Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

I've been drifting my way through the various other postings of fandom_snowflake, and I came across this gem of a challenge from oldtoadwoman:

• List at least one thing you've gotten measurably better at

That's a useful thing, and I have a story or two that happens to come along with it. I was gently browsing my Twitter feed (yes, I have one. No, I don't do much with it.) when I came across a picture post with a nice sign being held by a small child. This was sourced to one of the Women's Marches that have been taking place across the country both this year and last. The quotation of the sign is attributed to Robert Munsch's The Paper Bag Princess:

Don't fashion me into a maiden that needs saving from a dragon. I am the dragon, and I will eat you whole.

I can tell what the general tone of the disapproving side of Twitter was going for wwith the first comment that the feed chose to give me back, a commentary about how someone would tell their sons not to marry such a draconic woman. Far outsripping that side is the commentary track saying that this is a right and just sign for an apparent girl to be carrying. I agree with this - the world would do better for having more dragons and less maidens that think they have to be rescued from them.

The thing that actually caught my eye, however, was this reply statement:

Hate to rain on the parade, but isn't the whole point of metoo movement the reality that women need someone to defend them?

Instead of an individual "white knight" defending them, they need government, the courts, and other institutions to do the "white knight" thing for them.

If this were my younger self, not yet wise and trained in the library arts, I might have gotten into a reply war with them. Or spent about five thousand words angrily spiking the idea. Experience prevails in this matter, however, in two ways: One, I consulted the profile and saw the retweets and activities of the person making the statement, coming to the right and proper conclusion that replying to them would be unlikely to produce any movement on their part on the matter. The second is that I might be able to be a little more economical, words-wise, in the delivery of my annoyance / vitriol.

To wit, I see that subtweet you did there, bro, not actually engaging it to #metoo where you might have to deal with lots of people telling you how wrong you are about the goals and aims of the movement. Because you are wrong - it's not about women needing to be defended from men, it's that men behaving awfully is so prevalent everywhere that nearly every woman has a story of being assaulted, endangered, or creeped upon by men. The solution to that problem is not men defending women from other men. It's men not behaving awfully, not assaulting women, not being creepy. Men calling out other men on their behavior is helpful, but not if done in the way that gets mentioned in the next paragraph of the quote.

The second part, while you enclose "white knight" in quotes, bro, to suggest that you know it's a term rather than an actual white dude acting as a knight, you appear to lack etymological knowledge of the phrase. Because while white knighting is about dudes defending women, it's more specifically about dudes defending women who don't need to be defended, in a manner where they expect to be flattered and praised for their defense, in the most obnoxious way possible while claiming "chivalry", and to signal to other members of the MRA/PUA community that they're one of the bros, bro. It's not a good thing to white knight someone, individually or collectively, because it doesn't actually improve the situation of the person supposedly being defended. It substitutes one ass for another, I suppose, which might be good for a person who knows how to deal with the second type of ass more than the first, but it doesn't actually improve the situation.

The third part is the nonsensical assertion that women need someone to defend them in any way, shape or form, and that the options presented to them must be either that an individual defends them, playing into the purity culture idea where patriarchal control of women is essential to safeguard their "virtue," passing them from father and brothers to husband, with a heavy side of slut-shaming and insistence that any woman not under the control of a man is dangerous, or that the state must defend them from men, playing into the idea that women are fundamentally weak and hysterical creatures that manipulate men into giving them what they want, when what they need is a good strong man, instead of a socialist/Communist (and by extension, atheist) government that will hurt everyone in its hubris that it knows what's best for everyone. The false dichotomy requires you to accept the premise that women need defending in the first place. To that, we note the original quotation above and its context - if you try to force women into a particular role because you think that's what they're supposed to do, you will find compressing water and gases to be significantly easier. And less explosive when rapidly decompressed.

I'm sure there's more fractal wrong contained in that tweet, but those were the obvious things that I picked up on. And, as promised, significantly more economical than I used to be when taking apart a bad idea.

