I Have Held Back No Water In Its Season

So, here’s the thing. I’m all in favor of having books that are id-candy, brain-fluff, that demand nothing from your intellect and instead go straight on to punch your emoporn joybuttons.

This is, after all, why I own three quarters of everything Mercedes Lackey has ever published.

But, first off, id-candy is a different thing from good writing. The joybuttons don’t care about bad grammar or triteness or slop, they just resonate to the character shapes that hit one’s kinks. Kinks are often trite and cliche, when you think about it. Id-candy is enjoyable exactly because it doesn’t make your brain engage, it doesn’t deal in subtleties, it doesn’t make you do any work. To get enjoyment out of genuinely artful prose, you generally have to think, to ponder even, to put in some work.

Saying that you enjoy your id-candy immensely and saying that your id-candy is great writing are very different statements. Among other things, the first is true and the second generally isn’t. (Unless you’re using a completely Utilitarian definition of “good”, and when people try to compare Rowling and Tolkien it is unfortunately clear that they are not employing such a definition at all.)

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying the hell out of trite, cliched slop, of course.

Let us consider Misty, for example. She’s the Queen of Exposition, has a tendency to extremely moralistic and preachy narrative, and drives home her morals with a ten pound sledge. She is guilty of the most egregious cultural flattening and caricaturization and the only thing that comforts me even minutely is that she does it to everyone, whitebread, ‘noble savage’ and orientalist alike. (I maintain that Ancient Egypt should take out a restraining order on the woman.) Her characters are flat, their angst is repetitive, and half the time the stories read like SCA handbooks instead of novels.

Nevertheless–three quarters, right there on my shelf, and I reread handfuls of them at fairly regular intervals. This is because they are excellent brain-fluff emoporn.

Also because they are not toxic. Her moralism can get wearing awfully fast, but at least they are morals I can agree with. Mostly.

That’s the second thing. You have to be careful of the id-candy that uses a moral framework that’s harmful to you.

The Twilight books are a prime example of this. The writing is no worse than most id-candy, but the value system those books are hung on is poison. It’s misogynist, racist, deterministic, conflates obsession and stalking with love, and runs the mobius strip of nihilism and femininity myths at full speed with special emphasis on death by/for childbirth. (I would not want to be this woman’s therapist, not without hazard pay). This id-candy has a razor blade in it.

Some people probably bemoan the loss of innocent fun now that we chop up Halloween candy before eating it to make sure there aren’t any evil surprises in it. I expect some people feel the same about their id-candy. But, you know, I’d much rather take the time to chop and evaluate than swallow a needle.

So, a bunch of would-be allies have protested getting “flamed” or “piled on” or basically told to sit down and shut up, in Racefail 09, because they tried to join the discussion by contributing their own experience.

Well what did they expect?

In any discussion of privilege, stereotypes, oppression, agency, if you are on the plus side of the particular issue, do not try to join in with comments about your experience. It may seem like a gesture of sympathy and solidarity, but it isn’t. It’s you taking the focus away from the injured party. Don’t do that. It’s not about you.

Do not try to say that you are not privileged because, while you may be plus in this particular area, you are minus in others. For one thing, that’s flat wrong. If you are plus in this area, then you have privilege in this area. Trying to deny that by waving all the other areas in which you are minus just makes you part of the fail and ensures that the people who have to deal with a minus in the current discussion will have zero reason to respect your minus when that’s under discussion. For another thing, it’s beside the point. Because right now, it’s not about you.

Do not suggest that, yes, this is awful, and shouldn’t we all try to be colorblind (religion-blind, gender-blind, etc.). The only way anyone could imagine such a thing is a) possible or b) a good idea is by being plus in the area in question, and therefore not having to worry about it, not having to be aware of it constantly, not having to deal with how it makes you invisible or second class every day. Such a statement comes only out of a plus experience. Don’t make it. Because it’s not about you.

Do not, for the love of little pixels, try to tell anyone to calm down or be less angry. Do not try to join in by offering your own solution to the problem of being angry. Being angry isn’t the problem, it’s a reaction to the problem. More importantly, that isn’t your anger, so you don’t have any right to say what gets done with it. If it makes you uncomfortable, too bad. It isn’t about you.

You’re plus in a given debate and you still want to contribute? Listen. Don’t talk. Listen. Don’t tell about your own experience. Listen to someone else’s. Don’t deny the anger and don’t try to fix it. Listen to it. When you see another plus person failing in one of the above manners, step up and point out that it isn’t about them, and now is not the time for defensiveness or guilt. Now is the time for listening. Because the sad truth is that a lot of us listen better to people who are like us than to the people who actually have the experience under discussion. If you can redirect attention to where it currently should be, do it. That’s a bare first step, but it’s one that truly astonishing numbers of people seem unable to manage.

Also? Do not comment to this and prove the point in spades by talking about how your intrusion of your own experience into this or any similar discussion wasn’t like that. Because (all together now) it isn’t about you.

So, one of the many and varied arguments surrounding acafen and anti-aca is about specialist vocabulary, how exclusive it is, and whether one can actually acquire it by reading Wikipedia, supposing one is interested in acquiring it in the first place.

In general, my own verdict on Wikipedia would be “no”, if only because most of the articles on theory are written by theorists and require the Western Philosophy base kit to understand (kind of like having a box of general Leggos before you get a special purpose pack).

And then, one day, I thought, well, could some of these concepts be explained differently? So that someone unfamiliar with the base kit could still grok it? And I thought, well, why not try? It came out fairly tongue-in-cheek, but it does seem possible to at least offer some place to start for conversational purposes.

So have a few litcrit concepts:

Semiotics: Word mean things, but how? They’re just sounds. Why do we all understand what the other person means by sounds like “table” or “car”, especially when it isn’t referring to any particular or present example? Let’s think about this.

Structuralism: We connect words to things by a set of rules, and those rules can be figured out. The rules are stable standards that can be scientifically mapped (and incidentally you should give us money and respect for doing so).

Post-structuralism: No, actually it’s all about context. We all flail around in a sea of sound and meaning, hooking up the two and unhooking them again as seems warranted by any particular group of people we’re trying to communicate with.

Deconstruction: Every action highlights its opposite. So if you walk south you have to define it as not-north, and therefore north is the most important thing even though you’re going south. So every attempt to connect sound and meaning destroys the meaning at the same time it constructs it. Let us make portmanteaus to describe this and explain at length how neat it is!

In conclusion, go read Ursula LeGuin’s “Bryn Mawr Commencement Address” from 1986. She’s one of the best writers I know at explaining complex ideas from the ground up.

First the caveats: I don’t read even modern Japanese, far less 7th C Japanese, far less ancient Chinese, so my sources are all at one remove. I have tried to find ones that are not obviously biased in their translations and interpretations. Since this is a web essay, I have also tried to refer to web-sources, where I could find ones that seem reputable or are backed up from reputable paper sources. Nevertheless, this is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle, and there are places where I had to make assumptions and guesses. Do not take this essay’s conclusion as an attested source, because it isn’t.

Summary

The Twelve Divine Commanders (Juuni Shinshou) who appear as the shikigami of Abe no Seimei and his alternates in current popular literature such as Yami no Matsuei and Shounen Onmyouji seem to have started life as a group of tutelary deities or personifications in the five element system, settling into twelve figures with elemental powers based on the ten heavenly stems and the twelve earthly branches.

( Read the full account )

So, the Hale scandal has gotten me thinking again about privacy and business on the web. Have some random thoughts.

These thoughts aren’t about identity, or issues like outing fans; that was malice and vandalism in order to punish ‘competitors’ and gain traffic. Let us instead talk about privacy and anonymity on the web at large. Hale is trying to take advantage of business opportunities, so let us consider the kinds of information commercial sites can get about you, which has little to do with identity as fandom usually considers it.

