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I know I'm going to regret this. I regretted it the last time. But somehow, I just can't help myself.
sf_drama: This one's just ugly
...Well. I am impressed, if that's quite the right word. That there is one specTACular clusterfuck.
Weird thing is, for the most part? That particular scene didn't strike me as all that gratuitous or pointless. (And I didn't even notice the timing issue. Bad gay! Bad, bad gay!) True, in large part because I've been sitting here reading the Bat section of DC for the past several years and have never seen those characters. Not even once. Granted, I pretty much ignored Birds of Prey, and then it got cancelled for a while, and they don't seem to have been used anywhere else. When a very very little used character, gay or straight, apparently gets killed off in service of the story? Not that big a deal to me. (I know, I know. Bad gay! Two offenses in one paragraph! Y'all are going to take away my union card again. Eh, it's been removed and suspended so many times for not toeing the right line, I'm more or less used to it.)
The other thing being, of course, when the author herself pops up and says, "I don't want to spoil the story, but wait until the next issue because this isn't what it seems to be", I'm usually minded to wait until the next issue before unleashing the hounds of hell. (Or The Hounds of the Interwebs, as the case may be, frothing at the keyboard wherever they go. Makes for messy hands. But I digress.). And I certainly do think that Simone has certainly earned at least enough trust to wait a month to see what happens. I mean, seriously, people: you'd think the person who first formally articulated the concept of "fridging" might manage to, you know, avoid doing that.
That said, I have to admit: if I were doing creative work in an area with a lot of passionate intense fans, I think I would do the minimum necessary to establish an internet presence, primarily to keep squatters from claiming that they were me and making my life more difficult. I would tell people that if they wanted to contact me, they could send me a letter on paper to my agent or a post office box somewhere but that unsolicited email would be deleted unread, and then I would never ever EVER look up my reviews or interact with people on the nets. (I would also probably "forget" to pick up the mail. But then, I do that anyway.) I had my fill of that useless drama with the archive, thank you VERY much. And I found out that when, by accident, I forgot to turn the mailing lists back on, actually running the archive became a much more enjoyable task, because I wasn't aware of the people trying to pick fights with me. Ignorance actually can be bliss! And more importantly, useful bliss, and whoda thunk you could have such a thing?
I do get the desire to engage with people, to make them understand. To fight back when people are accusing you of something you find abhorrent. To not have them hate you and all that they think you stand for, however untrue it may be. But at some level, you really do have to detach and say, "Yep, that's your opinion. Bye now!" Because trying to defend yourself will only make you look defensive and angry -- who wouldn't feel angry at being accused like that? -- and nobody comes off well then.
That said: The Value of Rethinking. A quote, since she said at the start (back before this mess started) that she might delete the account if it proved too difficult or if she didn't really have anything to say:
It's worth reading the entire piece. And she's far kinder than I would have been about not writing people off. But then, I would probably have taken one look at the thread, gotten pissed off, written a long angry rebuttal to get it out of my system ... and then deleted it and walked away from the thread. (Yes, there would have been much silent fuming. I'm only human, after all. And perhaps there would have been a bit of outgassing to some friends. At length. Repeatedly. But that's all.)
(I will also note, having gone backwards through Ms. Simone's Tumblr, that what she says in this post just might be ... interestingly revelatory. After all, if what seems to have happened actually did happen, then this wouldn't be possible, would it? And note that it was posted after the clusterfuck began. Though I suppose it could be a "this takes place umpteen years in the past" kind of thing. Frankly, I'm surprised that people didn't have a cow about what Creote says about women in that frame. Again, I mean; I'm sure there must have been fallout when it was first published.)
To be honest, the one thing that did bother me about BoP #2 is the idea that Babs would have gotten complacent and let her hardware and software -- and more importantly, their defenses -- fall off the cutting edge. I get that it's necessary for the story to work; I simply don't buy that she would ever have let that happen, and certainly not at this point in her life, so to speak. To be sure, it's somewhat consistent with what's happening over in Batgirl, as well, although there she simply disconnected and isolated her systems before Calculator could infect them. But still, after Final Crisis, after dealing with the Calculator the first time, and now she's training Stephanie to be a more effective Batgirl AND serving as the coordinating and intelligence center of the Bat network again, after getting the Web's systems and defenses upgraded (and installing a backdoor into them, of course) -- after doing all that, she lets her own hardware and software become vulnerable? Really having a hard time with that one.
But with Creote and Savant? Honestly, not so much. At least, not yet.
sf_drama: This one's just ugly
...Well. I am impressed, if that's quite the right word. That there is one specTACular clusterfuck.
Weird thing is, for the most part? That particular scene didn't strike me as all that gratuitous or pointless. (And I didn't even notice the timing issue. Bad gay! Bad, bad gay!) True, in large part because I've been sitting here reading the Bat section of DC for the past several years and have never seen those characters. Not even once. Granted, I pretty much ignored Birds of Prey, and then it got cancelled for a while, and they don't seem to have been used anywhere else. When a very very little used character, gay or straight, apparently gets killed off in service of the story? Not that big a deal to me. (I know, I know. Bad gay! Two offenses in one paragraph! Y'all are going to take away my union card again. Eh, it's been removed and suspended so many times for not toeing the right line, I'm more or less used to it.)
