#Especially when they were only named in authorial statements

[bonefall]

Did you man beam Drizzle? If so, why not just pair up Rustle with Cranberry instead? I get for the amazing ship name but I'm curious about the choice /gen

I totally forgot Drizzle's original gender, but also, I really don't want to overthink it. I'm so tired of overthinking it. I wanted CranberryDrizzle funny ship name and it was getting exhausting to plan out where every pairing in several hundred cats would be getting their kits from

Rustle is going to die at some point after having two QR kittens, and Cranberrydrizzle is going to have 2 important litters (Sunstrike and Emberfoot in the first, Fernstripe in the second). I have done an exhausting amount of work (weeks of planning and hours of work at a time, scouring the wiki and facebook screenshots, redrawing tangles, reading through suggestions, writing out full posts of changes and creating new groups with their own histories) untangling broken fragments of family trees and like... I'm tired. No more shuffling. I deserve Funny Ship Name. is this too much to ask

Boy Drizzle is just the easiest answer. I'd like for Drizzle to just be transfem but I was also told to avoid cats being trans just to have kits, which is ALSO frustrating me at this point, I don't like this weight of "perfect representation" that's being put on me when I'M not even perfect representation as a living human queer.

Do I let Drizzle be transfem and "break a rule," or change them to a boy and "lose" a lesbian pairing? It feels gross to me to have fallen into a mindset where I'm treating queer relationships like quotas or rigid rulesets

I feel like if I 'get something wrong' (like forget the gender of a Missing Kit or a side character, or handwave 'where did these kits come from' with 'trans/queen's rights' without considering a real secret surrogate) I'm going to get smacked upside the head and be forced to hyperfocus on one small part of a massive project when I already have a million other things to work on.

So unfortunately the most honest answer I can probably give is that im tired. I'm really tired. Overthinking minor details before making every single tumblr post is draining me. I forgot the missing kit's original author-assigned gender and didn't scroll to the bottom of Onestar's wiki page to check it before posting. I like the ship name. Cranberrysplash somehow gets pregnant twice, but I was told to avoid trans bioparents, yet doing that is making things even harder after I had to do weeks of work to make a good tree in the first place

I'll figure out Drizzlefall's gender when they become relevant in some context

#i dont want cranberryrustle i want cranberrydrizzle #for my own sanity I am probably going to start straightup deleting asks and replies about accidental misgenderings of missing kits #i cannot keep the gender and names of 600+ characters straight 100% of the time #Especially when they were only named in authorial statements #i deserve funny ship name. i just. i deserve funny ship name #do i not bleed enough to deserve funny ship name #i don't think I can work with this ''minimize trans bioparents'' rule. It's done nothing but cause me frustration and make burnout set in #redtail is a man and he gave birth. get over it. im sick of feeling guilty over my own hobby project #for characters like sedge where it's a plot point it will stay but I CANT keep working with it in mind #Hazeltail is unkilled. She is trans. She is taking Mousewhisker's place in ThunderClan so he can go to riverclan #If canon gives mouse kittens then they will be hazeltail's. trans people fuck and have kids. deal with it #and you know what? in a world with countries that will fucking sterilize you if you want to legally transition #maybe it *should* be more normalized. #tw transphobia #btw anon it's clear you're being genuine so im not mad at you #vent a long time coming I think #bone babble

[aces-to-apples]

Your Reputation Precedes You

A response to “On Fandom Racism (and That Conlang People Are Talking About)” because lmao that cowardly bitch just hates getting feedback from people that she can’t then harass into oblivion

i.e. God I Wish I Could Use The Tag Fandom Wank Without The Titty Police Nerfing My Post

-

To be frank, I'm not here because I think you or any of your little cronies are going to change your minds. If the 'name' wasn't a giveaway, your group of ~likeminded individuals~ have quite the reputation for espousing ableist, antisemitic, and, yes, racist views under wafer-thin the veneer of "calling out racism." I think we both know that what you're actually doing is using the relative anonymity of the internet and progressive language to abuse, harass, and bully fans that you personally disagree with. You and your group are toxic, hateful, and utterly pathetic, using many peoples' genuine desire to avoid accidentally causing harm and twisting it into this horrid parade of submissiveness to You, The One And Only Arbiter Of Truth And Justice In Fandom. Never mind that you have derided autistic people as lacking compassion and empathy, that you've used racist colonizer dogwhistles to describe a fictional culture based heavily on real live Maori culture, that you've mocked the idea of characters having PTSD, or that vital mental health services are anything more than "talking about your feelings with friends uwu." Let's just ignore that you have ridiculed the idea of adults in positions of power exerting that power over children in harmful and abusive ways, that creating transformative fan-content that doesn't adhere to the spirit of canon or wishes of the original author garners derision and hatefulness from you, and that you've used classic abuser tactics in order to gaslight people in your orbit into behaving more submissively towards you in order to avoid more verbal abuse.

Let's toss all of that crucial context aside in favor of only what you've written here.

What you've written here is nearly 3,000 entire words based on, at best—though, admittedly, based on your previous behavior, I am actually not willing to extend to you an iota of good faith—fallacious reasoning. You posit that a constructed language, to be used by a fictional religious group located in an entirely different galaxy than our own, is othering, racist in general, and anti-Asian specifically. This appears based in several suppositions, the first being that a language unknown by the reader will, by nature, cause the reader to feel alienated from the characters and therefore less sympathetic, empathetic, and caring towards the characters. That idea is patently ridiculous and, I believe, says far more about your ability to connect to a character speaking an unfamiliar language than any kind of overarching truth about media and the human condition. New things are interesting; new things are fun; the human brain is wired from birth to be fascinated with new things, to want to take them apart, find out how they work, and enjoy both the process and the results.

The second supposition this fallacy is based upon appears to be that to move away from the blatant Orientalism of Star Wars is inherently anti-Asian. While I find it... frankly, a little bit sad that you cling so viciously to the Orientalist, appropriative roots of Star Wars as some form of genuine representation, that's really none of my business. If you feel that a Muslim-coded character bombing a temple and becoming a terrorist and a Sith, a white woman wearing Mongolian wedding garb, a species of decadent slug-like gangsters smoking out of hookahs and keeping attractive young women chained at their feet (as it were), a species of greedy money-grubbers with exaggerated features and offensively stereotypical "Asian" accents, and an indigenous people wearing modesty garb based on the Bedu people and treated by most characters as well as the narrative as mindless animals deserving of murder and genocide are appropriate representation of the many, varied, and beautiful cultures around the world upon which they were "based," then that is very much your business. Until you pull shit like this. Until you accuse other fans, who wish to move away from such offensive coding and stereotypes, of erasing Asian culture from Star Wars. Then it becomes everyone's business, especially when you are targeting a loving and enthusiastic group of fans who are pouring their hearts and souls into creating an inventive and non-appropriative alternative to canon.

Which leads into the third supposition, that a patently racist, misogynistic white man in the 1970s, and then again in the 1990s, intended his universe to be an accurate and respectful portrayal of the various cultures he stole from. I understand that for your group of toxic bullies, the term "Death of the Author" holds no real meaning, but the simple fact of the matter is that George Lucas based his white-centered space adventure on Samurai movies while removing the cultural context that gave them any meaning, because he liked the idea of swords and noble warriors in space. He based the Force and the Jedi Order on belief systems such as Taoism and Buddhism, but only on the surface, without putting any real effort into into portraying them earnestly or accurately. He consistently disrespected both characters of color and characters coded to be a certain race, ethnicity, culture, or religion, and likewise disrespected and stole from the cultures upon which he based them. He was, and continues to be, a racist white man who wrote a racist story. His universe has Orientalism baked into its every facet, and the idea that fans who wish to move away from this and interrogate and transform the text into something better than what it is are racist is not only laughable, but incredibly disingenuous and insidious.

As I said, I am not writing this to change your mind, because I truly believe that you already know that "cOnLaNgS aRe RaCiSt" is a ridiculous statement. The way you've comported yourself in fandom spaces thus far has shown to me that you are nothing more than a bully who knows that the anti-racist movement in fandom can be co-opted for your benefit. If you tout your Asian heritage and use the right language, make the "right" accusations and take advantage of white guilt and white ignorance, you can have dozens of people falling at your feet, begging for forgiveness, for absolution. And I think that gives you a thrill. So, no, none of this will change your mind because none of this is genuinely about racism—it's about power, it's about control, it's about fandom being the only space where you have some.

So I'm writing this for the creators of this wonderful conlang, which has been crafted by multiple people including people of color, who don't deserve this nonsensical vitriol, and for the fans reading this manipulative hate-fest, wondering if they really are Evil Racists because they don't participate in fandom the way you think they should.

Here it is: fandom has a lot of racism, antisemitism, misogyny, queerphobia, ableism, etc. baked into it. Unfortunately, such is the nature of living and growing up in societies and cultures that have the same. The important thing is to independently educate yourself on those issues and think critically about them—not "think critically" as in "to criticize" them, but to analyze, evaluate, pick apart, examine, and reconstruct them again in order to come to a well thought-out conclusion. Read this well-articulated attack on a group of fans who have always welcomed feedback and participation, are open about their backgrounds, their strengths and weaknesses, and wonder who is actually being genuine.

Is it the open and enthusiastic group who ask for the participation of others in this labor of love? Or is it the ringleader of a group of well-known bullies who have manipulated, gaslit, and then subsequently love-bomb people who did not simply roll over at the slightest hint of dominance? The ones who spent hours upon hours tearing apart, mocking, deriding, and falsely accusing authors of fanworks and metatextual works of various bigotries and -isms, knowing that those evaluations were spurious and meant only to cause harm, not genuine examinations of the works themselves or even presumed authorial intent. The ones who made their own, quote-unquote, community so negative and toxic that even after the departure of a large portion of them, including this author in particular, that community still has a reputation for being hateful, toxic, and full of mean-spirited harassers who will never look critically about their own behavior but only ever point fingers at others. The ones who are so very determined to cause misery wherever they go that as soon as their usual victims are no longer immediately available, they will turn on each other at the slightest hint of weakness.

This entire piece of (fan)work is misinformed at the most generous, disingenuous at the most objective, and downright spiteful when we get right into it. The creators of Dai Bendu, along with various other works, series, and fan events that these people personally dislike, have been targeted because it is so much easier to harass, bully, and use progressive language as a weapon against them, than it is to put any effort into making fandom spaces more informed, more positive, more respectful.

As someone rather eloquently put it, community is not a fucking spectator sport. You want a better community, you gotta work at it. And conversely, what you put into your community is what you'll get out of it. This author and their friends have put a lot of hate into their communities, and now they're toxic cesspools that people stay well away from, for fear of contracting some terrible form of harassment poisoning.

Congrats, Ri, you've gotten just what you wanted: adoring crowds listening to you spout your absolutely heinous personal views purely to live out some kind of power fantasy, and the rest of us staying well away, because fuck knows nothing kind, helpful, or in good faith has ever come from Virdant or her echo-chamber of petty, spiteful assholes.

No love, bad night.

P.S. Everyone actually in the Dai Bendu server knows your ass got kicked because you didn’t say shit for a full thirty days and ignored the announcement that inactive members would be culled. You ain’t cute pretending like it’s because you were ~*~Silenced~*~ after ~*~Valiantly~*~ attempting to call out racism. We see you.

#fandom bullshit #fandom racism #fandom harassment #fandom ableism #fandom antisemitism #fandom misogyny #by apples

[lamphous]

I enjoyed your paper on the Intertextuality between fanon and canon in Good Omens as a case study. Has your view changed since the release of the series, as it can be said the queer reading is no longer subtextual as opposed to the seldom implications one might find in the book? Do you think the series is an evidence of fan practices as contributors in the making of said series since no text is autonomous but a participant in a fundamental textual interconnectedness, be it authorial or fan made?

(the paper in question, for those who don't know it)

hello anon! unfortunately, even *I* with all my limited tone skills on the internet can tell that my answer is going to be unsatisfactory, given that I disagree with more than a few of the assumptions implicit in your wording.

for one, I don't think the queer reading of aziraphale and crowley's relationship is any less subtextual in the tv adaptation (an admittance here that I have not watched it, but have experienced significant—and I mean significant, you remember when it came out? it was EVERYWHERE—proportion of it secondhand from fans and critics and dislikers alike, including the opinions of people I trust in this area in specific)

nor do I think the ways in which one could argue it isn't (namely authorial extratextual statements on the subject) are in alignment with the argument of my paper—which, if you'll recall, is about accepting the interpretation of the author as only one of many, and thus not enough on its own to cement something as "canonically queer" (a la word of god)

I honestly haven't been very into gomens since that summer, due to the deluge of fans of an adaptation I felt was very contrary to the things I liked about the novel/specifically ship originally: I'm sure this comes across in my A/Nns and tags from that summer 2019, but it was really disheartening to watch the (new) fans in particular adhere to these interpretations of the characters—and, it has to be said, adhering to the undeath of the author in the fawning over gaiman's "you can read it however you want" esque hedging statements. I really found the fixation and sexualization of crowley's fem nanny persona especially unsettling, given that people were very eager to tout it as queer representation when it played, to everyone else in the world, as yet another man-in-a-dress-joke.

extratextual "confirmations" have also seemed to vary from the passive to the weirdly homophobic? (like, again, the argument that they don't have genders so they can't be gay but they can also be whatever you want so if YOU want them to be gay then that's fine for YOU just not me, the showrunner with immense control as the original and continuous author whose name is plastered all over the damn thing)—or, as I put it in the paper, gaiman still "exercises that supposed privilege while denying it nevertheless"

part of my introduction was in fact about how the adaptation is positioned as "more of an author's preferred edition of the text" than an adaptation, and I think my point about the disjunction with the long history of queer fan readings in the tv adaptation's refusal to double down on queer rep still stands. simply put, the tv adaptation did not so much kill the author as revive him and set him loose with a crowd of fans more than willing to take his word as law (in my paper I think I talked about individual tendencies towards the fannish version of the author-god view, but in the meantime it seems to have become, shall we say, less individual lol)

I do think there's still something to be said for the tv adaptation as another fan interpretation, on the same level as your favorite old LJ posts, but that hasn't seemed to be where the conversation has gone. the tv adaptation is treated as canonically as the book—the tags on ao3, for example, essentially overlap despite critical differences in their settings, characterizations, and plot (and isn't it weird how that that conflation always seems to work in favor of making the tv adaptation THE canon versus the book? that it isn't, say, fics set in the 90s, etc, mistakenly posted in the TV tag?)—and gaiman's remarks outside the show are steal treated as the word of god. the argument is not that "good omens (TV) is queer because the characters within it are in unambiguously queer relationships, labelled as such in-universe or otherwise made unmistakably clear to audiences who are not already looking for it." the argument has become "good omens (TV) is queer because gaiman said so!", which, I think you'll agree, is the exact opposite of what my paper was about

I am still humbled to hear that people are still reading that paper, though! I absolutely loved writing that paper and have actually been thinking about it a lot lately as something I was really privileged to get to write in real time in that specific moment. as disheartening as the result was, I still think fondly of that time! that summer of finally writing fic I'd wanted to for YEARS, getting to know people in fandom better, and especially the resultant bookshop back room discord server are bright spots of that year, and the response to the paper & following article has always been interesting & gratifying as a writer

#for those still reading the reason ive been thinking abt that paper a lot lately has been half bc the prof of that class is a SPN Academic #and ive been restraining myself from showing up at her office like 'hey [redacted] hows that j2 divorce taste?' uh at least once a month lm #go tv wank // #sorry for the answer i know you will not like #i also know that this is a common interpretation of my paper—enough that someone posted about it on the HARVARD CRIMSON (blog)—but #i would really take a closer look at my remarks on word of god affirmations especially #good omens

[badartfriend]

There is a sunny earnestness to Dawn Dorland, an un-self-conscious openness that endears her to some people and that others have found to be a little extra. Her friends call her a “feeler”: openhearted and eager, pressing to make connections with others even as, in many instances, she feels like an outsider. An essayist and aspiring novelist who has taught writing classes in Los Angeles, she is the sort of writer who, in one authorial mission statement, declares her faith in the power of fiction to “share truth,” to heal trauma, to build bridges. (“I’m compelled at funerals to shake hands with the dusty men who dig our graves,” she has written.) She is known for signing off her emails not with “All best” or “Sincerely,” but “Kindly.”

On June 24, 2015, a year after completing her M.F.A. in creative writing, Dorland did perhaps the kindest, most consequential thing she might ever do in her life. She donated one of her kidneys, and elected to do it in a slightly unusual and particularly altruistic way. As a so-called nondirected donation, her kidney was not meant for anyone in particular but instead was part of a donation chain, coordinated by surgeons to provide a kidney to a recipient who may otherwise have no other living donor. There was some risk with the procedure, of course, and a recovery to think about, and a one-kidney life to lead from that point forward. But in truth, Dorland, in her 30s at the time, had been wanting to do it for years. “As soon as I learned I could,” she told me recently, on the phone from her home in Los Angeles, where she and her husband were caring for their toddler son and elderly pit bull (and, in their spare time, volunteering at dog shelters and searching for adoptive families for feral cat litters). “It’s kind of like not overthinking love, you know?”

Several weeks before the surgery, Dorland decided to share her truth with others. She started a private Facebook group, inviting family and friends, including some fellow writers from GrubStreet, the Boston writing center where Dorland had spent many years learning her craft. After her surgery, she posted something to her group: a heartfelt letter she’d written to the final recipient of the surgical chain, whoever they may be.