( A little background )

The thing is, we do all maintain balance of a sort. A thin thread restrains the merchants in question because they don’t want to alienate their customers entirely. And the customers don’t like finding out about how little privacy they may have, hence the voluntary policies that at least limit information trading. Even more than that, customers don’t approve of dishonesty. When the extent of the Beacon network came out, when it was clear that Facebook had misrepresented it as something to share with friends and lied about the extent and of the information gathered, there was uproar. And Facebook backed down.

So Hale hasn’t just been abrogating the mores of fandom. Indeed, she hasn’t been acting within fandom at all; that was merely the front. She has also crossed the line for a commercial web-entrepreneur. She has suggested that her site was for fandom and/or historical research purposes, when, in fact, it is a commercial site. This is one of the few triggers just about guaranteed to anger and alienate prospective customers, thus demonstrating that not only is she a dishonest merchant but she’s not even good at it.

I’ll just be over here, watching the karma drop from a great height.

Continuing on with the What I Like series, I have been reflecting on where my genre fiction tastes intersect with my Literature tastes.

I enjoy a good deal of 19th C lit of all sorts, but the authors I am very especially fond of are Herman Melville and Virginia Woolf. Comparing them to my genre fic favorites and considering just what it is I enjoy, not just about reading them, but about analyzing them, I have concluded that I like authors who turn their brains inside out on the page.

But, and this is an important caveat, I also require a modicum of poetry to really hold my attention. That was my problem with Heinlein–well, one of my problems, to go along with my disgust for his rampant misogyny. His stories read as though he turned his brain inside out, indeed, and then just shook it over the page, squashed the pages together, and sent that off to the publisher like some kind of verbal Rorschach blot.

I require some linguistic artistry to go along with the brain-guts, otherwise I just get bored.

On reflection, this is often my problem with science fiction in general, at least the kind written by actual scientists and science associates, who, as a general rule, cannot write poetry to save their souls. Limericks, yes; poetry, not so much.

On a similar note, not only is brevity the soul of wit, it is the soul of keeping me reading. I have about the same tolerance for reading minute descriptions of machines as I do for reading minute descriptions of buildings and clothing, which is to say, very little. Jane Austin and David Brin both win on this score. Issac Asimov frequently loses and the less said of James Fenimore Cooper the better.

It’s really too bad there isn’t some kind of litmus test I can do on new books, a carefully calibrated metaphorical strip I could dip between the covers to see what colors it turned–whether I’d get that turquoise tinge that means poetry plus brain-guts or the flat indigo of just poetry. Which interests me about as much as just brain-guts, which is to say, yawn.  Jacket blurbs are worthless for this purpose.

Oh, well. I guess I’m stuck with standing in the aisle flipping through my prospective books and hoping for a bit of nicely turned gut phrasing to catch my eye.

I think I have identified one of the things that leads me to like an author’s writing: when they write in several genres at once.

I knew Bujold did this, and Pratchett. But they’re both the kind of writers it’s easy to think of as simply exceptional. What I just realized, recently, is that some of my other favorites do this too. Barbara Hambly, for example.

Hambly writes science-fiction and fantasy. She writes horror. She writes historicals. She writes romance. And the thing is, she writes all of them at once. While any book of hers may lean toward one more than the rest, you can pretty much count on all those genre threads being in every book.

Of course, this means that she doesn’t usually follow most genre conventions of any of them.

Take the horror, for instance. Hambly’s books have plenty of it, whether gruesome and unknowable creatures from beyond the stars or the depths of human depravity and cruelty. But it’s never the point. It’s just there, and the characters have to deal with it. Which means she can’t be easily categorized as “dark fantasy” either, because the fantasy elements generally contribute to a very optimistic story, overall.

Or take the romance. Her books do generally feature multi-verse spanning, life altering love found at long odds. But her characters deal with it as one would expect people in the middle of deadly crises to do: “Wow, this is incredible! If we live, let’s have a good snog/marriage/deathless bond, okay? Now duck!”

As for the historical aspect, well even without her biographical blurb I’d have guessed she had either an advanced degree or an advanced hobby in history. Her narratives are chock full of little details that unmistakably set the stories in place and time. But it’s still the characters who are the point, not the details, and a lot of the books are set in places and times that didn’t actually exist, which makes it hard to call them historical fiction.

She writes against the genre grain, which I find charming. Also something I should probably keep in mind when next browsing the library or bookstore shelves.

So, we as fandom and ficcers have gone around on the question of ratings quite a few times, and for quite a few reasons by now. The most peculiar and widespread round was probably triggered by the MPAA’s pissyness over archives using the NC-17 rating. Plenty of people in US fandoms still use G-PG-R-NC-17, of course, because it’s widely established and generally understood. Others, like ff.net, adopted the slightly altered version of K-T-M. Still others have come up with still more customized variations, and some people have argued that the written word should not have a rating system applied to it at all, and that it certainly isn’t to professional publications.

Ratings are pretty embedded in fandom practice by now, of course, and I doubt we’re getting rid of them. So we struggle on to find a system that says what we want it to say. One of the more recent contributions to the debate got me started thinking, though.

Ratings, as applied to fanfiction, work rather differently than ratings applied to other media, such as movies. For one thing, they’re self-applied and, for another, they don’t actually seem to be regulatory. I am not sure, though, that this fact calls for an alteration in the most commonly used ratings.

Let us start at the beginning. What do we use ratings to indicate?

One of the most common things seems to be sex. Among US fans at least, I believe this is inherited pretty directly from the MPAA, who place a completely disproportionate emphasis on sex as the primary gauge by which to restrict audiences.

This leads me off, though, to one of the major underlying questions: do we use ratings to restrict an audience? Or so we use them for another purpose?

Consider the use of the contested NC-17 rating in fanfiction. My impression in my own fandom sector, anime fandom, is that this rating is used more as advertising than for restriction. When an author wishes to warn off parts of the audience, for disturbing content let us say, such restriction is more often handled through the warning labels rather than the rating. The rating seems most frequently used to advertise the explicitness of the sexual and/or romantic content.

In some ways, then, it seems to me that we have taken in the MPAA focus on sex and subverted it. MPAA ratings are about restriction, and focus on the presence or absence of explicit sexual content disproportionate to the wide variety of other things that might justifiably restrict the audience. Fan use of those ratings is about audience selection and enlargement; we often use them to appeal to the audience that is looking for sexual content (at least in my corner and I think in others from what little I’ve seen of book/media/etc. practice).

There is, of course, another segment of fans that is interested specifically in restriction, or, as it’s most commonly expressed, keeping youngsters away from ideas they should not yet be exposed to. The actual content of those ideas, again, varies, but some of the frequently cited ones are sexuality, cruelty and/or violence, and bad language. Ratings, however, do not seem to come up in these discussions as much as mechanical restrictions, such as registration requirements for sites that contain variously defined mature material. This may be because this segment understands perfectly well that a rating never stopped any kid, especially from doing something as simple as clicking on a link.

So the actual utility of ratings for fandom texts seems to have very little to do with audience restriction. Rather, ratings seem to serve as a special-purpose label, one that can generally be counted on to address the sexual content unless the rest of the meta information specifically points in a different direction

The meta information can be reworked as a whole, so that the rating addresses something else and the sexual content is addressed in some other way. I do this in my own archive. But if a writer or reader desires greater precision or specificity, it is unlikely that a different rating system alone will deliver it. Ratings, by their nature, are very general and not comprehensive. Verbal labels seem far more likely to deliver, on that score.

Then, too, the MPAA scale has gained jargon meaning, among US fans. When I post to fandom forums and comms, I find myself swinging back to the MPAA scale in order to communicate with my potential audience in a way the community consensus understands. Considering this, it seems to me that, at least in my parts of fandom, our subversion of MPAA is already sufficient to its task. If the rating were the only meta information available, then it would not be, but meta information has become a form of composition all its own, and, looking at it, I think this may be a good thing after all. We are not making movies; we are not publishing novels; we are writing fic, and that is a medium of its own that calls for and evolves its own framework.