The other thing being, of course, when the author herself pops up and says, "I don't want to spoil the story, but wait until the next issue because this isn't what it seems to be", I'm usually minded to wait until the next issue before unleashing the hounds of hell. (Or The Hounds of the Interwebs, as the case may be, frothing at the keyboard wherever they go. Makes for messy hands. But I digress.). And I certainly do think that Simone has certainly earned at least enough trust to wait a month to see what happens. I mean, seriously, people: you'd think the person who first formally articulated the concept of "fridging" might manage to, you know, avoid doing that.
That said, I have to admit: if I were doing creative work in an area with a lot of passionate intense fans, I think I would do the minimum necessary to establish an internet presence, primarily to keep squatters from claiming that they were me and making my life more difficult. I would tell people that if they wanted to contact me, they could send me a letter on paper to my agent or a post office box somewhere but that unsolicited email would be deleted unread, and then I would never ever EVER look up my reviews or interact with people on the nets. (I would also probably "forget" to pick up the mail. But then, I do that anyway.) I had my fill of that useless drama with the archive, thank you VERY much. And I found out that when, by accident, I forgot to turn the mailing lists back on, actually running the archive became a much more enjoyable task, because I wasn't aware of the people trying to pick fights with me. Ignorance actually can be bliss! And more importantly, useful bliss, and whoda thunk you could have such a thing?
I do get the desire to engage with people, to make them understand. To fight back when people are accusing you of something you find abhorrent. To not have them hate you and all that they think you stand for, however untrue it may be. But at some level, you really do have to detach and say, "Yep, that's your opinion. Bye now!" Because trying to defend yourself will only make you look defensive and angry -- who wouldn't feel angry at being accused like that? -- and nobody comes off well then.
That said: The Value of Rethinking. A quote, since she said at the start (back before this mess started) that she might delete the account if it proved too difficult or if she didn't really have anything to say:
[...] This past week, I had a book out, Birds of Prey #2, which had a scene in it with the apparent death of two characters, one of whom is gay. Both are characters I created. Both deaths occur off-panel, one appears to be a death-by-beating, while the gay character’s death is self-inflicted. These characters were created by myself at the beginning of my run on Birds of Prey as ostensible villains. They became surprisingly popular with the readership, and made an apparent reformation (with some speedbumps along the way). I believe I’m the only writer to ever use either character, although I’m not positive on that last bit. Some readers were quite understandably upset at this turn of events.
In particular, many of the readers at Scans_Daily (a site that posts brief excerpts of comics and has a primarily lgbt-friendly group of posters) expressed their disappointment and unhappiness in no uncertain terms. Their contention is that mainstream comics has not treated lgbt characters with respect, and that such characters are often targeted for particularly brutal or meaningless deaths, and that lgbt readers are not represented well in comics in the first place. A recent spate of such killings and gory ends for gay characters and non-white characters makes each new example even more offensive, upsetting, and insulting. And to them, my BoP scene added an additional heterosexist trope, that of the gay man committing suicide due to the death of his straight male object of love. Above whatever affection some readers felt for the character, there is a feeling that in context, it represents a paradigm in comics that is downright hostile to lgbt and lgbt-friendly characters and readers....
[...] In retrospect, looking back at the thread, I don’t think ANYBODY was listening, myself included. And people made the case that me posting at length wasn’t helping and I see their point (too late, as usual, but I do see it). At the time, people were upset past the point of politeness, I would say.
But the useful thing about internet kerfuffles is that you can take a day, rethink them, and go back and see if you missed something, if you could have listened more or spoken more lucidly. In my case, yeah, absolutely I could have.
But I don’t like to write people off just because we had a disagreement....
It's worth reading the entire piece. And she's far kinder than I would have been about not writing people off. But then, I would probably have taken one look at the thread, gotten pissed off, written a long angry rebuttal to get it out of my system ... and then deleted it and walked away from the thread. (Yes, there would have been much silent fuming. I'm only human, after all. And perhaps there would have been a bit of outgassing to some friends. At length. Repeatedly. But that's all.)
(I will also note, having gone backwards through Ms. Simone's Tumblr, that what she says in this post just might be ... interestingly revelatory. After all, if what seems to have happened actually did happen, then this wouldn't be possible, would it? And note that it was posted after the clusterfuck began. Though I suppose it could be a "this takes place umpteen years in the past" kind of thing. Frankly, I'm surprised that people didn't have a cow about what Creote says about women in that frame. Again, I mean; I'm sure there must have been fallout when it was first published.)
To be honest, the one thing that did bother me about BoP #2 is the idea that Babs would have gotten complacent and let her hardware and software -- and more importantly, their defenses -- fall off the cutting edge. I get that it's necessary for the story to work; I simply don't buy that she would ever have let that happen, and certainly not at this point in her life, so to speak. To be sure, it's somewhat consistent with what's happening over in Batgirl, as well, although there she simply disconnected and isolated her systems before Calculator could infect them. But still, after Final Crisis, after dealing with the Calculator the first time, and now she's training Stephanie to be a more effective Batgirl AND serving as the coordinating and intelligence center of the Bat network again, after getting the Web's systems and defenses upgraded (and installing a backdoor into them, of course) -- after doing all that, she lets her own hardware and software become vulnerable? Really having a hard time with that one.
But with Creote and Savant? Honestly, not so much. At least, not yet.
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