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Not specific to this particular incident, but specific to the challenge idea, I can unequivocally say that I've improved my writing technique a lot even in the couple years that I've been posting to the ARchive. If I wanted to make it easy and obvious, I still remember many of my original attempts at fanfiction, composed t[mumble] years ago, with the 60s Batman serving as the frame story, but mashing it up with characters from video games turned into Batman villains appropriate to the show's aesthetic. The stories themselves never made it past a single page on the lined paper that was the writing notebook. Trying scriptfic at this point might be a research opportunity, but I can guarantee it would turn out a lot more like a script instead of a summary. I could also point at a piece that I composed t[mumble] years ago, which was essentially attempting to imitate the style of Bill WAtterson's Calvin-As-Private-Eye Tracer Bullet without actually referring to the character as such. It worked, in that the audience laughed at the spots where I intended them to laugh, but that may have been helped by the fact that I was reading my own work, and so I knew where all the spots were supposed to be for exaggeration and the like.

I could also take a look at some of my earlier work on various RP forums and webcomic forums, as well. Crossovers and fusions and character things and other parts that are probably still in those places, or that may have been archived by the WAyback. They'd need some significant cleaning up to be presentable at this point, or I'd essentially have to admit to remixing myself. (Not a bad thing to do, but I get the feeling that entire chunks of those stories might be excised or heavily reworked to match my current level of knowledge.)

But really, the last couple of years have been big on the growth of the writer-person, too. I've done a lot of writing of things I would not have considered in my earlier years - various slashes, alternate universes, some of my own universes, and generally having the confidence to post stuff that I don't actually know how it will be received. (And using the fact that I have a lot of kudos emails to try and inspire a younger fen to start posting, too...) So it's been a good journey. And it's going to get better with time and more practice.

In your own space, create your own challenge. Whatever your challenge is, and have fun with it!

Lots of people use this for reasonably abstract ideas - be better to yourself, remember to take a break, leave more feedback, have more conversations. Be excellent to each other. Probi Immotiqve Este. These are all important things. If you haven't achieved self-care, there's not a whole lot of anything you can do for others. If you haven't figured out how to play nice in the sandbox, you may need some extra time before moving up to the next grade. You might need some extra research time for your works, and that's okay. Don't skimp, but don't get lost in it, either.

Here's my challenge for you - make more this year than I do. Many people I know are looking for that spark to get themselves going and to sustain that desire throughout the year. Competition sometimes works. Why not consider me your friendly, yet easy to defeat, rival? You've seen what I put out on a given year - about 125,000 words. Go ahead and beat it. (Or the equivalent of the 2.5 NaNos in your chosen form(s).)

And if you want, check in throughout the year work your progress.

In your own space, create a fanwork. Make a podfic, an icon, a sketch, a meta, or a rec list. Arts and crafts. Cross stitch. Draft an essay about a particular medium. Put together a picspam or a fanmix. Write a review of book you love, a ship manifesto, a you-should-be-listening-to-this-band essay. Create something.

So I did. Twilight Sparkle writes a letter to Celestia about many things, but mostly her curiosity about the Cutie Mark Crusaders.

Spoilers for Friendship is Magic, seasons four, five, and possibly six.

This one is potentially difficult for a lot of people. Some people have a process that doesn't do well with creating things on the fly. Others might not have the desire to post a rough something and let other people see it. And still others might not have the tools or the time at hand to be able to create something. In theory, a thing that takes five minutes is equally as valid as one that takes five hours, but to each person their creative process.

Beginner's Mind often helps in these kinds of situations. If you don't know the rules, or can successfully forget them, you can do all sorts of things you wouldn't normally do.

Like writing something on a whim and posting it before the brainweasels can kick in.

In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. (Or a few!) Tell us what makes it work for you, and why it appeals to you so much. Talk about what you like to see in fanworks featuring that theme most. Feel free to include recs and examples!

There is one consistent thing that I have learned through all of my wanderings through media, and that is: if you want me to enjoy your work, put as much time and care into the characters in the background as you do the foreground.

I can give or take a protagonist (or protagonist ensemble), but if your surrounding world is flat, you will not catch my interest. For example, I stuck with NCIS (and the LA spinoff) far longer than I would have, because I wanted to see more into the life of Abigail Schiuto and Henrietta Lang, respectively. I had no use for the actual investigation teams in either case, as their Bunny-Ears Lawyer selves and aspects of masculinity that I had no real interest in actively turned me off to them. (Anthony gets better when he stops being a playboy goof and actually proves out why he's on the team, but that change never lasts long.) But the caffeine-addicted Perky Goth in the forensics lab? She was interesting.

