Fandom and cultural appropriation
hesychasm has an update: stellamira has edited her story, but is still screening her responses.
I have cooled down a bit and realized my last post was, in fact, completely wrong. Fandom is far from the only place where strangers' genocides are treated as local color: Western literature is full of stories of Westerners who go to foreign land, observe or participate in exotic tragedies, and return home, sadder but wiser, leaving behind natives either wiser or deader. People have even written books pointing this out in great detail.
And the problem, as is often the case, isn't that stellamira was malicious, or even thoughtless in quite the same way as many recent instigators of fandom debates about race have been; it's that her thoughtfulness and good intentions were so bounded by accustomed patterns of thought and description and power--so bounded by what, as a shorthand, we call "privilege"--that she could not see that she was not thinking nearly deeply enough.
siljamus has been collecting links on this discussion, which are probably more worth your time.
I have cooled down a bit and realized my last post was, in fact, completely wrong. Fandom is far from the only place where strangers' genocides are treated as local color: Western literature is full of stories of Westerners who go to foreign land, observe or participate in exotic tragedies, and return home, sadder but wiser, leaving behind natives either wiser or deader. People have even written books pointing this out in great detail.
And the problem, as is often the case, isn't that stellamira was malicious, or even thoughtless in quite the same way as many recent instigators of fandom debates about race have been; it's that her thoughtfulness and good intentions were so bounded by accustomed patterns of thought and description and power--so bounded by what, as a shorthand, we call "privilege"--that she could not see that she was not thinking nearly deeply enough.
siljamus has been collecting links on this discussion, which are probably more worth your time.