here's the story, morning glory.
I'm gonna go ahead and leave this un-flocked. Um, a Big Bang J2 featuring the Haitian Earthquake as a setting was released. I'm not gonna link it directly, but you can read some excerpts here.
I was in Haiti for a week. Lord knows it doesn't make me an expert and it doesn't mean I saw everything and it certainly doesn't mean I understand the enormity of the situation. I was a white girl, an outsider, doing short term relief work. That's it.
I found the premise of the fic offensive. I think it's different from a historical AU. I think it's different from a quake or a natural disaster that happened somewhere else, sometime else. This is a disaster that began in January and is ongoing. And it's not something that I think is appropriate for the backdrop of a story about two white dudes from America falling in love.
I should also add that many others have commented on race!fail in the story. I'm mainly focused on context!fail.
I'm going to approach this as respectfully as I can.
I find this fic extremely offensive. In March I spent a week in Haiti doing relief work, up north and also in Port au Prince. (Not that this makes me an expert by any stretch, but I did put eyes on the city and I saw things that have radically re-shaped my opinions about the developing world.)
This is not any setting that you have chosen. This is not a WWII AU or a fic about doctors trying to eliminate polio in the 1950's or even the Good Friday Quake. The Haitian earthquake just happened. It JUST happened. There are still bodies in the rubble, limbs trimmed off so they don't dangle out in front of pedestrian traffic. They're never going to find all the bodies. And the ones they did find? They're in a mass grave outside the city that you can smell when you drive past it.
[from the A/N]I have taken a few liberties with some of the facts in order to make them fit into the story the way I needed. For example, Haiti's daytime temperatures in February/March, when the majority of this fic takes place, tend to be in the 70s-80s F; I made it seem much hotter. The country's rainy season doesn't really begin until early April; I pushed it up a few weeks. And the Port-au-Prince General Hospital was severely damaged in the earthquake and since then, its emergency room has been housed in a tent. In the fic, the building is fairly undamaged and even has electricity.
And this, in all honesty, is what I find most repellent. These are not dry facts that you can take liberties with. These are death and life circumstances for living people. The building was damaged. There was not electricity. And people died because of that. Pretending otherwise is malicious fantasy.
But I think there is another aspect, at least there is for me. While many people died in the original quake, a work of nature, large numbers here are dying slowly and painfully from their injuries and from lack of medical care. Sufficient medical infrastucture didn't exist here to begin, not for the average, poor Haitian. And after the Jan. 12 quake the vast amount of international aid and attention needed couldn't get into Haiti rapidly enough to treat the badly injured.
My first day here,Jan.13, Dr. Barth Green of the University of Miami told me in complete exasperation that people were dying unnecessarily.
"In Miami, these people wouldn't die," he said. "We just don't have what we need to resuscitate them, to keep them alive." That situation has improved, but not ended.
And the people who were dying were not dying quietly. They were suffering. I have never in my life been anywhere where I have heard more horrible screams of pain at all hours of the day and night.
Please, please try and understand why I and several other readers have taken offense to this. Because it's really not okay.
ETA: The author's apology. In which she explains why comments were disabled, but does not address the race!fail.
I was in Haiti for a week. Lord knows it doesn't make me an expert and it doesn't mean I saw everything and it certainly doesn't mean I understand the enormity of the situation. I was a white girl, an outsider, doing short term relief work. That's it.
I found the premise of the fic offensive. I think it's different from a historical AU. I think it's different from a quake or a natural disaster that happened somewhere else, sometime else. This is a disaster that began in January and is ongoing. And it's not something that I think is appropriate for the backdrop of a story about two white dudes from America falling in love.
I should also add that many others have commented on race!fail in the story. I'm mainly focused on context!fail.
I'm going to approach this as respectfully as I can.
I find this fic extremely offensive. In March I spent a week in Haiti doing relief work, up north and also in Port au Prince. (Not that this makes me an expert by any stretch, but I did put eyes on the city and I saw things that have radically re-shaped my opinions about the developing world.)
This is not any setting that you have chosen. This is not a WWII AU or a fic about doctors trying to eliminate polio in the 1950's or even the Good Friday Quake. The Haitian earthquake just happened. It JUST happened. There are still bodies in the rubble, limbs trimmed off so they don't dangle out in front of pedestrian traffic. They're never going to find all the bodies. And the ones they did find? They're in a mass grave outside the city that you can smell when you drive past it.
[from the A/N]I have taken a few liberties with some of the facts in order to make them fit into the story the way I needed. For example, Haiti's daytime temperatures in February/March, when the majority of this fic takes place, tend to be in the 70s-80s F; I made it seem much hotter. The country's rainy season doesn't really begin until early April; I pushed it up a few weeks. And the Port-au-Prince General Hospital was severely damaged in the earthquake and since then, its emergency room has been housed in a tent. In the fic, the building is fairly undamaged and even has electricity.
And this, in all honesty, is what I find most repellent. These are not dry facts that you can take liberties with. These are death and life circumstances for living people. The building was damaged. There was not electricity. And people died because of that. Pretending otherwise is malicious fantasy.
But I think there is another aspect, at least there is for me. While many people died in the original quake, a work of nature, large numbers here are dying slowly and painfully from their injuries and from lack of medical care. Sufficient medical infrastucture didn't exist here to begin, not for the average, poor Haitian. And after the Jan. 12 quake the vast amount of international aid and attention needed couldn't get into Haiti rapidly enough to treat the badly injured.
My first day here,Jan.13, Dr. Barth Green of the University of Miami told me in complete exasperation that people were dying unnecessarily.
"In Miami, these people wouldn't die," he said. "We just don't have what we need to resuscitate them, to keep them alive." That situation has improved, but not ended.
And the people who were dying were not dying quietly. They were suffering. I have never in my life been anywhere where I have heard more horrible screams of pain at all hours of the day and night.
Please, please try and understand why I and several other readers have taken offense to this. Because it's really not okay.
ETA: The author's apology. In which she explains why comments were disabled, but does not address the race!fail.