One of my oldest anime fandoms is Fushigi Yugi, which spins a tale of a plucky school student caught up in a magic book that's trying to cast a spell with its story. The protagonist and her team are on stage the most, and I can't really say there's much to recommend that. Her best friend, on the other hand, also gets pulled in to perform the same rite, but for a different country. Aside from the part where the leader of her band lets her believe she's been sexually assaulted as a way of getting her to be sympathetic to his own ends, the second crew are far more interesting, because they're not all that shiny of people and they're not trying to be. They're still very much devoted to the cause, but it's different, and they have better characterization moments because of it.

Make I've just got an instinct for fanworks of the sort of "what was that character doing while the camera was focused over here?" and I want to see media works that leave those hooks and spaces available for connections later on, where someone can nestle a story in that fits there, another piece of the puzzle. More often than not, those connecting points are in the characters not perpetually on screen. So I'm paying attention to them and filling in the details and the spaces. If you don't give me that space, I'm not going to like your work that much.

(Which means I also like fanworks that provide those stories of the gap. Weird, yeah?)

In your own space, share a favorite piece of original canon (a TV episode, a song, a favorite interview, a book, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much.

Why shouldn't the collective noun for canon be a broadside? It tends to hit hard and its very likely to sink ships, so that seems like an appropriate word to use.

More seriously, though, this one is a lot easier for a fan whose canon is moving pictures, audio, or a visual art, because places like YouTube or Imgur make it ridiculously easy to find and embed the item you're looking for, even if the copyright laws frown on the creation of such things. (In the United States, at least, you can argue that an excerpt for critical or scholarly purposes qualifies as a fair use exception.) If your canon is textual, though, that can make it harder to just easily share your best bits and have it deliver the impact intended, because there's a lot more context that needs to be delivered to make text sing than other media that can deliver it in their own way. Not everyone hears characters in the same voice. And sometimes the performance of the textual material can be crystalizing, such that if you don't want to see it that way, you start using that as your reference of comparison.

So let's take a look at a piece of the Harry Potter canon that I quite like. Unsurprisingly, it's not actually any part of the narrative of Potter, but a story within the story, the Tale of the Three Brothers. A wiki with a reasonable summary of the story, if not the full text itself. This is supposedly one of the tales told to children, what appears to be a lesson about hubris and demanding what you want, only to have those same things come back to harm you later. It's almost a Monkey's Paw story, with the way the artifacts get used. Textually, it's pretty slight, almost a fable or nursery rhyme of a thing.

Of course, then you get to hear it.

The Three Brothers as an audiobook, for example.

Or then you get to see it.

The Three Brothers as a stage puppet show.

Most of us, though, get to see it when it comes to us in a movie form.

The Three Brothers as an animatic, narration Emma Watson.

For the intended audience, it's some worldbuilding in the context of learning about the truth of the artifacts that Harry has owned or is seeking. And it makes a nice story as a quiet breather in between scenes of intense action.

For the slightly older audience, those of us that might have had opportunity to take a class on works of the English language (or lucky enough to major in the Medium Aevum), this story might raise a ping or two. Where else might I have heard a story about three men meeting Death, getting promised a reward, and then having Death come to collect them because of their greed?

(Jo Rowling mentioned that this story is possibly based on the Pardoner's Tale herself, so you would be in the right ballpark to think this story might be a Whole Plot Reference, even if some of the details get changed.)

I like the animatic, and I think Emma Watson can narrate audiobooks forever, but I also really enjoy this as a microcosm of the nature of stories. Fanfiction is Older Than Dirt, given that we're fairly certain the Aeneid is fanwork of the Odyssey, and it shows up in the most interesting of places, even if the acknowledgment isn't direct, or someone isn't fully cognizant of the references they're making. Even here, in what was supposed to be a child's tale, in a small way, in a thing that is supposed to be an original story, there are bits that are from other stories woven in, little fan parts and pieces all the same.

And that's why I like canon and fanon and the way they interact and pull and push and reinvent themselves and talk to each other, officially and unofficially, over the generations and the places and the archives. Each person charts their path and travels it, and their footprints stay for others to see, and possibly walk themselves.