Personally, my childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I didn’t have the opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. A positive outcome of my early life is empathy, that it opened a well of possibility between me and strangers. While perhaps many more people would be motivated to donate an organ to a friend or family member in need, to me, the suffering of strangers is just as real. … Throughout my preparation for becoming a donor … I focused a majority of my mental energy on imagining and celebrating you.

The procedure went well. By a stroke of luck, Dorland would even get to meet the recipient, an Orthodox Jewish man, and take photos with him and his family. In time, Dorland would start posting outside the private group to all of Facebook, celebrating her one-year “kidneyversary” and appearing as a UCLA Health Laker for a Day at the Staples Center to support live-organ donation. But just after the surgery, when she checked Facebook, Dorland noticed some people she’d invited into the group hadn’t seemed to react to any of her posts. On July 20, she wrote an email to one of them: a writer named Sonya Larson.

Larson and Dorland had met eight years earlier in Boston. They were just a few years apart in age, and for several years they ran in the same circles, hitting the same events, readings and workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. But in the years since Dorland left town, Larson had leveled up. Her short fiction was published, in Best American Short Stories and elsewhere; she took charge of GrubStreet’s annual Muse and the Marketplace literary conference, and as a mixed-race Asian American, she marshaled the group’s diversity efforts. She also joined a group of published writers that calls itself the Chunky Monkeys (a whimsical name, referring to breaking off little chunks of big projects to share with the other members). One of those writing-group members, Celeste Ng, who wrote “Little Fires Everywhere,” told me that she admires Larson’s ability to create “characters who have these big blind spots.” While they think they’re presenting themselves one way, they actually come across as something else entirely.

When it comes to literary success, the stakes can be pretty low — a fellowship or residency here, a short story published there. But it seemed as if Larson was having the sort of writing life that Dorland once dreamed of having. After many years, Dorland, still teaching, had yet to be published. But to an extent that she once had a writing community, GrubStreet was it. And Larson was, she believed, a close friend.

Over email, on July 21, 2015, Larson answered Dorland’s message with a chirpy reply — “How have you been, my dear?” Dorland replied with a rundown of her next writing residencies and workshops, and as casually as possible, asked: “I think you’re aware that I donated my kidney this summer. Right?”

Only then did Larson gush: “Ah, yes — I did see on Facebook that you donated your kidney. What a tremendous thing!”

Afterward, Dorland would wonder: If she really thought it was that great, why did she need reminding that it happened?

They wouldn’t cross paths again until the following spring — a brief hello at A.W.P., the annual writing conference, where the subject of Dorland’s kidney went unmentioned. A month later, at the GrubStreet Muse conference in Boston, Dorland sensed something had shifted — not just with Larson but with various GrubStreet eminences, old friends and mentors of hers who also happened to be members of Larson’s writing group, the Chunky Monkeys. Barely anyone brought up what she’d done, even though everyone must have known she’d done it. “It was a little bit like, if you’ve been at a funeral and nobody wanted to talk about it — it just was strange to me,” she said. “I left that conference with this question: Do writers not care about my kidney donation? Which kind of confused me, because I thought I was in a community of service-oriented people.”

It didn’t take long for a clue to surface. On June 24, 2016, a Facebook friend of Dorland’s named Tom Meek commented on one of Dorland’s posts.

Sonya read a cool story about giving out a kidney. You came to my mind and I wondered if you were the source of inspiration?

Still impressed you did this.

Dorland was confused. A year earlier, Larson could hardly be bothered to talk about it. Now, at Trident bookstore in Boston, she’d apparently read from a new short story about that very subject. Meek had tagged Larson in his comment, so Dorland thought that Larson must have seen it. She waited for Larson to chime in — to say, “Oh, yes, I’d meant to tell you, Dawn!” or something like that — but there was nothing. Why would Sonya write about it, she wondered, and not tell her?

Six days later, she decided to ask her. Much as she had a year earlier, she sent Larson a friendly email, including one pointed request: “Hey, I heard you wrote a kidney-donation story. Cool! Can I read it?”

‘I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art.’

Ten days later, Larson wrote back saying that yes, she was working on a story “about a woman who receives a kidney, partially inspired by how my imagination took off after learning of your own tremendous donation.” In her writing, she spun out a scenario based not on Dorland, she said, but on something else — themes that have always fascinated her. “I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art,” Larson wrote.

Dorland wrote back within hours. She admitted to being “a little surprised,” especially “since we’re friends and you hadn’t mentioned it.” The next day, Larson replied, her tone a bit removed, stressing that her story was “not about you or your particular gift, but about narrative possibilities I began thinking about.”

But Dorland pressed on. “It’s the interpersonal layer that feels off to me, Sonya. … You seemed not to be aware of my donation until I pointed it out. But if you had already kicked off your fictional project at this time, well, I think your behavior is a little deceptive. At least, weird.”

Larson’s answer this time was even cooler. “Before this email exchange,” she wrote, “I hadn’t considered that my individual vocal support (or absence of it) was of much significance.”

Which, though it was shrouded in politesse, was a different point altogether. Who, Larson seemed to be saying, said we were such good friends?

For many years now, Dorland has been working on a sprawling novel, “Econoline,” which interweaves a knowing, present-day perspective with vivid, sometimes brutal but often romantic remembrances of an itinerant rural childhood. The van in the title is, she writes in a recent draft, “blue as a Ty-D-Bowl tablet. Bumbling on the highway, bulky and off-kilter, a junebug in the wind.” The family in the narrative survives on “government flour, canned juice and beans” and “ruler-long bricks of lard” that the father calls “commodities.”

Dorland is not shy about explaining how her past has afforded her a degree of moral clarity that others might not come by so easily. She was raised in near poverty in rural Iowa. Her parents moved around a lot, she told me, and the whole family lived under a stigma. One small consolation was the way her mother modeled a certain perverse self-reliance, rejecting the judgments of others. Another is how her turbulent youth has served as a wellspring for much of her writing. She made her way out of Iowa with a scholarship to Scripps College in California, followed by divinity school at Harvard. Unsure of what to do next, she worked day jobs in advertising in Boston while dabbling in workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. When she noticed classmates cooing over Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping,” she picked up a copy. After inhaling its story of an eccentric small-town upbringing told with sensitive, all-seeing narration, she knew she wanted to become a writer.

At GrubStreet, Dorland eventually became one of several “teaching scholars” at the Muse conference, leading workshops on such topics as “Truth and Taboo: Writing Past Shame.” Dorland credits two members of the Chunky Monkeys group, Adam Stumacher and Chris Castellani, with advising her. But in hindsight, much of her GrubStreet experience is tied up with her memories of Sonya Larson. She thinks they first met at a one-off writing workshop Larson taught, though Larson, for her part, says she doesn’t remember this. Everybody at GrubStreet knew Larson — she was one of the popular, ever-present people who worked there. On nights out with other Grubbies, Dorland remembers Larson getting personal, confiding about an engagement, the death of someone she knew and plans to apply to M.F.A. programs — though Larson now says she shared such things widely. When a job at GrubStreet opened up, Larson encouraged her to apply. Even when she didn’t get it, everyone was so gracious about it, including Larson, that she felt included all the same.

Sign Up for The Great Read  Every weekday, we recommend one piece of exceptional writing from The Times — a narrative or essay that takes you someplace you might not expect to go. Get it sent to your inbox.

Now, as she read these strained emails from Larson — about this story of a kidney donation; her kidney donation? — Dorland wondered if everyone at GrubStreet had been playing a different game, with rules she’d failed to grasp. On July 15, 2016, Dorland’s tone turned brittle, even wounded: “Here was a friend entrusting something to you, making herself vulnerable to you. At least, the conclusion I can draw from your responses is that I was mistaken to consider us the friends that I did.”

Larson didn’t answer right away. Three days later, Dorland took her frustrations to Facebook, in a blind item: “I discovered that a writer friend has based a short story on something momentous I did in my own life, without telling me or ever intending to tell me (another writer tipped me off).” Still nothing from Larson.

Dorland waited another day and then sent her another message both in a text and in an email: “I am still surprised that you didn’t care about my personal feelings. … I wish you’d given me the benefit of the doubt that I wouldn’t interfere.” Yet again, no response.

The next day, on July 20, she wrote again: “Am I correct that you do not want to make peace? Not hearing from you sends that message.”

Larson answered this time. “I see that you’re merely expressing real hurt, and for that I am truly sorry,” she wrote on July 21. But she also changed gears a little. “I myself have seen references to my own life in others’ fiction, and it certainly felt weird at first. But I maintain that they have a right to write about what they want — as do I, and as do you.”

Hurt feelings or not, Larson was articulating an ideal — a principle she felt she and all writers ought to live up to. “For me, honoring another’s artistic freedom is a gesture of friendship,” Larson wrote, “and of trust.”



Image



Sonya Larson in Massachussetts.Credit...Kholood Eid for The New York Times

Like Dawn Dorland, Sonya Larson understands life as an outsider. The daughter of a Chinese American mother and white father, she was brought up in a predominantly white, middle-class enclave in Minnesota, where being mixed-race sometimes confused her. “It took me a while to realize the things I was teased about were intertwined with my race,” she told me over the phone from Somerville, where she lived with her husband and baby daughter. Her dark hair, her slight build: In a short story called “Gabe Dove,” which was picked for the 2017 edition of Best American Short Stories, Larson’s protagonist is a second-generation Asian American woman named Chuntao, who is used to men putting their fingers around her wrist and remarking on how narrow it is, almost as if she were a toy, a doll, a plaything.

Larson’s path toward writing was more conventional than Dorland’s. She started earlier, after her first creative-writing class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When she graduated, in 2005, she moved to Boston and walked into GrubStreet to volunteer the next day. Right away, she became one of a handful of people who kept the place running. In her fiction, Larson began exploring the sensitive subject matter that had always fascinated her: racial dynamics, and people caught between cultures. In time, she moved beyond mere political commentary to revel in her characters’ flaws — like a more socially responsible Philip Roth, though every bit as happy to be profane and fun and provocative. Even as she allows readers to be one step ahead of her characters, to see how they’re going astray, her writing luxuriates in the seductive power that comes from living an unmoored life. “He described thick winding streams and lush mountain gorges,” the rudderless Chuntao narrates in “Gabe Dove,” “obviously thinking I’d enjoy this window into my ancestral country, but in truth, I wanted to slap him.”

Chuntao, or a character with that name, turns up in many of Larson’s stories, as a sort of a motif — a little different each time Larson deploys her. She appears again in “The Kindest,” the story that Larson had been reading from at the Trident bookstore in 2016. Here, Chuntao is married, with an alcohol problem. A car crash precipitates the need for a new organ, and her whole family is hoping the donation will serve as a wake-up call, a chance for Chuntao to redeem herself. That’s when the donor materializes. White, wealthy and entitled, the woman who gave Chuntao her kidney is not exactly an uncomplicated altruist: She is a stranger to her own impulses, unaware of how what she considers a selfless act also contains elements of intense, unbridled narcissism.

In early drafts of the story, the donor character’s name was Dawn. In later drafts, Larson ended up changing the name to Rose. While Dorland no doubt was an inspiration, Larson argues that in its finished form, her story moved far beyond anything Dorland herself had ever said or done. But in every iteration of “The Kindest,” the donor says she wants to meet Chuntao to celebrate, to commune — only she really wants something more, something ineffable, like acknowledgment, or gratitude, or recognition, or love.

Still, they’re not so different, Rose and Chuntao. “I think they both confuse love with worship,” Larson told me. “And they both see love as something they have to go get; it doesn’t already exist inside of them.” All through “The Kindest,” love or validation operates almost like a commodity — a precious elixir that heals all pain. “The thing about the dying,” Chuntao narrates toward the end, “is they command the deepest respect, respect like an underground river resonant with primordial sounds, the kind of respect that people steal from one another.”

They aren’t entirely equal, however. While Chuntao is the story’s flawed hero, Rose is more a subject of scrutiny — a specimen to be analyzed. The study of the hidden motives of privileged white people comes naturally to Larson. “When you’re mixed-race, as I am, people have a way of ‘confiding’ in you,” she once told an interviewer. What they say, often about race, can be at odds with how they really feel. In “The Kindest,” Chuntao sees through Rose from the start. She knows what Rose wants — to be a white savior — and she won’t give it to her. (“So she’s the kindest bitch on the planet?” she says to her husband.) By the end, we may no longer feel a need to change Chuntao. As one critic in the literary journal Ploughshares wrote when the story was published in 2017: “Something has got to be admired about someone who returns from the brink of death unchanged, steadfast in their imperfections.”

For some readers, “The Kindest” is a rope-a-dope. If you thought this story was about Chuntao’s redemption, you’re as complicit as Rose. This, of course, was entirely intentional. Just before she wrote “The Kindest,” Larson helped run a session on race in her graduate program that became strangely contentious. “Many of the writers who identified as white were quite literally seeing the racial dynamics of what we were discussing very differently from the people of color in the room,” she said. “It was as if we were just simply talking past one another, and it was scary.” At the time, she’d been fascinated by “the dress” — that internet meme with a photo some see as black and blue and others as white and gold. Nothing interests Larson more than a thing that can be seen differently by two people, and she saw now how no subject demonstrates that better than race. She wanted to write a story that was like a Rorschach test, one that might betray the reader’s own hidden biases.

When reflecting on Chuntao, Larson often comes back to the character’s autonomy, her nerve. “She resisted,” she told me. Chuntao refused to become subsumed by Rose’s narrative. “And I admire that. And I think that small acts of refusal like that are things that people of color — and writers of color — in this country have to bravely do all the time.”

Larson and Dorland have each taken and taught enough writing workshops to know that artists, almost by definition, borrow from life. They transform real people and events into something invented, because what is the great subject of art — the only subject, really — if not life itself? This was part of why Larson seemed so unmoved by Dorland’s complaints. Anyone can be inspired by anything. And if you don’t like it, why not write about it yourself?

But to Dorland, this was more than just material. She’d become a public voice in the campaign for live-organ donation, and she felt some responsibility for representing the subject in just the right way. The potential for saving lives, after all, matters more than any story. And yes, this was also her own life — the crystallization of the most important aspects of her personality, from the traumas of her childhood to the transcending of those traumas today. Her proudest moment, she told me, hadn’t been the surgery itself, but making it past the psychological and other clearances required to qualify as a donor. “I didn’t do it in order to heal. I did it because I had healed — I thought.”

The writing world seemed more suspicious to her now. At around the time of her kidney donation, there was another writer, a published novelist, who announced a new book with a protagonist who, in its description, sounded to her an awful lot like the one in “Econoline” — not long after she shared sections of her work in progress with him. That author’s book hasn’t been published, and so Dorland has no way of knowing if she’d really been wronged, but this only added to her sense that the guard rails had fallen off the profession. Beyond unhindered free expression, Dorland thought, shouldn’t there be some ethics? “What do you think we owe one another as writers in community?” she would wonder in an email, several months later, to The Times’s “Dear Sugars” advice podcast. (The show never responded.) “How does a writer like me, not suited to jadedness, learn to trust again after artistic betrayal?”

‘I’m thinking, When did I record my letter with a voice actor? Because this voice actor was reading me the paragraph about my childhood trauma.’

By summer’s end, she and Sonya had forged a fragile truce. “I value our relationship and I regret my part in these miscommunications and misunderstandings,” Larson wrote on Aug. 16, 2016. Not long after, Dorland Googled “kidney” and “Sonya Larson” and a link turned up.

The story was available on Audible — an audio version, put out by a small company called Plympton. Dorland’s dread returned. In July, Larson told her, “I’m still working on the story.” Now here it was, ready for purchase.

She went back and forth about it, but finally decided not to listen to “The Kindest.” When I asked her about it, she took her time parsing that decision. “What if I had listened,” she said, “and just got a bad feeling, and just felt exploited. What was I going to do with that? What was I going to do with those emotions? There was nothing I thought I could do.”

So she didn’t click. “I did what I thought was artistically and emotionally healthy,” she said. “And also, it’s kind of what she had asked me to do.”

Dorland could keep ‘‘The Kindest” out of her life for only so long. In August 2017, the print magazine American Short Fiction published the short story. She didn’t buy a copy. Then in June 2018, she saw that the magazine dropped its paywall for the story. The promo and opening essay on American Short Fiction’s home page had startled her: a photograph of Larson, side-by-side with a shot of the short-fiction titan Raymond Carver. The comparison does make a certain sense: In Carver’s story “Cathedral,” a blind man proves to have better powers of perception than a sighted one; in “The Kindest,” the white-savior kidney donor turns out to need as much salvation as the Asian American woman she helped. Still, seeing Larson anointed this way was, to say the least, destabilizing.

Then she started to read the story. She didn’t get far before stopping short. Early on, Rose, the donor, writes a letter to Chuntao, asking to meet her.

I myself know something of suffering, but from those experiences I’ve acquired both courage and perseverance. I’ve also learned to appreciate the hardship that others are going through, no matter how foreign. Whatever you’ve endured, remember that you are never alone. … As I prepared to make this donation, I drew strength from knowing that my recipient would get a second chance at life. I withstood the pain by imagining and rejoicing in YOU.

Here, to Dorland’s eye, was an echo of the letter she’d written to her own recipient — and posted on her private Facebook group — rejiggered and reworded, yet still, she believed, intrinsically hers. Dorland was amazed. It had been three years since she donated her kidney. Larson had all that time to launder the letter — to rewrite it drastically or remove it — and she hadn’t bothered.

She showed the story’s letter to her husband, Chris, who had until that point given Larson the benefit of the doubt.

“Oh,” he said.

