The New Garage Chronicles

Like, I do overwhelmingly think that in fandom the way to attract people to your ships and characters is honey, not vinegar. I generally dislike leading conversations by pointing out that people are generally biased towards characters like Saga because of the double whammy of being the only black woman in a cast of mostly white men, and I think any kind of mud-slinging about not being into het or "fandom thinks het is icky!" is entirely unnecessary and distracts from the point about how people really do have an empathy gap towards black characters.

...however. For the purposes of having a rich, diverse fandom, sometimes throwing my lot in with someone who thinks differently than I do on both of those points is acceptable to me. Because as much as I disagree with "the problem is that people think het is icky and would rather Objectify Those Gays" and think it's actively poor analysis, the core problem of "people will ignore the compelling dynamic black lady leads have with their white supporting cast" is very important to point out and address.

I'm not gonna linger on a single bad phrasing, or a single mischaracterisation of the source of a problem if I can go "Yeah that's a problem -- and I'm gonna do my part to solve it, now when it's been brought to my attention". Sometimes, the honey is agreeing with some poorly worded points because you think the core message is worth addressing. The way to get people to be more considered with the way they talk is to take seriously what they're trying to communicate. It's much easier to communicate someone's mistakes to them if they take you seriously in the first place.

I can recognise the pain of rejection. Snide nitpicking of the way they express that pain isn't going to make anyone believe I'm taking it seriously.

One of the wildest, stupidest things I see floating around in the modern moral panic over novels is this idea that people are allowed to write about "bad and triggering" topics if they do it well, and that a well-written story about heavy topics would be by default less likely to trigger someone.

When oh boy there's a substantial amount of things I thought I was just squicked or put off by that have turned out to be outright triggers once I read them in a story that was well-written. There's this one writer in my fandom who is a fucking genius and traffics in many of the characters I like, and I've never seen someone who was so good at executing on things in a way that consistently makes me contemplate my mortality, entirely because they're a godtier talent at getting horny about the topic. They're the one writer where I religiously read the content warnings and I still regularly discover new unpleasant things about myself!

(Also to fend off any nbh's abt this: hi Nev! :D you can imagine this is the kind of thing that is hard to put in a comment without sounding backhanded. Rest assured it's a "'worth it' said the vampire about garlic bread" kind of deal, and I will gratefully continue existing in your audience)

*GNAWS AT TABLE* so I try not to make these rambles too powered by salt but considering Impactor is very near my favourite character in the franchise and as a result I read a lot of badfic featuring him out of sheer desperation for something, I'm seriously devastated by the way I've never seen it explored just what a harrowing and accurate description of moral injury and reflexive self-loathing he is.

Like, it's wild to me that we have it in the text, actually on page, that Impactor outright thinks he's a monster. We see it on page! It is written with plain words! He's stuck thinking like "can't survive if the other guy doesn't die", "your life is bought with the blood you spill, and you want to keep living so you best learn to like killing" to the point where he doesn't even want to live anymore and yet he can't stop, he's stuck, there's no safety for him to retreat back to because nobody taught him to value himself in any other way except in balance against someone else.

Like we know. Exactly what Impactor considers horrible, what he considers ugly and unseemly and corrupt. And it's all stuff that makes sense. It's all stuff the most of us probably find a little bit horrifying. We know that his perception of the world is so utterly bleak that there is no way but down, the only trajectory he sees for himself is to slip further and further from that surface because this is just his life now, this is what he is now, this may be what he always was, so isolated in his self-loathing that he can barely see the surface of where the horrible things end, and sure as hell doesn't think he can reach it. He's been cut off from his access to the sublime, to the fortifying, to the beautiful and wonderful and safe, this is all he has left, this is just what he is now.

I think the massive overriding misreading is assuming Impactor has any regard for himself. He may have the ability to act confident and move through the world with intellectual assurance over his own skill, and it's easy to take that as a sign that he has some kind of a core, undivided wholeness of personhood that lets him keep acting like he knows what he's doing. But I don't think that's it at all. His sense of self has been so completely fractured and damaged by the horrors he's committed and been isolated with that they've attached themselves to the space where his sense of self would otherwise be. Again, I'm not even extrapolating -- this just is the text of "Escape".

