vaspider:

idlnmclean:

theanishimori:

oblakom:

nyarnamaitar:

politicalmamaduck:

Writing about a child rapist did not make Vladimir Nabokov a child rapist.

Writing about an authoritarian theocracy did not make Margaret Atwood an authoritarian theocrat.

Writing about adultery did not make Leo Tolstoy an adulterer.

Writing about a ghost did not make Toni Morrison a ghost.

Writing about a murderer did not make Fyodor Dostoevsky a murderer.

Writing about a teenage addict did not make Isabel Allende a teenage addict.

Writing about dragons and ice zombies did not make George R.R. Martin either of those things.

Writing about rich heiresses, socially awkward bachelors, and cougar widows did not make Jane Austen any of those things.

Writing about people who can control earthquakes did not make N.K. Jemisin able to control earthquakes.

Writing about your favorite characters and/or ships in situations that you choose does not make you a bad person.

It’s a shame that in this day and age these things need to be said.

Or, in short: the narrator =/ the author.

You know what else is a shame? This nowadays tendency of putting on the author the responsibility of teaching their readers morality.

Authors are allowed to write morally ambiguous characters.

Authors are allowed to write downright despicable characters - and guess what they are even allowed to make despicable characters charismatic and likeble and the protagonists of their stories if they wish - because absolute monsters exist only under the bed.

It is not up to the author to spoonfeed the readers about morality and Yes I know this character did a bad thing and I am going going to show it in the story and make other characters call them out of it and– Bullshit.

The authors should be able to write what they want without having thousands of people jumping and their throats claiming to know them, their ideas and their morality based on what they write.

It’s not up to the author to teach you about what is right and what is wrong.

It’s not up to the author to teach you about what is right and what is wrong.

“This nowadays tendency of putting on the author the responsibility of teaching their readers morality.” Bullshit. Ever hear about the Hays Code or the Comic Code? Before the advent of the commonly published graphic comics and the movie there were all manners of normative structures mandating that the primary function of publication was teaching people about what is right and what is wrong.

This goes back a long time in all classical cultures. It isn’t “nowadays” as if there were a mythical golden era of before.

Authors are allowed to write whatever the fuck. But whatever you write has consequences. Maybe you write something interesting with a lot of care that has great social value and happens to be about child abusing serial murders. Chances are that if your primary product is indistinguishable from political propaganda for Nazis and child abusers that you are indistinguishable from a Nazi and child abuser apologist.

Being the author for a thing does not make you immune to criticism for your authorial choices and does not bar people from opposing the publication of your work particularly in an environment where such work constitutes a kind of political propaganda to normalize violence and oppression.

Whatever you create is never truly independent of you. Narrator is not strictly identical to the author, but they may be similar enough that for general arguments the difference can be neglected without loss of precision.

You get free speech. That does not mean freedom from social consequence. In situations of injustice such as colonial, imperial, patriarchal, or capitalist politics choosing a neutral point of view as a creator is siding with the abuser. If you as an author choose to not teach ethics or morality or consider such things real world implications then you have made a choice which is reflected in your artifacts.

Language matters. Representation matters. Political apathy is not commendable.

I literally stopped after you cited the Hays Code and Comics Code as “mandating that the primary function of publication is teaching people what is right and what is wrong.” Because if that’s the case, you must think that gay people, interracial marriages, adults drinking alcohol, and married couples sleeping in the same bed are wrong. Let’s be real clear here: the Hays Code was both ridiculous and unconstitutional and the Comics Code was a parody of itself, and both of them made queers invisible unless they were suffering for their queerness. It was literally a rule, because homosexuality was “perverse”.