We might, in fact, think of our use of the G-PG-R-NC-17 scale as fic of MPAA, a notion that rather appeals to me.

So I was reading around on tvtropes.org recently and I read Spell My Name With An S, and I read Theme Naming, and I read Word Of God, and it all reminded me of the tangle that invariably comes up over the spelling of anime/manga names. Of course, any time we deal with a source from a different language the question of appropriate translation comes up, but names… names are special. Names get all the usual issues squared.

For one thing, there’s the basic issue of how one renders the sound of a language with a completely different writing system. In some ways, this is actually the easiest part; the only reason it’s complicated at all is that English has several standardized methods of romanizing any given Asian language to choose from. So some people write “Shaoran” and some write “Syaoran”, and if the two sides occasionally try to kill each other, well that’s fandom.

Things get more fun and exciting when the ‘Japanese’ name has, in fact, been taken from another language and there is a double transliteration to deal with. That adds the question of whether we should use a standardized English transcription of the original language (Xiao Lang) or a standardized transcription of the Japanese phonetic rendering (Shaoran).

Theoretically, an official romanization could resolve the question, but we run into complications there too. The original writer may or may not understand the rules of pronunciation and transcription for a) the original language or b) English if the two are different, and may or may not even be the source of the official information in question (aka Studio Minion Syndrome). This can leave us with romanizations like “Riza”, for a name pronounced ree-sah, which doesn’t make sense as an English spelling no matter how you slice it but almost everyone uses anyway just to stop the bickering. It’s just as bad when the official in question is an English speaker who doesn’t understand Japanese phonetic transcription of loanwords; that’s when we wind up with “Arukennymon” instead of “Arachnemon”.

Then, of course, there’s the problem that Japanese does not seem to have an official standardized system for kana-fication of other languages. The characters used to render Latinate or Germanic languages, especially, can vary, and the unwritten rules appear to be pretty constantly evolving. Complicating this basic problem, the same character often gets used for more than one sound. An extended terminal “ah” syllable may stand for an “er” or it may stand for an “a”. A terminal “su” may indicate an “s” or a “th”. If there is no official romanization or, better yet, if different official sources conflict, we’re left to guess and argue and act like there are spelling OTPs.

And that’s just for starters!

Because a number of anime/manga authors mess with the spelling of their characters’ names deliberately, usually in order to indicate that they are strange/futuristic/exotic. Consider the name Kira Yamato, about as Japanese a name as you can get, but spelled on the official website in katakana, the script used for foreign words. Consider K.T.’s penchant for putting extraneous double letters in the names of some characters, eg Nnoitra. Double letters in general seem to be a popular way to strange names, especially double L’s (Cagalli, Killua). And then, sometimes, the writer goes full bore and comes up with something like “Quwrof Wrlccywrlir” for a name pronounced “Kuroro Rushirufuru” (the historical betting leans toward the last name being an imported “Lucifer”).

That’s my personal line in the sand. If I look at it and say “it doesn’t make any sense”, even after thematic research, then I don’t care if it’s official, I’ll spell according to my own best guess. Milage varies on this, of course, and some fans hold by official spellings no matter how weird. All of which only goes to show, this is another debate that will never end. Ah, well, I suppose life would be boring if fans agreed on anything.

So, upon considering the question of disability in anime, two things pop immediately to mind. One: portrayals are very limited. Two: they’re almost all symbolic.

For one thing, cognitive disabilities are pretty much non-existent unless it’s a case of dramatically going crazy or being Emotionally Wounded and, erm, deciding to destroy the world because of it. These are clearly not intended to be realistic; instead they are a highly dramatized acting out of common emotional patterns.

For another, physical injuries or illnesses are rarely as severe or lasting in effect as they should be. Anime and manga in general are not written for physical realism either–quite the reverse in most cases. They regularly disregard all laws of physics and biology, and injuries are no exception to this. When a character is injured, the results are either hop-scotched via magic or technology (eg Bleach, Getbackers), or else the healing period is skipped with, perhaps, a few scenes of the character dealing with a cast used as humor. The day-to-day issues of “I can’t use that arm” or “I can’t stand up” are rarely dealt with, certainly not by main characters.

Sometimes an illness or injury is used as a source of plot tension, something the protagonists must overcome during a critical situation (eg Card Captor Sakura), but that seems to be a one-episode sort of thing, done to emphasize the hero/ine’s sense of responsibility. The rest of the time it’s used for humor and then cured so the action which is the focus of the story can be got on with. When there is a lasting effect that must be dealt with or overcome it’s a secondary character who deals with it (eg Eyeshield 21‘s Torakichi), and therefore the process is not foregrounded.

The more adult-oriented the show, the more likely injuries are to be shown realistically (eg Cowboy Bebop), but even then the process of recovery is generally invisible. If the lasting nature of an injury is dealt with at all it is more likely to be in symbolic terms (eg CLAMP’s eye thing) than in terms of what a missing or inoperable body part actually does to a person’s life and experience.

This seems to be even more true of how chronic conditions are deployed, especially the most common one I’ve observed: tuberculosis. Japanese literature in general has a love affair with beautiful pathos, and TB offers writers an illness that is a) not unsightly, b) still allows the sufferer to be active in a pinch, c) is deadly, and d) has a great historical weight behind it. (For those interested, I highly recommend The Modern Epidemic: A History of Tuberculosis in Japan by William Johnston). So TB gets used as a lever to produce tropes like ‘impending fate’, ‘fragile beauty’, ‘vain struggle against the inevitable’ and so on. Okita Soujirou’s various animated incarnations make good examples.

The bit that really interests me, though, is that, while disability is almost never shown, the experience of social isolation that goes along with it is shown. Stories like Fruits Basket, X/1999 and Meine Liebe show characters who, despite any stated disability being either completely invisible or having no effect, are sequestered. The mental and emotional injury done to them by that sequestration is dealt with in these stories. So, even as the isolation and erasure of disability and difference continues on the screen, that isolation is critiqued. To be sure, social isolation is generally presented as a very bad thing in anime and manga, something to be overcome; consider Shoujo Kakumei Utena or Rurouni Kenshin. So, in those shows that state the presence of a disability but do not actually show it, it seems that two cultural imperatives are pitted against each other: that difference be erased and that social connection be paramount.

The subtext of those stories, that one must become somehow normative to be connected, is not exactly a hopeful one, but at least a few of these characters are making it out of the attic/basement.

(And have a couple interesting links that show a bit of the shape of how Japanese culture deals with disability.)

Whenever I think about IP I find myself suffering from having one part of my brain considering the practical economic issues, another part working in abstract legal and ethical terms, and yet another part thinking about the practical writerly and interpretive issues.

For example, consider the notion of owning a character. In practical economic terms, I agree that it is useful to pretend that a concept plus description can be owned, in order that a writer be able to profit from supplying stories about that character. In economic terms I can see this working nicely as the sort of limited monopoly that, for example, patents offer, which allow inventors to recoup R&D costs and make a bit of a living.

In abstract legal terms, on the other hand, the notion of owning a concept strikes directly at something I consider a pillar of sensible and ethical practice: that ideas cannot be owned, only products. In these terms, only the specific words on a page can be an author’s property, and only direct copying of those specific words considered a violation of rights. Even a trademark, after all, that most ephemeral of intellectual property, must be a material, embodied symbol.

This touches on part of the writerly portion of my thoughts, because one thing I find curious is any author getting wound up over what another author does with “their” character.

As though it were the same character. Which, of course, it isn’t.