Everything that happened two years earlier, during their email melée, now seemed like gaslighting. Larson had been so insistent that Dorland was being out of line — breaking the rules, playing the game wrong, needing something she shouldn’t even want. “Basically, she’d said, ‘I think you’re being a bad art friend,’” Dorland told me. That argument suddenly seemed flimsy. Sure, Larson had a right to self-expression — but with someone else’s words? Who was the bad art friend now?

Before she could decide what to do, there came another shock. A few days after reading “The Kindest,” Dorland learned that the story was the 2018 selection for One City One Story, a common-reads program sponsored by the Boston Book Festival. That summer, some 30,000 copies of “The Kindest” would be distributed free all around town. An entire major U.S. city would be reading about a kidney donation — with Sonya Larson as the author.

This was when Dawn Dorland decided to push back — first a little, and then a lot. This wasn’t about art anymore; not Larson’s anyway. It was about her art, her letter, her words, her life. She shopped for a legal opinion: Did Larson’s use of that letter violate copyright law? Even getting a lawyer to look into that one little question seemed too expensive. But that didn’t stop her from contacting American Short Fiction and the Boston Book Festival herself with a few choice questions: What was their policy on plagiarism? Did they know they were publishing something that used someone else’s words? She received vague assurances they’d get back to her.

While waiting, she also contacted GrubStreet’s leadership: What did this supposedly supportive, equitable community have to say about plagiarism? She emailed the Bread Loaf writing conference in Vermont, where Larson once had a scholarship: What would they do if one of their scholars was discovered to have plagiarized? On privacy grounds, Bread Loaf refused to say if “The Kindest” was part of Larson’s 2017 application. But Dorland found more groups with a connection to Larson to notify, including the Vermont Studio Center and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers.

When the Boston Book Festival told her they would not share the final text of the story, Dorland went a step further. She emailed two editors at The Boston Globe — wouldn’t they like to know if the author of this summer’s citywide common-reads short story was a plagiarist? And she went ahead and hired a lawyer, Jeffrey Cohen, who agreed she had a claim — her words, her letter, someone else’s story. On July 3, 2018, Cohen sent the book festival a cease-and-desist letter, demanding they hold off on distributing “The Kindest” for the One City One Story program, or risk incurring damages of up to $150,000 under the Copyright Act.

From Larson’s point of view, this wasn’t just ludicrous, it was a stickup. Larson had found her own lawyer, James Gregorio, who on July 17 replied that Dorland’s actions constitute “harassment, defamation per se and tortious interference with business and contractual relations.” Despite whatever similarities exist between the letters, Larson’s lawyer believed there could be no claim against her because, among other reasons, these letters that donors write are basically a genre; they follow particular conventions that are impossible to claim as proprietary. In July, Dorland’s lawyer suggested settling with the book festival for $5,000 (plus an attribution at the bottom of the story, or perhaps a referral link to a kidney-donor site). Larson’s camp resisted talks when they learned that Dorland had contacted The Globe.

‘This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story.'

In reality, Larson was pretty vulnerable: an indemnification letter in her contract with the festival meant that if Dorland did sue, she would incur the costs. What no one had counted on was that Dorland, in late July, would stumble upon a striking new piece of evidence. Searching online for more mentions of “The Kindest,” she saw something available for purchase. At first this seemed to be a snippet of the Audible version of the story, created a year before the American Short Fiction version. But in fact, this was something far weirder: a recording of an even earlier iteration of the story. When Dorland listened to this version, she heard something very different — particularly the letter from the donor.

Dorland’s letter:

Personally, my childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I didn’t have the opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. A positive outcome of my early life is empathy, that it opened a well of possibility between me and strangers. While perhaps many more people would be motivated to donate an organ to a friend or family member in need, to me, the suffering of strangers is just as real.

Larson’s audio version of the story:

My own childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I wasn’t given an opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. But in adulthood that experience provided a strong sense of empathy. While others might desire to give to a family member or friend, to me the suffering of strangers is just as real.

“I almost fell off my chair,” Dorland said. “I’m thinking, When did I record my letter with a voice actor? Because this voice actor was reading me the paragraph about my childhood trauma. To me it was just bizarre.” It confirmed, in her eyes, that Larson had known she had a problem: She had altered the letter after Dorland came to her with her objections in 2016.

Dorland’s lawyer increased her demand to $10,000 — an amount Dorland now says was to cover her legal bills, but that the other side clearly perceived as another provocation. She also contacted her old GrubStreet friends — members of the Chunky Monkeys whom she now suspected had known all about what Larson was doing. “Why didn’t either of you check in with me when you knew that Sonya’s kidney story was related to my life?” she emailed the group’s founders, Adam Stumacher and Jennifer De Leon. Stumacher responded, “I have understood from the start this is a work of fiction.” Larson’s friends were lining up behind her.

In mid-August, Dorland learned that Larson had made changes to “The Kindest” for the common-reads program. In this new version, every similar phrase in the donor’s letter was reworded. But there was something new: At the end of the letter, instead of closing with “Warmly,” Larson had switched it to “Kindly.”

With that one word — the signoff she uses in her emails — Dorland felt trolled. “She thought that it would go to press and be read by the city of Boston before I realized that she had jabbed me in the eye,” Dorland said. (Larson, for her part, told me that the change was meant as “a direct reference to the title; it’s really as simple as that.”) Dorland’s lawyer let the festival know she wasn’t satisfied — that she still considered the letter in the story to be a derivative work of her original. If the festival ran the story, she’d sue.

This had become Sonya Larson’s summer of hell. What had started with her reaching heights she’d never dreamed of — an entire major American city as her audience, reading a story she wrote, one with an important message about racial dynamics — was ending with her under siege, her entire career in jeopardy, and all for what she considered no reason at all: turning life into art, the way she thought that any writer does.

Larson had tried working the problem. When, in June, an executive from the book festival first came to her about Dorland, Larson offered to “happily” make changes to “The Kindest.” “I remember that letter, and jotted down phrases that I thought were compelling, though in the end I constructed the fictional letter to suit the character of Rose,” she wrote to the festival. “I admit, however, that I’m not sure what they are — I don’t have a copy of that letter.” There was a moment, toward the end of July, when it felt as if she would weather the storm. The festival seemed fine with the changes she made to the story. The Globe did publish something, but with little impact.

Then Dorland found that old audio version of the story online, and the weather changed completely. Larson tried to argue that this wasn’t evidence of plagiarism, but proof that she’d been trying to avoid plagiarism. Her lawyer told The Globe that Larson had asked the audio publisher to make changes to her story on July 15, 2016 — in the middle of her first tense back-and-forth with Dorland — because the text “includes a couple sentences that I’d excerpted from a real-life letter.” In truth, Larson had been frustrated by the situation. “She seemed to think that she had ownership over the topic of kidney donation,” Larson recalled in an email to the audio publisher in 2018. “It made me realize that she is very obsessive.”

It was then, in August 2018, facing this new onslaught of plagiarism claims, that Larson stopped playing defense. She wrote a statement to The Globe declaring that anyone who sympathized with Dorland’s claims afforded Dorland a certain privilege. “My piece is fiction,” she wrote. “It is not her story, and my letter is not her letter. And she shouldn’t want it to be. She shouldn’t want to be associated with my story’s portrayal and critique of white-savior dynamics. But her recent behavior, ironically, is exhibiting the very blindness I’m writing about, as she demands explicit identification in — and credit for — a writer of color’s work.”

Here was a new argument, for sure. Larson was accusing Dorland of perverting the true meaning of the story — making it all about her, and not race and privilege. Larson’s friend Celeste Ng agrees, at least in part, that the conflict seemed racially coded. “There’s very little emphasis on what this must be like for Sonya,” Ng told me, “and what it is like for writers of color, generally — to write a story and then be told by a white writer, ‘Actually, you owe that to me.’”

‘I feel instead of running the race herself, she’s standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities.’

But Ng also says this wasn’t just about race; it was about art and friendship. Ng told me that Larson’s entire community believed Dorland needed to be stopped in her tracks — to keep an unreasonable writer from co-opting another writer’s work on account of just a few stray sentences, and destroying that writer’s reputation in the process. “This is not someone that I am particularly fond of,” Ng told me, “because she had been harassing my friend and a fellow writer. So we were quite exercised, I will say.”

Not that it mattered. Dorland would not stand down. And so, on Aug. 13, Deborah Porter, the executive director of the Boston Book Festival, told Larson that One City One Story was canceled for the year. “There is seemingly no end to this,” she wrote, “and we cannot afford to spend any more time or resources.” When the Chunky Monkeys’ co-founder, Jennifer De Leon, made a personal appeal, invoking the white-savior argument, the response from Porter was like the slamming of a door. “That story should never have been submitted to us in the first place,” Porter wrote. “This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story. You owe us an apology.”

Porter then emailed Larson, too. “It seems to me that we have grounds to sue you,” she wrote to Larson. “Kindly ask your friends not to write to us.”

Here, it would seem, is where the conflict ought to end — Larson in retreat, “The Kindest” canceled. But neither side was satisfied. Larson, her reputation hanging by a thread, needed assurances that Dorland would stop making her accusations. Dorland still wanted Larson to explicitly, publicly admit that her words were in Larson’s story. She couldn’t stop wondering — what if Larson published a short-story collection? Or even a novel that spun out of “The Kindest?” She’d be right back here again.

On Sept. 6, 2018, Dorland’s lawyer raised her demand to $15,000, and added a new demand that Larson promise to pay Dorland $180,000 should she ever violate the settlement terms (which included never publishing “The Kindest” again). Larson saw this as an even greater provocation; her lawyer replied three weeks later with a lengthy litany of allegedly defamatory claims that Dorland had made about Larson. Who, he was asking, was the real aggressor here? How could anyone believe that Dorland was the injured party? “It is a mystery exactly how Dorland was damaged,” Larson’s new lawyer, Andrew Epstein, wrote. “My client’s gross receipts from ‘The Kindest’ amounted to $425.”

To Dorland, all this felt intensely personal. Someone snatches her words, and then accuses her of defamation too? Standing down seemed impossible now: How could she admit to defaming someone, she thought, when she was telling the truth? She’d come too far, spent too much on legal fees to quit. “I was desperate to recoup that money,” Dorland told me. She reached out to an arbitration-and-mediation service in California. When Andrew Epstein didn’t respond to the mediator, she considered suing Larson in small-claims court.

On Dec. 26, Dorland emailed Epstein, asking if he was the right person to accept the papers when she filed a lawsuit. As it happened, Larson beat her to the courthouse. On Jan. 30, 2019, Dorland and her lawyer, Cohen, were both sued in federal court, accused of defamation and tortious interference — that is, spreading lies about Larson and trying to tank her career.

There’s a moment in Larson’s short story “Gabe Dove” — also pulled from real life — where Chuntao notices a white family picnicking on a lawn in a park and is awed to see that they’ve all peacefully fallen asleep. “I remember going to college and seeing people just dead asleep on the lawn or in the library,” Larson told me. “No fear that harm will come to you or that people will be suspicious of you. That’s a real privilege right there.”

Larson’s biggest frustration with Dorland’s accusations was that they stole attention away from everything she’d been trying to accomplish with this story. “You haven’t asked me one question about the source of inspiration in my story that has to do with alcoholism, that has to do with the Chinese American experience. It’s extremely selective and untrue to pin a source of a story on just one thing. And this is what fiction writers know.” To ask if her story is about Dorland is, Larson argues, not only completely beside the point, but ridiculous. “I have no idea what Dawn is thinking. I don’t, and that’s not my job to know. All I can tell you about is how it prompted my imagination.” That also, she said, is what artists do. “We get inspired by language, and we play with that language, and we add to it and we change it and we recontextualize it. And we transform it.”

When Larson discusses “The Kindest” now, the idea that it’s about a kidney donation at all seems almost irrelevant. If that hadn’t formed the story’s pretext, she believes, it would have been something else. “It’s like saying that ‘Moby Dick’ is a book about whales,” she said. As for owing Dorland a heads-up about the use of that donation, Larson becomes more indignant, stating that no artist has any such responsibility. “If I walk past my neighbor and he’s planting petunias in the garden, and I think, Oh, it would be really interesting to include a character in my story who is planting petunias in the garden, do I have to go inform him because he’s my neighbor, especially if I’m still trying to figure out what it is I want to say in the story? I just couldn’t disagree more.”

But this wasn’t a neighbor. This was, ostensibly, a friend.

“There are married writer couples who don’t let each other read each other’s work,” Larson said. “I have no obligation to tell anyone what I’m working on.”

By arguing what she did is standard practice, Larson is asking a more provocative question: If you find her guilty of infringement, who’s next? Is any writer safe? “I read Dawn’s letter and I found it interesting,” she told me. “I never copied the letter. I was interested in these words and phrases because they reminded me of the language used by white-savior figures. And I played with this language in early drafts of my story. Fiction writers do this constantly.”

This is the same point her friends argue when defending her to me. “You take a seed, right?” Adam Stumacher said. “And then that’s the starting point for a story. That’s not what the story is about.” This is where “The Kindest” shares something with “Cat Person,” the celebrated 2017 short story in The New Yorker by Kristen Roupenian that, in a recent essay in Slate, a woman named Alexis Nowicki claimed used elements of her life story. That piece prompted a round of outrage from Writer Twitter (“I have held every human I’ve ever met upside down by the ankles,” the author Lauren Groff vented, “and shaken every last detail that I can steal out of their pockets”).

“The Kindest,” however, contains something that “Cat Person” does not: an actual piece of text that even Larson says was inspired by Dorland’s original letter. At some point, Larson must have realized that was the story’s great legal vulnerability. Did she ever consider just pulling it out entirely?

“Yeah, that absolutely was an option,” Larson said. “We could have easily treated the same moment in that story using a phone call, or some other literary device.” But once she made those changes for One City One Story, she said, the festival had told her the story was fine as is. (That version of “The Kindest” ended up in print elsewhere, as part of an anthology published in 2019 by Ohio University’s Swallow Press.) All that was left, she believes, was a smear campaign. “It’s hard for me to see what the common denominator of all of her demands has been, aside from wanting to punish me in some way.”

Dorland filed a counterclaim against Larson on April 24, 2020, accusing Larson of violating the copyright of her letter and intentional infliction of emotional distress — sleeplessness, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, weight loss “and several incidents of self-harm.” Dorland says she’d had some bouts of slapping herself, which dissipated after therapy. (This wasn’t her first lawsuit claiming emotional distress. A few years earlier, Dorland filed papers in small-claims court against a Los Angeles writing workshop where she’d taught, accusing the workshop of mishandling a sexual-harassment report she had made against a student. After requesting several postponements, she withdrew the complaint.) As for her new complaint against Larson, the judge knocked out the emotional-distress claim this past February, but the question of whether “The Kindest” violates Dorland’s copyrighted letter remains in play.

The litigation crept along quietly until earlier this year, when the discovery phase uncorked something unexpected — a trove of documents that seemed to recast the conflict in an entirely new way. There, in black and white, were pages and pages of printed texts and emails between Larson and her writer friends, gossiping about Dorland and deriding everything about her — not just her claim of being appropriated but the way she talked publicly about her kidney donation.

“I’m now following Dawn Dorland’s kidney posts with creepy fascination,” Whitney Scharer, a GrubStreet co-worker and fellow Chunky Monkey, texted to Larson in October 2015 — the day after Larson sent her first draft of “The Kindest” to the group. Dorland had announced she’d be walking in the Rose Bowl parade, as an ambassador for nondirected organ donations. “I’m thrilled to be part of their public face,” Dorland wrote, throwing in a few hashtags: #domoreforeachother and #livingkidneydonation.

Larson replied: “Oh, my god. Right? The whole thing — though I try to ignore it — persists in making me uncomfortable. … I just can’t help but think that she is feeding off the whole thing. … Of course, I feel evil saying this and can’t really talk with anyone about it.”

“I don’t know,” Scharer wrote. “A hashtag seems to me like a cry for attention.”

“Right??” Larson wrote. “#domoreforeachother. Like, what am I supposed to do? DONATE MY ORGANS?”

Among her friends, Larson clearly explained the influence of Dorland’s letter. In January 2016, she texted two friends: “I think I’m DONE with the kidney story but I feel nervous about sending it out b/c it literally has sentences that I verbatim grabbed from Dawn’s letter on FB. I’ve tried to change it but I can’t seem to — that letter was just too damn good. I’m not sure what to do … feeling morally compromised/like a good artist but a shitty person.”

That summer, when Dorland emailed Larson with her complaints, Larson was updating the Chunky Monkeys regularly, and they were encouraging her to stand her ground. “This is all very excruciating,” Larson wrote on July 18, 2016. “I feel like I am becoming the protagonist in my own story: She wants something from me, something that she can show to lots of people, and I’m not giving it.”

“Maybe she was too busy waving from her floating thing at a Macy’s Day parade,” wrote Jennifer De Leon, “instead of, you know, writing and stuff.”

Others were more nuanced. “It’s totally OK for Dawn to be upset,” Celeste Ng wrote, “but it doesn’t mean that Sonya did anything wrong, or that she is responsible for fixing Dawn’s hurt feelings.”

“I can understand the anxiety,” Larson replied. “I just think she’s trying to control something that she doesn’t have the ability or right to control.”

“The first draft of the story really was a takedown of Dawn, wasn’t it?” Calvin Hennick wrote. “But Sonya didn’t publish that draft. … She created a new, better story that used Dawn’s Facebook messages as initial inspiration, but that was about a lot of big things, instead of being about the small thing of taking down Dawn Dorland.”