Under the Hays Code:

  1. Crime (again, including BEING OPENLY GAY) must have consequences shown on-screen. You couldn’t be gay without punishment for your gay. 
  2. The “correct standards of life” must be upheld. Guess what? NO OVERT GAY, because that wasn’t correct. No interracial marriages. Both of those items were directly and explicitly banned as “perverse.” Anything that didn’t fit the sanitized version of life could not be shown. Also, directors shied away from depiction of poverty, or anything that the ruling class didn’t think was ‘correct standards of life,’ because showing people living in poverty could be construed as not showing people ‘living to proper standards.’
  3. No nudity or sexual activity even between consenting adults. The Hays Code is why married adults on sitcoms had separate twin beds. This also included pregnancy and childbirth, as those were the ‘results’ of sex. To prevent love scenes from being considered sexual, a woman had to be shown with one foot on the floor.
  4. Adults could not drink alcohol unless it directly was related to plot.
  5. Religion could never be ‘depicted in a mocking manner,’ which led to some editorial changes. For example, 1940′s Pride and Prejudice? Mr. Collins was a librarian. 1948′s Three Musketeers had Prime Minister Richeleu. To avoid being accused of ‘mocking’ religion, studios removed religion altogether.
  6. And, of course, the sanctity of marriage had to be upheld. You know. Marriage between one cisgender heterosexual man and one cisgender heterosexual woman. That marriage.

The CCA was so ridiculous that it wouldn’t approve a comic written by Stan Lee called ‘Green Goblin Reborn’ which was explicitly recommended by the US Dept of Health, Education and Welfare, because it depicted a character’s drug use in an extremely negative light and had an extremely anti-drug message.

The CCA wouldn’t approve the comic because it showed drug use at all. Comics couldn’t even have positive messages or show characters overcoming or recovering from negative paths they were on because those negative paths couldn’t be shown in the first place. And of course they had all the same issues as above. 

It’s also worth noting that the United States Supreme Court began neutering the Hays code 14 years after its inception, and in 1965 it ruled that the Hays Code could only approve a film, it could not ban one, because that was an infringement on the First Amendment. 

This is how we got – wait for it, wait for it! – a ratings system instead of content bans! Jack Valenti was elected to the head of the MPAA in 1966 with the specific promise to move from bans and codes to ratings. 

So, if your point was ‘this already existed and it was good!’ actually, uh, those things already existed, and they failed, and it bears repeating that attempts to bar films from being shown without Hays Code approval were explicitly declared unconstitutional, and were replaced by ratings systems and content warnings. 

I don’t give one good goddamn about shipping wars on Tumblr, but for fuck’s sake, at least take three hot seconds to Google the history you’re citing and see if what you’re holding up as some standard that supposedly “established blah blah movies should only teach us morality” did something other than

  1. fail miserably
  2. lead to a bunch of ridiculous workarounds and euphemisms and Melanie in Gone With The Wind giving birth like she’s some shadow creature about to stab Renly Baratheon 
  3. disproportionately affect LGBTQ/queer people, POC, and other marginalizations
  4. get declared unconstitutional (because, as it turns out, making a big board of people who decide what can get published does in fact violate the First Amendment)
  5. make such a parody of itself that comics companies stopped giving a fuck and released comics without the Comics Code approval.

Like, seriously, this isn’t difficult history. You could Google it. Literally the only film critic these days who actually supports the Hays Code is Michael fucking Medved. You know, the guy who says that all non-Orthodox Jews vote primarily based on their hatred of Christianity? The one who’s super great buds with Daniel Lapin? The one who wrote “Six Inconvenient Truths About The US and Slavery”? That’s the only film critic still around who thinks that the Hays Code was ever a good idea. That’s who you’re aligning yourself with by pointing to the Hays Code and going “see?  The Hays Code! ‘mandating that the primary function of publication is teaching people what is right and what is wrong.’” That is literally the only film critic I could find who agrees with you. Someone who thinks that the United States didn’t prosper because of slavery and that the concept that slavery is what built the US a lie, who champions himself as a former delusional leftist turned ‘conservative champion.’

That’s your buddy. That’s your pal in morality, methods, and rightness.  

Jesus fuck, read a little history. I’m so exhausted. 

(via aceweyoun)

Source: politicalmamaduck

ladydragon76:

socialjusticewargames:

It’s okay to have fictional characters do problematic stuff. Really, it is. Fictional characters are there to tell a story; not to be perfect paragons of virtue.

“Yeah!” some people will say. “It’s fine as long as you show that it’s problematic!”

And I’ll say: No. You don’t need to always do that either. We can’t expect writers to point out every moral misstep a character makes.

It’s okay to have characters do something problematic, and it’s okay to assume that the readers can see why it’s problematic on their own.