A character inside my head is not the same one as in someone else’s head. I might call it the same name, it might look a bit the same, but it isn’t the same character. No one can do anything to someone else’s character, because the only place someone else’s character lives is in that someone else’s head and on their page. The character in my head and on my page, that’s, well, someone else. The general agreement, in fandom and elsewhere, to pretend that all the Rukias, all the Leons, all the Rodneys we read are the same one, the shared fantasy of unity, masks this fact, I think. But the unity and the distinction exist side by side, and, in writerly terms, it is the distinction that I see most clearly. So the occasional diatribes about the “violation” of one’s characters being used by someone else seem to me to ignore some basic facts about how separate people with separate brains write.

It strikes me sometimes that many writers have a very poor sense of boundaries.

But, then, another part of my writerly thought understands, intellectually at least, that the emotional investment of writing leads very easily to a strong sense of ownership and identification. This part is entirely in sympathy with the desire to not know of the existence of stories that imagine other histories, other existences, for a character you wrote. It’s even more in sympathy with the wish to be clearly acknowledged as a source, and, if any profit is being made, to get a suitable share of it.

And that brings me back around to economic issues, and the search for viable models for licensing for commercial use. Alas, we have none yet, so this is where my thought process usually tails off into wild fantasies of a rational world.

When I try to imagine how all these different threads might actually be reconciled, that’s when I get irremediably tangled up. Practically speaking, it seems to me that the economic measure of copyright has dovetailed so neatly with emotional investment that the conjoining has become naturalized: people have started to think that copyright should protect the emotional investment and not merely serve as an economic incentive. This is certainly the direction European law seems to be moving in, witness the Berne Convention. I do not think it is a very productive direction; I do not think law should be based that immediately on emotion. But there it is, and it is certainly a fact that law changes and evolves over time, and someone will always not like it.

Which, now I think of it, probably means we’ll always be in this muddle. There will likely always be a huge middle ground that is ill defined and fuzzy. We’ll always be arguing over it from a slew of different, likely conflicting, perspectives. This is, after all, how rules are generated and laws are made.

So I suppose my conclusion today is, let us not try to quash any of these thought-threads in a vain effort to arrive at the One True Answer. Let us disagree and debate and not ever be ashamed to hold forth for what we each think is right in each moment and circumstance. The answer will change as we go exactly because no one of us controls it, and, all things considered, I can only think that this is a very good thing.

A distinction that may assist in clarifying thought:

The practical business of the sciences is to figure out how to change the material world.

The practical business of the humanities is to figure out whether and how it is a good idea to do so.

Many have asked, whenever the various vields of the humanities are judged not sufficiently Serious and Morally Approved, what is the good of studying philosophy, literature, history, political science, etc. And the answer is not, as some philosophers would have it, “because it’s the most noble and spiritual thing possible to do”. The answer is, rather, “to figure ourselves out”–so that, hopefully, we can learn our own strengths and weaknesses and improve our lives without shooting our collective foot off.

History, stories, politics, they all tell of the patterns that human action and thought take. The better we understand those patterns, the better we can judge what effect a new technology or change may have on our lives, and how we need to prepare for it. Understanding isn’t a simple A to B line, though; you can’t just study Great Literature ™ and think that will give you all the understanding you need. Someone has to study everything, so you get the whole alphabet, so you have all the parts.

Studying in the humanities is about finding those parts, and every place you look, every sort of thing you study, is another piece, another letter, that you can add to the collective bag.

Unfortunately, the pretentious philosophers were often the ones with the money and influence to be heard, and their version still pollutes the mind of many an interlocutor, who then wants to know what on earth is so noble and spiritual about studying, for example, fanfic.

Well, you know, fanfic is probably Q.

It’s the wrong question, you see. It comes out of centuries on centuries of self-serving propaganda about what scholarship in the humanities is good for. Yes, Plato, I’m looking at you. And Confucius, you too. I mean, honestly.

There’s nothing especially noble about any of this. Rather is is a) potentially useful and b) a lot of fun. That’s it. And, really, what more can you ask from any activity?

Cultural relativism is a useful mental tool, especially in the field of anthropology but also in day to day life in a global world. It can be boiled down to the reminder that not all cultures are the same, and the conceptual categories of one may well not be what you need to understand another.

This can also be rendered, especially by frustrated anthropology teachers, as: it’s not yours, you are not at home, do not try to make this other place/time/people into your own, because they’re not! (Case in point of failure to remember, or even consider, this: Wallis Budge’s translation of the Book of the Dead.)

This is, as I say, especially useful for people from a dominant, privileged or mechanically/technologically advanced culture who are going off to study people who are not any or all of those things. It keeps the arrogance of understanding, or, more accurately, assumed understanding, in check.

The thing is, what cultural relativism does only help ensure a person does not either a) assume they know all the whys and wherefores or b) dismiss everything unfamiliar to them as stupid and barbaric.

It does not mean that one does not make judgments about what one encounters.

Cultural relativism, especially of the non-anthropology-specific philosophical variety, does not mean “Oh, it’s their own way, they’re not from our culture, we can’t judge”, because that’s nonsense. Of course we can judge. And so can they. And so we all do. Pretending otherwise won’t help, and the notion that “outsiders have no right to judge” is exactly the kind of thing that prevents both legislation and action against violence inside the family. We have every right to judge, all of us, about everything.

The responsibility of an intelligent and thoughtful person is not to cease judging. It is, rather, to keep in mind that being outside a situation makes some things easier to see and others harder, and that the thing in question might be one of the ones that’s harder. An intelligent and thoughtful person has a responsibility to always be willing to look at new information and take that information into account, no matter how well they think they understand the situation already.

An intelligent and thoughtful person also has a responsibility to evaluate the information, of course, taking into consideration the source and occasion.

It’s always a balancing act. Always in motion. Judgments that are stable, that have stopped, that are satisfied… those are the ones that are categorically mistaken, not necessarily in content but in process. Those are the judgments that are insupportable, because time always goes on and we never know when new information will come to light that might change the whole question into something else. Because we never know, we must stay alert to the constant possibility.

The fact that good judgments are never final, never absolute and never finished does not let anyone off the hook from making them.

Or changing them.

What cultural relativism does is remind us that we might be wrong. Not that we are certain to be wrong, when we are judging someone else’s cultural activities, because having grown up with something or not grown up with it does not confer automatic and eternal rightness or wrongness. But that we might be wrong, and should remember where we’re standing.

Another way to boil down cultural relativism is: be aware of your own position.

No one is unbiased, whether inside or outside of a situation. Nor is it always clear where the in/out line lies. This is the other reason no one can make absolute judgments, because every judgment comes from a very specific life experience.

That does not invalidate the judgments in question.

The trick, in all cases, is to be aware of the interest one may have when judging a given cultural practice because one is female or white or the employee of an oil corporation or a dog owner. Be aware of the interest and ask oneself, not whether one’s position is influencing one’s judgment because of course it will, but instead whether it is obscuring one’s ability to view and consider all the information involved. That is what one must strive to avoid, not the making of ongoing judgments as best one can.

In the end, this can be a powerful tool in making judgments and then choosing where and when to act on them. What it should never be is an excuse to avoid the responsibility, as a thinking human being, to have opinions on how human beings act towards each other.

Spinning off from Resonant8′s entry on character making, and the discussion following, I find myself wandering in thought toward the writers of the Endicott Studio, toward Ursula K. Le Guin and her “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, and toward Lois McMaster Bujold and her Vorkosigan books.

At first glance, one of these things is not like the others.

