or make better systems that can, because identity is one of the fundamental things that humans need.
Take care of yourself as well as others. The terrible truth is that no single person can be everything to everyone, can fight perfectly on all fronts, and have endless energy to keep that combat going perpetually. Make decisions based on your ability, your affinity, and your desires. Maybe the way you make the world a better place is not through carrying signs and speaking loudly, but through sharing your resources, providing rest and support, persistently pestering the people who supposedly represent you to do a far better job of it, and/or creating art that helps people understand and be seen. (Or maybe you carry signs and punch fascists. That's also cool.)
These are the small things that are huge, the things that are simple and complicated, that can be adopted immediately and that will take a lifetime of work to achieve. These are presented in the form of the lies we tell children so they look achievable, so we can be prepared for the bigger lies, the ones we must believe as noble truths.
If you must blink, do it now.
In the 1970s, educator Arleen Lorrance wrote, "Be the change you want to see happen." Which is all well and good, but personally I think one ought to get one's friends to be the change you want to see happen.A fair number of the things that I might use for a create-your-own challenge have been covered this year. In the current climate, it seems like humans as a whole need to remember some of the things they were supposedly taught in their earliest of years. Say hello and make friends. Say nice things about yourself/Don't sell yourself short. Talk about the people who inspire you to be your best. Be kind to one another.
[Challenge Text]
This can be big or small; strictly fannish or extending across all aspects of life; a challenge you saw someone else do, or that used to run and you miss, or something you have thought up just now, or something you yourself are already doing. Earnest, silly, fun, all three! Send us off into the rest of the year by challenging us all to give it a go.
And there have been more than a few resources and recommendations posts, whether for canon, fannish and creative resources, tropes and their interpretations, communities, and fanworks recommendations. So the sorts of things that I might be able to sneak in with my professional self have also been mostly covered.
There are even a couple of posts about what someone wants to see in their lives, whether by setting goals for themselves, making wishes that others might fulfill, or by following the path of creation to its completion.
I'm fairly certain many of the other challenge responses to this will have practical things to do, like finishing WIPs, adding your stories to places like Fanlore, having a transformative works statement ready to go, cleaning your spaces, whether physical or digital, or to do the thing that you've been meaning to ask of this time but haven't felt like you have the skills or the confidence to do. (Mediocre white dudes do it all time, using their unearned confidence to make up for their lack of skill. So you can probably crush it with your skills.)
I also expect an amount of "support your local marginalized community" as a challenge. "Toss a coin to your [community]" will be one of the more common ways suggested for that, since a lot of people in the majority have spare cash to do this with. "Make support a verb" will be another, and that one is sometimes harder, because that means listening with the ear of learning what might be useful from the people who know, and being okay with the possibility of being wrong, not being invited into the space you want to be in, or finding that you have to advocate for others to your own group, rather than turning your focus outward.
One of the prevalent themes I saw during the wishlist challenge (and engaged in some myself) was around the idea of not feeding the trolls, not getting deep into the shipping wars, and otherwise trying to find the correct space between "treating the wank too seriously" and "bringing serious issues to the fore where they can be discussed and, if necessary, consequences delivered." Which may have a generational gap or two to contend with, as the Fandom Ancients that grew up in an Internet that let them hide and only expose as much of themselves as they wanted to (relatively speaking) are trying to contend with the gatekeepers that say their accomplishments aren't a Real True Hugo Award, advertisers that are trying to shrink their private space to nil (and other entities that will happily use that advertising and other data to spy on them), and an entire generation coming behind them that hasn't come of age on the same Internet and is, instead, trying to fight the next battle. Only the next battle looks too much like one of the battles the Ancients have already developed conventions and solutions for, and so there's enough talking about the same things to let them talk past each other and get aggravated about how the other side isn't listening to them.
anneapocalypse talks brilliantly about this phenomenon, and I am thrilled to be able to point people at this post, because it is brilliant.We need throughlines that can link The Discourse to the meta already there, the articles and the rants and the things Fandom Ancients wrote during the Ship Wars. I had a pretty solid WTF about Ginny Weasley being Harry's love interest at the time. (I have an equally large one now about why Hermione chose Ron.) Now, of course, I can look at both of them and go "love is weird, so that's a thing that happens" and shrug, and also go "maybe Ron is Jaune to Hermione's Pyrrha, and the reason she kept him was because he was the only one who consistently saw her as something other than the brilliant Gifted Child that her narrative hat was." (That same logic has to shift slightly for Harry and Ginny, because Ginny is pretty explicitly a fangirl at first. But she does manage to prove to Harry that she's not only interested in him because of his fame and the potential prestige dating Harry would bring, so the underlying logic works.)
There's got to be many of those same kinds of essays floating about. I wouldn't be surprised if many of them have been orphaned or abandoned as things done in the impetuousness of youth, opinions tossed aside now that maturity has arrived and someone can see more clearly how much effort was wasted on something that was important at the time. (The endorsement of TERFs isn't helping, either.) Re-summoning ourselves from those times is painful, but if it can be done, the people we were might provide insights and clues into how things are working now, and what things might be effective ways of leading people out of the cave where the shadows are on the wall into the much harsher light and experience outside.