^^^  

(via perceptur)

Source: socialjusticewargames

Stop using my skin color to fluff your diversity boner, fandom.

tmirai:

I don’t even go here in regard to TAZ, but I read the creator’s response to all of the “backlash” yesterday and…

Wow. It is a fucking shame that even had to be written. Gracious and smart and honest as it was, it’s incredulous it came to them having to do that.

From an outsider’s perspective, it seems like yet another gross example of fans overstepping boundaries and using Representation and Diversity as their progressive superiority fodder. Which is always difficult (especially for creators belonging to certain majority groups) to argue against without coming across as assholes or dismissive. It does not allow the possibility that maybe these fans are just entitled assholes using skin color as a means to bully creators into telling their stories.

And can I just say: the fact that anyone would expect a fantasy character named Taako to be Latinx just because the name sounds like/is related to tacos is fuckin’ racist as shit. How is that an actual parameter of someone’s assumed race/culture? And that this sect of the fandom has hung that expectation (or other expectations of representation) over the creators’ heads to the point that if the creators don’t adhere to it (like the graphic novel), they feel justified hurling claims of racism and whitewashing which, from what I read, is far from the truth.

What disgusts me more in this is that the majority of these dissenting voices do not seem to belong to brown people. There is a new form of fetishization of brown flesh happening in fandom–where white fans use us and our skin color to get a stamp on their Progressive Brownie Points card. A new way to assuage their White Guilt and fluff their I’m Woke About Representation boners at the same time. They think it’s some significant act of contribution to diversity in media to headcanon characters as brown. Or gay. Or disabled.

Well. It’s not. Because it’s not their story to do that with. And it’s often really just another form of fetishization with self-centric intent on some “I love brown people! Some of my best friends are brown!” bullshit. These are people that’d rather bark at three white guys about including brown character instead of, oh, I don’t know…using that energy to look for some brown creators to support.

When earnest, the challenge of “Creators should think beyond the narrow standards” should always be presented. And fans should be able to communicate with creators their concerns and critiques about representation. But stories should ALWAYS belong to creators first. They should be able to create the kind of stories and characters they envision and determine what degree of influence their audience will have.

Concerns of predominantly white or straight or cis casts are usually valid and discussions should be had. But every story is not going to be representative of everyone. Or anyone. Sometimes, stories are just stories that people love for very personal reasons and they want to tell and share them for reasons of self fulfillment and the hope that others will enjoy it, maybe even identify with. But if certain people don’t enjoy or identify with it, it’s not necessarily the duty of the creator to change their vision in order to check off representation boxes.

Social media has made creators too accessible and given fans a stage on which their voices are too loud. Tumblr and Twitter can be great tools to connect creators and community, and produce some wonderful discussions that should and need to be had. But creators also have to set some firm and impassible boundaries of how much interaction fans have with them and how much influence they will have on their creation. Arguing for representation and diversity isn’t always done with the best intentions or communicated with the most effective voice.

I give it to any creator–even the ones who fuck up–who bare themselves with an admission of guilt and a true desire to do better through listening to their fans. But sometimes, the fans aren’t right. Sometimes it’s the fans that should check themselves and feel guilty.

(via unbadgr)

Source: tmirai

The scientific explanation for why humans are so convinced that aliens look like octopuses

0ct0pus:

From the cartoonish Zoidberg (Futurama) and Kang and Kodos (The Simpsons) to the aliens of Prometheus and Arrival, modern storytellers seem particularly fond of drawing upon the deep for inspiration.

In many ways, it makes sense to use the squid and octopus as models for alien life. The oceans are like an alien world, with an atmosphere we cannot breathe that gives birth to bizarre forms beyond our imaginations. And cephalopods are about as far from the classic mammalian arrangement as you can get—yet they display surprising intelligence. 

The differences between our minds and theirs are evolutionary. Cephalopod intellect evolved under very different conditions than most creatures we consider intelligent. […]

Cephalopods live brief, antisocial lives. Even large species like the giant Pacific octopus last but a few years, and want little to do with other octopuses outside of copulation. Their minds didn’t evolve to form social bonds or lasting relationships. We don’t really know why they’re so smart or what evolutionary pressures led to their relative brilliance, though some think it may have to do with adapting to a life without a shell (an hypothesis that could also explain their short lifespans). Their intelligence, like their eight-legged, boneless bodies, is truly alien, even though both are from this world.