The Endicott writers such as Emma Bull, Charles Delint, Terri Windling and all her proteges have, I think, an obvious resonance with Le Guin. As Le Guin points out, the story of the Hero and his linear conflict with, not uncommonly, most of the rest of the world, is the most valorized literary model of Western storytelling. There are, however, other ways of telling a story, and other stories worth telling. Those other stories are often the ones that the Endicott writers focus on. The world of their stories does not make sense (as per Mr. Clemens’ dictum); what we see instead is the characters attempting to make sense of their world–not always successfully and certainly never completely. Their stories and characters wander, picking up as they go things that seem meaningful or interesting to stow in the bag of the story. Some of those things prove not to be meaningful to the immediate story, after all, and, in a proper Hero story, would have been snipped out in the telling… or, at least, in the editing. Here, they are not, but rather left in the bag to puzzle everyone with their presence. “Secondary” characters have just as full a life and existence as “primary” ones, only we see far less of those lives, often leaving us wondering what was left untold. We are not directed to the triumphant or tragic end of the story, but rather tempted toward the outskirts and down side alleys. This is especially obvious in the Bordertown anthologies, in which the writers shared their characters back and forth, pulled them into each other’s stories and chucked them out again, willy nilly and with no enlightenment to show for it. The conflict that the characters think they are in often turns out to be a mistaken perception.

This is Carrier Bag writing.

And that brings me to Bujold. Because one of the more consistent themes in the Miles Vorkosigan books is that Miles throws himself into the conflicts in his life with every ounce of energy and spirit that is in him… only to find that the conflict is a mirage and his hands pass through it and he lands in an ungraceful heap in the middle of another situation entirely. By all rights of character, Miles should be a Hero. And sometimes he is. But those times are, as he puts it, matters of “forward momentum”, of running full tilt along a highwire, because if he stops he’ll waver and fall. Exciting. Desperate. Unsustainable.

Is that not the essence of the Hero story?

Recently, and, tellingly, as Miles gets older, Miles comes to reject that model. He is still the Hero, at times. But now, instead of running, he stands still. Instead of his military career he embraces a political one–and not the politics of conflict but the politics of family, of kitchen negotiation, of cultivation. Instead of the stories of the bag-carriers being subordinated to The Story of The Spear-carrier, it happens the other way around. Miles is the Hero in the service, not of Accomplishment, but of Existence–not the linear, or even the circular, but the still and the wandering.

Bujold has put the Hero in the Carrier Bag.

I find this delightful, but it is true that such departures often fail to endear a story to an audience grown to expect Heroes with spears and without bags, and nicely spun yarns that don’t snarl. I suspect that the presence of the Hero, despite his Bagging, is one of the reasons Bujold has better sales, and considerably better market staying power than the Bordertown books. By the same token, I suspect Bujold’s tendency toward bag-narrative is a significant part of why she has a smaller following than, say, Mercedes Lackey.

Jumbled up bags are fascinating, but they are not quick.

These, then, are my own models of character building (and, indeed, world building). The guiding concept I have taken from these stories is not to select a specific conflict to motivate my characters, but rather to elaborate wildly and somewhat omni-directionally on my characters’ potential lives and then choose a handful of threads from that tapestry (or snarl) to tell about in a given moment. The choice of threads narrows the scope of what is told. But my most favorite stories are the ones that tell, one way or another, everything that the chosen viewpoint can see in that swatch.

This post is made a little for humor, and a little for snark, and a lot because I was more or less dared to do it. I’m all in favor of apocalypses, which the following is alleged to be a sign of. (Apocalypsi? Is this a Greek root at all? *goes to look it up* Indeed it is; still doesn’t say what the plural would be. … it strikes me that my immediate interest in this subject does not make the strongest possible starting point for this endeavor. Oh, well.) At any rate, take this with a dash of salt.

An Essay about Creative Punctuation, Arguing for its Acceptability in Modern Usage

First of all, for practical reasons, I really do think that any and all apostrophes should be removed from the company of “its”. When the only real use an item of punctuation serves is to make those who have memorized the usage feel superior to those who have not, the game ceases to be worth the candle. I do not argue that the usage, in the abstract, doesn’t have more utility than that. As a way to distinguish between possessive and contraction, it is, indeed, useful, albeit utterly arbitrary. Theoretically useful. In application, however, hugely variable usage does not seem to impede understanding, and it is beyond pointless to insist on an item of usage that is not actually being used. An absence of apostrophe seems less jarring than the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey approach. Alternatively, as Ken suggests, we could always use the apostrophe, which would allow people their finger-jerk reflex, and even conform to both sets of general rules on how to use apostrophes.

Next, I think commas should go wherever they seem wanted. The only comma rule I feel should be carefully abided by is the parenthetical comma structure. One half a parenthetical comma pair is about as useful as one half a pair of parentheses. The “comma splice”, however, is an absurd thing to get all up in arms about. Why shouldn’t two complete sentences be joined by a comma, instead of a period, or a semicolon, or a comma and conjunction? There is no lack of clarity in “It’s late, eat some lunch” versus “It’s late, so eat some lunch”. That being the case, I find no other valid reason to adopt the rule. As for lists, there is no one definitive rule, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. The rules for that look like a flow-chart that swallowed its own tail.

If someone wants to use both a colon and quotation marks to set off a question or quotation within a sentence, well, it’s a bit of overkill, but why not? Ideas about when to use one or both come and go in cycles of fashion about thirty years in duration. I’m not getting excited over them.

Use semicolons for as long as you want to! BWAHAHAHAHAHA! *hem* If the idea is to show the flow of a connected series of thoughts, I see no reason to stop at two just because the hacks over at Bedford say so. I know some of the people they hire and publish…

When wondering whether or not to hyphenate some particular compound phrase or word (e.g. anal-retentive), or whether to add a hyphen after what is, technically, a prefix (e.g. cooperate), please do whatever. You. Damn. Well. Want! If it makes a difference, worry about it; if it doesn’t, then don’t. (Note the conjunction with the comma, here? I considered it a useful progressive indicator and a nice addition to the rhythm–pure iconoclasm is precisely as useless as blind rule-mongering.)

I entirely approve of the use of dashes, kind of like confetti, as a way to enliven a block of text that already has as many commas as it wants. It’s a wonderful tool for indicating a sharp break in a thought, and I think it should be acceptable in all forms of writing.

And, for pity’s sake, space your ellipses however you like.

As for whether to put punctuation inside or outside of quotation marks, USE YOUR COMMON SENSE. Which, in the US, means ignoring the rules at least half the time. If it looks (or hears, to your mind’s ear) bizarre to put the comma or period inside the closing quotation mark, then put it outside. *flips the bird at rules based on antiquated printing practices*

And while I’m at it: split infinitives? beginning with a preposition? sentence fragments for emphasis? inventing new participles? Go for it!

The only earthly use of all this messing about with standardization and classes teaching the standard is to promote clarity of communication. Those rules which are derived from a linguistic system not equivalent to English (that is, from Latin) do not serve the purposes of clarity. Quite the contrary, in some cases, especially when the rule is derived from some element of speech that English doesn’t have, or has in a different form. And then the poor muddled students ask the eternal question: Why is it like that? And the poor, stuck teacher can only reply: Because that’s the rule. Or, occasionally, make up some cockamamie BS in an attempt to keep from admitting that they don’t know either. Thus are the rules of English Usage born.

Pfeh.

However. I am still wholly and entirely against any use of ‘netspeak’ any where, for any reason, at all. It is abhorrent in the eyes of… well, me. And that’s also how usage rules are born.

So, out of the latest go-rounds about writing sensitive issues and writing what one knows have come the following thoughts. In many ways, this little coda only brings a few high points back around, but, then, most good discussions run in spirals. And I did want to toss an extra point or two out for consideration.

Lest this be a circle, rather than a spiral, let me address the “write what you know” question in separate parts as a technical and a moral item of advice. For technical usefulness, “write what you know” is on a par with “cut the adverbs”. It’s a bad habit to use a lot of adverbs to shortcut descriptions out of laziness. Equally, it’s a bad habit to write without enough knowledge of your subject to judge plausibility for your story’s purposes. Taken this way, neither is any kind of moral imperative, simply technical guidelines or reminders to help write something that has some depth to it and will draw your audience in.

