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sunshine_challenge time, since it's July, and that means that we have some spaced-out, themed prompts to go through, and I can freely admit that I will try to go through some of the responses, many of them, even, but I will probably not go through all of them, because they just keep coming, and people are interested in that kind of thing.
This year's prompt set seems to be flower-themed. I mostly know nothing about the supposed language of flowers, but I suspect there are several languages of flowers around, much like the uses of gemstones and the various interpretations of oracle cards and tarot decks and the like. So you'll get to watch me contort things into fandom stories or ruminations about my own life and where it stands. Or hare off on weird tangents because that's where my brain decided it wanted to go at the time and I'm indulging it in doing so.
My admiration, though, often goes to the people who are displaying all of those other virtues in the world around us today. The United States, through the exercise of power along specific ideological lines by appointed judges, struck several blows against systems put in place to ensure that people who have been systematically discriminated against get what they need to at least make a gesture at making up for all of the active and passive discrimination they have faced in their lives (and will continue to face.) The last few years in specific states of the US have made it their missions to make life as difficult as possible for everyone who isn't a cisgendered white extremely wealthy heterosexual Christian man/corporation. Obviously, the people who aren't all of those categories still exist and still continue about their lives. Just because the state demands that you disappear doesn't mean that it happens, but it takes additional reserves of courage and wisdom, and holding on to one's hope to continue living in those places, or to make the decision to leave a place, and the support systems that you have built up over the years, because it has become fundamentally hostile to you and you are afraid for your safety and your life.
In fannish spaces, right now there's a focus on the Organization for Transformative Works and a campaign to make them be more transparent, more actively anti-racist, and to equip the people who use the Archive of Our Own with effective tools to moderate their spaces and experiences as a first line of defense against harassment. It's one of the truths of our fannish experiences that we will encounter people who have different opinions about our fandoms and characters than we do. Some of us have different headcanons than others, and we read characters and situations differently, sometimes at right angles with what the narrative is telling is happening and the motivations of the characters involved. What is a sad truth, but doesn't have to be a truth, is that a significant number of fans receive vitriol, targeted harassment, and other things meant to try and run them out of being part of the community of fans. Often for extremely petty reasons, like "you ship something different than I do," "you analyze media and point out some unfortunate messages and their effects, whether those messages were intentionally placed or not," or "you're not white." Since fandom is a part of our society, it comes with many of the pieces of baggage that go with society, including systemic --isms and a wide variety of ways of consuming and interacting with pop culture around us. From what I've seen, and had relayed to me (since I'm not living it as a daily part of my life, hi privileges,) it's exhausting to have to put up with the nonsense of both life and of fandom when there's a host of bad takes floating around or the winds have shifted and now your ship is specifically the one that's being called out as the problematic one. And yet, there are still people out there doing fandom as themselves despite the haters and the harassers and the amount of additional effort it takes to endure all of that. That takes courage and wisdom, maybe some hope that things will get better, and most likely several liberal and repeated applications of the block button to anyone who is foolish enough to show themselves as a blockable person within range of the banhammer. (The OTW has been slow off the line to provide these tools. It seems mostly because they have blinkers on about how fans interact with each other, and they didn't want to believe that this would be a problem as soon as AO3 achieveed a certain critical mass of subscribers and works. Had it remained solely as an archive, with no social or exchange features, they might very well have avoided all of it, but that probably wouldn't have made it the popular thing that AO3 is today.)
