SIGNAL BOOST

[musical_emjay]

WOW. So. My fannish attention is all over the fucking map lately, and I haven't read a single SPN/J2 Big Bang from this year's crop yet, but something has been called to my attention that I really, really can't stay quiet about.

Please take a moment to go here and read up about the latest absolutely galling pile of racist fail to come out of SPN

Comments

[star_maple]

There are one or two insensitive or clueless AU fics every year in Big Bang, and I've come to rely upon it like the tides. (AUs are my favorite, but there are certain limitations when your story has to be about two young white guys, and sometimes their white friends.)However, the thing I find interesting are that all of them are really well-written from a technical perspective. They use correct grammar and spelling and punctuation. There's a beginning, a middle and an end. The action moves along at a good clip. There's clever dialogue. It would be an okay to good story if not for the massive FAIL inherent in the subject. It's like they get to a certain skill level and think they need to really challenge themselves and push their boundaries and don't really consider the consequences.

I do hope, however, that this turns in to a learning experience for them rather than making them defensive, because they are otherwise talented. We are extremely lucky that through our education and/or where we live that we've been exposed to why this is wrong. When I graduated high school (growing up in a small, very white American town) I would have never considered problems of cultural appropriation or the concept of 'the noble savage' or similar tropes-- I'm a smart person, but I just wasn't exposed to it and I know I perpetrated some race!fail in things I wrote at the time, which fortunately was private enough or small enough (or the internet was small enough) and didn't have the scope of a Big Bang release. I learned my lesson through exposure and *one or two* patient people who pointed out my issues either in person or online and I am forever indebted to them. I hope this writer, and whoever else wins the Sensitivity!fail Olympics in this year's Big Bang (and with this many participants there will be *at least* one more) gets the same lesson I did from similarly patient teachers.

[musical_emjay]

YES. That's one of the things killing me the most. I was so excited for her story! I had no clue what it was supposed to be about, but I remembered reading her fic in the past and knew that it was very high quality. But NOPE, SORRY, HERE'S 80K OF STEAMING RACIST FAIL INSTEAD :/

I'm...kind of not that surprised though, actually. This kind of "I DON'T THINK ABOUT IT IN TERMS OF RAAAAACE" racism is exactly the kind that most often comes from educated, smart people, the ones that like to claim they have tons of friends who are POC and would never think they were ~~different. Which is exactly where I was in my early days in Fandom, before I was confronted with all of the fantastic meta the criticism over the years that forced me to realize just how WRONG and FUCKING STUPID I was being. Right now it seems like the author's only half-assedly owning up to her shit, so we'll see how it all turns out, I guess.

[star_maple]

I haven't read the author's apology yet, but I think a half-assed apology is progress, actually. I mean, she's worked on this for months and no one brought up problems before and she posts it, excitedly expecting positive comments and then gets this reaction. Regardless of your subject, your first response is going to be defensive-- especially if a whole crowd comes after you. I mean, back in the days before the internet had pictures, I got one e-mail from one person on a (hopefully) much less failtastic slip-up and my first response was defensive until I calmed down and read it a few more times and thought about it. So any response that is not, "Why are you so mean to meeee?" or "Haters to the left!" or anything else that is just summarily dismissive I have to look at as an open door-- it's going to take time to change ingrained thought processes that she's had for 20+ years.