silveradept | Sunshine Challenge 2023 #4: Daisy, Princess of Sarasaland. Also, factionalism and bad-faith actors.

Prompt 4: Daisy
These sunny springtime blooms have several positive meanings. The meaning of a daisy flower can be purity, innocence, new beginnings, joy and cheerfulness. In the Victorian Era, daisies symbolized innocence, loyalty and an ability to keep things secret.

Bonus Prompt: White Rose

See also: Daisy, Princess of Sarasaland, introduced in Super Mario Land, the Game Boy spinoff series to the main Super Mario Brothers sequence on the Nintendo. Princess Daisy made Mario a series that no longer ran on the Smurfette Principle. (Depending on how you slot Super Mario USA (the reskinned Doki Doki Panic released as Super Mario Brothers 2 in the US) into the canon, Birdo has Daisy beat on that front by a year, but SMBUSA was a panic reaction to the difficulty of Super Mario Brothers 2 (released as The Lost Levels in the US), so Daisy is the first intentional new female character into the series. Anyway…) Because Daisy's series was a Game Boy spinoff, her presence is more known and felt in her appearances in the SMB sports games, Mario Party series, Mario Kart series, and Smash Brothers. She's not as well-known as Peach is, and she's usually canonically paired off with Luigi so that both Bros have a princess of their own, in what likely was a pair the spares situation. In the same way that Luigi started as a palette swap and slowly began developing his own ability set to play games with, Daisy seems to have started as a Peach clone and is still differentiating herself from the Princess of the Mushroom Kingdom, even as Peach herself has started to become more active in her own right. She and Luigi probably have a lot to chat about regarding their journeys to become characters in their own right, with unique mechanics and motivations. As characters without quite as much history and definition as Mario and Peach, though, I thoroughly expect the fanon about Daisy and Luigi to be intense and voluminous.

Daisy was also a regular Mario Kart and Mario Party choice for some of the people I played with when they came over to game and talk during the evil ex phase of my life. The one where my evil ex deliberately mistook my grumbles about the fairness of the RNG as me having sour grapes about not winning all the time. I don't hold the character any ill will from the experience, though.

And it's also interesting how few human-looking characters there are in the Mario Brothers series: two plumbers, two princesses, Rosalina, who probably qualifies as at least a Princess, if not higher on the authority scale, and Paulina, who came back in Odyssey as the mayor of New Donk City after having been connected to the Mario Brothers greater universe because Jumpman was in Donkey Kong before he became Mario. (And, okay, New Donk City is full of humans and humanlike characters, but they're an outlier, a single world across basically all of the games and their various worlds.)

Onto the flower language. Purity, innocence, new beginnings, joy and cheerfulness. As someone with the variable attention stimulus trait, I often deeply enjoy the things that I am doing, while in the moment of doing them. At the same time, I often want to do them in ways that are complete or have good stopping points, so that when it evaporates from my model of reality until I come across it again, I can pick it back up without too much of the frustration of having stopped in the middle of a thing. That disappearance also means that I come back to things as if no time has passed, and that includes things like friendships and people reaching out after a while. If we've fallen out of contact, it's probably because other things are taking my attention right now. Feel free to ping. Also importantly, it means I can enjoy things when I pick them back up with much the same sense of happiness, curiosity, and determination as when I started them for the first time. And sometimes, the thing that was vexing me before is doable or goes smoothly on the first try, so taking breaks is sometimes great for me to do.

There's something in there about how being able to approach everything without preconceptions is one of the signs that you're not stuck in either the experiences of the past or the worries of the future and are living in the Now that often accompanies enlightenment. Treating everything as a new beginning allows for someone to potentially experience joy and cheerfulness here they might not have been expecting it. It's not putting yourself in a situation where you will be genuinely surprised if someone behaves as they have in the past," nor is it "not knowing and not ever deciding what you are going to do in response to someone being terrible to you." It's more like one of the professional rules that we have, and that gets applied to our teenage users of the library more than most, because they're the ones who run afoul of being needed to ask to leave for the day the most. The way it gets phrased is "you'll have to leave for today, but you are welcome to come back tomorrow," and what's most important for us, as library folk, is to go into tomorrow genuinely believing that it is a fresh start, and not carrying over any ill will or preconceptions about what will happen today, based on yesterday. By treating each encounter as fresh and without prejudice, we don't give in to the belief that the teenager is going to do a bad thing today, which in turn would put us on higher alert and more suspicion that said teenager is going to do a bad thing today, and would influence us against this teenager where we might give another teenager, or a grownup, the benefit of the doubt in an ambiguous situation. (At its best, it allows us to avoid holding people with non-USian sounding names to higher standards than those with USian-sounding names, and thus having to avoid issuing clarifications claiming that it's the narrow and specific focus of the campaign that produced those very similar-sounding statements about the non-USian candidates and not any kind of implicit bias that might have been present.)