While cephalopods have inspired countless science fiction authors, it’s intriguing that they are almost entirely absent from abduction accounts. 

“I’ve seen no more reports of tentacles on UFO aliens than I could count on my fingers, […] the aliens that show up in purported real-life encounters “are a bit like us… something we can relate to.”

(via 0ct0pus)

Source: qz.com

amazonpoodle:

There is one very specific aspect of what’s going down in fandom right now that just boggles my mind, and that is very simply that even if I put aside my personal opinion on issues of the fandom-mainstream fourth wall and/or appropriate creator-fandom interactions, one of the first things I ever learned in my first writing class was that what I write does not belong to me.

So it was 2003, right? I was fifteen years old, almost sixteen, and I was taking an intensive fiction-writing class during the summer, for funsies, like the gigantic nerd I was (am). My class was given a new short-story assignment each week, and at the end of the week we each made enough copies of our story for the entire class and spent a full day editing and critiquing.

When it was my turn to have my story raked across the coals – and I think it’s worth noting, just so you understand that fifteen-year-old-me had uncommonly strong feelings about what she’d written, that my first short story was an extremely painful account of how my dad had died less than six months earlier, thinly disguised as fiction – this is what I, like every other teenager in my class, had to do:

I sat in a circle made up of professor, T.A., and about fifteen people my age (some of whom I liked and/or respected, and some of whom I sincerely believed had the reading comprehension and original thinking ability of banana slugs), and let those seventeen separate people talk to me and to each other about what I’d written. They went through this story that plugged directly into my heart (and which, by the way, nobody knew had any basis in reality), and talked about my grammar, my word choice, my plot arc, the humanity of my characters, how believable the story was, the subtext they read there, their speculations about what I’d been trying to say, and their recommendations for improvement…

…and I wasn’t allowed to say anything unless somebody asked me a direct question. No arguing. No corrections. 

That was really fucking hard, okay? Aside from being hella humbling, it was excruciating. I had people telling me they didn’t really buy that the main character would act that way; or that such-and-such sequence of events didn’t make sense, narratively speaking; or that they really liked such-and-so antagonist; or that they found this symbolism unnecessarily convoluted or that subtext evocative. And it was my job, as a writer who had completed a text and given it away, to listen to what they were saying and take notes of my own and keep my mouth shut, even as part of my brain was shrieking stuff like, OF COURSE THE MAIN CHARACTER WOULD ACT THAT WAY BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT I ACTUALLY DID! THAT IS THE ORDER THINGS ACTUALLY HAPPENED IN! THAT PERSON MADE MY LIFE A LIVING HELL AND I THINK IT’S FUCKING SICK THAT YOU LIKE THEM! I DIDN’T PUT ANY SYMBOLISM OR SUBTEXT IN THIS STORY, IT IS LITERAL AS FUCK!

But I did it, okay, and I got exactly what I wanted, which was a) some goddamn catharsis, b) what would eventually become a pretty fucking baller short story and c) to learn as much as I could about my own weaknesses and strengths as a writer.

Once you have written something and somebody else has read it or had it read to them or performed it or seen it performed, that thing does not belong to you anymore. This is Writing 101, guys. This is Creative Anything 101. This is SO BASIC. People will ask questions you think are irrelevant; they’ll fixate on details you threw in there on a whim; they’ll berate the characters you love and overidentify with and put the most effort into portraying, and they’ll love the characters you created as villains or cannon fodder. They’ll miss what you thought was the most beautiful part of your story, or the most important part. They’ll see symbolism that you think is bullshit and subtext that goes directly against what you intended to get across. They’ll see some oppressive bullshit you sure as fuck didn’t mean to put in there. They may even imagine things about you and what you were thinking and what you were trying to say. They will MAKE SHIT UP. And here’s the thing: they won’t be wrong. 

