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silveradeptWe're back for the Sunshine Challenge this summer, and the runners have mixed things up again, this time going with a different theme.
It certainly seems warranted to think and talk about death and finality in the middle of the current pandemic, even if many governments are pushing hard on the idea that if the pandemic is over in their country, it's over everywhere and nobody needs to concern themselves about it any more. Except, of course, for the people who can't or won't take a vaccination, and the variants that are around that may require new tactics and advancements to keep people healthy even if they are vaccinated against one of the other variations. But there are others handling that part, and quite well.
I could talk, instead, about the heat dome that was in my region of the United States last week-end that reminds us of the phrase "hot as Hades" and the long term consequences of decisions made to continue generation of large scale greenhouse emissions so as to chase short term profit (and that the profit calculation takes into account all of the necessary and legal bribes for legislators and regulators to ensure no actions are taken against them), and how swapping over to electric vehicles requires money I do not have and would probably need some calculation as to whether the emissions saved by going electric were greater than the emissions generated in the mining and manufacture of the vehicle and its battery and the power that would be used to charge it. But others do that, and better, as well.
And in this past year, there's been some of the clearest views we've received of how the systems that we were raised and schooled not to seriously question are working as they were designed to do so that only the wealthiest whitest men will benefit from them and the rest of us will have no method of redressing our grievances against these systems, even if, more than ever, the public wants those systems destroyed because they cannot be reformed. Or, now that we've proven that the world could continue working with a far greater percentage of people doing their work remotely, the people with the power strings are determined to close off that avenue to everyone rather than admit that perhaps they could have employed the disabled and everyone else who had care requirements that would necessitate working from home and flexibility in their schedules. Like drinking from the Lethe, we're supposed to forget what we saw and pretend it didn't happen and believe with all our being that everything is going back to normal, it it isn't already there, and so we don't have to grapple with these issues that have been brought into stark relief. And there are others doing this, extremely well.
I could talk more personally, about how the consequences of decisions I made for my own health and safety years ago still interfere with my ability to go forward with other projects that would help my health and safety, and that I'm probably going to have a lot of anger and regret and depression that accompanies any time that interference rears its head again. "It always seems impossible until it is done," reads a poster on one of my walls, and that sums up a lot of things about my situation, where there is nothing to do but continue moving forward and dream of the time where I am starting to build wealth and security, rather than being forever indebted to someone else. I'm not ready for that conversation yet, and I may not be for years. But I'm sure that some people can read between the lines, even if they don't have direct knowledge, and so they know. After all, write what you know, right? The things that feel the most real to a reader are likely so because either reader or writer knows those things, often intimately.
Which leaves us at fandom again, the safe topic that we use to talk about very unsafe things. Or that we use to write unsafe things because that is what the brain wants, even if we know full well that we wouldn't do it in our own lives, or we would do so with a lot more safety in mind, because we love ourselves and our companions, and don't want to break either bodies or brains for them or us (for the most part, anyway). But fandom also has some of those problems mentioned above about unbalanced systems that are having their settled and final orthodoxies challenged, and the bad reactions that follow from people having their power and privileges challenged. (In some ways, the continued debate about what counts as a metric of quality for fanworks is a good thing. It doesn't prevent someone from arbitrarily declaring that one metric or ratio is the ultimate arbiter of good, but it does give everyone else license to tell them they're full of it.) I was listening to a Grace Lin TEDx talk about how, as a child, she tried to erase away her own identity, and how it failed to really move the needle on how others perceived her, including being told by her school-aged peers that she couldn't play Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, because she didn't look like Dorothy. The latter part of the talk is feel-good about how a school play adaptation of one of her books cast four children in the main character's role, because they all wanted to be her, but I wonder about how many grown-ass adults get told they can't be Dorothy. Or that they can't write, art, or cosplay that character because that character isn't their race. And while representation is still pretty bad (and good representation even rarer), there is a difference between telling someone they can't do a thing for racist reasons and telling someone "This is not your lane, you don't understand it and you may never understand it, so don't get in it." ("Thou shalt not point out to me how stupid it is to call myself a person of colour and then get mad when someone not of color calls me a colored person." But it's not stupid, because there's context there that has to be pointed out. Person of color is a term from the community and doesn't carry the baggage of what "colored" meant. It's the same reason that non-Black people don't get n-word privileges. Words mean things, and their contexts matter.) I want there to be space in fandom for the people who want to recreate improbable costumes in exacting detail and people who want to give us a more abstract look that's recognizable. And for people to look at a character and then try to build what they would look like and act like if they were from their own cultural context, rather than the one the writers put the character in. I have seen some really gorgeous cosplay like that, and I want to see more people do that thing.