I recently read a novel by Lyla Lee, I'll Be The One, about a plus-size Koran-American teen who's trying out for a talent search show, where the prize is for the best singer and the best dancer to become K-pop trainees at a company and try to make it in the industry, wither as solor artists or part of a group. Skye, the protagonist, is confident in her singing and dancing abilities and tries out for both parts of the competition, where she runs into cultural fatmisia from one of the judges, and from the social media fans who are trashing her because she's fatter than the expected thinness of a K-pop idol. And her mother hasn't had anything supportive to say about Skye's body size at all. We find out it's because her mother used to be "fat," and then succumbed to the body pressure and the hate and made herself thin and is trying to keep her daughter from suffering the same kind of pain. I note here that the book itself doesn't do a lot about concrete numbers, measurements, or similar, just that Skye shops and wears a lot of Torrid, so that's your baseline guess as to how "fat" she actually is. But she's a good enough singer and dancer to get into the competition in both places, and to keep maintaining her place in the competition, at least until she's bounced from the dance portion because the fat-hating judge somehow convinced one of the other judges to go along with her to do the elimination. Because it's a YA novel, Skye wins the singing portion of the competition, managing to defeat the Korean-fetishizing ex-girlfriend of the hottest guy there, and eventually win both his friendship and his date-ship. (But it's not a cis-het romance, because Skye's bi, and makes a couple of girl friends who are in a relationship together, one singing, one dancing, who also tried out and made it at least a little ways into the competition.) It takes tremendous support and perseverance and skill for Skye to do what she does and not to give in to the hate being thrown her way. It wraps up fairly nicely, and there's a lot of body positivity messaging going on all throughout the book. For people who dislike YA as a style, they'll have plenty to object to about the neat resolution, about the happy ending of the bi girl getting the hot guy and winning the singing competition, the fact that the villains are clearly marked and the heroes all have very tolerant and supportive messages for each other, and the liberal sprinkling of pop culture references all throughout the book. But also, it's precisely because it's a story where the bi girl wins, both the competition and the hot guy, that makes me think it's probably a useful book for reading right now, especially for people who would like to shut the world outside off for a little bit and indulge in something that makes them feel good and has a certain amount of two-dimensonality in it. (There's another rabbit hole waiting for you if you want to dive into how, at least in US literary criticism, we like to confuse "depth" with "grittiness" and heap lots of praise on books with lots of conflict, violence, hurting, and awfulness, and then decry as "twee," "cozy," "romance," or insufficiently literary, books that choose to have happy narratives and people generally getting along and conflicts that are real and important to their characters, even if they're not about saving the world or stopping a serial killer.)
That "stop the world and indulge in a bubble of feelings" is one of the things that fandom is supposed to be really excellent at doing, so much so that we have entire tags and genres devoted to it. There's a whole set of domestic bliss AUs and/or low-stakes situation alternate plots that are or were very popular, and some setting that ratchet up specific kinds of feelings too fever pitches and then either hold the tension or let it release on all kinds of ways, often cathartic and often sexual in one way or another. The flexibility of writers and creators and fans is such that we can take any of the blorbos from our shows and put them in just about any scenario that appeals to us, regardless of whether it will become canonical, or even has a chance of making it out of our own heads. Many of the works that are created are because the author wanted to explore a theme, or because it's exciting for them, or because they really just want to write a particular character getting into all kinds of situations and seeing how they get out of them. Or indulge themselves in them. It's an act of bravery and courage to put out for others things that say anything about you and what you might find enjoyable to write about or read, because there are so many people, it seems, on patrol to attack any interpretation of the canon that differs from theirs, to declare certain ideas to be taboo and off-limits for anyone in the fandom to discuss or engage with at all, or to claim that certain pairings are similarly taboo for discussion or works focused on them. And as much as we would like for principles like Ship and Let Ship and Your Kink Is Not My Kink And That's Okay to be the standard operating procedure for people who want to play in fandom (because it would resolve a reasonably large amount of these differences and free up resources to talk about the bigger issues that these ship wars, taboo declarations, and harassment campaigns are often proxies for), fandom as a whole has grown too large to be able to enforce a single set of norms on everyone, and it's not sufficiently scattered that pockets of fandom can exist basically next to each other without the dangers of crossing the streams, either.
So, faith and hope that things will get better, both in fandom and outside of it, even in these times where things seem to be moving in the wrong direction a lot, and admiration for those who use their courage and wisdom to keep creating things, to share things, and to push and try to move fandom and society toward better outcomes.
sunshine_challenge time, since it's July, and that means that we have some spaced-out, themed prompts to go through, and I can freely admit that I will try to go through some of the responses, many of them, even, but I will probably not go through all of them, because they just keep coming, and people are interested in that kind of thing.This year's prompt set seems to be flower-themed. I mostly know nothing about the supposed language of flowers, but I suspect there are several languages of flowers around, much like the uses of gemstones and the various interpretations of oracle cards and tarot decks and the like. So you'll get to watch me contort things into fandom stories or ruminations about my own life and where it stands. Or hare off on weird tangents because that's where my brain decided it wanted to go at the time and I'm indulging it in doing so.