Leave feedback for a fanwork. Or multiple fanworks. It can be as simple as I liked this to a detailed list of all the things you loved about the fanwork. The key is to leave some sort of feedback.

Hits, Kudos, Comments, Bookmarks. Four units of engagement with fanwork, on a kind of progression from least to most involvement. (At least on AO3.) The hit says there was something about it that drew you there - a clever title, a liked pairing, a good user of a tag, or a recommendation from someone else. Hits get recorded every time the page is loaded, though, so they're not really a good way of measuring success. They're great if you want to convince someone your work will get lots of eyeballs.

The kudo says "Not only did I read this, I liked it." Which is sometimes exactly the sentiment you want to express, nothing more, or is the only thing you can do based on your energy levels. A kudo is a one-time thing, though, and so is better about measuring impact, but it often fails to indicate the depth of the feeling. Kudos come to those who liked it a little and to those who have accepted it as their headcanon forever. And sometimes your kudo count is more a function of the size and virulence of your fandom - I wrote a pinch hit that was an extended riff on the idea of one character proposing to another. Good story, but it was in one of the megafandoms of the time, which have it a lot bigger exposure that it might have had otherwise. It's still got the highest count of hits and kudos of all of my works, as a consequence of there being so many more fans that it might be exposed to.

Then there are comments and bookmarks, which seem to rule the interaction scale as a duopoly. Bookmarks can be either, "I intend to read this later," "I totally recommend this, people who follow me and think I'm interesting" or both. AO3 tries to help disambiguate the two, allowing a bookmark to be marked as a recommendation, but I'm not sure how many people use it, or go back and change from bookmark to rec when they're done, if they think it warrants it. A comment I picked up from somewhere days that the truest measure of impact for a work is the bookmark count, because that means someone wants to come back to it. If we were going solely by bookmark count, as of this post, my Yuletide fiction for this year would be winning "Beat Work Ever."

And then there are comments. The freetext box that allows someone to express their exact feelings for a creator, which can ruin the gamut from a reserved uptick of the lips to full-resonance squee about what's been done. Is the most-commented fic the best one? How do you value squee versus amount? I write for exchanges, so works that go well often have the recipient beside themselves with joy, along with a sampling of other comments that are often complimentary, if not quite as full-throated. What is to say what the best work is, if it works exactly right for the recipient?

Comments have the additional benefit of being interactive - an exchange that can make the work better by providing useful context or the difficulty of making the work come together. Comments indicate someone took enough time to compose something thoughtful on the work you have put out, even if that thought is "YAAAAAAAAAAAAS!" *kermithands* Since it's tangible feedback, the creator tends to enjoy comments the most. It's the surest sign that someone read it all the way through. And yet, plenty of works exist with only few or no comments, despite hits and kudos. And the ease in which we consume works and can make them convenient to ourselves sometimes makes we forget to give the feedback we want to.

Comments help the struggling feel like the work they've made is important and good for people. Comments help the famous remember that there are people that want to talk with them, instead of just praise their work. Comments are a really good way of helping yourself come to realizations and dig deeper into a work, if you want to. They're quite powerful things, and we should leave more of them. Like everything else, creators sometimes move on, and sometimes they are torn from us long before we are ready for them to go. Tell the people you admire that you admire them. Leave comments on works now, instead of assuming you'll get back to it later. Increase the happiness and the thinky-thoughts now, if you can. Because there's always going to be new works, new exchanges, new fandoms. Be mindful of where you are, and take that moment to appreciate what you have done and finished.

And then, if you are so moved, leave a comment.

In your own space, create a fannish wishlist. No limits on size or type of fanwork; just tell us what you’d like to see.

Peace on earth, good will toward all. Inside fandom and outside of it. And not in some Monkey's paw or secretly dystopian way, either.

If I can't get that, though, here's what else might make things nice.