There's a story about a Zen master named Tanzan and a junior monk who came across a woman who needed to get to the other side of a river. The version of it I'm used to seeing is the Tsai Chih Chung illustrated version which has been reproduced at this page on The Magical Buffet in low resolution. I couldn't find any better copies of it that weren't on things like pirate book sites. Anyway, in the story, the monks aren't supposed to touch women, or the monks have made a vow not to do so. In any case, Tanzan picks up the woman and carries her across the river, sets her down on the other side, and the two monks and the woman part ways. Eventually, the junior monk points out the part where monks aren't supposed to touch women, and Tanzan tells the junior monk, "I set the woman down some time ago. Are you still carrying her?" The story as told is intended to be about not holding on to things, or possibly about how even things such as monkish vows should not be upheld in the face of helping other beings or doing greater good with them. Everyone coming through the door gets the same opportunity to have a productive library visit and receive high-quality service.

We also have progressive disciplinary measures, such that someone who does keep behaving poorly has to take longer timeouts form library services, in the hopes that they will do some thinking and come back ready to use the library in a more accepted way, so, again, we're not pretending things don't happen, or ignoring accumulated evidence if a person has a history of behaving poorly. The idea is to treat each person by being watchful for what they might do, but not biasing ourselves unfavorably toward that person. It's really hard to do, especially with people who have a demonstrated track record of bad behavior and trying to figure out where the line is so they can dance right on it and believe we won't discipline them for their actions because they're on the line instead of over it. (This doesn't work, by the way. There's almost always a catch-all in the Rules of Conduct, usually phrased in the neighborhood of "stuff that disturbs other users' ability to use the library or interferes with the staff doing their jobs is bannable." Lots of people think they're dancing right on the line, only to find that the line is actually somewhere well behind them.)

That's the new beginnings part, anyway. The other four virtues seem to be, in our current times, divided into two factions of two virtues each. It's not just in fandom that these four seem to be opposed to each other. Up until recently, I would have said that fandom is generally where the conflict is sharpest and most combative, but that's also not true any more when you have legislators and governments making sweeping changes to curtail what can be taught and what can be said in schools and in public spaces. There have always been censorious and repressive regimes, and there have always been third rail topics, but the official narrative for such things, for the most part, in the United States and other places claiming to be civilized Western democracies, is that those things were outliers and happening Over There Somewhere instead of being obviously and unmistakably endorsed here. And in fandom, the Official Narrative has always been that disputes between the fandom (or between fandoms) can happen, but the fandoms themselves agreed that they wouldn't actively try to erase each other from existence over petty things. The veracity of those official narratives has always been suspect, but we're living in times where there's not even a fig leaf of deniability present, in fandom or out of it.

I am of sufficient Great Old One-ness to have been around in the LiveJournal days, and to have seen the mass purges that led to the founding of the Archive of Our Own and the Organization for Transformative Works that administers it. The entity that sparked off Strikethrough called themselves Warriors for Innocence, and they claimed to represent the faction calling for the protection of the purity and the innocence of young fen, proto-fen, and outside audiences that might encounter fanworks through the interconnectedness of the Web, social sites like LiveJournal, and search engine results (back when search engines gave more useful results and fewer advertisements and SEO spam) against the joy and cheerfulness of fandom creativity in a space that understands and takes as a bedrock value that not everything in the fandom space is for all fen, caveat lector, but also, we'll do our best to warn you about things we think are worth warning about. (Is it a perfect system? No, because what the author thinks to tag and warn for may leave out something that is deeply distressing for a reader, no author can warn for everything, and authors can and do willfully and accidentally persist and promote harmful stereotypes.) Outside of fandom, several groups have perpetually claimed the authority to dictate to others what must happen in society so that children's purity and innocence are protected against what they paint as numerous, malicious forces.