On Aug. 15, 2016 — a day before telling Dorland, “I value our relationship” — Larson wrote in a chat with Alison Murphy: “Dude, I could write pages and pages more about Dawn. Or at least about this particular narcissistic dynamic, especially as it relates to race. The woman is a gold mine!”

Later on, Larson was even more emboldened. “If she tries to come after me, I will FIGHT BACK!” she wrote Murphy in 2017. Murphy suggested renaming the story “Kindly, Dawn,” prompting Larson to reply, “HA HA HA.”

Dorland learned about the emails — a few hundred pages of them — from her new lawyer, Suzanne Elovecky, who read them first and warned her that they might be triggering. When she finally went through them, she saw what she meant. The Chunky Monkeys knew the donor in “The Kindest” was Dorland, and they were laughing at her. Everything she’d dreaded and feared about raising her voice — that so many writers she revered secretly dismissed and ostracized her; that absolutely no one except her own lawyers seemed to care that her words were sitting there, trapped inside someone else’s work of art; that a slew of people, supposedly her friends, might actually believe she’d donated an organ just for the likes — now seemed completely confirmed, with no way to sugarcoat it. “It’s like I became some sort of dark-matter mascot to all of them somehow,” she said.

But there also was something clarifying about it. Now more than ever, she believes that “The Kindest” was personal. “I think she wanted me to read her story,” Dorland said, “and for me and possibly no one else to recognize my letter.”

Larson, naturally, finds this outrageous. “Did I feel some criticism toward the way that Dawn was posting about her kidney donation?” she said. “Yes. But am I trying to write a takedown of Dawn? No. I don’t care about Dawn.” All the gossiping about Dorland, now made public, would seem to put Larson into a corner. But many of the writer friends quoted in those texts and emails (those who responded to requests for comment) say they still stand behind her; if they were ridiculing Dorland, it was all in the service of protecting their friend. “I’m very fortunate to have friends in my life who I’ve known for 10, 20, over 30 years,” Larson told me. “I do not, and have never, considered Dawn one of them.”

What about the texts where she says that Dorland is behaving just like her character? Here, Larson chose her words carefully. “Dawn might behave like the character in my story,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that the character in my story is behaving like Dawn. I know she’s trying to work through every angle she can to say that I’ve done something wrong. I have not done anything wrong.”

In writing, plagiarism is a straight-up cardinal sin: If you copy, you’re wrong. But in the courts, copyright infringement is an evolving legal concept. The courts are continuously working out the moment when someone’s words cross over into property that can be protected; as with any intellectual property, the courts have to balance the protections of creators with a desire not to stifle innovation. One major help to Dorland, however, is the rights that the courts have given writers over their own unpublished letters, even after they’re sent to someone else. J.D. Salinger famously prevented personal letters from being quoted by a would-be biographer. They were his property, the courts said, not anyone else’s. Similarly, Dorland could argue that this letter, despite having made its way onto Facebook, qualifies.

Let’s say the courts agree that Dorland’s letter is protected. What then? Larson’s main defense may be that the most recent version of the letter in “The Kindest” — the one significantly reworded for the book festival — simply doesn’t include enough material from Dorland’s original to rise to the level of infringement. This argument is, curiously, helped by how Larson has always, when it has come down to it, acknowledged Dorland’s letter as an influence. The courts like it when you don’t hide what you’ve done, according to Daniel Novack, chairman of the New York State Bar Association’s committee on media law. “You don’t want her to be punished for being clear about where she got it from,” he said. “If anything, that helps people find the original work.”

Larson’s other strategy is to argue that by repurposing snippets of the letter in this story, it qualifies as “transformative use,” and could never be mistaken for the original. Arguing transformative use might require arguing that a phrase of Larson’s like “imagining and rejoicing in YOU” has a different inherent meaning from the phrase in Dorland’s letter “imagining and celebrating you.” While they are similar, Larson’s lawyer, Andrew Epstein, argues that the story overall is different, and makes the letter different. “It didn’t steal from the letter,” he told me, “but it added something new and it was a totally different narrative.”

Larson put it more bluntly to me: “Her letter, it wasn’t art! It was informational. It doesn’t have market value. It’s like language that we glean from menus, from tombstones, from tweets. And Dorland ought to know this. She’s taken writing workshops.”

Transformative use most often turns up in cases of commentary or satire, or with appropriation artists like Andy Warhol. The idea is not to have such strong copyright protections that people can’t innovate. While Larson may have a case, one potential wrinkle is a recent federal ruling, just earlier this year, against the Andy Warhol Foundation. An appeals court determined that Warhol’s use of a photograph by Lynn Goldsmith as the basis for his own work of art was not a distinctive enough transformation. Whether Larson’s letter is derivative, in the end, may be up to a jury to decide. Dorland’s lawyer, meanwhile, can point to that 2016 text message of Larson’s, when she says she tried to reword the letter but just couldn’t. (“That letter was just too damn good.”)

“The whole reason they want it in the first place is because it’s special,” Dorland told me. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t bother.”

If anything, the letter, for Dorland, has only grown more important over time. While Larson openly wonders why Dorland doesn’t just write about her donation her own way — “I feel instead of running the race herself, she’s standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities,” Larson told me — Dorland sometimes muses, however improbably, that because vestiges of her letter remain in Larson’s story, Larson might actually take her to court and sue her for copyright infringement if she published any parts of the letter. It’s almost as if Dorland believes that Larson, by getting there first, has grabbed some of the best light, leaving nothing for her.

Last year, as the pandemic set in, Dorland attended three different online events that featured Larson as a panelist. The third one, in August, was a Cambridge Public Library event featuring many of the Chunky Monkeys, gathering online to discuss what makes for a good writing group. “I know virtually all of them,” Dorland said. “It was just like seeing friends.”

Larson, while on camera, learned that Dorland’s name was on the attendees list, and her heart leapt into her throat. Larson’s life had moved on in so many ways. She’d published another story. She and her husband had just had their baby. Now Larson was with her friends, talking about the importance of community. And there was Dorland, the woman who’d branded her a plagiarist, watching her. “It really just freaks me out,” Larson said. “At times I’ve felt kind of stalked.”

Dorland remembers that moment, too, seeing Larson’s face fall, convinced she was the reason. There was, for lack of a better word, a connection. When I asked how she felt in that moment, Dorland was slow to answer. It’s not as if she meant for it to happen, she said. Still, it struck her as telling.

“To me? It seemed like she had dropped the facade for a minute. I’m not saying that — I don’t want her to feel scared, because I’m not threatening. To me, it seemed like she knew she was full of shit, to put it bluntly — like, in terms of our dispute, that she was going to be found out.”

Then Dorland quickly circled back and rejected the premise of the question. There was nothing strange at all, Dorland said, about her watching three different events featuring Larson. She was watching, she said, to conduct due diligence for her ongoing case. And, she added, seeing Larson there seemed to be working for her as a sort of exposure therapy — to defuse the hurt she still feels, by making Larson something more real and less imagined, to diminish the space that she takes up in her mind, in her life.

“I think it saves me from villainizing Sonya,” she wrote me later, after our call. “I proceed in this experience as an artist and not an adversary, learning and absorbing everything, making use of it eventually.”

Robert Kolker is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y. In 2020, his book “Hidden Valley Road” became a selection of Oprah’s Book Club and a New York Times best seller. His last article for the magazine was about the legacy of Jan Baalsrud, the Norwegian World War II hero.

Correction: Oct. 6, 2021

An earlier version of this article misstated the GrubStreet writing center's action after Dorland's initial questions about potential plagiarism. It did reply; it's not the case that she received no response. The article also misstated Dorland’s thoughts on what could happen if she loses the court case. Dorland said she fears that Larson would be able to sue her for copyright infringement should she publish her letter to the end recipient of the kidney donation chain. It is not the case that she said she fears that Larson might be able to sue her for copyright infringement should she write anything about organ donation.

#emmie this for you

[miraculousfanworks]

Miraculous Fanworks’ Grammar Guide: Commas

Image credit.

Grammar. It’s confusing, isn’t it? English has so many rules to follow!

Well, worry no more. We here at the Miraculous Fanworks Discord server have got your back.

Here is the first section of the Miraculous Fanworks’ Grammar Guide, 24 Hard and Fast Rules for Commas--Miraculous Fanworks Style! 

I just want to preface this by saying that it’s okay to break grammar rules in fiction writing for stylistic choices. Especially in dialogue.

But in order to intentionally break rules or guidelines, you have to recognize what they are and learn when it’s best to break them.

The Miraculous Fanworks’ Grammar Guide is a collection of basic rules of grammar and writing tips condensed into a single document, with examples from our very own Miraculous Ladybug.

If you have suggestions for the guide, feel free to join the server, DM me directly on Discord at @Cass6177, or drop a suggestion in my inbox.

Thanks, and enjoy!

-”Server Mom” Cass Maylis

24 Hard and Fast Rules for Commas--Miraculous Fanworks Style

1) Commas are all about authorial intent and indicate pauses. Basic rule of thumb: if your sentence needs too many commas, it needs to be rewritten and you probably have clauses in it that should be sentences on their own.

2) Never use a comma after "but" if it's the beginning of a sentence. This is actually because of commas as a clause separator. "But" can serve as a transition word to contrast against the previous sentence (this actually has some open grammatical questions as to whether or not it's completely precise), or it can be used in the middle of a sentence to conjoin two clauses. In the second case, you use a comma to separate the two clauses, but in the first case there is no clause to separate.

3) Using a comma before but in the middle of a sentence is only acceptable when the second phrase can stand on its own. For example, you wouldn't use a comma here: "Marinette was happy but also sad," because the second part isn't a complete sentence. But you would use a comma here: "Marinette was happy, but she was also sad," because the pronoun makes the second part of the sentence stand on its own. A sentence that can stand on its own is called an independent clause. This rule of thumb also applies to "and" and "or."

4) You need a comma before the word "too" if the word needs emphasized or requires a pause before and after it. Like, “Marinette, too, was Adrien." The commas are needed because the too interrupts the flow of the sentence. If the two doesn't come in the middle but at the end, then a comma isn't needed. Like, "Marinette liked bananas too." Too is all about authorial intent.

4a) From C-Note#9640: Commas surrounding "too" is actually a meaning thing. "Too" without commas means "in excess." ",too," with commas surrounding it means "also."

5) You always use commas to separate out things in a list. But how many to use and where to use them are subjects of contention. For example, in the sentence, "Marinette liked red, green, and blue," I place a comma after the word green and some people do not. This comma immediately before the “and” is called the Oxford comma, and it drives a lot of people up the wall. People get into fights over this, haha! I like to use them because it separates the words in my head. For example, someone saying, "Adrien owes $100 to Nino, Alya, and Chloe," makes the $100 owed to each of them. Whereas saying, "Adrien owes $100 to Nino, Alya and Chloe," makes Adrien owe Nino $100, and Adrien owes Alya and Chloe some other numbers making up 100, like 50/50. This is why I go to bat for the Oxford comma.

5a) Addendum to guideline 5: Lists are complicated, because you need a comma with three items but not two. Like, "Marinette likes red and green" does not need a comma, but "Marientte likes red, green, and blue" needs commas.

6) You need a comma before a dialogue tag unless you’re using an exclamation point or a question mark (or dashes, which indicate an interruption; more on that later). For example, “‘What?’ Marinette exclaimed” does not need a comma, where as “‘You have got to be kitten me,’ Chat said” does. Dialogue tags are also called attributive tags. They can even come in the middle of the sentence, in which case you need commas. For example: “‘You,’ Chat said, ‘have got to be kitten me.’”

6a) You need a comma after the word said or a dialogue tag if you're using a gerund (ing word). For example, "'Haha,' Marinette laughed, wrinkling her nose," needs a comma. But "'Haha,' Marinette laughed as she wrinkled her nose" does not need a comma. Does that make sense?

6b) In American English, commas always go before closing quotation marks. For example, “‘No freaking way,’ Marientte said,” requires a comma inside. But in British English, the convention is the opposite; the comma goes after the closing quotation mark. For example, “‘No freaking way’, Marinette said.” If you are writing for a British audience, use a comma after the closing quotation mark.

7) Using a comma after then is complicated. Here are some examples for sentences using the word then: http://sentence.yourdictionary.com/then

8) There are also things called compound predicates. From Grammarly, "You get a compound predicate when the subject of a sentence is doing more than one thing. In a compound predicate that contains two verbs, don’t separate them with a comma." For example, "Marinette smiled and waved" does not need a comma. But "Marinette spotted the man who entered the diner, and waved" does need a comma because we want to make sure the reader knows that Marinette waved, not the man. Make sure your reader doesn't misread.

9) Comma splices are interesting, too. When you're trying to join two independent clauses, you need a conjunction or a semi-colon. For example, "We were out of milk, I went to the store" is incorrect. You need, "We were out of milk; I went to the store," or "We were out of milk, so I went to the store."

10) Participial phrases that introduce a sentence usually need a comma. For example, "Grabbing her umbrella, Marinette left the house."

11) Interrupters and parenthetical phrases need commas. Interrupters are used to show tone or emotion. Like, "Marinette, sadly, went to camp." Parenthetical phrases are little pieces of information that don't affect the sentence as a whole, but give information. Like, "Adrien’s cooking skills, if you can call them skills, left something to be desired."

11a) Em dashes are interesting, because they're used to set off parenthetical phrases. If you use an em dash, you have to accept that what you place inside the em dashes is skippable. The sentence still has to make sense without the information contained inside the em dash. To use Treees' example from before (or something like it), "Adrien's car--a blue van--was a junkheap." The bit about the blue van is bonus information that the sentence doesn't need. But you also don't need an em dash in that sentence, a comma will do. As a good rule of thumb, em dashes are used when the bonus information phrase is super long. From Fight: "As soon as they were inside--a process Chat didn’t even pay attention to; one moment he was outside on her balcony, in the next he was standing in front of her on the floor of her room--Ladybug dropped her transformation."

12) From Grammarly: "A question tag is a short phrase or even a single word that is added to the end of a statement to turn it into a question. Writers often use question tags to encourage readers to agree with them. A question tag should be preceded by a comma." For example, "I think question tags are silly, don't you?"

13) When addressing someone by name, use a comma. For example, "Marinette, find your shoes." But not, "Marinette doesn't understand her letters yet."

14) From Grammarly: "An appositive is a word or phrase that refers to the same thing as another noun in the same sentence. Often, the appositive provides additional information about the noun or helps to distinguish it in some way." Appositives that are necessary for the sentence to function are called essential and do not need a comma, whereas unnecessary appositives are non-essential and need a comma. An essential appositive would be "Edgar Allen Poe's work The Raven is neat." The Raven is the essential appositive to the noun work. A nonessential appositive example is this: "My mother, Sabine, is a great cook." Sabine is the non-essential appositive to the word mother and needs a comma.

15) Commas in dates are tricky. Month-day-year formats need commas. "June 15, 2020." Day-month-year formats do not. "15 June 2020." If you are using a day of the week and a date, use a comma. "Tuesday, June 15, at three o'clock, ..." When referencing only a month or a year, you don’t need a comma. “June 2020.”

16) When using multiple adjectives to modify a noun, they might be coordinate, which means they are interchangeable and should be separated by commas. If a sentence still sounds natural (rhythm-wise) then the adjectives are coordinate. For example, “That man is a self-righteous, pompous, annoying idiot” vs. “That man is an annoying, self-righteous, pompous idiot.” If adjectives are not coordinate, don’t separate them with a comma. “The adorable little boy ate ice cream.” Little adorable doesn’t sound natural because of rhythm, so don’t use a comma to separate the non-coordinate adjectives.

17) Don’t separate a transitive verb from its direct object with a comma. A transitive verb is one that acts on an object. Similarly, an intransitive verb is one that doesn’t act on an object. Intransitive: “Marinette eats.” Transitive: “Marinette eats food.” Food is the object, so don’t separate the verb (eats) from the object with commas. Intransitive: “Adrien cleans often.” Transitive: “Adrien cleans his bathroom often.” Bathroom is the object being acted upon, so don’t separate the verb (cleans) from the object with commas.

18) From Grammarly: “A nonrestrictive clause offers extra information about something you have mentioned in a sentence, but the information isn’t essential to identify the thing you’re talking about. Nonrestrictive clauses are usually introduced by which or who and should be set off by commas.” For example, “The Agreste manor, which Adrien lived in, was freaking huge.” The clause, “which Adrien lived in,” is nonrestrictive because “Agreste manor” is already specific. The clause doesn’t add anything to the sentence; it’s just bonus information.

19) Opposite from nonrestrictive clauses are restrictive clauses. Restrictive clauses offer necessary information about the specific noun you used. They are often introduced by that or who and are never set off by commas. For example, “The bakery that Marinette’s family runs is fantastic.” If you removed the clause about the Dupain-Cheng family, you’d have no idea what bakery this was talking about.

20) From Grammarly: “Correlative conjunctions are conjunctions that come in pairs (such as either/or, neither/nor, and not only/but also) and connect words or phrases in a sentence to form a complete thought. Typically, commas are unnecessary with correlative conjunctions.” For example, “Either the black undershirt or the red sweater will look good with your jeans, Adrien.”

21) Parenthetical asides are used to give bonus info to the reader when a nonrestrictive clause would disrupt the flow of the sentence. Commas are placed after the closing parentheses, but not before either the opening or the closing parentheses. If the sentence would not require any commas if the parenthetical statement were removed, the sentence should not have any commas when the parentheses are added. For example, “After opening the new cookie tin (and eating several of the cookies), Adrien had a hard time replacing the lid.”