• Helping me get caught up on the last several years of media -- I watched a lot of singing competition shows and CBS cop dramas and not much else over the last several years. I could use a catchup in just about everything (besides bad reality shows) including animation and books and comics and all of it. Not that I'll necessarily be able to get around to catching up, but plenty of y'all are talking about things I have not heard of and have no idea whether I want to devote time to.
• Moar discussion. I like think pieces and meta over large amounts of RP and the endless supply of material chasing megafandoms. Community recommendations or good long form would be great not just for me, but for plenty of others. And if we could manage to stop passing each other as ships in the night, that would be even better.
• A Time Turner or a TARDIS, so that I can both go to work and manage to catch up on the endless supply of interesting things that I have yet to read.
• A fandom matcher. Sort of how AO3 matches people for exchanges, if there are a way we could do that for people, that would be groovy, because I get kind of nervous and then a little burnt out on reading person after person in friending memes, if I'm going to be honest, and often for not a lot of apparent gain. Let the algorithms do the work, and see if they can't match us up reasonably well.
• Commissions. Not getting, but giving, because I see all the great fanart around and I want to support creators, but there's one more thing I need to be able to manage that.
• A forkton of money, so that I can pay debts and buy all sorts of nice goods and prints and stories that I have had my eye on, but realize am far too frugal to ever actually get, because there's always something more practical I could be spending the money on.

And also, possibly? Knowing what the things I really want in fanwork actually are might help. I don't think I've got that, either.

In your own space, share a favorite memory about fandom: the first time you got into fandom, the last time a fanwork touched your heart, crazy times with fellow fans (whether on-line or off-line), a lovely comment you’ve received or have left for someone.

When you live in a remote sort of place, it can be disheartening to be a fan. While the World Wide Web has mostly mitigated the problem of making contact with fellow fans, assuming you have a stable enough connection, the physicality of being in the same place as other fans and interacting with them can be profoundly energizing. (Or draining, depending. Introverts get to be fans, too.) There might be a thing in the brain that clicks when seeing all those people here for the same thing that gives legitimacy and weight to what might have seemed less real or less important when the brainweasels were playing with it.

Sometimes the best thing to do when you think you're the only one, or that your group is the only group, for miles around, is to go to convention. Whether it's a library convention, a small regional one in your area, or one of the truly massive conventions that happen at major metropolitan areas throughout the year, going to the space where you can be unabashedly fannish and the people around you will celebrate and encourage it is a profound experience.

Hakim Bey wrote about the Temporary Autonomous Zone, a place that existed outside formal governance for a while and where creativity was uniquely possible by stepping outside the bounds. While convention doesn't fit the formal definition, if it is run well, it will seem like it. Panels of fans having discussions on their own terms and sometimes getting to interact with creators on those terms as well. The ability to choose who you want to hang out with, where you want to spend your time, and so on. So long as you stay within the code of conduct, and you don't try to sneak into a panel that you're not old enough for, the amount of freedom is pretty awesome.

That said, a formative memory for me in fandom is on one of those later-night programs that are supposed to happen when the kids have been put to bed. Things like Tokusatsu After Dark are rather fun to attend, because you know that Akibaranger can't be the only take on the Super Sentai universe that's meant to grow it up some. The best thing I witnessed, and would make pilgrimage for, even though it was mostly the same material the years I attended, were the block of Anime Hell and the gag fandubs that would accompany it.

Anime Hell is slightly misnamed - there's a lot of interesting cartoons (Don Hertzfelt's Rejected) and live action material (Forklift Driver Klaus) there that's funny, if you find the idea of gallons of red deployed comedically to be funny. (Also previews for movies like Dig Dug.) Lots of parody material to work from, and that's before you get into the fandubs, which are mostly like the Abridged Series of various shows, except the dubs seem a lot funnier. There's a certain glee in going with a premise like Evangelion's Second Impact was caused by trying to play Prince's "1999" past 1999. Or in trying to make Fist of the North Star into as camp gay a production as possible. I'm not sure either of those would stand up well to current times and our better awareness. Maybe they could use a redub. The material that used Cowboy Bebop as fans going to a convention might do okay and need only a few patches. Anyway, laughing along while you try to stay awake and not freeze in a ballroom with the air conditioning still on is a bonding experience. And so, one of my very best memories of fandom is being exposed to the variety of ways that people do fandom, including gag dubs and parodies. I still like whimsical works over grimdark ones.

Get you to a convention, if your batteries need a recharge and you can afford the trip. If not, there's always the communities and places one the Snowflake.