As far as the technical aspects go, it’s worthwhile to remember that storytelling requires both passion and dispassion, in varying proportions depending on one’s goals. Ironically enough, personal experience of the subject in question can be just as much of an impediment to writing it in fiction as having only third-hand sensational rumor to go by. The more intense the experience, the more difficult it’s likely to be for the writer to look beyond her own individual variation and remember that her particular experience may not be common to either the majority of those who share the general experience or to the kind of character she’s trying to write. Total universalizing of the personal is just as much of a dead end exercise as assuming that individual experiences have no commonality at all.

Come to think of it, I’m not surprised at all that trauma and sex are two major poles in this discussion, in any of its many incarnations. By its nature, trauma is both intense and difficult to consider with any kind of dispassion if one has experienced it, even if one coped by intellectualizing it. And even when the actual experience of sex is mediocre, US culture in particular adds so much symbolic baggage to the act that it becomes significant anyhow–a personality indicator the integrity of which must be defended at all costs.

As for the moral aspect of all this… two things come to mind.

One is the question of whether fiction writers carry a responsibility to make ethical/political statements with their work. This immediately subdivides in my mind into the questions of Is it even possible not to? and Is it ever possible to do both deliberately and well? My own inclination is to answer no to both. Any story we write carries the stamp of our worldview, whether overtly or between the lines; we are the ones choosing the words, and the choices are ours. The writer’s subject position cannot be denied, occasional attempts at doing just that to the contrary. I think our greatest moral responsibility is to be aware of that position and to own it, in fiction as we should for any other kind of communication, lest we all be reduced to screaming reiterations of watertight personal opinions at each other. Which, besides being pointless, is really boring, no less in a story than in a debate. As for the second question, well, by and large, only talented satirists seem able to make deliberate political statements in fiction without the story becoming flat, dry and tasteless. Without that ironic self-awareness, well, then you have Chernyshevskii or Morris, and I’m sorry but the thing with the aluminum still makes me laugh. Actually, so does the thing with the manure–that was the only high point in the book. Dystopias seem slightly less prone to this than utopias, but even there 1984 and A Brave New World aren’t a patch on The Handmaid’s Tale for storytelling. Atwoods are few and far between, and notably more ambiguous than either Morris or Orwell.

The other thing that comes to my mind is the less abstract and more immediate question of whether a writer has any responsibility to guard her readers from discomfort. I find my own response divided, depending on what angle I’m looking at the question from. As a writer, I think not; the writer’s duty is to the story, and if the shape of the story is a disturbing one then that’s the way it is. The writer might want to take a moment to consider why she feels it necessary to write a disturbing story, but that’s between the writer and herself. And, possibly, her therapist. Considering the question as a member of a social community of readers and writers who know each other sometimes even as friends, however, I think it is… productive, let us say, to give the readers some indication of what they’re getting into. Then, if all goes well, the readers will not be frightened or disgusted by stumbling unawares over evocation of emotions/thoughts they can’t deal well with, and they may, in turn, not totally abandon all the works of the writer in question in order to guard themselves from another such experience. Because if they do that, then even the stamp of that writer’s worldview will be abandoned, and there will be no chance for a more subtle negotiation between the reader’s and writer’s ideas. Fortunately, these two answers are not mutually contradictory and can both be served by writing the story however and dabbing on some meta-information upon publication–vague or explicit, as seems appropriate. Shades of Avus’s answer to the issue.

So, somewhat like Marinarusalka, what I come to is less “write what you know” than “know what you write”.

At the simplest level, a little research to track down overviews and details is not particularly onerous for anyone with a modem. A very little research goes a remarkably long way. As for the really ambitious stories, wherein the author attempts to write about something fraught and complicated, well, she should expect to work harder for those.

Then, too, if you know what your goal is it should be a lot easier to figure out how to get there. And, if you know what you’re doing and choose to go forward, then you have taken responsibility for it. It’s your choice, and you can defend it as such if it seems necessary to do so. If you choose to write realism, well and good; if you choose to write unrealistically, well and good. If you choose to write on sensitive subjects and either assert that your personal experience is the totality of what should be said on that subject, or use it for cheap angst without minding how it affects people who may be reading… well, as long as you know that the first is untrue and the second callous and shallow, go for it.

Caveat: It’s very true that trauma, and rape in particular, has, for lack of a better term, a symbolic existence in the fantasy world of middle American culture (and quite likely others, but I can’t speak for that by either meaningful academic or personal knowledge, so… ) that has only a tenuous connection to rape in the real world. This is, in fact, often put forward as a defense of stories that contain eroticized rape. I firmly believe both that this is an entirely valid exploration of existing sexual power dynamics, and that what it expresses is a deeply harmful cultural tendency. A discussion of how those two things interact, though, is another essay. For now, suffice it to say that, if you choose to write such a story, you should remember that reading it might really mess with the heads of some people who have dealt with the real world version.

In the manner proper to a spiral, let me end someplace different. When we write a story, we make a world, be it full-bodied or barely sketched. Sometimes it’s only for ourselves; sometimes it goes further than that. Any story, good or bad by whatever measure, is a transformation. I do not think that responsibility to one’s story, to oneself, and to one’s readers are really separate things, despite having dealt with them separately above. The meaning of the transformation is something we, writers and readers and history, make together. It serves nothing, even simple enjoyment, to forget or ignore that.

So, one of Hana’s posts made me think–specifically about authority in fandom.

The start of this thought was actually the perennial issue of feedback and commenting, and how well or ill fic authors receive critical reviews. The occasion, this time, was an article noting how badly many students in the current generation (whatever that may be) take criticism in class or at work once they have jobs. And the juxtaposition of these things suddenly snapped something into focus for me.

A lot of the hissing and spitting over this subject in Western fandom seems to come down to authority.

A great many negative responses to negative comments that I’ve seen, my own included, are variations on the theme of “Where do you get off talking like that to me?” Which then gives rise to the standard return, which has become some variation on “You posted it in public and nobody paid me to be nice, get over it.” It may sound like an exchange over manners or freedom of speech or too much/too little personal investment, and those issues are, no doubt, present. But I think the underlying debate has directly to do with how authority is produced in fandom.

The problem, of course, being that there isn’t any one stable way, and the most stable model does not lend itself to calm interaction.

So, author X writes and posts a story (let’s keep this about fic, for now) and reader Y comes along and says that X got some characterization wrong. X goes up in flames and asks how Y can be so rude, was she raised in a pigpen, and things go downhill from there. In particularly bad cases, friends of both X and Y pile on, and ego-fluffing and mud-slinging commence apace. Sound familiar?

I would like to suggest that what X is saying is not (or not only) “how can you do such a mean thing as say my story isn’t perfect” but rather (or also) “where’s your authority to say your character interpretation is more valid than mine?”

And where is the authority?

Fandom is not an academic context, so it doesn’t necessarily do any good for those of us who have advanced degrees to make our CVs into icons for when we post commentary. Teaching as a system of authority has no formal parameters for recognition, here; when it happens it’s a one on one arrangement of personal recognition. Any attempt to arrogate that kind of authority, without getting the individual, personal recognition of it first, tends to be met with especially violent rejection–quite rightly, in my own opinion. Fandom is not a commercial context (at least not this way), so there’s no really big salary to wave around, no fic equivalent of three BMWs and a lake house. A place in a well known archive can sometimes have the same effect as getting the corner office, but those who maintain archives have no particular authority of their own outside that particular site. Thus any insistence that such recognition is based on merit tends to have credence only in very localized terms. Online fandom has no supervisory structure at all, except for moderators who are usually extremely self-limited in their powers. Those who are not seem to often find themselves the targets of scorn and revilement. Awards theoretically mark acclaim by one’s peers, which, in established fields, generally does constitute some authority. But that just begs the question again, because the panels who give out awards are supposed to be experts in the field, supposed to have those tangible marks of success (publication credits, patents, money, etc.) that fandom lacks. Expertise is almost impossible to judge with any surety. The vastly different criteria by which different segments of fandom judge a story good or bad mean that popularity is an extremely unstable basis for authority. It can always be argued, and almost certainly will be, that that doesn’t count.

