Otter's Rock

GO. READ THIS. RIGHT NOW.

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I've been a member of fandom for over ten years now (and boy, it sure doesn't feel like it's been that long). Over the years, there have been numerous wanks, flame wars, kerfluffles, fails, etc., etc., on a wide variety of subjects, some of which seem to consume the entire online fandom, not just bits and pieces of it. Currently, the issue is warnings. A few months ago, it was race. I usually try to stay fray-adjacent, even when it's an issue I care deeply about. (I really don't like conflict, and fandom is my safe space away from conflict, among other things.) Over the years I've noticed some patterns that I think will be useful to more people than myself.

( First, while people come to fandom for various reasons, they stay because fandom is a safe space for them. )

( Second, every major fail or wank I've ever seen was caused by one basic thing: a failure to recognize when you're stepping on other peoples' issues when those issues are opposing, compounded by a failure of basic courtesy. )

( Let's take the current warnings argument as an example. )

( How to make fandom safe/unsafe )

This entry was originally posted at http://beatrice-otter.dreamwidth.org/139529.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

So, I didn't post anything about/during Racefail '09 because I'm pretty much generic whitebread middle-class American and had nothing to say on the subject that other people weren't saying far more eloquently and didn't want to add to the signal/noise ratio. Also because I'm lazy and don't like conflict.

But you know what? Racism and productive/constructive ways to deal with it and (as much as possible) prevent it are ordinary, everyday situations that should be thought about constantly, not just whenever it happens to blow up. That way, hopefully, we can make things better instead of worse. I still don't have much to say on the subject that others haven't said better, but I do have a rec: Go read the Spock/Uhura Racefail Prevention Post. It's concise, it's positive, and it's got good advice for how to talk and think about issues of race particularly in the fannish realm but also in general.  With links you can follow which lead to lots of other places where racism in life and in fandom are discussed in helpful ways.

For those of you who don't know, in the new Star Trek movie Spock and Uhura (a character of color) have a romantic relationship. This has led to a whole lot of fiction and fan attention for Uhura and to the creation of a community dedicated to the pairing. Within two months of its creation, spock_uhura has had at least one major incident of racefail.  The mods then publicly apologized on behalf of the community to the person who'd gotten attacked, put together a post on how to prevent such things from happening again (and then on how to respond appropriately when they inevitably do), and generally serve as an example of how to be responsible human beings.

I swear.  If the anti-racism training they'd given us in school had been even 1/4 as sane and reasonable and reality-based as the stuff you can learn through fandom ...</user> This entry was originally posted at http://beatrice-otter.dreamwidth.org/134942.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

My absolute main kink, whether fanfic or profic or movies or tv shows, is for solid worldbuilding.  I want to know about culture, government, history, religion, ethnology, psychology--all the soft-science background details.  So, for instance, for the new Star Trek timeline/AR, I have all kinds of ideas about how I think the surviving Vulcans will react.  My impressions of Vulcan culture are taken from all the tv shows and movies, combined with the classic Star Trek books from the 80's/90's (e.g. Spock's World, the Vulcan Academy Murders, Sarek, the Pandora Principle, Dwellers in the Crucible, Strangers from the Sky, etc.  Note that Kurtzman and Orci consider Spock's World to be canon, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.  Here is a summary of Vulcan history interludes from that book.)

( So, here's Vulcan culture as I have interpreted it. )

( How will this affect the rebuilding of Vulcan culture? )

( So, if I were Spock Prime, going off to help rebuild Vulcan society, here's what I would suggest. )
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In 1994, comic book superhero Kyle Rayner (the Green Lantern) came home to find that one of his arch-enemies had killed his girlfriend and stuffed her body in his refrigerator. This caused a public comic book fan recognition of the "women in refrigerators" problem in comic books and (by extension, when you think about it) most literature and pop culture over the centuries.

This happens when bad things happen to women solely to motivate the men around them. Female characters are raped, murdered, mutilated, depowered (in comic books) etc., so that their boyfriends/husbands/brothers/etc. can grieve and seek vengeance. The female characters are only important for their impact on the men around them. They have no agency or weight in the story in their own right. On a fundamental level, they don't matter. A good example of this is the TV show "Supernatural," in which the primary cause of Dean and Sam (the heroes) starting on their adventures is the death of their mother Mary. But the only important thing about Mary for the purpose of the story is that she died, and that only because it affected Dean and Sam. Another good example of this is the movie "The Searchers, starring John Wayne. Ethan (Wayne)'s niece Lucy is abducted by Indians, and he and his nephew Martin spend the whole movie searching for her. The movie is not about her. At the end of the movie we know little more about her than we did at the beginning. The movie is about Ethan and Martin, and their friendship and strife in difficult circumstances. There are other female characters besides Lucy; their job is to die in the raid (so Ethan and Martin can grieve) or write to them while flirting with the men who stayed behind (so Martin can worry about his girl back home). Now, there's nothing wrong in principle with having a character who exists only as motivation for another character. You can't flesh out every character in a work; it's simply not possible, at least not if you're writing anything coherent and reasonably well written. And a lot of great works of art and literature use this model to great effect (including The Searchers, which is arguably the greatest Western of all time and is twelfth on the American Film Institute's list of the hundred greatest movies of all time).

