like clockwork.

[amonitrate]

So, a SPN Big Bang author, gatorgrrrl, thought it would be "the best idea ever" to write a RPS story that takes place in present-day Haiti, in the aftermath of the earthquake. From the summary and the excerpts I've read, it fits into a long history of such fiction, especially in film, as gabby_silang points out.

[ETA 6/16/10: The author has locked her story and

Comments

[vikki]

I agree that it should be talked about; I hugely agree. Last night, before giving the wank a serious read-through, I thought that I would love to write a fic set in India, using SPN as a vehicle for talking about the culture, native rights and migrants and the awesome of Kali and the people - the ADP hydropower fiasco, for instance - but wow, I thought after really digging into it - I. No. Not me. Someone who lives there should do it. I'm far too divorced from the subject.

[amonitrate]

Yeah. I'm grateful for conversations like this one because not so long ago I wouldn't have grasped what was problematic with a fic such as this without someone outright explaining it to me. I know I've read and liked uncritically fics that would fall into this same ... genre, for lack of a better term, in the past.

I went back and forth about saying anything and whether it was appropriate for me to do so, and I'm not sure whether it is, but there were a couple points I hadn't seen when reading around yesterday and today so I made the post.

I'm not sure it's always inappropriate to use real settings/situations for fic, but I do think as a writer you have to be very, very sure that you're capable of giving it the care and sensitivity it deserves. And identifying, as you did, that maybe you're too distanced from it to do so is probably a good thing to be aware of. As well as identifying whose story you're choosing to tell in that setting, and why.

[vikki]

I was kind of =/ at the summary, but the moment I saw excerpts I just could barely look at them, which is, for me, coming a long long way myself. I still have to be somewhat primed, my phasers set to stun, before I'll pick up on the full extent of a fail!fic like this.

I didn't talk about it on my journal. This isn't because I feel like I have no right to and more because I couldn't look at it, and it's my policy that I must understand both sides of a wank situation before I post about it. Just because I am white and American doesn't mean I can't go, 'wow, I think this is just fail', though; however, I can see why it might come across as the white man championing the cause of Justice for the Poor Brown People. It's ... difficult subject material, and the best of intentions can lead you so far down the wrong roads. I honestly do believe that the author of this BB fell into this exact trap

[amonitrate]

I do understand how the author could think the premise was a good idea (though the fact that it is a very current event effecting living people complicates that); I have less sympathy for how she executed it, but I get that part too. Many of us grew up with this kind of thing in the movie theatres and in the children's books we read and on television, and if you're like me and grew up in an area that was probably at least 90% white, these kinds of discussions just don't happen around you. The contrary: stories like the one in this fic are held up as heroic, as classics, as something to aspire to even.

So yeah, I get it.

[amazonziti]

Thanks for turning up the volume! (I love overworked metaphors.) I wanted to let you know I've linked to your post.

[amonitrate]

thanks! and I admire you for collating information, that can be a big undertaking.

[little_tristan]

It's really hard to pull this all together and understand it just from the comments, although I'm getting the idea. It's hard not to. (Showing his teeth? Really?) But when I try to follow the links to the fic, it says it's protected and I'm not authorized. If it had been removed, I'd say that was a good thing. Like the author had gotten the point. But this suggests that it's still there, just not open to everyone. Is there a way in? Because given the level of outrage, and my own feelings on the subject of race, I really want to see this, in context, for myself.

[amonitrate]

Thank you for alerting me, the story has been placed under lock, and her new apology is here.

[little_tristan]

That's quite an apology. Although, reading through her earlier entries, I saw something else that made me want to step back and ask a lot of questions. Sadly, that entry is comment locked, so I can't. But she said that writing for ourselves and not for the reader is the #1 rule of things NOT to do. That we should, in fact, write for the readers. And that's the exact opposite of what I've always been told. I mean, yes, we need to look at our work critically and try to judge if it's blatantly offensive to large numbers of people (who aren't insane, that is; for instance, I have no problem with offending homophobes), but if writers are obsessed with pleasing any number of unknown potential readers, nothing would ever get written at all.

I wonder if that's her way of saying she's out of the game.

[amonitrate]

You could always PM her, I suppose.

I'm not entirely sure how that difference interacts with the way that story failed? I rather think it would have failed in the same way whether she was writing for herself or writing for her imagined readers.

Holy crap

[deiseach]

See, this is why I don't like RPF/RPS (and sorry those whose squee I just trashed, but that's the way it goes).

I just recently went ballistic over someone making a damn stupid reference to a piece of 7th century Christianity in the British Isles history in an internal point-scoring denominational argument, so I can't begin to imagine what I'd do if somebody decided to write a story about, oh, two Americans turning up in Belfast or Derry for a bit of making-nice-with-the-natives during the Troubles (and I'm not even from the North of Ireland, just a Southerner).

Oh, wait, I can. Especially in light of the release (finally!) of the Saville Enquiry into Bloody Sunday.

Well, this just goes to reinforce what I've always said: Humans - we're stupid.

Re: Holy crap

[amonitrate]

I don't think this is limited to just RPF/RPS. People write AU's all the time, fictional people AU's, and this could have just as easily been "Sam and Dean go to Haiti" and written in a very similar way.

And while I think it's easier to do with AU's due to a kind of distancing that can happen, it's not limited to AU's either.

Re: Holy crap

[deiseach]

It was probably unfair of me to single out RPF, as you say, it would have been no better to have Sam and Dean heading to Haiti and exhibiting the same attitudes.

But the wider point, I suppose, is using real people, real places, real situations as fiction fodder. I've never been comfortable with mixing real and fictitious elements, even though I enjoy historical fiction - argh, that means I contradict myself.

What I'm getting at is that I never liked the "Sherlock Holmes meets Teddy Roosevelt" (a real novel) style of story because my instinct has been that when you're treating real people and fictional characters as equivalents, you're going to end up treating the real history as fictional and putting your own spin on it.

Or, as here, just using it as exotic window-dressing for your epic tale of love and growing as a person before heading the feck home to your comfortable life.

Re: Holy crap

[amonitrate]

I guess that is possibly true, but I think the most important issue here is the fact that the author chose to appropriate a current event, that is still effecting living people as we discuss it, and that she appropriated the story of people of color to use as the backdrop for a love/redemption story for two white dudes. So I don't see it the same thing as "Sherlock Holmes Meets Teddy Roosevelt" at all. For one, that story isn't going to hurt anyone but picky historians. And it's about two privileged white dudes interacting, so there isn't the power differential.