It feels like The Discourse is grappling with important things and, perhaps most crucially, there's a distinct lack of feeling of control over them as well. The platforms they are trying to express opinions and learn identities and otherwise figure out their ideals and not ones they can exercise fine-grained control over, nor are those platforms giving prominence and eyeballs to nuanced, researched, thoughtfully-considered posts. Hot takes, short takes, and takes devoid of context get better reactions, and the ease in which content can be shared makes malicious promotion as easy as beneficial promotion. With the amplifying effect of gathering mobs or using robots (even if there's a pretty robust block list in place), it's not difficult for a single remark to provoke an avalanche of response, right at the time where a person's brain development is telling them to go find social bonds and build a community that will support them through adulthood.
There's a problem with setting a challenge like Engage, though, and it's that so many marginalized people are already doing it because they don't have a choice. Whether they're seen as The Exception, or The Educator, or the Token Minority, plenty of marginalized people are already stretched pretty thin on resources, patience, spoons, and willingness to put up with the bullshit. So exhorting everyone to engage more isn't fair to them. Beyond that, more engagement is not necessarily better engagement, if people aren't listening and thinking and otherwise trying to produce the best outcomes with their engagement. It's no good to reinforce an awful status quo if the goal of transformative works is to change the things that aren't great or otherwise provide an alternative in the what-if scenario.
So maybe I could instead make a suggestion for everyone to Forgive, but that also has the same issue as above regarding who would be expected to forgive more, despite being the ones who are wronged more often. Plus, places that take their cultural cues from Christianity have an interesting relationship to forgiveness. The Catholicism I was raised in used a form of the Nicene Creed that said "forgive us our trespasses / as we forgive those who trespass against us". There's a slightly more poetic and different form of that statement in style of the hymns that was "forgive us our faults / as we our faults confess" In both cases, forgiveness is conditional on either our own willingness to forgive others or our willingness to admit to our faults. (There's probably some interesting comparisons to be made between this idea of conditional forgiveness in the Christian Foundational Writings versus the jubilee / amnesty ideas expressed in Tanakh.) The problem with this conditional forgiveness conception is that it can very easily be transformed into an obligation or a transaction where the person doing the wrong demands the forgiveness of others because they've fulfilled their end of forgiving others or admitting to their role in the issue. Forgiveness, of course, can only be offered, not required, but that doesn't stop various outlets and structural cultural pieces from putting pressure on the person wronged to forgive the person who made such public confession or who has already been punished by having their livelihood temporarily disrupted by the outrage generated by having their behavior brought to light. (Or, in those rarest of cases, they actually are punished with jail time for their transgressions.)
Which makes it look a lot like grand philosophical challenges aren't going to work all that well, because there are more than enough mitigating and complicating circumstances to make them less universal. I would really like to have something more meta than immediately practical, since this is the last challenge, but that can have immediate and practical applications all throughout the year. Because my ego is apparently unsatisfied with simple, practical things. (Quelle surprise. It probably stems from a multitude of Gifted Child related issues, but one that is particularly relevant right now are the people who, upon hearing that I was competing in impromptu speaking, said something to the order of "Oh. So, I'm the person on the other end of the phone and I'm telling you I'm going to do something terrible. What do you say to stop me?" And then sat in expectant silence waiting for me to say something on that topic, even after I had immediately said that this thing and the thing I was doing were not related at all to each other. Or the boys who taught me early on what arguing in bad faith looked like, along with the crows of "victory!" that would ensue from them when I refused to engage, having figured this out, even if I didn't have the words to articulate that at the time.)
So I guess I land in a space where the challenges I might give sound trite and cliché. Perhaps because they are small, seemingly doable, possibly even easy, and yet we don't do them as consistently as we might want to, or as we might want others to. (So maybe they are more of a challenge than they could be.)
Make art from your own experiences. Include people whose experiences are different in your art and portrayals. Do the research on different experiences from people whose experience it is. If you can't find it, or they refuse you, find something else. Try to consume a lot more art from people who are creating their own experiences than from people who aren't. Recommend the good stuff for everyone to enjoy. (If you can't find enough good stuff, examine in yourself why you think that. Then expand your horizons or change your assumptions.) Leave good comments for the creator, if you can.
When you mess up, own up to it, apologize for it, and repair the damage, if you can. (For all those things, remember ring theory, and that if you've messed up, you're not the center of the rings.) Talk frankly with your own circles when someone in those circles messes up. Figure out what you can learn from their mistakes, and change accordingly.
Believe marginalized people. Even when their experience is different than yours. Especially when their experience is different than yours. Understand that marginalization on one axis doesn't mean marginalization on all axes, and that the intersection of where someone is with regard to their marginalizations and privileges is almost certainly unique to them. Recognize the interactions between those axes means all sorts of things, where someone can be right for their experience and wrong for everyone else's in the same sentence.
Call people by the names, pronouns, and forms of address that they have chosen for themselves. If your systems cannot accommodate these things, demand and/or make better systems that can, because identity is one of the fundamental things that humans need.
Take care of yourself as well as others. The terrible truth is that no single person can be everything to everyone, can fight perfectly on all fronts, and have endless energy to keep that combat going perpetually. Make decisions based on your ability, your affinity, and your desires. Maybe the way you make the world a better place is not through carrying signs and speaking loudly, but through sharing your resources, providing rest and support, persistently pestering the people who supposedly represent you to do a far better job of it, and/or creating art that helps people understand and be seen. (Or maybe you carry signs and punch fascists. That's also cool.)
These are the small things that are huge, the things that are simple and complicated, that can be adopted immediately and that will take a lifetime of work to achieve. These are presented in the form of the lies we tell children so they look achievable, so we can be prepared for the bigger lies, the ones we must believe as noble truths.
If you must blink, do it now.