This takes us toward one of the other difficulties of authority, which fandom shares with all the other performing arts: the double edge of popularity. (Many thanks to Becky for making me think about it.) In the Fine Arts, popularity is desirable and yet suspect. If you’re too popular, then your credentials as a maker of High Art come into question. And in the industries of movies, publishing, music, etc., there’s a strong tendency toward increasing the level, the height, of one’s art. Higher is better. Higher is also narrower in appeal. (This mixes weirdly with the commercial imperative to appeal broadly to make lots of money, but I think that’s a whole different essay.) So judges and panels who are authorities because they are big names, because they are popular, are undermined by the very thing that gives them authority. There’s always room for the rejected one to say ‘well, they’re just a popular success, of course they can’t judge the real worth of my artistic effort’.

I think this carries over into fandom. Not very consciously, because I doubt many of us think of ourselves in terms of High Art. I would, at least, be deeply and lastingly amused, for all sorts of reasons, should anyone contemplate applying for an NEA grant to write fanfiction. But the same dynamic of both desiring and suspecting popularity definitely applies, and I think that feeds very strongly into the ‘poor, misunderstood me’ response that sometimes comes in answer to attempted criticism of any sort, especially if it comes from someone who has gained acclaim.

Both of the authority systems I see actually working, in fandom, are ones with limited scope.

The expertise model does work, but judgments of what constitutes expertise in writing are both very personal and wildly diverse. Even where formal guidelines exist, for grammar, for example, fandom harbors sufficient sophistication to argue the correctness of commonly accepted authoritative sources. One fine example of this is the use of “they” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun–arguments for correctness or incorrectness can both be made, and are. The use of “blond” as a specifically masculine descriptor is another of these. The fact that a commonly accepted authority does exist only means that both sides agree there is a final authority to be had, can they only triumph over the wrong-headed stubbornness of their opponents. This is not conducive to broad-based authority.

The expertise model works a bit better when dealing with the original text. An exhaustive knowledge of canon generally garners respect. In Western anime fandoms, in particular, those who can read or understand the source text can gain authority by translating and interpreting it. In any fandom, deep familiarity with the details indicates the kind of investment many fans can respect.

The family model of authority, however, seems to me most common, and certainly has resonance with how fandom operates. The family-based authority is an insular one. It requires a virtual blood connection–liking the same source text for the same reason, for example, or sometimes sharing a basic worldview. Authority from outside that connection is discounted. Authority, in this case, is given by usually unspoken consensus reached within the family group, based as much on personal dynamics as the quality of writing. Attempts to assert authoritative critique from outside that circle meet with about as much success as some random adult telling a non-related child to clean her room. (Of course, the fact that fen from non-Western cultures are part of English speaking fandom puts a bit of a crimp in that analogy; within cultures that place more value on respect for elders, this would not, necessarily, draw resentment. *tips hat to Genie for reminding me*)

I choose the terms “adult” and “child” for a reason. Any criticism suggests that the criticizer knows better on the subject than the criticizee. Within the family context this translates pretty automatically into seniority terms: older/younger or adult/child. Coming from someone outside the consensual “family”, such an implied claim can only read as arrogant, unjustified and even predatory. Is it really any wonder that the response is violent? Or that it spreads? After all, when we insult someone’s family, what we generally get is a fight.

A caveat in closing: I do not mean to imply that all negative reaction to criticism is based in fandom’s conflicts of authority. Some of it is simply spoiled whining by people who feel the world should conform in every detail to their whims. I do, however, think that the consistence and vehemence with which criticism is rejected has a great deal to do with those conflicts. Nor do I think that can be resolved. Such is the nature of fandom–decentralized and fluid in its structures.

A mention in one of the recent threads at fanthropology reminded me of that apparently popular fandom sport: Mary Sue hunting. And one of the things that struck me, thinking about it, is that Mary Sues are reviled in the same terms within lit fandoms and anime fandoms. I find this strange.

It bears pointing out that almost all of the common criteria for Sue-dom fit a sizable category of the canon characters in anime. While I can see the justice of readers becoming annoyed by a fan-made original character who takes over the story when the reader was expecting to read about the original original characters, I’m increasingly convinced that it’s unreasonable to protest on most of the other standard Sue grounds.

Consider the common criteria sited: Funky hair/eye color or otherwise remarkable appearance. Completely unrealistic powers, possessed just because it’s her/him. An equal degree of “endearing” klutziness or similar lack of some basic skill such as self-preservative instinct. Universally loved, despite immature behavior and somehow manages to be the center of the other characters’ attention at all times. Either effortlessly sweeps to victory through overwhelming power or else falls into it by luck and the apparent blessing of chance at every turn. Instant love interest for any and all heros and villains, frequently both at the same time (if heros/villains are of the same sex, “obsession” may be substituted for “love”; it looks much the same). Usefully tortured past, or possibly present, that s/he has nevertheless managed to survive/overcome at completely unreasonable odds.

This is the basic profile of both the shounen and shoujo hero/ine.

Tsukino Usagi (BSSM); Yuuki Miaka (FY); Himura Kenshin (RK); Mutou Yuugi (YGO); Honda Tohru (FB); Utena (Utena); Shiro Kamui (X); Naruto (Naruto); Vash (Trigun); Sanzo (Saiyuki). Few of them meet all of the criteria, but it’s close. Admittedly, the major victories won by these characters are rarely “effortless”, but they are often a matter of uncovering a pre-existing inner strength and the catalyst for doing so is often external. That’s what the main love interest, or, occasionally, the friend-group, is there for; to flip the switch for the hero/ine.

It may be worth noting, here, that I love most of these characters to pieces.

My point is, in order to fit new characters into an anime-based fanfic, they need extraordinary appearance and ability, and quite possibly equally extraordinary Murphy-baiting, Darwin-taunting behavior.

One complaint that I have some sympathy for points out that writing a replacement hero/ine turns the story away from the beloved original, and where’s the point in either writing or reading that. And yet… I still find myself asking, where’s the heinous crime? I don’t exactly go out of my way to read Sue stories, both because it’s generally an extremely personal kind of writing and because the technical ineptitude with which Sues are usually written gives me headaches. But the technical lacks have no intrinsic relation to the character shape so often denounced. If I want, say, a female character who can fight at the same level as the males of Rurouni Kenshin, I’m going to have to make her myself, because the mangaka sure isn’t going to. (And, you know, I’d really like to read that.) If I want a character to come in and smack Naruto upside the head and talk some practical sense to him, s/he will have to come from outside Konoha to have an unencumbered viewpoint, and s/he had better kick ass and take names or Naruto would never listen. And if I want it right now, I’ll have to make her/him up myself. And if I want more adventures of Sailor Moon and Co. I’ll have to invent yet more villains, because she’s vanquished all the pre-existing ones. And they’d better be super-duper villains, to be worth her time. And they almost have to fall in love with her, because that’s practically an article of faith in that story’s universe. None of these things are intrinsically technically flawed, but you’d never know it to listen to the Sue hunters’ complaints.

The other category of complaint that is often valid is that a Mary Sue does not develop. As Omi pointed out, this is what really differentiates a Mary Sue from an anime hero/ine. Well, most of them. But if this is the primary complaint, why is it so rarely articulated? What I see far more often is scorn for the fact that here is a character with lavender hair and phenomenal cosmic powers named Tsukihana Kirei–which characteristics do not, in themselves, really differentiate her much from the canon character standing next to her. It’s as if the Sue’s appearance has become the metonymy of all the more significant character aspects that readers wish to protest–her flat/static nature, her takeover of the story, her use to manipulate the hero/ine’s love life. I find this problematic enough in lit fandoms, but in anime fandoms it becomes absurd.