22) Don’t use a comma between an article  and a noun. An article is a part of speech that indicates, specifies, and limits a noun (eg. a, an, or the in English). Incorrect: “I’ll eat an, apple.” Correct: “I’ll eat an apple.” Often times we pause when speaking and want to add a comma there in our writing to indicate the pause, but this is grammatically incorrect. If you want to indicate a pause between an article and a noun, use an ellipses: “I’ll eat an… apple.”

23) The phrase “as well as” doesn’t need commas unless it’s part of a nonrestrictive clause. For example, “Adrien wore a white overshirt as well as a black undershirt.” And also, “Adrien’s black undershirt, as well as his white overshirt, were garments he wore.”

24) The phrase “such as” requires a comma if it introduces a nonrestrictive clause. For example, “Coniferous trees, such as pine and spruce, smell great.” But if it introduces a restrictive clause, omit the comma. For example, “Trees such as pine and spruce smell great.”

#mod: cass #guide

[moonlitgleek]

On Account of Her Womanhood

I started this post over two months ago with the hope that it would help me work through my iffy feelings on Fire and Blood, namely how much I dislike the way many of the female characters are written in this book and how it repeats and expands on some unsavory elements of GRRM’s narrative that have been broadly noted in fandom across multiple books. But a closer look only increased my frustration with this book for how it underlined several of Martin’s problematic patterns when it comes to writing women but in a more condensed form this time, perhaps due to the nature of the medium. The history book form of F&B focuses these recurring problems and offers little to offset or challenge them that the authorial issue of casual and uncritical misogynistic writing feels more pervasive. It may be that Martin tried to address at least one aspect that’s been criticized before, but I remain disquieted with how he largely traded one issue for another.

Whatever the case, I think that a writer of Martin’s caliber and with his affinity for interrogating and examining traditional genre tropes can and should do better than this uncritical use of misogynistic writing that he not only leaves to stand unchallenged, but actively leans into. In this depressingly long post, I’ll address some of the problems that jumped out at me while reading. Feel free to add any I may have overlooked.

Objectification and the categorical sexualization of female bodies:

One of the most noticeable trends I found in F&B is how distinctly different it treats male and female bodies. While there may be plenty of overlapping, there is a decidedly heavier focus on sex in women’s stories. Too many stories witnesses a woman’s ultimate fate incorporate a sexual component, often violent and/or fatal, that is if the story isn’t completely built on sexual appetites or escapades. Fire and Blood dives into the personal lives of its characters far more than its cousin The World of Ice and Fire, and that has translated to a lot of sex. That is not inherently a bad thing, but F&B is also notably heavier on female characters so it’s really conspicuous that the number of women goes up in direct proportion to the increase in cases of sexualization and sex stories.

To put it mildly, women’s stories are drenched in sex, to the point where I’ve compiled a list in my initial notes under the title “Gyladyn is a Pervert” due to the sheer amount of unsolicited, unnecessary and disturbingly detailed accounts of women’s sexual experiences. You’d be hard pressed to go one chapter without focus being given to minute details of women’s sex lives which sometimes spans whole pages of the text. It’s primarily the women who get framed through a sexual lens in this book, especially in instances where the female characters don’t even get a story that is not based on their sexual history. Sexuality is not just one aspect of a woman’s personality like it is for the men, it is the core of her entire characterization. Far too many Targaryen ladies get that treatment, along with a myriad of other women. I chose some examples to discuss, but they are but a drop in the total number of characters receiving that treatment.

Coryanne Wylde

Lady Coryanne’s story is the most infamous examples of a gratuitous sex tale that doesn’t serve any real purpose in the narrative, but not only does it occupy way too much space in Gyldayn’s writing, he goes on to describe in excruciating detail the violation and abuse of a young girl while consistently blaming her for it. For all that Gyldayn keeps saying that we need not concern ourselves with the sordid details of A Caution For Young Girls, we get to hear quite a lot about Coryanne’s sexual history.

Coryanne’s entire narrative derives from sex. She gets no other story and no other characterization. Her voice and actions are filtered through the opinions and assumptions of various maesters. Her body is presented as an object for more powerful and/or older men to use and abuse, and the one spin of her story that affords her some figment of agency (i.e, the take that Coryanne taught Jaehaerys how to have sex because she became fond of him and Alysanne) deliberately minimizes how dysfunctional her entire situation is and neglects to reflect her real age and experiences by casting her as someone with more carnal knowledge and the ability to teach Jaehaerys about sex. Keep in mind that Coryanne’s so-called sexual "knowledge” has been exclusively through rape.

I read to what amounts to one quarter of a chapter about Coryanne Wylde but I still have no idea who this girl was. What I do know is way too much information about her sexual history and the men who took advantage of her.

Rhaena Targaryen

Rhaena is luckier than Coryanne in the sense that her characterization doesn’t derive solely from her sexuality and her story is more nuanced and layered. However, not only does Rhaena’s sexuality remain the underlying factor in her narrative, it’s kinda absurd how the narrative ties itself into knots trying to justify the inclusion of rumors about how Rhaena lost her virginity to a lowborn lover whose identity is debated, even though the information presented thus far by the in-universe author contradicts the very premise of those rumors or even the reasoning presented as the cause for discussing those rumors. The whispers of Rhaena’s so-called affair is preceded by rather strong hints of Rhaena’s preference of women; though that does not necessarily preclude the possibility of her liking men too as her reported affection for her brother Aegon suggests, it’s that affection and the note about how Rhaena and Aegon grew up expecting and welcoming their eventual nuptials that makes Rhaena’s supposed loss of virginity to a random guy all the more weird. Too, it’s been noted previously that Rhaena neither encouraged nor entertained any of her many suitors and instead preferred the company of her siblings, dragon and her latest favorite Alayne Royce. So for rumors to exist about her having a raunchy affair with some lowborn guy she met while dragonriding is not only random but baseless. Where did these rumors come from if there is nothing in Rhaena’s history to either trigger or support them?

The reasoning the narrative gives us for those rumors is to explain Rhaena and Aegon’s marriage, since Aenys was supposedly driven to marry Rhaena off as soon as possible in light of these rumors. However, reports of Rhaena and Aegon’s closeness and their expectation to wed, as well as the Targaryen incestuous tradition more than explains the match and Aenys’ decision, especially since Rhaena and Aegon were well-within the normal age for marriage in Westeros. There is nothing weird about this match that warrants an obscure affair to explain. Which only serves to illustrate the oddity of this unsolicited commentary on Rhaena’s virginity. Those rumors stand as a random tangent about a subject that no one should care about in the context of the story. Who cares whether Rhaena was a virgin or not when she married Aegon? What possible effect did her virginity or possible lack thereof have on the narrative for it to be included? The way this story is handled, Rhaena’s sexual agency is there to serve as a matter of intrigue, speculation and scandal when there is no fathomable reason for that to happen, not to mention that it makes Rhaena’s dynastic role as the expected future queen dependent on the expression of her sexuality.

Alyssa Targaryen

Full disclosure: I hate how Jaehaerys and Alysanne’s daughters are written and how sex is the make of their stories. That’s the case for five of the seven daughters they had, and it is infuriating. Is this the best you could come up with for the daughters of the best Targaryen queen Westeros has seen, GRRM? Sex, dead (Daenerys), septa (Maegelle who is clever and reconciled her parents, that’s mostly it) and barely mentioned (if you count Jocelyn Baratheon) are the only options?

The characterization of Princess Alyssa starts off promising enough with information about her personality, her unladylike interests and her closeness to her brother Baelon, but quickly devolves to be solely about sex. We literally do not hear one word from Alyssa’s mouth that is not about sex. Her story is a tale about how she loved sex, had sex, joked about sex and shrieked during sex. For all the narrative says that Alyssa was brave and irrepressible, it reduces her to someone whose sole purpose and sole story focus is sex. Alyssa Targaryen exists to have sex with Baelon and give birth to Viserys and Daemon before conveniently dying of complications after birthing her third son.

Alyssa’s story is not only symptomatic of the incessant sexualization in this book but of the recurring misogynistic problem of reducing women to their sexuality and fertility. Alyssa’s function in the story becomes intrinsically tied to both since the narrative never bothers to give her anything outside of her sex life. What non-sexual tidbits we get are either dismissed or glossed over. This is a princess who reportedly delighted in dragonriding, followed her brothers to the training yard and eschewed ladylike activities but for some reason, she responds to Baelon’s statement about how his bravery in battles does not measure to her own in giving birth by telling him that he was made for battles and she was made for childbirth. What even is that?

Alyssa Targaryen is a woman of whom Septon Barth said: “Alyssa may be all her mother is and more”, but we never get any elaboration on that. Instead we get to know about how Alyssa’s sounds of pleasure echoed through the Red Keep on a regular basis and how she constantly wanted to have sex.

Saera Targaryen

Dear god, is this an optimal example of how this book centers women’s characterization on their sexuality. Saera’s story is that she had sex with her companions and Jaehaerys punished her for having sex with her companions, which filters all aspects of her personality through a sexual lens by the narrative. It’s rather pointed that everything we know of Saera’s childhood is almost exclusively negative with a clear vibe of presenting her behavior as an escalating problem that reaches its peak when she has sex. It felt like Saera’s entire characterization up to when her sexual relations are discovered is one long build-up to that point of discovery. Saera’s “appetites” are remarked upon since she is literally a baby in a rather clear attempt to underscore her later actions when those appetites turned sexual. This is not simply a matter of hindsight coloring perception of Saera too, given how Maetser Elysar’s comments about how Saera “wants what she wants and she wants it now” are dated to 69 AC, when Saera was all of two. That gives the feel that Saera’s sexuality was the fulcrum that the rest of her characterization was build on, which certainly explains why her sexual affairs are framed as an extension of her previous bad behavior.

Daella Targaryen

Oh but this is a lesson in frustration. Daella's story doesn’t drip of sex like her sister Saera, but even when she is not unbearably sexualized, sex is still a primary filter that Gyldayn uses to shape our perception of her as this childlike frightened figure who apparently had no interests and no purpose in life other than needing comfort, and who wouldn’t talk to boys because she was frightened.

The text infantilizes Daella to such an extent that her disinterest in men who had no interest in her (Corlys Velaryon), who tried to force her into drinking (Simon Staunton) and who sexually assaulted her (Ellard Crane) is treated as a fault in Daella. Her entire story is about her parents’ ardent efforts to find a husband for her, a pursuit so irksome to Jaehaerys that he mandates that Daella must marry within the year when she approaches 16, in a conversation that introduces a rather needless sexual component in how Jaehaerys talks about Daella when he suggests lining a hundred naked men before his not-yet-16 year old daughter so she could pick one to marry. The story also seems to treat Daella’s later refusal of a bedding ceremony as a childish quirk that Rodrik Arryn indulged “his precious princess” in.

It might be a different facet of how a woman’s sexuality is used to define her than the previous cases, but it remains that Daella is treated as a sexual object by both the characters and the narrative in their dismay of how she doesn’t fit the traditional mold of womanly behavior and sexual mores in Westeros. It’s as if Daella is looked down upon for not having a sexual history.

Baela Targaryen

Wild, willful and wanton are the three words used to describe Baela Targaryen. It honestly boggles the mind that a character that has so much going for her gets introduced through a sexual situation. One of our first glimpses of Baela’s agency comes through the mention of her playing kissing games with squires followed by that one time she was found with a kitchen scullion who had his hand inside her jerkin. It’s especially notable to see how Baela’s willfulness (and unladylike behavior) is tied time and again to her sexuality and her interest in boys, which is very clear when Gyldayn talks about her unsuitable pets that she brought back to the Red Keep, a mention that is immediately followed by how her septa - who was in charge of Baela’s “moral instructions” - despaired of her and how Septon Eustace spoke of the need for her to wed immediately.

(Side note: I found the language of that paragraph so weird. It carries a heavy suggestion that Baela may have been involved sexually with her so-called pets, makes fun of her intelligence and suggests that she may or may have not been involved with the twin female prostitutes that the text then links to her own sister because they were twins “like us, Rhae” in Baela’s own words. There is a lot going on in that paragraph that I don’t know what to do with. Is Gyldayn trying to imply that Baela had sex with all of these people, including an entire trope of mummers and two girls that she explicitly connected to herself and her sister? Because he is certainly insinuating so, and I have been burned by this book enough already to assume good intentions).

Nettles

Instead of basing her characterization on it, how about we use a woman’s sexuality to undermine her accomplishments just to shake things up? Here’s a girl who relied on her intelligence instead of a pedigree to tame a dragon and succeeded in becoming a dragonrider, but her taming of Sheepstealer gets prefaced by a statement about how “worse was yet to come with dire consequences for the Seven Kingdoms” to preemptively blame Nettles for Rhaenyra’s own brutality and Daemon’s subsequent abandonment of her cause (a statement not made any better by talking about how “the power young maidens exert over older men is well-known” when discussing Daemon’s affair with Nettles as if to cast her as a seductress), and that’s when her dragontaming is not getting framed as something she traded sex for as suggested by Gyldayn’s speculation about how she traded sex for the sheep she fed Sheepstealer. He makes sure to treat us to his thoughts on the state of Nettles’ virginity when she began her affair with Daemon while he is at it as well.

Helaena Targaryen & Alicent Hightower

Straining logic to add a sexual rumor is a personal favorite of mine. Look, Gyldayn may be less zealous and less outrageous than Septon Eustace in his bias towards Aegon II, but he is still clearly biased towards him. He writes about him with a degree of sympathy not present in his writing of Rhaenyra and he goes out of his way to undermine events that may paint Rhaenyra in a better light while arguing against rumors that paint the greens as (more) monstrous. How convenient it is, then, for that bias to fail when it comes to discussing the rumor about how the teenage Alicent may have slept with both Viserys I before Aemma’s death and the elderly Jaehaerys I when she was his caretaker, a rumor that Gyldayn seems disinclined to believe (or so he claims) but more than willing to wink at its possible accuracy through a comment about how Alicent strangely spoke often of the Old King in her final hours but not of her late husband.

To add insult to injury, we’re also treated to a rumor about how Rhaenyra, on the behest of Mysaria, may have forcibly prostituted Alicent and Helaena in what comes to be referred to as the Brothel Queens. Spending time on a rumor that casts Rhaenyra in a bad light at least falls in line with Gyldayn’s biases, but it strains logic to have Mushroom be the source of that rumor. Why would a guy who loved Rhaenyra well as Gyldayn says perpetuate a rumor that casts Rhaenyra in such a monstrous light? It seems like the logic of this amounts to “Mushroom delights in sex tales and perverse rumors so he was the obvious choice” which doesn’t account for Mushroom’s feelings or biases (and which is problematic in its own way - do you think I missed that the two vulgar books that are widely quoted in this work were written by a woman and a dwarf, GRRM? Do you think I missed that the implication here is that Mushroom’s sexual perversions are prioritized over his depiction as a person who liked Rhaenyra?)

The Brothel Queens rumor adds nothing to the narrative but another case of unnecessary sexualization. Gyldayn ultimately rejects that rumor as false but I question the need to include it in the first place. Is it there to perhaps inform us that the public view of Rhaenyra was so bad at this point that people were inclined to not only believe in but also manufacture rumors about her monstrosity? Having one of Rhaenyra’s supporters as the accredited source of that rumor flies in the face of that, and narratively speaking, this doesn’t accomplish anything that the latter rumor about how Rhaenyra sent Maelor’s head to Helaena in a chamber pot - which is clearly framed as evidence of how much the public opinion on Rhaenyra has soured - doesn’t. So why is this pesky rumor there and what purpose does it have beyond showing us that Gyldayn is all too willing to spend his time discussing every sexual rumor under the sun?

As I’ve said, these examples are but a few of the number of women needlessly and excessively sexualized in this book. I have more on my list but talking about every story separately is going to make this post longer than it already is, not to mention be unbearably repetitive because many of them bear the same elements of having our knowledge of these women centered almost exclusively on their sex lives and their presence in the text reduced to their sexuality. Gael Targaryen was seduced, gave birth and died. Sara Snow's is a contrived and downright illogical story that only exists so she could have sex with Jace either as his wife or a fling. All Viserra Targaryen gets to do is pit boys against each other for her favor and try unsuccessfully to seduce her brother Baelon. Aliandra Martell is there to entertain men and possibly sleep with Alyn Velaryon to the displeasure of her siblings (psst, GRRM, your depiction of the Dornish, especially Dornish women, continues to be atrocious and this book does nothing to deconstruct the stereotype of them as violent hypersexual people). The questions Gyldayn ponders while discussing Tess killing Dalton Greyjoy include ones about her virginity and her physical beauty. Rue - one of two female writers in the book, the other supposedly being Coryanne Wylde - is there to write a vulgar account about Alyn Velaryon who she may or may not have slept with.  The list goes on and on.

Sexualizing the mundane:

The hypersexualized treatment of women bodies is so overwhelming in this book that it extends to ordinary stuff like nursing and pregnancy, both of which get weirdly graphic and gross descriptions in Alys Rivers’ story when she puts her pregnancy with Aemond’s child as “I can feel his fire licking at my womb” while her wetnursing is described as “the milk that flowed abundantly from the breasts of Alys Rivers”. Not even death or description of women’s death throes is spared that sexual aspect. While Princess Aerea is getting cooked from within in a horrifying portrait of suffering and agony, the fact that smoke is emanating from her vagina gets described as obscene, even though smoke is coming from every other body orifice. Meria Martell gets the rumor that she was coupling with a stallion at the time of her death. Rhaenyra’s breast is prickled to rouse Sunfyre.