It is an extremely common tactic of those who claim to be protecting purity and innocence to sift through the bulk of what fandom or society produces to find the material likely to have the greatest shock value to their chosen audience (whether advertisers, legislators, bureaucrats, boards, administrators, or the public at large), excerpt the shocking material, divorcing it from its context, and then present these context-free excerpts as proof that the whole of the society or the fandom products material like this. Find a Snarry archive, look for the ones where Snape abusers his power and Harry, then claim the Snarry pairing itself is immortal and impure and should be forbidden. Take a panel or two from a graphic memoir, remove all the context, them show the panels and read the accompanying text out loud, and then make two claims: the material is being marketed to children because there are no locks on the material that would prevent children from freely obtaining it if they wished, and the culture (or subculture) the author comes from (or identifies with) is immoral and impure and will corrupt children if they come in contact with the work or the culture of the author. Thus, anyone who isn't completely in favor of completely censoring and silencing this work and its author for the protection of children must want to destroy the purity and innocence of the children and is no better than whatever the worst thing the attacker can conjure, which almost always seems to settle on "is sexually attracted to children and is trying to use this material to normalize the idea of children and adults having sex," even if the material is about how someone came to realize what their own sexuality was when they were a teenager, or even an adult, and the work itself is meant for an adult audience to read. Or the story fully showcases all the ways in which an adult's attraction and sexual exploitation of a child was and remains immoral and evil.

Those purporting to protect purity and innocence through the destruction of anything they don't like usually exploit the most obvious weakness of any ad-supported media by going to the advertisers and proclaiming that their product is being associated with such innocence-corrupting, purity-destroying material, and unless they want to be known as the company that supported pederasty, they need to make sure such filth isn't allowed on any website where their ads are. This is usually an effective tactic, as companies are very sensitive to their public perception and will happily throw anyone under the bus if it means protecting the corporate reputation. And so any site that takes ad dollars basically has to comport themselves to whatever the most conservative of their advertisers believes is acceptable content, upon the threat of losing the money necessary to running the site, which in turn means a site is held hostage by the most conservative of the people who view the site and will complain to the advertisers about content they don't like. Depending on the policies of various app stores, entire swaths of content may have to be hidden or unavailable to make sure that whatever is present is palatable to the advertisers. (An app-mediated Internet is a bad idea, friends. We don't want that, and neither do you.) Joy and creativity and wanting to tell certain stories isn't possible on those platforms, or will only be possible for however long a person can exist without having their profile flagged or their content complained about, at which point the automated moderation usually suspends the account and all of its content without appeal or the ability to preserve that content. Thus, Strikthrough, Boldthrough, and the regular purges that happen on Fanfiction.net. The ban on "female-presenting nipples" on Tumblr, and the regular suspension and destruction of material on Twitter or Facebook or other such corporately-controlled social media. These things that happen regularly are the reason for the existence of the Organization for Transformative Works and the Archive of Our Own. And is the reason why Dreamwidth doesn't take advertising dollars and instead relies on the subscription payments for those who want to support them (and want more icon slots) for the costs of bandwidth and storage. It doesn't mean that the OTW or Dreamwidth is perfect and beyond criticism, but their outlook on allowable and allowed content is firmly rooted in a desire to avoid having anyone but themselves (and relevant legal statutes) as the responsible people for making decisions about content and what requirements are needed to ensure that content is appropriately warned-for.