But I also think that a world with balance where laws applied to all wouldn't need the ten foot high signs that say "cosplay is not consent," the reminders that questions are short and end with a question mark, that smallings should always get to ask their questions first, and that I wouldn't have had the opportunity of overhearing a couple of panelists who had spoken at length about doing cosplay and good practices, after asking them what I thought was a basic politeness ("After the room is clear and you've talked to people, could I get a picture of your cosplay?") tell each other, "Yeah, like that. That's a perfect example of how we want people to ask." (On the other hand, it took me a couple times to parse correctly that I was being given direction about how to take a picture on a different interaction. We're not perfect and should never claim to be.) Because so much of what would bring this world back into balance would be starting from the proposition that all lives are valuable as themselves and should be given every opportunity to find where they thrive. We could make Hades' job a lot easier by proving ourselves worthy while we're still mortal.
Hades is the god of the dead and the king of the Underworld with which his name became synonymous. Despite modern connotations of death as evil, Hades was actually more altruistically inclined in mythology; his role was often maintaining relative balance between the realms. He was often depicted as cold and stern in his judgment, and he held all of his subjects equally accountable to his laws. Above all else, Hades ensured the finality of death and that none of his subjects ever left the Underworld.Mostly because I've seen it around on my list of friends, the first thing that comes to mind is Supergiant Games' roguelite Hades, which portrays the titular character as a perennially overworked bureaucrat, surrounded by piles upon piles of paperwork and an endless queue of shades who have to be sorted and their appeals heard (and denied) about their final placement. There's more to this story, of course, but I don't want to spoil it for people who haven't played the game.
It certainly seems warranted to think and talk about death and finality in the middle of the current pandemic, even if many governments are pushing hard on the idea that if the pandemic is over in their country, it's over everywhere and nobody needs to concern themselves about it any more. Except, of course, for the people who can't or won't take a vaccination, and the variants that are around that may require new tactics and advancements to keep people healthy even if they are vaccinated against one of the other variations. But there are others handling that part, and quite well.
I could talk, instead, about the heat dome that was in my region of the United States last week-end that reminds us of the phrase "hot as Hades" and the long term consequences of decisions made to continue generation of large scale greenhouse emissions so as to chase short term profit (and that the profit calculation takes into account all of the necessary and legal bribes for legislators and regulators to ensure no actions are taken against them), and how swapping over to electric vehicles requires money I do not have and would probably need some calculation as to whether the emissions saved by going electric were greater than the emissions generated in the mining and manufacture of the vehicle and its battery and the power that would be used to charge it. But others do that, and better, as well.
And in this past year, there's been some of the clearest views we've received of how the systems that we were raised and schooled not to seriously question are working as they were designed to do so that only the wealthiest whitest men will benefit from them and the rest of us will have no method of redressing our grievances against these systems, even if, more than ever, the public wants those systems destroyed because they cannot be reformed. Or, now that we've proven that the world could continue working with a far greater percentage of people doing their work remotely, the people with the power strings are determined to close off that avenue to everyone rather than admit that perhaps they could have employed the disabled and everyone else who had care requirements that would necessitate working from home and flexibility in their schedules. Like drinking from the Lethe, we're supposed to forget what we saw and pretend it didn't happen and believe with all our being that everything is going back to normal, it it isn't already there, and so we don't have to grapple with these issues that have been brought into stark relief. And there are others doing this, extremely well.