Even in death, women’s bodies are treated as sexual objects. Mysaria’s horrific death via scourging has a sexualized dimension in how her body is put on display in her agony as she gets whipped while being paraded naked despite her crimes not being sexual in nature. To be fair, both Septon Bernard and Lysaro Rogare also get sexual punishments for non-sexual crimes, but the notable difference between them and Mysaria is that Lady Misery gets narrative focus on her “pale white body” while dying. (Mysaria’s fate is also too contrived in a way that Bernard’s and Lysaro’s aren’t but that’s only relevant here for how it appears like the narrative conspired to have her caught by that specific mob so she could get such a punishment). Even immolation gets a gendered and sexualized tint because when it’s women burning, they obviously get to “dance in gowns of fire, naked and lewd underneath the flames”. The thrashing of someone burning is apparently “lewd” if it’s a woman. Women’s suffering get inexplicably beautified (dance in gowns of fire) and sexualized, and somehow they are blamed for it because they are being lewd by thrashing in agony.

Child brides

Let’s start with their number, shall we?

Alyssa Velaryon, 15

Larissa Velaryon, between 12 and 14

Alysanne Targaryen, 13

Alyssa Targaryen, 15

Aemma Arryn, 11

Helaena Targaryen, 13

Elinor Costayne, exact age unclear but younger than 16

Floris Baratheon, 14\15

Unwin Peake’s unnamed daughter, 11\12

The Northern blacksmith’s daughter whose story Alysanne cited to ban the first night, 14.

Daenaera Velaryon, 6

Jaehaera Targaryen, 8

This list doesn’t account for those who were meant to be child brides but ultimately weren’t because of external circumstances. Cassandra Baratheon hadn’t yet flowered in 129 but she was going to marry Aegon II immediately in 131 when she was between 13 and 15. Viserra Targaryen was being shipped off to wed at 15. Myrielle Peake (14) was touted as a suitable queen for Aegon III because she could get pregnant immediately. Prudence and Prunella Celtigar were offered by their father for Maegor to immediately wed at 12 and 13 (at a time when Maegor had just murdered two wives, btw), Jaehaerys Targaryen made ardent effort to marry off Daella as young as 13 and mandated she marry by 16. And those are only the marital relationships that involve young girls, but the inherent issues of child brides exist in cases of non-marital sexual relationships like Marlida of Hull’s with Corlys Velaryon when Marlida was 15 if not younger, or Rhaenyra Targaryen’s “training” by her uncle Daemon at 14.

So what’s the problem?

This has been a subject of debate for a long, long time, whether in terms of its actual historical inaccuracy despite GRRM’s claim to the contrary, or of its defiance of Martin’s own Word of God. Margaret Beaufort is an example that has been brought up repeatedly to justify the broad inclusion of child brides in ASOIAF but while Margaret did give birth aged 13, the severe physical toll that took on her not only rendered her sterile but was a main reason she argued vehemently against her granddaughter being wed young too. But Martin only reflects the first part of the story while steadfastly ignoring the second part. Oh, it’s true that F&B acknowledges that the in-universe characters know that bedding young girls has severe and often fatal health risks, but that knowledge is either dismissed or categorically ignored.

The most outrageous example of that comes from the story of Daella Targaryen. In what could have worked as a way for the narrative to call out the problems entrenched in the concept of child brides, Gyldayn notes that Queen Alysanne blamed herself and King Jaehaerys for marrying Princess Daella too young when her physical constitution made pregnancy dangerous and indeed ultimately fatal for her. But rather than working as a resounding rebuff, the way this plot is handled makes it stick out instead as an oblique attempt for the author to say “see, I said it was bad!” rather than a serious condemnation of that constant trend. It’s a throwaway line without the commitment to showing that this information changed anything in-universe or was even allowed to stand as a clear, if a late and woefully limited, condemnation of the narrative’s over-reliance on child brides. Rather, Alysanne’s justifiable condemnation is promptly undermined by how it is immediately tied to her grief over Daella’s death with the clear aim to paint Alysanne’s deduction as an emotional - and thusly not rational - response which in turn dismisses her completely justified assessment.

Still, I might have only ascribed this to Gyldayn’s own misogyny if only that statement hadn’t been soundly forgotten by everyone in-universe, apparently including Alysanne herself. This incident appears to have come and gone with no visible effect on the main participants’ actions - it sure doesn’t look like either Rodrik Arryn nor Jaehaerys Targaryen learned one damn thing considering they go on to sign off on Aemma Arryn’s marriage at age 11, at a time when Queen Alysanne goes mysteriously silent on the subject. That is further compounded by how Alysanne herself comes to arrange for the 15-year-old Viserra to wed only four years after Daella’s death.

Be sure to give it up for the maesters’ (painfully casual) assessment that Aemma’s childbearing issues were because she was bedded too young though, it sure had as much impact on the narrative as Alysanne’s own statement years earlier, considering the numerous girls who would go on to be child brides, including Viserys I’s own daughter Helaena. Despite strong evidence of the risk of forcing girls into sex and pregnancy at an early age and despite the narrative’s own admission to it, it remains a regular occurrence to see teen girls married off (often with no pressing reason) and giving birth way too young without any kind of explanation as to why their guardians would think it a splendid idea.

Also a story where the text came close to properly addressing the core issue of child brides is that of Alysanne Targaryen. The narrative initially touches upon the issue of the inherent sexualization of child brides with Alysanne’s story, but somehow still ends up reaffirming how young girls tend to be regarded through a sexual gaze in Westeros. Gyldayn goes to great lengths in trying to differentiate between Jaehaerys and Alysanne’s nuptials and consummation, and that of your average Westerosi child bride where girls get no agency in the matches made for them, often to much older men who have no qualms about having sex with actual children. By contrast, Alysanne is shown as an architect of her marriage to Jaehaerys, actively going to him to curtail her betrothal to Orryn Baratheon and pushing for their marriage to be consummated so that no one could set it aside. Alysanne’s ability to consent in a match that she pursued to a similarly-aged boy is starkly different from what we typically see in matches with child brides, which is then affirmed by Jaehaerys’ recognition that Alysanne is too young for the marriage to be consummated after their first wedding, and her own advocacy for consummation later despite Jaehaerys’ lingering hesitance. So far, so good. It is another instance of a child bride but it’s used to add commentary about the inherent problematic elements of it rather than being presented in an abstract manner and left to stand unchallenged.

But not only is the commentary we can glean from this story undermined by Jaehaerys’ own actions with his daughters and granddaughter later, it is further diminished by the constant insistence to sexualize Alysanne. Gyldayn deems it necessary to tell us of how Jaehaerys and Alysanne slept naked, gives us servant gossip about the long lingering kisses they shared and inserts an offhand rumor about how Jaehaerys might have invited Alysanne to the bed he supposedly shared with Coryanne Wylde to “frolic with them in episodes most often associated with the infamous pleasure houses of Lys”, persisting in referring to Alysanne as “the little queen” throughout. That insistent sexualization of Alysanne contextualizes the mention of Jaehaerys’ refusal to consummate the marriage to be an attempt from the author-character to make Jaehaerys look good, rather than an attempt to offer any kind of critique to the custom of deflowering too-young maidens. It does, however, fall right in line with Gyldayn’s tendency to dedicate an ordinate amount of space to comment on the sex lives of teen girls. Which brings me to:

The hypersexualization of young girls

One can not go through this book without taking notice of how absolutely obsessed Gyldayn is with the sex lives and sex appeal of teen girls. Too much of this book is spent discussing, speculating on and pondering rumors about the sex lives of young girls, minor and major characters alike. It’s really telling that he, and the narrative by association, is so cavalier about inserting commentary about a girl’s body, sexuality or sexual desirability, even for characters who were only mentioned once or twice in the text. It’s all so disturbingly casual that it might not register on first read but there is an unholy pattern of slipping in a sexualizing comment about barely seen teenagers and pubescent girls. They may have no personality, no voice, no agency and sometimes no names but for some reason their sexual history (read: abuse), desirability or physicality is brought up. Among them:

Prudence and Prunella Celtigar. For the longest time, our knowledge of both is restricted to their age, and Rogar Baratheon’s charming comment about them being chinless, breastless and witless which Gyldayn keeps bringing up as their defining factor.

The Archon of Tyrosh’s daughter (15) is noted for her wit, hair and flirtatious manner (she is later rumored to have cuckolded her eventual husband, Orryn Baratheon, and birthed a daughter that wasn’t his, since she is a woman of the Free Citites and all that)

There may have been a nameless faceless 12-year-old girl that was being raped by Aegon II at the time of Viserys’ death. But fear not, we know exactly what kind of sexual act she was performing on him.

Jocelyn Baratheon (16) barely exists in the text, but we needed her physical description to include that she was full-breasted just so we can understand that she was desirable.

According to Mushroom, Aemond kissed all four of Borros Baratheon’s prepubescent daughters to “taste the nectar of their lips” before picking one as a bride. The second-eldest, Maris, makes a sexually-charged comment to challenge Aemond’s manhood at like, 11.

Floris Baratheon’s characterization is limited to pretty, sweet, somewhat frivolous and dead.

The only mention of the 15-year-old Johanna Swann’s is that she was sold into sexual slavery and became a famous courtesan in “a fascinating” tale according to Gyldayn.

No less than 8 girls involved in the so-called Maiden’s Day Cattle Show are defined by sexual comments and sexual deeds. (There is a comment from Mushroom about how everything couldn’t have been more beautiful, unless if the girls had all arrived naked. This is a ball that had girls as young as six and seven.)

Coryanne Wylde’s first sexual “encounter” rape happens at 13 and she is assaulted repeatedly by the time she is 15.

“Aegon III had never shown any carnal interest in either of his queens (understandably in the case of Queen Daenaera, who was yet a child)” - Uh, Gyldayn? Jaehaera was ten when she died. So why is the extent of Aegon’s maturity judged as lacking because he didn’t desire a literal child and measured negatively against that of his brother Viserys because Viserys, who was a child himself, consummated his own marriage?

As for the regular-flavor hypersexualizion of major characters by the narrative, you can find Rhaenyra Targaryen whose sexual training assault at Daemon’s hand at 14 is described in painful detail, Rhaena Targaryen who is strongly implied to have had somewhat of a sexual awakening at the age of 12, Nettles whose virginity is speculated upon with the conclusion that she must have had sex before she flowered taken as a basic fact and Baela Targaryen who gets a majority story focus on her sexual adventures.

The worst part is that there is no point to most of the above. I can maybe find a logical narrative motive for one of those stories and the only point I can find to several others is to frame the character of the men involved, including Gyldayn. But mostly, these characters exist to serve as as a set dressing, to be exploited and paraded to sensationalize a story.

Sexual violence as a punishment, a plot device, and a sacrifice for male characters’ story

GRRM has frequently claimed that the various acts of sexual violence in his books, against both men and women, is historically accurate. He takes it as a dishonest approach for him not to show that rape and sexual assault were historically a part of war. The existence of sexual violence in wars can not be denied, but it’s rather remarkable that Martin took only the negative parts of women’s lives from real life history, then made it worse for the women in his narrative. Despite his claim that Westeros is no darker nor more depraved than our RL history, Westerosi patriarchy is actually worse than the real Middle Ages and it is lacking a lot of the roles women occupied throughout history, which gives the effect of furthering the women’s suffering without giving them the benefit of having proper well-rounded narratives.

Furthermore, if, as Martin claims, sexual violence is a part of war narrative, what are we to do with the numerous examples of assault and sexual violence that occur in peacetime, both in the main narrative and in F&B? Westeros wasn’t at war when seven Lyseni slaves were used and abused by the Baratheon brothers prior to the Golden Wedding, nor did Coryanne Wylde’s repeated assaults occur during war. Alyssa Velaryon and Alysanne Targaryen were not impregnated, to the former’s grave and against the latter’s expressed wishes, by wartime enemies but by their own husbands. Saera Targaryen had her own father condone her humiliation and abuse in the name of punishing her. And what about the countless child brides who had no choice in their marriages, many of whom went on to either die in childbed or suffer health problems due to premature consummation of their marriages?

Sexual violence is a frequently used window dressing across the series. That Westeros is a terrible place for women is often the singular take of such stories that consistently build on the victimization of women, either as a decoration for the setting to inform us over and over and over that Westeros is a misogynistic society, or as a tool to characterize male characters and further their stories. This is an overarching problem in Martin’s narrative that sees the use of women’s very bodies on the sacrificial altar of the narrative’s requirements, to the extent that even in their suffering, the story belongs less to these women and more to the men whose stories they are sacrificed for. Too often does that happen in this book.

Argella Durrandon is one such case, a women whose violation at the hand of her own men is mostly there to tell us about the gentleness of Orys Baratheon. Several women are used in various ways to inform us about Rogar Baratheon in what is frankly a perplexing waste of narrative space because we didn’t really need these women’s suffering to tell us that Rogar is a grade A asshole when we had plenty of damning evidence of his villainy and misogyny. But we still get such casual mentions of Rogar and his brothers “deflowering” slaves who were probably too young, mainly to juxtapose the actions of Rogar and young Jaehaerys during the proceedings of the Golden Wedding and paint the former in a bad light while holding up the latter. Coryanne Wylde has her narrative of abuse that tells us nothing about her and more about the men taking advantage of her, and Alyssa Velaryon is severely sidelined by the narrative during the regency and has her body used to her death to further Rogar’s characterization. And while this upcoming example is a part of a war narrative, it remains that the function of the rape and sexual slavery of Lady Alys Oakheart and her ladies is largely about informing our perception of Wyl of Wyl and being used to threaten Princess Deria with a similar fate.

Sexual violence also gets used as a tool of punishment against women for various “offenses”. Argella Durrandon is stripped of her clothes and her voice alike for her defiance. Coryanne Wylde’s assault is treated as some sort of karmic punishment for her so-called promiscuity and bearing a child out of wedlock. Princess Saera gets silenced, shaved and beaten essentially for liking sex. Her punishment is designed to shame her for having had sex before she is pressed to the Faith in an attempt to force her into chastity and moral righteousness. The Silent Sisters continue to be routinely used as a threat and a punishment for sexual promiscuity.

Rape culture and normalising sexual violence

I’m having a bit of a case of stating the obvious when I say that Westeros has a flourishing rape culture. But it’s still a fact. Westerosi patriarchy perpetuates and enables sexual violence on an institutional level to the extent that rape has become so normalised that no one so much as blinks at it. The custom of the first night is a clear example of that. And although we have Alysanne and Septon Barth’s impassioned arguments against it that ultimately succeed in having it banned, Gyldayn does his level-best to downplay and beatify the sentiment towards the first night on Dragonstone and exclude the Targaryens from pushback against it. According to Gyldayn, not only was the resentment of the first night muted on Dragonstone, but “brides thus blessed upon their wedding nights were envied, and the children born of such unions were esteemed above all others". Normalise and glamorize rape, why don’t you, Gyldayn?

Also a fixed feature of Westerosi mores is the bedding ceremony, something that involves the stripping of both the bride and the groom by the wedding guests and that often include liberities taken with the bride. In F&B, Daella’s rejection of a bedding is treated disparagingly by the narrative as a facet of her childishness and immaturity, while Rhaenyra, at the age of 9, is included in the party that disrobed her father for his bedding ceremony. For the boys, the bedding ceremony is treated as a sign of virility, strength and character maturity as seen by the reactions of those who attended the bedding ceremony of the 13-year-old Maegor, and the description of how mature the 12-year-old Viserys was because he bedded his wife.

Those are facets of a problem that, for me, largely starts and ends with the authorial attitude towards some forms of sexual violence in the text. In a discussion about F&B on westeros.org, Martin’s collaborator Elio Garcia, echoing previous comments made by Martin, insisted that bedding young girls is understood to be gross and inappropriate in Westeros and that an example such as Unwin Peake’s young daughter is simply an indication of Peake’s (and his onetime goodson’s) awfulness and cruelty. However, the argument that it’s socially, if not legally, frowned upon to bed young girls in Westeros does not hold in the face of the sheer amount of young girls being wed and bedded at young age, to the extent that the matter became so normalised that neither father nor husband of any such unfortunate girl attracts any kind of censure, not even socially. I certainly saw no such sentiment when Viserys I was marrying the 11-year-old Aemma Arryn and bedding her at 13 to the tune of zero opposition. Nor when no one blinked at the fact that the-nearly-60 year old Thaddeus Rowan was searching for a suitable young maid to wed after the death of his first two wives, or when he later wed the 14/15-year-old Floris Baratheon. What about when Jaehaerys and Alysanne Targaryen arranged for their daughter Viserra to wed their contemporary Theomore Manderly at age 15? Or when the 60-year-old Corlys Velaryon started sleeping with Marlida of Hull at 15, if not younger, which earned zero condemnation and zero focus? The perversion and predatory behavior of these old men is treated as a non-issue within the text, even though Martin and Garcia keep telling us that it should. They just fail to have the narrative actually show that. But you can’t keep insisting that it’s considered perverse in-universe to bed young girls when everyone is doing it.

As for the argument that young Lady Peake’s example was meant as a deliberate point about her father’s character, that’s a fig leaf that doesn’t even hold up in the face of the text. It’s easy to say that this was an added commentary on Unwin Peake’s character when Peake is an awful human being that we’re meant to hate, but what about Thaddeus Rowan who is clearly presented to us by the narrative as a decent and moral man that we’re supposed to sympathize with? Was there a point to be made about what an awful man he was in his marriage to Floris Baratheon too? Did I miss any part of the narrative that treated Rowan as a figure worthy of denunciation for his culpability in Floris’ death, or even acknowledged that culpability? Because from where I’m standing, that young girl’s death was treated as something that we’re supposed to sympathize with Rowan over. What about Rodrik Arryn, a two-time offender who impregnated the delicate Daella and witnessed her death only to repeat the tragedy by marrying off his daughter as a child? Rodrik is also presented as a decent person who loved Daella and who is barely criticized for his part in her death, which is ironically an improvement on the lack of acknowledgment of what he did to Aemma.