Prompt 1: IrisFaith, hope, courage, wisdom, and admiration. They sound a little like the perfect partner, honestly, or fairly far along the way to being the perfect partner for someone. I'd take a fairly expansive definition of faith so that we're not limited solely to what the large number of Christians in the US believe qualifies as such. (And there's an entire rabbit hole that you can go down about what constitutes correct faith for a particular denomination or church of Christianity, whether there are requirements of also doing virtuous works, whether the ritual is the most important thing and it must be performed exactly, with the correct words, actions, and timing, or whether the intent of the ritual is sufficient, even if the words are not as pristine and recited and refined as they might ideally be.)
They can represent faith, hope, courage, wisdom and admiration. Specific flower colors attach further meanings to the pretty blooms. Purple iris brings a message of wisdom and compliments, while a bouquet of blue iris blossoms speak of hope and faith.
Bonus prompt: Pink Rose
My admiration, though, often goes to the people who are displaying all of those other virtues in the world around us today. The United States, through the exercise of power along specific ideological lines by appointed judges, struck several blows against systems put in place to ensure that people who have been systematically discriminated against get what they need to at least make a gesture at making up for all of the active and passive discrimination they have faced in their lives (and will continue to face.) The last few years in specific states of the US have made it their missions to make life as difficult as possible for everyone who isn't a cisgendered white extremely wealthy heterosexual Christian man/corporation. Obviously, the people who aren't all of those categories still exist and still continue about their lives. Just because the state demands that you disappear doesn't mean that it happens, but it takes additional reserves of courage and wisdom, and holding on to one's hope to continue living in those places, or to make the decision to leave a place, and the support systems that you have built up over the years, because it has become fundamentally hostile to you and you are afraid for your safety and your life.
In fannish spaces, right now there's a focus on the Organization for Transformative Works and a campaign to make them be more transparent, more actively anti-racist, and to equip the people who use the Archive of Our Own with effective tools to moderate their spaces and experiences as a first line of defense against harassment. It's one of the truths of our fannish experiences that we will encounter people who have different opinions about our fandoms and characters than we do. Some of us have different headcanons than others, and we read characters and situations differently, sometimes at right angles with what the narrative is telling is happening and the motivations of the characters involved. What is a sad truth, but doesn't have to be a truth, is that a significant number of fans receive vitriol, targeted harassment, and other things meant to try and run them out of being part of the community of fans. Often for extremely petty reasons, like "you ship something different than I do," "you analyze media and point out some unfortunate messages and their effects, whether those messages were intentionally placed or not," or "you're not white." Since fandom is a part of our society, it comes with many of the pieces of baggage that go with society, including systemic --isms and a wide variety of ways of consuming and interacting with pop culture around us. From what I've seen, and had relayed to me (since I'm not living it as a daily part of my life, hi privileges,) it's exhausting to have to put up with the nonsense of both life and of fandom when there's a host of bad takes floating around or the winds have shifted and now your ship is specifically the one that's being called out as the problematic one. And yet, there are still people out there doing fandom as themselves despite the haters and the harassers and the amount of additional effort it takes to endure all of that. That takes courage and wisdom, maybe some hope that things will get better, and most likely several liberal and repeated applications of the block button to anyone who is foolish enough to show themselves as a blockable person within range of the banhammer. (The OTW has been slow off the line to provide these tools. It seems mostly because they have blinkers on about how fans interact with each other, and they didn't want to believe that this would be a problem as soon as AO3 achieveed a certain critical mass of subscribers and works. Had it remained solely as an archive, with no social or exchange features, they might very well have avoided all of it, but that probably wouldn't have made it the popular thing that AO3 is today.)