It is not a good writer’s business to wade into a discussion of something they’ve created to ~correct~ people. Once you are done writing something, it stands on its own whether you want it to or not. You don’t get to get mad at your beta and/or your audience for not reacting exactly the way you wanted. If you find yourself feeling like you have to explain or correct something after someone’s made their own analysis of it, your first reaction doesn’t need to be “they probably read it wrong” but could possibly stand to be “maybe I wrote it wrong”. What you find yourself wanting to add or correct in the discussion is something that should have spoken for itself in the text. By all means, answer questions when they are put to you directly! But you can’t (and shouldn’t try to) chase down every copy of your text in the whole world and correct the notes people have made in the margins. That would be ridiculous.

So aside from the fact that I think that creators walking into fandom and throwing their weight around re: fans’ opinions of dialogue, characterization, plot arc, the actors’ talent, or anybody’s overall intentions is bullying, disrespectful, and almost sublimely missing the point of what fandom is, it’s also a fucking neon green sign of hubris, immaturity, and POOR AUTHORSHIP. 

(via unbadgr)

Source: amazonpoodle

yamino: “ leehama: “ I took a break from my plant comic… to draw another plant comic My creative process is definitely not as smooth as it looks here, but this is more or less how I got around to starting FP! (Also the venus flytraps are definitely a...
Zoom Info
yamino: “ leehama: “ I took a break from my plant comic… to draw another plant comic My creative process is definitely not as smooth as it looks here, but this is more or less how I got around to starting FP! (Also the venus flytraps are definitely a...
Zoom Info
yamino: “ leehama: “ I took a break from my plant comic… to draw another plant comic My creative process is definitely not as smooth as it looks here, but this is more or less how I got around to starting FP! (Also the venus flytraps are definitely a...
Zoom Info
yamino: “ leehama: “ I took a break from my plant comic… to draw another plant comic My creative process is definitely not as smooth as it looks here, but this is more or less how I got around to starting FP! (Also the venus flytraps are definitely a...
Zoom Info
yamino: “ leehama: “ I took a break from my plant comic… to draw another plant comic My creative process is definitely not as smooth as it looks here, but this is more or less how I got around to starting FP! (Also the venus flytraps are definitely a...
Zoom Info
yamino: “ leehama: “ I took a break from my plant comic… to draw another plant comic My creative process is definitely not as smooth as it looks here, but this is more or less how I got around to starting FP! (Also the venus flytraps are definitely a...
Zoom Info
yamino: “ leehama: “ I took a break from my plant comic… to draw another plant comic My creative process is definitely not as smooth as it looks here, but this is more or less how I got around to starting FP! (Also the venus flytraps are definitely a...
Zoom Info

yamino:

leehama:

I took a break from my plant comic… to draw another plant comic

My creative process is definitely not as smooth as it looks here, but this is more or less how I got around to starting FP!

(Also the venus flytraps are definitely a reference to Little Shop of Horrors)

@summerlightning <3

(via amummy)

Source: leehama

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book.
The reason for that is that in adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. Adult writers who deal in straightforward stories find themselves sidelined into a genre such as crime or science fiction, where no one expects literary craftsmanship.
But stories are vital. Stories never fail us because, as Isaac Bashevis Singer says, “events never grow stale.” There’s more wisdom in a story than in volumes of philosophy. And by a story I mean not only Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk but also the great novels of the nineteenth century, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Bleak House and many others: novels where the story is at the center of the writer’s attention, where the plot actually matters. The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They’re embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do.
But what characterizes the best of children’s authors is that they’re not embarrassed to tell stories. They know how important stories are, and they know, too, that if you start telling a story you’ve got to carry on till you get to the end. And you can’t provide two ends, either, and invite the reader to choose between them. Or as in a highly praised recent adult novel I’m about to stop reading, three different beginnings. In a book for children you can’t put the plot on hold while you cut artistic capers for the amusement of your sophisticated readers, because, thank God, your readers are not sophisticated. They’ve got more important things in mind than your dazzling skill with wordplay. They want to know what happens next.

Philip Pullman, born October 19, 1946 (via annaverity)

Exceedingly apropos of my last reblog, and also just some Basic Truth.

(via sarahreesbrennan)

(via pennypaperbrain)

Source: five3oh-oh-blog