I could talk more personally, about how the consequences of decisions I made for my own health and safety years ago still interfere with my ability to go forward with other projects that would help my health and safety, and that I'm probably going to have a lot of anger and regret and depression that accompanies any time that interference rears its head again. "It always seems impossible until it is done," reads a poster on one of my walls, and that sums up a lot of things about my situation, where there is nothing to do but continue moving forward and dream of the time where I am starting to build wealth and security, rather than being forever indebted to someone else. I'm not ready for that conversation yet, and I may not be for years. But I'm sure that some people can read between the lines, even if they don't have direct knowledge, and so they know. After all, write what you know, right? The things that feel the most real to a reader are likely so because either reader or writer knows those things, often intimately.
Which leaves us at fandom again, the safe topic that we use to talk about very unsafe things. Or that we use to write unsafe things because that is what the brain wants, even if we know full well that we wouldn't do it in our own lives, or we would do so with a lot more safety in mind, because we love ourselves and our companions, and don't want to break either bodies or brains for them or us (for the most part, anyway). But fandom also has some of those problems mentioned above about unbalanced systems that are having their settled and final orthodoxies challenged, and the bad reactions that follow from people having their power and privileges challenged. (In some ways, the continued debate about what counts as a metric of quality for fanworks is a good thing. It doesn't prevent someone from arbitrarily declaring that one metric or ratio is the ultimate arbiter of good, but it does give everyone else license to tell them they're full of it.) I was listening to a Grace Lin TEDx talk about how, as a child, she tried to erase away her own identity, and how it failed to really move the needle on how others perceived her, including being told by her school-aged peers that she couldn't play Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, because she didn't look like Dorothy. The latter part of the talk is feel-good about how a school play adaptation of one of her books cast four children in the main character's role, because they all wanted to be her, but I wonder about how many grown-ass adults get told they can't be Dorothy. Or that they can't write, art, or cosplay that character because that character isn't their race. And while representation is still pretty bad (and good representation even rarer), there is a difference between telling someone they can't do a thing for racist reasons and telling someone "This is not your lane, you don't understand it and you may never understand it, so don't get in it." ("Thou shalt not point out to me how stupid it is to call myself a person of colour and then get mad when someone not of color calls me a colored person." But it's not stupid, because there's context there that has to be pointed out. Person of color is a term from the community and doesn't carry the baggage of what "colored" meant. It's the same reason that non-Black people don't get n-word privileges. Words mean things, and their contexts matter.) I want there to be space in fandom for the people who want to recreate improbable costumes in exacting detail and people who want to give us a more abstract look that's recognizable. And for people to look at a character and then try to build what they would look like and act like if they were from their own cultural context, rather than the one the writers put the character in. I have seen some really gorgeous cosplay like that, and I want to see more people do that thing.
But I also think that a world with balance where laws applied to all wouldn't need the ten foot high signs that say "cosplay is not consent," the reminders that questions are short and end with a question mark, that smallings should always get to ask their questions first, and that I wouldn't have had the opportunity of overhearing a couple of panelists who had spoken at length about doing cosplay and good practices, after asking them what I thought was a basic politeness ("After the room is clear and you've talked to people, could I get a picture of your cosplay?") tell each other, "Yeah, like that. That's a perfect example of how we want people to ask." (On the other hand, it took me a couple times to parse correctly that I was being given direction about how to take a picture on a different interaction. We're not perfect and should never claim to be.) Because so much of what would bring this world back into balance would be starting from the proposition that all lives are valuable as themselves and should be given every opportunity to find where they thrive. We could make Hades' job a lot easier by proving ourselves worthy while we're still mortal.
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Date: 2021-07-01 11:02 pm (UTC)Yes, I think anyone who didn't realize this before, because of propaganda and indoctrination, and because it was camouflaged so well, now sees it with perfect clarity.
Very interesting read.
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Date: 2021-07-11 04:38 pm (UTC)Words mean things, and their contexts matter. - AMEN. Also, yes: let's make Hades' job a bit easier, I'm down with that. :)
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Date: 2021-07-14 03:46 am (UTC)Spot on, sadly. So many good points here. Thank you for sharing.
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Date: 2021-07-14 04:37 am (UTC)