3 Things

[dhampyresa]

1. LJ for some reason stopped sening me notifs somewhere between 48 and 36 hours ago. I think I've finally solved the problem and I will try my best to reply to every comment/reply I got in that time, but if I miss one, please let me know. (Like it wasn't enough that Ao3 sends me comment notifs a couple of days late sometimes. Kudo emails might also be late, but then how would I know?)

2.I recently joined a French writing forum for original fiction. I'm not naming names, but wow I had never realised how attached I was to certain things I found in fandom.

Being able to talk to/about people without gendering them (and especially without being gendered myself) is one. It's not really anyone's fault, because French is a gendered language. I have to say that try to not use any gendered terms about myself does make for a good writing exercise though and it's interesting to see how people gender me (it's mostly women->female, men->male).

Anyway, this vent is brought to you by the fact that I (am made to) feel like I'm being super "politically correct" all the time.

I once expressed surprised that one of the authors (let's call her N) had cast her Philadelphia-set story with all white actors. (Philadelphia, for the record, has only about 1/3 white inhabitants.) I was told by another member that I was being too nitpicky and that lol who wants to make that much research and by another user that stories "follow exceptional people not statistics" (I paraphrase), which wow. N was actually quite nice and pointed out that one of the characters was Hispanic (the actror isn't, but I'm not getting into that debate) and that she did have black people, including one that "wasn't so nice" (not getting into that debate either).

That's without mentionning the dude who has worldbuild a world with elves and shit in which racial cleansing has led to alt!Europe being "pure" humans, the top military power/colonial empires and looking down everyone one for being "mongrels", something that according to his worldbuilding, they are, since they all have traces of non-human blood (elves, etc...). I have tried to make him see what's wrong with this picture. I have literally written thousands of words to try and make him understand how fucking racist that is to no avail. I am no longer engaging with this dude. (Which is easy since he never comments anywhere else on the site and is apparently only here to be cheerled and not to cheerlead.)

Yesterday or the day before, someone posted the beginning of their new project. It's an urban fantasy type of thing from the PoV of a male narrator. We make it two paragraphs before a female character is being threatened/about to be raped (the narrator meanwhile just gets punched in the stomach despite being prisoner to the same villains) and then sharp turn into backstory time. Needless to say, this does not fill me with confidence about the guy's ability to treat rape respectfully and not use it as a cheap ploy for drama. I have pointed out that the passage that implied her imminent rape (including the gloating dialog line by one of the villains) made me uncomfortable, only to have the reply be "That's on purpose. My villains have to really awful to be believable. I have a very dark view of fantasy and hate Narnia-esque saccharine stuff". To this I explained (this evening) that if his villains were so awful why wasn't his narrator threatened with rape as well? There's no response from him yet, but someone else has come forward to support my point of view, so at least that's good.

All this to say, goddamn but is fandom a nice place to be sometimes. There's a certain baseline amount of feminism/anti-racism/acceptance of LGBT+ people/etc that is really really awesome and I miss it when it's gone. (This isn't to say that everyone on that site is awful - they're not -, just that sometimes I feel so tired of being the one going "yo that shit is terrible".)

3. I finished a fic! It's about 4k. Would anyone be interested in beta-ing Wanda Maximoff and the Winter Soldier being (sort of) friends?

Comments

[schneefink]

Whoa. With all the wank we have in fandom and how often people complain about overzealous SJ in certain parts it's easy to forget how much better it is here than not having that at all. Kudos to you for pointing it out!

Cool concept, but I don't know enough about Wanda, sorry.

[dhampyresa]

I KNOW RIGHT? Getting all that off my chest felt good, thanks for listening. This sort of thing is why I can never get too angry at overzealous SJ people: most of them grow out of it and become better people for it. I wasn't looking for kudos, but thank you. I just wanted to vent, really.

That's fair enough.

[ollipop]

All this to say, goddamn but is fandom a nice place to be sometimes. There's a certain baseline amount of feminism/anti-racism/acceptance of LGBT+ people/etc that is really really awesome and I miss it when it's gone.

Yep, that's precisely why I'm in fandom, more than an attachment to any one storyline. Your group experience sounds like a particularly mainstream cross-section of the population, and I don't say that kindly.

I am a little confused by the description... is the group you're currently working with in French, or there are two fiction groups operating here? I fixated on French + pronouns and now am wondering if there are French speakers writing about Philadelphia and racist elves and etc. The idea of that is wild. I live in the US and still would be hard-pressed to tell you anything about Philadelphia without doing some basic research (except yeah, it's an urban area, therefore a diverse population).