I recently read a novel by Lyla Lee, I'll Be The One, about a plus-size Koran-American teen who's trying out for a talent search show, where the prize is for the best singer and the best dancer to become K-pop trainees at a company and try to make it in the industry, wither as solor artists or part of a group. Skye, the protagonist, is confident in her singing and dancing abilities and tries out for both parts of the competition, where she runs into cultural fatmisia from one of the judges, and from the social media fans who are trashing her because she's fatter than the expected thinness of a K-pop idol. And her mother hasn't had anything supportive to say about Skye's body size at all. We find out it's because her mother used to be "fat," and then succumbed to the body pressure and the hate and made herself thin and is trying to keep her daughter from suffering the same kind of pain. I note here that the book itself doesn't do a lot about concrete numbers, measurements, or similar, just that Skye shops and wears a lot of Torrid, so that's your baseline guess as to how "fat" she actually is. But she's a good enough singer and dancer to get into the competition in both places, and to keep maintaining her place in the competition, at least until she's bounced from the dance portion because the fat-hating judge somehow convinced one of the other judges to go along with her to do the elimination. Because it's a YA novel, Skye wins the singing portion of the competition, managing to defeat the Korean-fetishizing ex-girlfriend of the hottest guy there, and eventually win both his friendship and his date-ship. (But it's not a cis-het romance, because Skye's bi, and makes a couple of girl friends who are in a relationship together, one singing, one dancing, who also tried out and made it at least a little ways into the competition.) It takes tremendous support and perseverance and skill for Skye to do what she does and not to give in to the hate being thrown her way. It wraps up fairly nicely, and there's a lot of body positivity messaging going on all throughout the book. For people who dislike YA as a style, they'll have plenty to object to about the neat resolution, about the happy ending of the bi girl getting the hot guy and winning the singing competition, the fact that the villains are clearly marked and the heroes all have very tolerant and supportive messages for each other, and the liberal sprinkling of pop culture references all throughout the book. But also, it's precisely because it's a story where the bi girl wins, both the competition and the hot guy, that makes me think it's probably a useful book for reading right now, especially for people who would like to shut the world outside off for a little bit and indulge in something that makes them feel good and has a certain amount of two-dimensonality in it. (There's another rabbit hole waiting for you if you want to dive into how, at least in US literary criticism, we like to confuse "depth" with "grittiness" and heap lots of praise on books with lots of conflict, violence, hurting, and awfulness, and then decry as "twee," "cozy," "romance," or insufficiently literary, books that choose to have happy narratives and people generally getting along and conflicts that are real and important to their characters, even if they're not about saving the world or stopping a serial killer.)
That "stop the world and indulge in a bubble of feelings" is one of the things that fandom is supposed to be really excellent at doing, so much so that we have entire tags and genres devoted to it. There's a whole set of domestic bliss AUs and/or low-stakes situation alternate plots that are or were very popular, and some setting that ratchet up specific kinds of feelings too fever pitches and then either hold the tension or let it release on all kinds of ways, often cathartic and often sexual in one way or another. The flexibility of writers and creators and fans is such that we can take any of the blorbos from our shows and put them in just about any scenario that appeals to us, regardless of whether it will become canonical, or even has a chance of making it out of our own heads. Many of the works that are created are because the author wanted to explore a theme, or because it's exciting for them, or because they really just want to write a particular character getting into all kinds of situations and seeing how they get out of them. Or indulge themselves in them. It's an act of bravery and courage to put out for others things that say anything about you and what you might find enjoyable to write about or read, because there are so many people, it seems, on patrol to attack any interpretation of the canon that differs from theirs, to declare certain ideas to be taboo and off-limits for anyone in the fandom to discuss or engage with at all, or to claim that certain pairings are similarly taboo for discussion or works focused on them. And as much as we would like for principles like Ship and Let Ship and Your Kink Is Not My Kink And That's Okay to be the standard operating procedure for people who want to play in fandom (because it would resolve a reasonably large amount of these differences and free up resources to talk about the bigger issues that these ship wars, taboo declarations, and harassment campaigns are often proxies for), fandom as a whole has grown too large to be able to enforce a single set of norms on everyone, and it's not sufficiently scattered that pockets of fandom can exist basically next to each other without the dangers of crossing the streams, either.
So, faith and hope that things will get better, both in fandom and outside of it, even in these times where things seem to be moving in the wrong direction a lot, and admiration for those who use their courage and wisdom to keep creating things, to share things, and to push and try to move fandom and society toward better outcomes.
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Date: 2023-07-09 10:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-09 01:20 pm (UTC)