Zealots are not content with mostly driving things out, or getting entire cultures and groups to disappear from public visibility, however. Knowing that somewhere, someone might exist with a wrong idea is a problem, because one person might share the idea with others, and then an idea they'd worked so hard to suppress springs back into existence and has followers again. Purity and innocence are under constant threat, after all, and so requires constant vigilance. Getting the advertisers to pull support or impose conditions is the most common and most immediate tactic, but there are plenty of places that don't have advertisers that still carry "dangerous" ideas. Public libraries, for example, or places like AO3 and Dreamwidth. How does the zealot get inside those enclosures to ensure there are no unapproved ideas floating about? The most common tactic here is to find some entity that has power over the target, and get that entity to declare those ideas, those people, illegal, and then use the power of the State to enforce the nonexistence of those ideas and people. So boards and legislative bodies alike get candidates running openly on a platform of "I intend to do the exact opposite of what this body is constituted for, and to change all relevant laws and rules in my way so that ideological purity is enforced, because only then can the innocence and purity of children be preserved." Massive public pressure campaigns spring up and make public accusations that those invested in joy and creativity are trying to corrupt the innocent and pure, often with the accusation that any fanwork a craetor creates must be because the creator themselves endorses all of the ideas therein, erasing the existence of the fourth wall. If you write underage, you must support underage in real life, in all possible situations where it might happen. If you write non-con, then you must support non-con in real life, happening to everyone under all circumstances. A library that offers a drag performer doing story time, or carries a book with breasts or genitals or mentions of sex at all anywhere in the building, or even has something acknowledging the wide expanse of gender is accused of trying to sexualize children and all the staff are clearly trying to get children into sexual situations, the younger the better.

It sounds ridiculous when you read these words. Which is why most of those accusations are couched as "librarians are groomers," or "this material is obscene" or "parents should have the absolute right to dictate what is taught in classrooms," or even "this is critical race theory," (meaning "this talks about white supremacy and history accurately and we don't like it when white people are portrayed accurately.") Or, fannishly, "this ship is Problematic" usually gets a lot of mileage without anyone having to stop and explain exactly what they mean by that. ("I dislike stories of these fictional characters getting together sufficiently that I'm going to claim it's morally wrong to like it.")

The thing that's the saving grace and the biggest aggravation about moral panics and the fandom police and the anti-fandom brigades is that they're usually very small, even though they're very loud and often very skilled at amplifying themselves and getting others to join in with them when they're on the attack. Any space that can wait them out will find that after the first few salvos, the energy dissipates. It's absolute hell while it's happening, and nobody should have to go through that, ever, but so long as nothing gets enshrined into law or policy, nobody makes a panic decision to give the mob what they want, and nobody with decision-making power turns out to have decided to open the gates and let the mob in because they agree with them, the siege is over relatively quickly, as these things go. Because security in these days is not always about keeping people out, it's making it unprofitable for someone to put in the effort needed to break in. With sufficiently robust tools to manage the situation as it happens (or to utilize the experiences of others who have suffered the same thing and import or use their blocking lists), it's possible to weather the storm and possibly even keep some lines of communication open to others.

We do not need to put these virtues at odds with each other. Joy and cheerfulness at the act of creation (and possibly even creating things where someone's innocence or purity are given freely, corrupted, taken, or manipulated) can co-exist alongside reasonable efforts to make sure that people know what they're getting into, such that if they want to maintain their innocence about what a particular trope or stay "pure" by not reading something they don't like, they have the opportunity to avoid it. It's a lot easier to promote and uphold Don't Like, Don't Read, The Back Button Is Your Friend, and Your Kink Is Okay, It's Just Not My Kink when there's been an effort put in to tags and warnings. I'd rather someone use a search engine to figure out what "Dead Dove, Do Not Eat" means before they read through a fic with that tag and find out the hard way. Yes, I know, metadata is a pain in the ass to have to write. I work with metadata on a daily basis. I know. But I would much rather have a world where the norms are such that when someone says "I don't want to describe those tags, they'll spoil the story," they use a tag that indicates they've consciously thought about this and have made the decision to go "Choose Not To Warn" or they indicate "Some Content Notes Untagged." By doing that, it becomes harder for the next moral panicker to look at a lack of tags and say "This person clearly intends to endorse everything in their fic! They're Problematic! Cancel them!" And if they adopted similar kinds of warnings or indications that the lack of warnings is a deliberate choice with traditionally published materials, I would be ecstatic. I want a world where people can find what they love and filter out what they don't, rather than one where a reader always has to be on guard against something that wasn't mentioned. And I want authors to be able to be their entire selves so that their readers can decide whether or not the author is someone they want to support according to their own moral and ethical systems, without being pressured into taking the side of "they're perfect and can do no wrong" or "they're Problematic and nobody is allowed to like them."