I also confess I'd had you gendered as female (because I'm female, and tend to assume that all fandom authors are female until I ask otherwise). I'll get better about a gender-neutral conception of you. What pronouns do you like, in English?

[ollipop]

Oh! And I wanted to say that I am about to establish myself as World's Worst Beta, but I would love to read the Winter Soldier fic, and absolutely wouldn't return it until my life starts calming down at the end of next week. I also am not sure I'd bring any kind of hard improvements to it because my brain is so fried. But TWS is one of the fandoms that has hooked my brain recently and I would love to look at it and make soft squeeing noises.

[dhampyresa]

Yeah, I love that about fandom too. That and the fact that no one will ever tell you you read too much into works of fiction is why I stick around fandom even between fandoms, if that makes sense.

a particularly mainstream cross-section of the population is a good way to put it.

This is the group I'm working for in French, yes. I'm venting in English bevause it forces me to paraphrase and not copy-paste, because I suppose it distances me from the thing a bit and because I feel more at ease in English in writing (50/50 when talking). That last one is the reason I joined the group in the first place. I really want to be at least a little better at writing fiction in French. (Pipedream: write a novel in French.) This is not a thing that's coming easy to me, I have to say.

I can understand why you'd think setting a story in Philadelphia is surprising for a French person (although it's sadly not*), but elves? There's nothing particularly not-French about elves. (It's humans being racists to elves and not racist elves, but I don't suppose that changes anything.) To be fair to N, her story is set about a century after some kind of Apocalypse, so research might not be super super relevant, but still. I except it to stay diverse unless something major happens.

It's fine that you had me gendered as female, I don't mind. I'm still mostly unsure about gender, but I'm edging towards "don't care"/genderqueer/neutral, I guess. As far as pronouns go, I like singular they or Elverson (ey/eir/em/eirs/emself -- basically them minus th).

Hahaha, sure I'll send it to you. Is your email still the same?

*Because Americentrism of the media. "America is where the stories happen." It's something it took me a long time to question. There's a lot of stories on that site that are set in the US apparently just because. It is annoying, but not a fight I feel like fighting right now. Maybe later.

[ollipop]

Oh no! I thought all my stories were set in the United States, because I live in the United States. I figured in Spain, although the stories would be set in Spain, and so on.

Same email. Hooray!

I like your pronouns. I am in the middle of a hiring process with someone who is gender fluid, and it's truly awesome. They use them, their, they, themselves, and Crow was really good practice for that constellation of pronouns. :) I'm still pretty clunky but am getting better.

[dhampyresa]

Hahaha, I wish, but no. This is why people who deny the existence of US-centrism get a major side-eye from me.

Sent! Tell me if you got it, please.

I am so so happy to hear that Crow has actually helped you in a concrete way. I feel like my work here is done, in a way.

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

What kind of beta do you need? I can do spelling and grammar/story flow but I don't know the Scarlet Witch very well so I might be sort of shabby on the characterization front.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

That sounds about right. I'm using a mix of comics and X-Men:Evolution that I tried to fit into the MCU for her characterisation anyway.

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Cool. If you want to send it to me, my email is msmercury10[at]gmail.com.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

I've sent it to you, let me know if you get it.

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Received! Will have it back to you sometime this week. :)

[apgeeksout.livejournal.com]

it's interesting to see how people gender me (it's mostly women->female, men->male).

This has been my experience, too. Even when using what I think of as a fairly feminine username, I'm consistently presumed to be a dude in baseball-centric spaces, and the same in comics-centric spaces when I spent time there.

sometimes I feel so tired of being the one going "yo that shit is terrible".)

I hear that, and often I just don't have the juice to engage, so the list of non-fandom places where I regularly read the comments, let alone participate, is steadily shrinking. Hats off to you for trying with your writers group!

My comics knowledge of those characters is pretty spotty, but I could do SPAG/Ameripicking if that's helpful.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting phenomenon. I wonder if it's law of average or people projecting? /idle speculation

It's been years since I was involved in a non-fandom internet community. It's, shall we say, an experience. I have to admit there's an extent to which my trying is selfishly motivated: maybe if they stop posting stupid shit, going on the site will stop being a game of 'I hope somebody does say some stupid shit this time, I want to relax today gdit' and I think it will also make for better stories and maybe I will stop feeling like I'm the nitpicky killjoy of the group who always insists people source their art (so much unsourced art ):< !) or the unfunny feminist or whatever.

I might ask you to Ameripick some of it later on, but I think I'm set for now. Thanks for the offer, though.