And then there's the negative influence of Guzzle, another person who thinks the way to deal with your trauma is by committing massive violence on it who has no idea this should maybe be something to discuss with people -- like, we see the way his abandon and reveling in having power and returning the violence drags Impactor down, too, because it's familiar, it makes sense, and then Impactor locks him in a box and goes "I can't fucking do this anymore". It's literally the most unsubtle death wish, it's a textbook flight arrest response, he doesn't want to keep doing the thing he's doing but he doesn't know what else there is, he sees no way out other than down.

And IDK I don't want to cast blame, honestly as a recovering abusive asshole myself, the terrible things he does to other people out of a sense of "this is how it has to be, don't be naive, don't be stupid", the loop of self-justification and grasping for value in his identity as an anonymous source of violence and ruiner of lives is a big part of why I love him so much, and his victims are really visible in the text, their mess deserves exploration and their pain deserves narrative validation, if only for completeness' sake

but like goddamn I just feel for this trash mech so much. He was left locked up with only his own bad thoughts for company, forced in a situation where becoming a worse person was the only way to escape further pain to the point where he's just completely cut off from his access to the sublime, to the fortifying, to the beautiful and wonderful and safe. Like where is there to go when the only things you know what to do are all fucked up? What do you do when all you've been "taught" is that living means killing, but you're getting extremely sick of the killing, when you're tired of your whole life being stained in blood and gore and the traces of the grotesquerie that is living with the knowledge that having power over other people is the ultimate act of survival when you never wanted that?

Fun fact I recently extended an invitation to someone who's like lowkey fandom famous and whose work I deeply enjoy to come hang out in my Robot Server(tm), someone I have no personal relationship with, and having been emboldened by that, I kinda wanna reach out to other people in the fandom I'm aware of! Who I think are cool!

But it's become so normal for antis in the TF fandom to have gone underground and purged all mention of having participated in violent harassment campaigns in the past three years that I don't feel comfortable inviting someone off just the vibe I have of them, and I can't seem to get the server to take off word-of-mouth since almost nobody in the fandom is up for forming new social bonds either.

IDK. I feel more bold about wanting to reach people who have kind of lost the joy of the thing and come hang out with us! Because yeah, been there! That's why I started it! And I really resent being afraid of my fellow fan and not wanting to put the people who have been harassed into danger in case my own social radar turns out to be complete shit.

EDIT: I suddenly started wondering if the lack of spread by word of mouth also has to do with not just me being like this with strangers, but also people who are on this server being like this with their strangers? Like are we all just in an ouroboros of not trusting one another b/c it's so much safer to NOT have a stance on this, and those who have hard stances have often been harassed enough to be suspicious of a stranger being like "hey you're cool and I heard you'd gotten shit for stuff, would you like to come on our Anti Giving Shit To People For Stuff That Doesn't Matter" server?

Every story is a biography.

Every manifesto is a confessional.

Ended up down a rabit hole of trying to see if a callout post I saw had any merit and it ended up with me reading a bunch of extremely informative articles about Karelian rights and how "suomalaistaminen" was also enacted against them as a way to pave over the fact that we just decided to Do Some Colonialism in Karelia, same as in Lapland.

Like, I never felt much of a connection to a Finnish identity, y'know? Growing up with most of my positive relationships being in English (with my mom's encouragement) and generally just being really ill-suited to society until I was about twenty honestly did more to hasten my general alienation from society than work ever did, and has so far, and a lot of the bonding with strangers I've done has been with other people alienated from Finnish society, which turns out to be a lot of immigrants and minorities. Honestly, to this day I had a harder time settling in with my work b/c of the anti-Romani and anti-Somali racism.

But that doesn't really change the fact that my disconnect to my culture as a white Finn is just not the same. Finnish nationalism being a comforting blanket that I could wrap myself in, a sense of Finnish cultural heritage in the absence of meaningful community, is honestly just as much of a fabrication as other nationalist identities, and is just as virulent about self-maintaining as other nationalist identities. I still find the "sob-story" (I'm allowed to say that, just like I'm allowed to say I bullied people into accommodating me) about reclaiming Finnish identity in the face of Russification, after pushing for Finnish language and culture to be treated at least as equal to Swedish language that had been imported here over the puddle relatable in the way you do when you've been excluded and your contributions devalued and you just wanna see yourself accepted as you are.

But, yeah, I guess this just means that Finnish nationalism is an edifice I'm just gonna have to let go of if I want to address the mental dissonance. I've been drifting away from it anyway, but mostly out of distaste of how "Finnishness" just gets weaponised over and over against Finns that aren't sufficiently white, and how non-Finns get treated in this country despite the fact that out society purports to hold egalitarian values in high regard. I've never known how to address the losing sense of someone trying to pit me against someone.