The problem is when the characters who exist purely as motivation are all women and the characters who get motivated are all men.

This is one of those things where if you're looking at it in the abstract, it's real easy to tell when "fridging" is happening. In practice, with an actual story, it may not be so easy to tell the difference between chauvinistic cultural assumptions (even ones so deep you're not aware of them) and good storytelling. Where do you draw the line? At what point does it become objectionable? resolute has an interesting discussion of this you should check out, particularly the writers out there.

I spent much of my free time last semester watching a friend's DVDs of New School Who, and a sampling of her Old School Who (Tom Baker era), while waiting for this season's Doctor Who to start in America. I avoided most spoilers, but not Lizbee's meta post on the difference between the old-school Doctor and Nine/Ten. Basically, it boils down to the fact that the Doctor is deeply emotionally scarrred by the destruction of Gallifrey and his role in it, and doesn't believe that he deserves a second chance--and because he doesn't think he deserves a second chance, can't quite make himself believe that others do, either, making him a much harder character, and more prone to manipulate and use others. Not always, but often enough to be a serious problem. lizbee thinks Donna is good for the Doctor because she's not going to let him get away with that kind of thing, and is far more proactive about that than either Rose or Martha were, and when combined with the fact that he's had a little more time to heal than he has since the first time we saw Nine, he's actually starting to go back to something closer to what he used to be like. Having now seen the first few episodes of this season, I think lizbee's got some good insights here (although her knowledge of Old School Who is far superior to mine, so I can't judge that portion of her argument).

This, then, combines with something else I'd been thinking about as I re-watched the DVDs, namely that awesomeness that is Human Nature/Family of Blood. In Human psychology at least, a little temporary amnesia or denial can actually be a good thing, because it gives the mind time to put distance between a traumatic event and process it subconsciously and heal without having to DEAL WITH IT consciously. Like any defense mechanism, it's good in the short term but can be destructive when taken too far. Let's apply this to the Doctor: he's already trying denial as a defense mechanism (not talking about the fact that HIS ENTIRE WORLD AND ALL ITS PEOPLE ARE GONE unless the world is coming to an end counts, I think--and just watch his face when he's avoiding talking about it). Let's also realize we're dealing with the fact that Time Lords live very long lives, and what would seem like a long time to engage a defense mechanism to us probably feels very short to them.

So here we have the Doctor, as a human, not consciously remembering his past but still dreaming it, which means his subconscious is still processing it. He's happy and content, which he hasn't been since before his people were destroyed, at least. He's living in a stratified, stable society ruled by tradition (as Gallifrey was) that still is about to go through a lot of changes (and he likes that sort of thing), so it's about the perfect environment for balancing homesickness for a world that no longer exists with, you know, the fact that he couldn't stand to actually live there when it did exist. He's got the beginnings of a family, so he wouldn't be alone. He's got a job he enjoys--no one pontificates as much as the Doctor does who doesn't like teaching, at least the idea of it. If he'd used the Chameleon Arch again after dealing with the Family of Blood, he would have had a human-span life with Joan, a quiet life. No great joys and triumphs ... but no great tragedies, either. Just the thing to let him heal a little.

Then all you have to do is have Martha look up his obituary in the papers and use the Tardis to go back in time to the day before. She gives him the pocket watch and he's the Doctor again, except one who's had a long time to lay quietly and rest. Run the obituary the next day, and off we go again. (The fact that I loved Joan and wanted to see more of her has nothing to do with this idea, nothing, I tell you. Or that I would love to see the Doctor try and extricate himself after several decades of a human life, and see him deal with those kids we saw in his vision, whether or not they were fully human or regenerated into Time Lords eventually.) I think that if HN/FoB had happened after the Master arc, the Doctor might have chosen something like this, or at least been more likely to.

I doubt I'll ever write this idea, but it's a fun one to contemplate. I have this scene where he's convinced some of his family to take a trip in the Tardis with him to the early 21st Century to drop Martha off (in my AU timeline for this, HN happens right after Last of the Time Lords, and she didn't say she wanted out until after HN/FoB). Anyway, so they're in London and he's buying cell phones so his human family can call him if they need him, and Jack Harkness comes up behind him and swings him into a kiss by way of a hello. And the Doctor's family, coming from the mid-20th century (maybe ca. 1950/1960, if we take the vision as a clue to when human!Doctor dies?) is SHOCKED, and the Doctor doesn't get why, and then he says something about how he just doesn't understand humans--they don't care that he spent forty years married to someone who wasn't even a member of his own species, but snogging someone of the same gender throws them?!? This then requires him to introduce Jack to his family, which shocks Jack (Jack is so hard to shock that it amuses me to think up things that actually would).