Comments | evilhippo: Meta calls to me!

evilhippo

Meta calls to me!

Jan 16, 2012 23:12

I wish I had enough time to finish writing up some Meta things tonight because agh, authorial intent! It is haunting me. Thankfully I got through Reichenbach without any meta-level issues, but I still have some lingering from ASiB, and somehow Andrew Hussie is massively stepping into it in regards to race on Tumblr tonight and this makes an ( Read more... )

homestuck, fandom, thinking, velocipede

Comments 18

flutingfrenzy January 17 2012, 06:29:10 UTC

I read those tumblr posts and cringed so hard I think I strained something. I wanna talk about all this in detail (even if I can't comment intelligently on Moffat due to lack of familiarity with canon), but bed now and race talk later. (Or, more likely, bed now, work later, five hundred pages of six-hundred-page book club book after that, THEN race talk.)

evilhippo January 18 2012, 02:18:37 UTC

No worries on not being familiar with Moffat... there's plenty to delve into just in regards to Mr. Hussie. (Though I do find it interesting that they're basically the same kind of jerkoff when it comes to their respective fandoms, just at different intensity levels. It makes me wonder about the sort of media I enjoy... (-;)

zolac_no_miko January 17 2012, 08:13:46 UTC

Hmmmmmm, that's a very interesting discussion going on there.

evilhippo January 18 2012, 02:22:49 UTC

Yeaaaah, watching Hussie and his fandom go round and round on this is pretty interesting. Especially when he escalates it to nonsense-retcon and tries to half-backpedal on calling some of his fans racist. With all the other issues in Homestuck, I'm actually kind of surprised the giant author/reader kerefuffle ended up being about race... it seems to be one of the only things people (up to this point) didn't actively argue about. Though, on the plus side, there's been a certain portion of very interesting fanart out of this that I'm totally on board with, beyond John and Jade being drawn as Asian (which, as far as I can tell, was pretty popular in fanon beforehand).

apple_pathways January 18 2012, 01:41:11 UTC

UUGGGGHHHH, I got about three sentences in to each of those Tumblr posts and just wanted to punch that guy in the face. Condescending asshole, much? I'm not going to suggest that an author has to represent diversity in their work (though I think it's a laudable goal), but you don't get to write about a bunch of ostensibly white kids and then insist that "no no no, actually one or two of them could be asian, or maybe hispanic! I haven't decided which, but the possibility's there, and so you're racist for assuming they were white." Just...no.

I know you and I have had this conversation before, and discussed the "default to white" assumption of readers. Can an author be held accountable for that assumption? No. But an author who is interested in representing diversity in their work should take those assumptions into consideration and take overt steps to counteract them. Otherwise, you don't get to call people racists for assuming characters you yourself pictured as white--are white.

evilhippo January 18 2012, 03:02:22 UTC

Wanting to punch Hussie in the face is a pretty common thing. I'm not going to defend his persona toward his fans, because while it's amusing when he's approaching his own characters and explaining his creative process, it's a hugely terrible way to approach an argument like this. Unfortunately, either he doesn't know how to break character, or he's a tremendous asshat.

That said, there is a little more nuance to this than an author just saying "you're all racist for assuming they're white." There had been dust-ups between the fans, with a certain subset insisting that the characters were white. What I'm taking away from this is that his issue was the idea of forcing that interpretation on others. (He just made the argument very poorly, possibly because he's trying to argue on the same level as his fandom.) Then things escalated from there into utter nonsense and flailing and one very random invocation of Martin Luther King, Jr ( ... )

flutingfrenzy January 26 2012, 01:59:03 UTC

I like how I was all, "I wanna talk about this!" and then proceeded to ignore this post completely. So it's just as well that you've basically articulated my thoughts on the matter perfectly. But as a postscript, there's some discussion on it today on fandomsecrets. Oh look, there I am all over the place in it, admittedly mostly regarding Dirk. Dirk and Roxy are rapidly becoming my favorite characters in Homestuck, no lie.

evilhippo January 26 2012, 04:45:20 UTC

Hehe, no worries, I've managed to not provide my lingering questions to you in your other post yet, so we're probably even. (-;

Tangential to the whole Homestuck Racism 2012 Debate, what's your stance on Hussie's sudden interest in making non-inflammatory and semi-informative, considered posts about things like gender? Five bucks on Complacency of the Learned being a thinly-veiled, maybe-or-maybe-not-cringeworthy treatise on gender and race that reflects Hussie's habit of learning from/absorbing/weirdly reimagining his fandom's ideas? (I'm pretty sure about 68% of what I love about Homestuck is the way it's so self- and fandom-referential and you can just sort of watch ideas cycling around and evolving. Another 15% is Dirk Strider.And omg, I've been wanting to flail at you about Dirk and Roxy. I didn't think the Alpha kids would grow on me, but then Dirk and Roxy. Mostly Dirk... I adore Dirk more than should technically be allowed. (And the AR... the "I'm glasses" line just about killed me in several different ways.) I want ( ... )

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