You want to present child brides as some sort of commentary about the terrible character of their guardians and husbands? Don’t have your best king - who previously refused to consummate his marriage to his own sister-wife on account of her age - and his good queen arrange a marriage for their minor daughter. Don’t have the fact that Rodrik Arryn had loved Daella for years before marrying her at 16 count as something in his favor when that means he was in love with a literal child. Don’t have numerous kindly-written characters do the exact same thing that you claim indicates awfulness and cruelty. Also, also, don’t have your characters treat the rape of a 13-year-old girl as her fault. F&B is utterly unsympathetic to Coryanne Wylde despite acknowledging that the man who slept with her was in his thirties, but Coryanne is blamed by everyone for “her shame” and her subsequent assaults are treated as something she brought on herself. Don’t tell me that a boy kissed Daella against her will in those exact words, then not only act like she was unreasonable for disliking him, but make no mention of any kind of rebuke made to a kid who forced himself on a royal princess. Don’t normalise child brides and build a society that enables, encourages and accepts the rape of pubescent and prepubescent kids as par for the course.

Depiction of female sexuality and queerness:

Let me preface this section by saying that I’m not a medievalist or a historian so my knowledge of the medieval era comes from what research I did on the subject, all of which makes me scratch my head over the fascination with female sexuality present in Gyldayn’s writing. This goes beyond cases where a woman’s sexuality was a part of events that would typically be noted by a historian to include random tangents about a lady’s sexuality for pretty much no reason. That strikes me as really weird because that information is relayed to us in the form of a history book, and female sexuality wasn’t typically that widely scrutinized, recorded and commented on. Moreover, the way their sexuality is used in the narrative leaves a bad taste in my mouth, especially when it comes to talk of their queerness - the narrative gives us very little in means of a relationship between two queer women, but uses their sexual orientation to either undermine or negatively frame these women.

Queen Rhaena Targaryen is a prime example of how a woman’s queerness gets used to depict her negatively in the text. It doesn’t get any clearer than her sexuality being referred to as a beast through Frankly Farman’s Four-Headed Beast epithet that just so happens to describe four queer women. It might be argued that Franklyn is not necessarily the voice of the text and so his view is only reflective of him and not of a textual problem, but the problem is that the text never really bothers to challenge Franklyn’s misogynistic and queerphobic view. In fact, it appears as if the text is at best excusing and at worst exonerating Franklyn, first by repeatedly talking about how condescending and dismissive Rhaena’s companions were towards Androw as if to suggest that Franklyn was correct to dislike them and label them as beasts, then by having Rhaena’s confrontation with Franklyn after Elissa’s escape condemned unanimously by Jaehaerys and his court as Rhaena’s fault. Jaehaerys might have taken issue with how Myles Smallwood talked about Rhaena but he certainly did not contradict his assessment of her or Franklyn’s own misogynistic response to her. It’s Rhaena who gets the explicit censure while also being painted as wrong and borderline hysterical.

Too, I dislike the way that Rhaena’s performance of her formal dynastic role seems to have been tied to her sexuality by the text, an implication which exists in the pointed reporting of Rhaena’s rudeness and emotional absence during a royal progress until her current favorite was summoned to her side, and in how Jaehaerys seems to blame Rhaena for bringing Elissa to Dragonstone in a segment that carries a suggestion that Rhaena’s sexuality and her love for Elissa undermined her governance of Dragontone. More damning is the sense of vagueness with which Gyldayn talks about Rhaena’s companions that were killed by Androw. While the term “favorite” is consistently used when the text wants to indicate a lover rather than a friend, Gyldayn has used the term “companion” to indicate a relationship too - more clearly in the case of Jeyne Arryn and her dear companion Jessamyn Redfort - so for him to call those killed by Androw Rhaena’s companions and including two of her acknowledged favorites among them, Gyldayn (and Androw himself in his final conversation with Rhaena) seem to be implying that Rhaena was involved with all of them. Even the 14-year-old Cassella Staunton and Lianne Velaryon? It’s unclear but that vagueness introduces a problematic dimension to Rhaena’s sexuality that certainly did not need to be there and that does nothing for the story.

The story of the Maiden of the Vale carries similar elements to Rhaena, only clearer. While the story provides us with an entirely legitimate concern of how men try to leech power from powerful women as a possible motive for Lady Jeyne’s refusal of marriage, she is still the subject of rumors about being a lesbian, or alternatively, someone trading sexual favors from the 15-year-old Jace for her political and military support which links her political action to her sexuality, of which we only get a last-minute confirmation on her deathbed. The rumors about Lady Jeyne can certainly stand as an example of in-universe misogyny, but it’s undeniable that the story both builds on and asserts a prevalent misogynistic assumption that a women who doesn’t want a husband must be a lesbian (which strikes me as a modern stereotype), while linking refusal of marriage to a man to exploitative behavior.

Also a modern stereotype is the assumption that two gender non-conforming women who share quarters and appear to be close must be lovers which is present in the thinly-veiled suggestion that Sabitha Frey and Alysanne Blackwood were involved. It’s immensely strange to base such a deduction on the fact that the two ladies shared a tent and were always in each other’s company when they were the only two women in an army of men, especially in a society where a highborn lady sharing her quarters with friends, companions and ladies-in-waiting is a common occurrence. I can see where people would think Lady Sabitha or Black Aly unnatural or even grotesque in the way Brienne is treated in the main novels for being gender non-conforming and/or ugly/not traditionally beautiful, but making the jump to “well, they must be queer” for keeping company with each other and sharing a tent when surrounded by men is not a typical sentiment of the medieval era as far as I know.

This, however, is a symptom of how Sabitha Frey in particular is portrayed in the narrative. She is a fairly prominent figure throughout the Dance and yet we don’t really get much in the way of a characterization for her. She gets called merciless and grasping in passing with no elaboration as to why she is thought to be so and when she gets a moment of close examination, Gyldayn uses it to tell us of how she “would sooner ride than dance, wore mail instead of silk, and was fond of killing men and kissing women”. I don’t know if Martin was trying to lean into or affirm our negative perception of House Frey, but Sabitha’s sexuality and gender performance seem to be the focal point of her characterization so assigning uncorroborated negative attributes to her does not come across in the best light.

Another aspect of how badly this books deal with queerness comes from a certain parallel I noticed between the stories of Saera Targaryen, Baela Targaryen and three girls from the Maiden’s Day Ball, the three Jeynes as Gyldayn calls them - Jeyne Smallwood, Jeyne Mooton and Jeyne Merryweather. In all three stories, there is an offhand mention (or an obscure insinuation in Baela’s case) of how each of them had sex or at least experimented sexually with other women that is simply there to frame the scandalous wanton behavior of each of them. Saera’s relationship with Perianne Moore and Alys Turnberry, Baela’s possible involvement with the twin brothel workers, and the three Jeynes’ supposed visits to the Street of Silk are mentioned casually and aren’t treated like any kind of a meaningful connection but as a sensationalized scandal that adds color to the story through its eroticism. That treats wlw relationships as an embellishment that solely exist to decorate the narrative. It’s fetishizing and dehumanizing in the way it treats these women and their relationships as merely objects of scandal.

Portrayal of women’s relationships:

This is one part where I think Martin made an attempt to in try to fix the solitary woman issue that’s been pointed out repeatedly in the main novels – how we keep hearing about male friendships and male relationships that frame and sometimes drive the narrative whereas women are either mysteriously solitary figures or have their friendships go unexplored/framed negatively. Queen Alysanne and her companions are where Martin succeeds in fixing this problem to some extent; everywhere else..... Eh.

I’ve argued before that the problem in Martin’s writing of female friendships isn’t just that he gives precious few of them, especially compared to the male friendships that drive the narrative; it’s in the overwhelmingly negative representation of female friendships. The majority of female friendships (and that includes familial relationships) are mired in conflict and negative associations across the series, and this book is no difference. Women’s relationships are often defined by jealousy, competitiveness over a man or rooted dislike. Maris Baratheon is so jealous that Aemond Targaryen chose one of her sisters over her that she challenges his manhood and, in Gyldayn’s eyes, provokes Aemond into attacking Lucaerys Velaryon in a plot that is both unnecessary and contrived so as to blame a woman girl for a man’s actions. Cassandra Baratheon spreads a false rumor that her sister Ellyn asked Aegon III if he liked her breasts during the Maiden’s Day Ball, and that’s when we’re not spending time on rumors about how she may have been involved in young Jaehaera’s death because she blamed the little queen for her woes, which are that she didn’t get to marry Aegon II and become queen, and that she lost her place as the heir to Storm’s End due to her little brother’s birth. Oh yeah, I can certainly see how that is a natural line of thought. Cassandra then goes on to be involved in the plotting against Daenaera Velaryon and the Rogares.

Saera Targaryen is disliked by every single one of her sisters (but it should be noted that both Aemon and Baelon were amused by her). The question of the possible motive of Jaehaera Targayen’s suicide includes her being jealous of Baela’s pregnancy (Jaehaera was ten). Rhaenys and Visenya’s relationship is largely defined by a rivalry over Aegon. Rhaena and Alysanne’s relationship is afflicted by tension, resentment and blame. Lucinda Penrose’s jealousy of Daenaera Velaryon having the queenship she coveted not only led her to participate in the plot against her, but made her quite randomly blame Daenaera for no man wanting her, implying she was attacked because of Daenaera which is not true. Priscella Hogg wanted Larra Rogare dead so that Prince Viserys could marry her.

Why do female relationships need to be defined by the presence of a guy, GRRM? What’s up with the downright illogical motivations of some of them? Why is it that the only positive relationship a queen has with her ladies on-page is that of Queen Alysanne?

GRRM also has a frustrating tendency to link female friendships to their sexuality or introduce a sexual component to those friendships. In the main novels, we have Cersei’s rape of Taena Merryweather and Arianne’s youthful sexual experimentation with Tyene Sand as notable examples; in F&B, Rhaena Targaryen is the first woman who gets meaningful relationships with named women and it’s suggested that many of them were her lovers (Rhaenys, Visenya and Alyssa Velaryon are said to have had lady companions as well but we barely get anything in the way of an actual relationship with any of them, or, you know, names for them). Sabitha Frey and Aly Blackwood gravitate to each other and share a tent during the Dance and we immediately get a reference to a potential sexual involvement. Coryanne Wylde, in one of the many versions of A Caution For Young Girls, is said to have thought of Alysanne as her own sister, with the reported rumors being either that she “taught” Alysanne’s husband how to pleasure Alysanne or that she taught Alysanne herself alongside Jaehaerys how to have sex. Saera had sexual intercourse with her two female companions. It is as if two women can not be friends without sex being a part of it.

So basically, men get to have friends and meaningful positive relationships in asoiaf while women get sexually-tinged friendships or have their relationships revolve around squabbling over a man. With the exception of Queen Alysanne and her companions, the vast majority of female relationships are either negative or framed negatively by the text.

Broken mothers, broken women:

Grief is a woman’s kryptonite in this book, especially if she is a mother. Gender is used as a default explanation for why several women break and freeze after a child’s death, often as a prelude to their stories tapering off till their death. While certainly understandable in the context of the tragedies they face, I question why it’s always the women who break down, rend their garments and retreat from public life, whereas men react to similar tragedies with anger, pursuit of vengeance and singular political focus. I also question why Martin uses a mother’s grief so often as a convenient plot device to force passivity, silence and absence on his female characters to fit the requirements of the plot, even when their previous (and sometimes even later) characterization and actions fly against that abstract frozen moment of time they experience due to their grief. Why do you keep having women freeze in their grief, Martin?

The tale of the Dance of the Dragons is not new to F&B but in the stories of Rhaenyra and Helaena appears a clear gendered approach to the depiction of women’s grief over their children that is echoed in several other places. This is somewhat more apparent during the Dance for how Rhaenyra and Helaena’s reactions can be contrasted against that of Daemon and Aegon II, both of whom reacted to the death of Lucerys and young Jaehaerys respectively by swearing vengeance, exacting a bloody toll in revenge and pushing their political and military campaigns. But while their husbands reacted, Rhaenyra and Helaena suffered from crippling depression that forced them out of the war narrative entirely, even to the detriment of their respective factions as underlined by the repetitive remarks about how additional draconic power might have affected the course of the war. That Dreamfyre was rendered useless to the greens because of Helaena’s inability to ride due to her depression is pointed out repeatedly, whereas Rhaenyra’s seclusion and grief over Luke’s death and her absence from her own war council is blamed for Princess Rhaenys flying to Rook’s Nest alone and getting killed. The narrative even accentuates how detrimental Rhaenyra’s absence might have been to her own war efforts in having Corlys Velaryon blame her for Rhaenys’ death, and again in having Jace recruit dragonseeds to increase the black’s draconic power at a time when one of their dragonriders is indisposed.

In the case of both sisters, a mother’s grief is largely used as a way to get a dragonrider out of the picture, at least for a period of time in Rhaenyra’s case - a gendered approach that adds to how Rhaenyra’s pregnancy and childbirth, both clearly gendered, were also used as a convenient plot device to sideline her in the early days of the Dance. In the words of Gyldayn, “[t]he death of her son Lucerys had been a crushing blow to a woman already broken by pregnancy, labor, and stillbirth”

Mother’s grief is also used to explain how sisters Rhaena and Alysanne retreated from public life after the loss of their daughters. Rhaena leaves Dragonstone for Tarth then Harrenhal, turning into a ghost herself as she settles in the haunted castle after refusing to return to her seat on Dragonstone or have anything to do with court for years till her death (Rhaena had previously stopped governing Dragonstone and retreated to her chambers to mourn her companions as well), while Alysanne takes herself from court to Dragonstone after Gael’s death, a more acute echo of her self-imposed isolation following Princess Daenerys’ death, and the offhand mention of how her four youngest children’s marital plans brought her so much pain and grief that she considered joining the silent sisters. It just so happens that two of the four (i.e, Daella and Viserra) had died at the time and Jaehaerys persisted in pushing Alysanne to consider Saera dead as well. Alysanne even tells Jaehaerys point-blank that she is going to Dragonstone to grieve for her dead daughters.

But two exceptions exist to this trend: Alyssa Velaryon and Alicent Hightower. Alyssa is a character that defies the broken mother trope by being a main architect of Jaerhaerys I’ accession and the survival of the Targaryen dynasty after her two eldest sons died horrifically. She survived the loss of three children and estrangement from her surviving three. She could have been a sound critique to the broken woman trope, if only the narrative allowed her to stay that active dynamic figure she was instead of trying to minimize her. Despite her defiance of the trend of how a mother’s grief leads to depressed seclusion, the narrative still managed to sideline Alyssa by having her inexplicably choose a self-imposed confinement for the remainder of Jaehaerys’ regency after her confrontation with Rogar Baratheon in the small council. Not only is this undeniably minimizing to Alyssa’s character, it flies in the face of all her prior characterization. This is the woman who survived the loss of two sons by horrifying means but soldiered on and showed tremendous political ability, who dealt with estrangement from her surviving children but continued to rule the realm throughout it, who stood up bravely in the face of her husband’s dehumanizing attack. But I’m supposed to buy that Rogar Baratheon broke her? Come on now. To make things worse, this act of isolation is the last thing we get of Alyssa’s own agency.

Alicent Hightower is another case of someone who defied the broken mother trope by being a steady political presence throughout the Dance, even after only Aegon II remained to her. Even after Aegon’s death, Alicent still tried to influence the court by trying to get her granddaughter Jaehaera to kill Aegon III. But when the time came for Alicent to depart the narrative, GRRM chose to fall on his tried trope of the broken depressed woman. For the last year of her life, Alicent's time in confinement was spent weeping, ripping her clothes to pieces and talking to herself. Alicent’s deteriorating mental state might not seem unreasonable in the context of her circumstances, but it certainly boggles the mind that she is presented to us as slowly losing her wits while imprisoned in her own apartments at the same time that the horrifically tortured and maimed Tyland Lannister is said to have kept his sharp wit through his harsh imprisonment in the black cells, so Alicent’s gentle imprisonment in a familiar place with servants and septas attending her somehow took a worse toll than Tyland’s residence in inhumane conditions where he was tortured regularly. Too, Alicent's final image in the text is wretched and undignified which is striking compared to how Grand Maester Orwyle is presented as a hero during the course of the Winter Fever and a vital source of information on the Dance through the confessions he wrote while imprisoned.

So even in the cases that the broken mother trope is challenged, GRRM still uses the same element of seclusion and depression to define a woman’s fate. It has not escaped me that our final look at both Alyssa and Alicent depicts them in ghastly conditions.

Treatment of women’s voices:

Fire and Blood’s handling of women’s voices is hit-and-miss, with the misses outpacing the hits by miles. It goes without saying that not everyone in the narrative can or should have a voice so it’s not that I expect every single woman that ever appears to have one, but some of the omissions are really glaring. Take Jocelyn Baratheon for example. She was a sister/surrogate daughter to Jaehaerys and Alysanne, wife to Aemon and mother to the fiery Princess Rhaenys.... and we know almost nothing about her, leaving her function to the story to be about her motherhood and her fertility. Pages upon page of this book is dedicated to discussing women’s sexual lives but I guess the life and experiences of a court-raised onetime crown princess was unimportant to warrant a mention. Jocelyn existed to birth Rhaenys then promptly disappeared from the narrative after her angered reaction to Baelon being named heir over Rhaenys and her unborn child.

