I think this is really very smart and well thought-out; you hit on so many relevant things, and had me nodding my head "yes! that!" in many places. First: comics. I love the medium, I love so many of the characters, but it is not a genre that often treats its women very well. That is indisputable :( I also think your mention of retconning is really interesting. Grieving over the loss of (male) characters is sometimes just an exercise in waiting for retcon, which I'm a little bit grateful for and a little bit sad about. Just - we get to keep the characters, and they get to keep their power, and the dead women who have very little agency at all, but who motivate them. I don't know. I don't think I'm being very coherent!
About fan fic more specifically, I guess I've learned to try to avoid any deathfic that's also first-time 'ship fic, but it can be difficult without warnings or labels. And that in itself is problematic and painful, because the author isn't not warning because they want to preserve the ~impact of the death~ or something (the point is that there isn't a visible impact at all); rather, they're not warning because, presumably, it doesn't matter to them at all.
(I thought Scratch Your Name dealt with the deaths very respectfully, for what it's worth.)
Times like this - "like this" meaning when fandom undergoes a sort of internal upheaval and self-examines en masse w/r/t expressions of privilege and internalized prejudice - generally end up frustrating and depressing me enormously. I feel that "we" (oh dear, I'm referring to fandom collectively, someone lock me up, stat) talk up a storm about genuinely important issues, and then simply return to status quo, as if we had done our penance or something. I'm guilty of this myself, and I think I've only recently begun to actually *think* about my privilege, my choices, my actions, instead of just reading along and thinking that I'm too insignificant to matter at all in the grand scheme. It makes fandom less comfortable a place for me, but I'm beginning to think that escapism as I've previously defined it is a) not possible and b) not all that it's cracked up to be.
Anyway, I didn't mean to get my issues all over your journal!, but I'm grateful for this post, and for your general existence. You always push me to be more kind and more thoughtful, in both senses of the word. <3
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I think this is really very smart and well thought-out; you hit on so many relevant things, and had me nodding my head "yes! that!" in many places. First: comics. I love the medium, I love so many of the characters, but it is not a genre that often treats its women very well. That is indisputable :( I also think your mention of retconning is really interesting. Grieving over the loss of (male) characters is sometimes just an exercise in waiting for retcon, which I'm a little bit grateful for and a little bit sad about. Just - we get to keep the characters, and they get to keep their power, and the dead women who have very little agency at all, but who motivate them. I don't know. I don't think I'm being very coherent!
About fan fic more specifically, I guess I've learned to try to avoid any deathfic that's also first-time 'ship fic, but it can be difficult without warnings or labels. And that in itself is problematic and painful, because the author isn't not warning because they want to preserve the ~impact of the death~ or something (the point is that there isn't a visible impact at all); rather, they're not warning because, presumably, it doesn't matter to them at all.
(I thought Scratch Your Name dealt with the deaths very respectfully, for what it's worth.)
Times like this - "like this" meaning when fandom undergoes a sort of internal upheaval and self-examines en masse w/r/t expressions of privilege and internalized prejudice - generally end up frustrating and depressing me enormously. I feel that "we" (oh dear, I'm referring to fandom collectively, someone lock me up, stat) talk up a storm about genuinely important issues, and then simply return to status quo, as if we had done our penance or something. I'm guilty of this myself, and I think I've only recently begun to actually *think* about my privilege, my choices, my actions, instead of just reading along and thinking that I'm too insignificant to matter at all in the grand scheme. It makes fandom less comfortable a place for me, but I'm beginning to think that escapism as I've previously defined it is a) not possible and b) not all that it's cracked up to be.
Anyway, I didn't mean to get my issues all over your journal!, but I'm grateful for this post, and for your general existence. You always push me to be more kind and more thoughtful, in both senses of the word. <3