I guess I just had to be disillusioned properly, like, I've always thought a lot of anarcho-syndicalists and anti-statists have good and practical ideas, I've just been at a loss on how you could ever coordinate anything without creating an elective identity to create a sense of working together, just for the sake of coordination. And frankly, I don't think I can do things out of a global sense of interconnectivity, because in the global sense everything is predicated on someone's arm getting twisted. I am actively educating myself to go work a job that wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the pillaging of Africa and the continued need for conflict minerals. But a national identity isn't going to give me the sense of "belonging" and "being useful" that I want -- it's only gonna be used to pit me against someone else saying "I don't want that".

So Eric Sophia (from Curio) had a cameo on Maggie Mae Fish' new video on Zack Snyder's treatment of gender in his films and mostly I agreed that it's sort of fascinating how Snyder keeps coming back to a gender trinary where the third leg is this... aberrant, queer, indistinct mass, and what could be read into that.

But like, oh wow they actually used Owls of Ga'Hoole to talk about Zack Snyder "doing a hecking gender" and... honest to god this movie has always had one of my favourite approaches to female character design? There's a lot of indicental female speaking roles, Gylfie is great, the female owl's designs are subtle and pleasing and they are not animated any different... The criticism about the two main girl owls both being smaller than any of the main male owls is, I guess, a fair criticism, but I don't see how they have any less narrative agency than anyone who isn't Soren, so I can't relate to that point either....

It's just very strange to me, because as far as Gender Binaries In Kids' Films Goes, Owls of Ga'Hoole is one of my favourite ways of doing it, and it being used as a negative kinda just gave me whiplash. Like, is the point that when it comes to owls, females tend to be bigger than males, and therefore the lack of ground-breaking as far as male speaking roles is uniquely interesting because it fits a pattern with Zack Snyder?

(Like okay there's also the whole video Curio had about how thinking there's a guy named Dick Suckle who ruined the DC movies is hooey but. Having someone explicitly use the thing you use as a positive example as a negative one is still a trip.)

Spoilers for Death Stranding

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It might be nothing, but being aspec myself, that was quite "doubt.jpg"

Reposting some comment I made in the notest of this post about how construing all shipping is amatonormative is not very good because I feel like I'm onto something.

To wit: As things are, the word “shipping” is commonly used to mean (at least) three different things:

1. Constructing a narrative (often but not always an aspirational one) and vicariously experiencing through it what a relationship like that can be like
2. Wanting to see the characters that appeal to you have sex/receive affection/experience emotional catharsis for your gratification
3. The study and analysis of the text of a relationship, just like you’d explore the text of someone’s characterisation or the text of the plot of a story

And to be clear, when people say they “ship” something, it can be any combination of the above. (Arguably the concept of an OTP exists as shorthand for a ship where the speaker experiences it as sitting right in the middle of that triangle.)

This is what leads to the problem of critical analysis becoming impossible in a framework like this. Essentially, both cases 1 and 2 involve some kind of a value judgement – whether something works within the narrative or whether something appeals to the creator – and as such conforming to preference and principle is kind of the entire point, but analysis done in a way that is meant to conform to a preference or a principle… is poorly argued at best, and openly dishonest at worst.

If you point out erotic tension in the text between two characters, that is not actually the same as imagining or enjoying the idea of those characters having sex. If you point out emotional tension from things like miscommunication and how that colours a relationship, that is just pointing out an element of the text, and doesn’t mean the fic you wanna write will deal with that issue. But over and over, simply trying to critically examine the text is labeled as “shipping”, which… well, it does kind of make sense, because we live in a culture that considers “critique” something objective and removed and aimed to “improve” the “product” instead of a form of creative self-expression, but a lot of times it ascribes motivations to the person doing the analysis that they might not have.

As for amatonormativity... I can sort of see where people are coming with it, really? The narrative structures we’ve grown up with insist on amatonormative “love”, no analysis of text is free of cultural baggage, and frankly for a lot of alloromantic people, romance is gratifying. That being said, the criticism that shipping itself is amatonormative because it’s predicated on “needing” to put characters in monogamous pairs only applies to the first of my personal three cases, and even only then if it’s treated as an aspirational fantasy.

At every instance, the shipping can be driven by amatonormative assumptions, but to argue that therefore it inarguably is is some mind-reading bullshit my aro that obsessively analyses the interactions between everything isn’t willing to co-sign.