So, while I’m all for the idea of increasing one’s technical skill, and staying true to the shapes of the characters and story, I think it may have been overlooked that a Sue, by and large, is true to the shape of a big chunk of anime. The vituperation poured on her copper-tressed head seems disproportional and oddly angled. If the critiquers really dislike that particular character shape, why are they watching these shows to begin with? And if they don’t dislike it, why do so many rail against it with such unthinking specificity?

While I’m thinking about the functions of fic, here’s something I’ve been playing with for a while.

I tend to divide fic, loosely and not exclusively, into two categories: stories that are stories, and stories that are not stories. It seems to me that a great deal of angst, drama, flames and wanking arise from people confusing the two.

Stories that are stories (STAS): these are what people mean when they talk about caring for the art and craft of writing. These are the stories presented to convey something about the characters in question, commentaries on yet another story that serves as source text. Generally some effort is made to stay congruent with the source text.

Stories that are not stories (STANS): these make no attempt to interpret the source text, rather they function purely as shibboleths. These are gestures of community, presented to convey the writer’s interest in belonging. Generally, they include only enough reference to the source text to distinguish, say, Naruto from Fushigi Yuugi. At least half the fics posted at ff.net fall into this category.

This is why I never have and never will offer critique of the stories in that archive, or any other story that gives evidence of being STANS. Since no value is placed on congruence with the source text, or with either conventional or experimental storytelling technique, there is no point in even mentioning them. Failures in those areas can’t be considered actual failures, because they were never a concern in the first place. The concern is to present a personalized token of belonging. Hence, any criticism leveled against STANS can only be read as a personal criticism of the writer, and of her wish to belong. This is, as most STANS writers will readily point out, extremely cruel. It is only reasonable that a STANS writer wishes for purely positive ‘feedback’; anything else is a personal rejection. By the same token, the laudatory replies these posts receive have no contact at all with ‘the art and craft of writing’. Rather, they are gestures of welcome, as oblique as the original gesture.

Now, in their own way, STAS also function as gestures of community, but the community in which they participate is one which does place value on the techniques of storytelling, of metaphor, of interpretation, and, of course, of grammar. (Grammar itself seems to be the shibboleth of the STAS community.) So the gesture required for participation must contain good evidence of these things or face exclusion.

This is not, of course, to say that any given story must, or is even likely to, be wholly one or the other. As Hal pointed out, most of us take part in both to some degree.

The loudest problems seem to arise, though, when the two categories are confused. An author writes STAS, but, when she is criticized for some part of her technique, insists that she only writes for the fun of it and the criticizer is cruel to make such a personal attack. Another author writes STANS, gathers the usual gestures of welcome, and then, when criticized by the STAS rules, points to the positive ‘reviews’ as evidence that she does, in fact, have good technique.

This is what makes me wary of offering any technical critique at all, even when requested. “Review” has very different meanings in the STAS and STANS communities. I will venture critique only at the request of an author I know well enough to have some confidence that we are occupying the same communal space, and speaking more or less the same language. Anything else simply invites explosions, particularly considering that many writers don’t seem to be very sure in their own minds just what kind of writing they are attempting, or in what proportions they subscribe to or participate in the STAS and STANS dialogues.

Which rather puts paid to any dream of cleanly separating the communities and letting them commune happily with their own kind. But, hey, where would be the fun in a life without uncertainty? Besides, there are far too many evangelical STAS proselytizers, who insist that any story presented in fandom should be STAS. They’d never leave the STANS writers in peace. And the STANS writers, typically being young and/or inexperienced, would wander into STAS territory and be traumatized, and there we’d all be again with the explosions.

Once again: wank is inevitable.

So, Cathexys posted a link to a nice little free-for-all over the issue of authorial intention. See here to be entertained and, possibly, confused. My own opinion, sufficiently expressed by other people, is that Kita, or, more likely, the people she’s been reading, are confusing authorial intent with explicit canon, but the whole thing made me think.

It seems to me that a whole lot of people are looking at stories (print or video) purely as commercial objects. And, to be sure, the maker/owner of a commercial object should have a great deal of control over it; when s/he doesn’t, that’s called unhappy things like alienation. But a story is not purely a commercial object. I would say it isn’t even primarily a commercial object, though it sometimes functions as one.

Primarily, a story is an act of communication.

Communication has two ends to it–two equally participating ends. If this is not the case for a story, if the author only ever tells the story to herself, then, perhaps, it is not communication but rather psychology. But the common understanding and acting out of a story involves communication.

There is no perfectly transparent medium of communication (and this is where the authorial intent arguments usually start), so both parties in any act of communication have to put in some work. The originator chooses words/images that she feels best express her meaning; the receiver attaches the meanings that seem most congruent with those words/images. In a dialogue, this goes back and forth in turns. A conversation is an ongoing process of negotiation, of approximation, which, if everyone is lucky, will result in a workable degree of understanding. Having a common pool of symbols helps.

A recorded story, one set down on paper or tape or dvd, generally only goes one round of this process. The teller tells and the listeners say what they heard–often to each other since the teller is rarely personally available.

What I think many people, on both ends, forget is that hearing is not a passive process. Hearing is active, as active as telling, and the story takes shape in between, the exclusive property of neither. A story is a collaboration. How else could Shakespeare be regarded as timeless? He’s not timeless, he’s dated as all get-out; when students come into their college libraries asking if there are any copies of Shakespeare in English, they have a point no matter how we laugh about it once they’re gone. But, because teachers of English continue to believe that his stories have worthwhile points to make, they demand that students put in the effort to hear, to construct, to attach. To be the collaborators who work with the author to give the story meaning.

Of course, most of Western culture seems to have the myth of the Artist, the artist as god-touched, the artist as the recipient of sufficient divine, stable Truth that he can convey it without slippage. So when the artist hears, as he does in this day of insta-news, what the audience has heard, and realizes that it isn’t the same thing he tried to say, he gets his knickers in a twist and records commentaries telling the stupid readers what they were supposed to hear. This is conversation of a sort, negotiation over understanding. But I tend to think it’s also cheating.

So, Lewis says that he didn’t intend the Narnia books to be a thinly veiled allegory of the New Testament. Does this matter one jot to the fact that they are? I wouldn’t say so.

Stories have the weight they do because they are metaphors; they employ symbols, hopefully shared ones, to convey more than everyday words do. This demands even more work on the part of the hearers/collaborators than usual. After making that kind of demand, after choosing to use more than usually obscure and ambiguous media for communication, I think it’s a bit much for the authors to get pissy over readers attaching meanings they didn’t have in mind.

And video! Good grief, that has even more collaborators. In addition to the writer, quite possibly several writers, maybe animators, there’s the actors with their interpretation of the characters, and, depending on the density of effects, the techies and their interpretations, and then there’s the audience. This is where communication starts to show its true richness, and its true obscurity–two sides of one coin.

It gets better, though. The hearers get together in groups and compare notes; they negotiate with each other’s meanings; they fill in the holes in the story this way and that way; and then they start to write their own stories illustrating what they heard; and the whole cycle starts again, teller and hearer becoming more and more blurred, meaning becoming more and more promiscuous as it’s approximated and negotiated over and over again to the merry erosion of authority.

I think this is great.

But some hearers seem to think other hearers are getting too uppity, putting on the airs of tellers. And so they appeal to the One True Meaning of Authorial Intent to put a stop to it. Never mind that no one is forcing them to read the parts of the stew that make their eyes bleed, they can’t tolerate the very knowledge that such parts exist. Thus, to twist Bakhtin just a bit, the centripetal and centrifugal impulses of communication balance each other out in an argument that will never be resolved and never end.

Conclusion: wank is an integral part of communication.

And the only timeless author is Aristophanes.