More acutely, the narrative has a bad tendency to have notable women suddenly fall silent or completely disappear at times when they should be present and outspoken, if it’s not actively punishing them for having a voice altogether, while their male counterparts get pages detailing their opinions and their reactions. The broken mother/woman trope discussed above contributes heavily to this problem in presenting a distinct sense of narrative-enforced quietness that befalls these characters once the narrative decides that their voices are no longer necessary for plot development. Princess Rhaena Targaryne is pretty much turned into a ghost on the outskirts of the story from Aerea’s death till her own. Her mother Alyssa gets turned into a nonentity not long after her fight with Rogar Baratheon in the small council. Alyssa’s retreat from public court is the last time she is given a voice of her own. The report that both the former Hand and the Queen Regent were “wounded and silent” in the aftermath of that showdown really struck me, because for all that Rogar and Alyssa fell silent, it’s Rogar that the narrative chose to restore voice to, despite the fact that, unlike Alyssa, Rogar’s silence was a result of his own hubris and thirst for power. For him and Alyssa to be treated as if on equal foot by the narrative in the first place and for their silence and “wounds” to be framed as similar is preposterous, but what’s even more preposterous is the fact that Rogar gets afforded pages to detail his reconciliation with Jaehaerys and even a transcript of their meeting, whereas Alyssa gets one paragraph in which the focus is on Jaehaerys’ own thoughts and we hear nothing from her; instead her thoughts and feelings are posited by Grand Maester Benifer.

From there on out, we don’t hear from Alyssa Velaryon, only of her. The narrative deliberately silences Alyssa and substitutes her voice with the suppositions and opinions of the men around her. It’s Jaehaerys and Rogar who get voices in Alyssa’s own marital reconciliation but we don’t hear about what she thought about it. We don’t know what Alyssa thought about either of her pregnancies or the health risk they posed. We do hear about Rogar and Benifer’s happiness and Barth’s concerns though. Even when she lay dying and arguments were made about her and her child’s chances of survival, Alyssa is denied a voice. The one statement we get from her is immediately dismissed by Gyldayn as likely not happening and we’re left with the reactions of those around her, Jaehaerys and Rogar, Alysanne and Rhaena. But we never find out what Alyssa thought or wanted. Instead, her narrative purpose lies in her fertility.

At least Rhaena voices a condemnation for the way women’s bodies are callously used by men in Westeros in a statement that is contextually very powerful but that is, once again, undermined by the narrative not too long after. It is both outrageous and unnecessary to have Jaehaerys himself ignore such a powerful statement years later in a plot that also dismisses Alysanne’s clearly expressed wishes and borderline silences her since Jaehaerys’ objection to her reasoning is voiced to Grand Maester Elysar rather than Alysanne herself, and she isn’t even given the chance to give the counter-argument that, you know, the mother that Jaehaerys is citing died because her husband only cared about having a child. Queen Alysanne may be the most prominent, most well-rounded female voice in F&B, but that does not stop the narrative from robbing her of her voice when it wants to. I certainly have not forgotten how she falls silent on the matter of her granddaughter Aemma’s marriage, or how there is so much discussion about the tragic fates of Alysanne’s children all around that conspicuous quietness. Neither have I forgotten how there is a random comment about how Alysanne contempled joining the silent sisters due to the pain and grief she suffered in the matter of her youngest four’s marital prospects.

Then there is Maris Baratheon and the convoluted needless story that does nothing but attempt to shift blame off Aemond for Lucerys Velaryon’s murder and lay it on Maris, then have her literally silenced as a punishment, whether that’s through being consigned to the silent sisters or the rumor that she had her tongue removed beforehand. Maris exists to be scapegoated and silenced, her forced silence a penalty for a man’s violent tendencies.

Going back a little in history to Aegon’s conquest gets us a few more queens who got silenced by the narrative. I’ve talked before about how Argella Durrandon’s fate stands as a unique abnormality in the history of the rebellion and how her forceful loss of voice was the last we hear of her in the narrative as the focus thereafter shifts to Orys and his own actions and behavior. Similarly, the circumstances of Marla Sunderland’s deposing bears uncomfortable parallels to Argella’s own: while not sexually humiliating like Argella’s, Marla had her voice violently stripped away when her tongue was pulled out before she was sequestered to an order that takes women’s voices away in the name of piety. That Argella and Marla were the only ones to suffer that literal loss of voice in the history of the rebellion (while Rhaenys and Visenya get their voices take away by the narrative itself since both inexplicably vanish from the story despite being physically in the area right before Argella and Marla were deposed) makes it very much about their gender.

Of course there is always the argument that it’s not only women who had their tongues ripped out or got silenced throughout the narrative, and while that is true, they were the only ones during the rebellion to receive that pointed stripping of voice by men, including Marla’s own brother. Moreover, it’s really glaring that this violation was specifically a punishment for defiance and daring to claim power. The violence visited on Argella and Marla was unnecessary for plot development, weirdly personal in a clearly gendered way, and done exclusively by men for the benefit of men as a punishment to these women for having the audacity to have agency and power in their own right.

Death by childbed

In times of peace especially, it was not uncommon for a man to outlive the wife of his youth, for young men most oft perish upon the battlefield, young women in the birthing bed.

Well, perhaps women wouldn’t die that often in the birthing bed if they weren’t getting pregnant as young as 12. Just saying.

This is another recurring problem in Martin’s writing that’s been broadly criticized for being too present in the narrative. It intersects with the problem of child brides, and the Dead Ladies Club, though it’s not only limited to them.

Death in childbirth is an inherently gendered death that is used as a rather convenient way to kill off female characters across the series. Often these women’s relevance in the text amounts to their fertility and the children they bore, and they are used as either a vessel to deliver the true important characters, or a part of the setting around a male character. By my count, F&B has 12 women dead by childbirth.

The unnamed wife of Edmyn Tully. Exists to explain why her husband resigned his seat on the Small Council

Queen Jeyne Westerling. Exists as a part of framing Maegor’s political decline and her function in the story is explicitly solely about her fertility.

Queen Alyssa Velaryon.

Princess Alyssa Targaryen.

Princess Daella Targaryen.

Queen Aemma Arryn. No characterization. Narrative function lies in having Rhaenyra.

Lady Laena Velaryon. Afforded scant characterization. Dies for the convenience of the plot. Main function is having Baela and Rhaena Targrayen.

The unnamed fourth wife of Jasper Wylde. The first three may or may not have died of “exhaustion” as well, since the man sired twenty nine children on four wives.

Lady Arra Norrey. Childhood companion and wife to Cregan Stark. Dead giving birth to his son Rickon. That’s it. That’s all we know of her.

The unnamed daughter of Unwin Peake. She died in childbed aged 12. That’s the extent of her relevance.

Lady Floris Baratheon. Pretty, sweet, frivolous, dead.

Ormund Hightower’s unnamed wife. Only mentioned in the introduction of her successor, Samantha Hightower.

The main point of criticism here is that these women didn’t need to die in childbirth or complications from childbirth of all things. They didn’t need to be reduced to walking wombs or plot devices or set decorations. They didn’t need to be a side note tacked on to explain a quirky nickname. And they didn’t need to die for the male character’s angst or characterization.

“But the above is only reflective of Gyldayn’s misogyny, not an authorial problem”

I chose to address this argument at the conclusion of this post because I know that inevitably, the argument that the problem lies in the in-universe narrator’s bias rather than an authorial failure will come up. I’ve already seen it argued, by fans as well as Elio Garcia, that Gyldayn’s own misogyny and personal views account for the problems that many fans have criticized in the text. But that’s a paper shield. Ascribing every problematic element in the narrative to the in-universe characters is not good enough at this point. This argument is neither productive nor satisfactory, and it strikes me as a rather transparent and convenient way to shut down any critique leveled at Martin’s writing, or at the very least deviate it from its intended objective to tangle us in a debate about sexist narratives vs sexist societies.

But I will have that conversation because this distinction causes a lot of confusion over what’s an authorial problem and what’s not. Westeros is a misogynistic patriarchal society that systematically minimizes, marginalizes and dehumanizes women, but just because your society is sexist doesn’t mean that your narrative has to be. We see that in the main novels when characters like Catelyn, Asha, Brienne, Arya and many others have to contend with the limitations their society places on them and the prejudices leveled at them because of their gender, but the narrative does not validate that misogyny. It doesn’t discredit these women or treat them as an afterthought. Westeros may be biased against these women but the narrative isn’t. That is not the case with F&B because Martin chose to make our sole source of information on these women a deeply misogynistic man, which made his narrative deeply misogynistic as well by virtue of the narrative adopting Gyldayn’s biases and making them a defining aspect of the characters’ stories. That is a choice on Martin’s part, just like exaggerating Gyldayn’s misogyny to the point of minimizing the few instances of challenge the narrative attempts to offer is also a choice.

It wouldn’t have cost Martin anything to leave Alysanne’s condemnation of Jaehaerys and Rodrik Arryn’s role in Daella’s death to stand without undermining it. It wouldn’t have cost Martin anything to let Alyssa Velaryon and Alicent Hightower remain as a deconstruction of the broken mother trope, instead of falling back on tired ideas that build on breaking women’s spirits down to their graves. It wouldn’t have cost Martin anything to have Rhaena’s powerful statement about how men use women’s bodies to their graves to stand without undercutting it via Jaehaerys (who once refused to consummate his marriage out of concern for Alysanne but apparently have grown to not care that much about her health in later years). Those rare cases of pushback are right there; they allow for both the characterization of the author-character and the worldbuilding of the society to stand but offer a critique of the misogyny shown instead of just leaving it present and unchallenged as a set decoration. Even allowing for Gyldayn’s misogyny, Martin could have found a way to elevate some of the problematic aspects of this book. He didn’t. He chose to undermine his challenges instead.

I find that the idea that Gyldayn is the one who should be blamed for what this book is rather than GRRM such a weird argument to make. Gyldayn is Martin’s creation; he does not exist independently from Martin. If Gyldayn is a sex-obsessed pervert, it’s because Martin chose to write him that way. If Gyldayn is a misogynistic victim-blaming abuse apologist, it’s because Martin chose to write him that way. It goes without saying that it’s not inherently problematic to write a character with these characteristics, but the problem emerges when that character is an author whose lens our knowledge of every single woman is filtered through. We’re not likely to have any information about these historical characters from any other source. The best we can hope for is a throwaway line in the main novels that wouldn’t give us much in the way of personhood for these characters. In writing Gyldayn as he did, Martin crippled our knowledge of a large number of women in Westeros history and denied them any chance of ever becoming realized characters in our eyes. So why did Martin choose to write Gyldayn as the avatar of every patriarchal bias in existence? What is the narrative gain in having your narrator be so interested in the sex lives of teenage girls? What did GRRM do to push back against Gyldayn’s misogyny? Why is Gyldayn’s characterization prioritized over the personhood of so many women? Because Gyldayn’s characterization is only relevant insofar as his function as a vehicle for authorial exposition. The narrative and the readers gain nothing by him being so painfully misogynistic. In fact, this is what is used to cut any attempts by the narrative to challenge the rampant misogyny in the text at the knees.

Furthermore, the argument that that Gyldayn’s prejudices shouldn’t be taken for the narrative’s own and thus as an authorial problem falls apart when you consider how many of the issues I discussed above exists in the main novels too, when there is no Gyldayn to blame for the narrative’s misogyny. Also, it should be noted that Gyldayn in-universe misogyny doesn’t even account for all the problems of the text. Gyldayn isn’t the one who made Jaehaerys ignore Alysanne’s wishes not to have more children. Gyldayn isn’t the one who made Septon Barth denigrate Alyssa Velaryon as someone whose main objective was to be liked. Gyldayn certainly isn’t the one who decided to kill off 12 women in childbirth, or cover F&B with child brides. Gyldayn isn’t the one who decided that multiple women needed to isolate themselves to grieve. And Gyldayn might have been the one who reported on Coryanne Wylde, but he sure as hell wasn’t the one who created her story. Those are authorial choices made by GRRM.

I’ve seen it argued that F&B is supposed to be some kind of critique of how misogyny colors history but I disagree vehemently with that notion. You can’t lean into old sexist tropes and call it a critique. You can’t put an inordinate focus on women’s sexual lives to the exclusion of their own personhood and call it a critique. I know that that depiction is not endorsement, but it is not a critique either. Depiction is not inherently a condemnation. There is no inherent challenge in events just being there - the narrative needs to make some effort to push back against them to make it clear that something is being called out. F&B rarely challenges the misogyny permeating it, and when it does, the challenge is promptly undermined, dismissed or ignored.

#asoiaf #asoiaf meta #fire and blood volume 1 #asoiaf criticism #misogyny in asoiaf #gender in asoiaf #the dead ladies club #warning for a lot of awfulness #gyldayn #is a warning on his own #also I'm a ranter so be aware #long post

[hamliet]

On Banana Fish’s Ending

Welcome to the hell that is Banana Fish’s ending. If you like it it’s hell. If you hate it it’s definitely hell. If you’re like me somewhere in the middle but closer to “I don’t like this” it’s hell. We’re all suffering. 

Like any useless writer, I cope by writing out my feelings so here, have this.

I can see why some feel the ending narratively works in some respects, and in some ways I can even agree it can be read in certain ways that make it work. But I also think a happy ending could have been just as narratively excellent, depending on the execution, and my personal opinion is that this would have been a more responsible ending. But no one has to agree, and I understand why people hate the ending and why people defend the ending. 

I’m going to talk about this in a few segments: authorial statements, social messages, and genre. (I’m writing another meta on the narrative themes of the ending because that section got massively long.) For what it’s worth, a story does not exist in a vacuum, and while it’s absolutely valid to interpret and critique a story according to simply the written story, it’s also valid to weigh authorial intent (or to dismiss it), and to evaluate how the story plays into both larger cultural messages and larger literary trends. Any author 100% knows that their story will be interpreted according to all of these. But what follows is mostly my opinion/explaining why I feel as I do. It is not me saying anyone has to feel or interpret it the same way. 

Authorial Statements

I know Yoshida has made... contradictory and, frankly, offensive statements on the ending, in which she’s said things such as that Ash narratively had to die because he was a murderer and people who kill need to pay with their own lives. In general, Yoshida seems to struggle in interviews--like saying she hates Yut-Lung when the story’s moral center character (Sing) literally tells him in his last scene “I can’t hate you” and promises to help him redeem himself. This is hardly unique to her. It’s hard to explain a complex element of story in a few sentences of an answer. Ishida’s first interview after the end of TG had some cringeworthy moments, Rowling seems to make constant missteps (and retcons), etc. Hence, I generally employ “death of the author”--I think the author’s intent matters to the extent their work conveys their intent, but not if their work contradicts what they then say. 

The entirety of Banana Fish contradicts this idea of murderous karma. In fact, the story is at its core about finding a way out of a violent cycle, of finding freedom. Ash dying with a smile on his face literally says that he did not die trapped in a system of karmic violence with no hope of freedom. 

Not to mention Sing is a murderer. Yut-Lung* is a murderer. Blanca is a murderer. They all live, and get hopeful (even happy-ish) endings and implied redemption for Yut-Lung and for Blanca. 

*I know Yut-Lung is name-dropped as having been assassinated in a later manga called Yasha but like, he never actually appears in Yasha and it has nothing to do with his character’s arc in Banana Fish, so I don’t think it’s relevant to anything relating to Yut-Lung’s character as we know him. It’s really just an Easter egg, and since Yut-Lung dying in Yasha is a retcon of the fact that his arc ending with him living in the main story (Banana Fish) I feel completely free to disregard it as not actually canon.*

Additionally, Banana Fish takes empathetic looks at children who are suffering in a world where they are forced into the roles of prostitutes and killers, and what’s the point of empathy if it can’t change anything? Eiji is noted to basically be walking empathy, having a gift for comforting those around him, and the mutual, spiritual, and yes, romantic, love he and Ash share changes things for Ash (and for Eiji). To say that death had to happen narratively is to say that Eiji was, in the words of his critics, useless, which is rather at odds with the central emotional draw of the story: Ash and Eiji’s relationship. It contradicts Eiji’s beautiful letter, the one that Ash smiled as he died because of, because in this letter Eiji assures Ash: “you can change your destiny.”

So anyways, regardless of what Yoshida says, Ash being a murderer is not a narrative justification for the ending because that simply isn’t what the story conveys.

That being said, that perspective--that Ash’s death is karma for killing--is exactly Ash’s perspective. Just when he was about to overcome his flaw of not seeing his value by realizing how much he meant to Eiji, Lao reminds him of Shorter’s death, the one thing he cannot forgive himself for. And so Ash allows himself to die. But the thing is this perspective is wrong and narratively condemned. Eiji’s letter offers a counter to this, but Ash doesn’t take it (which is slightly inexplicable). Plus, as we see in “Garden of Light,” it leaves Eiji unable to completely overcome his flaw (an inability to act/truly live) for seven years, so the story condemns it too. 

And, of course, Ash also did not kill Shorter out of malice--he was forced into it, like he was forced into the life he had to live with Dino. It’s not the deaths of one of the people begging to be spared whom Ash killed for playing a role in killing Shorter, but Shorter’s death itself that brings about fear and mistrust in Lao. To have Ash’s death be a consequence for killing willingly (which he did plenty of), it should have been for one of those nameless people we got a brief shot of, instead of as a consequence for a murder Ash had no choice in and was a victim of almost as much as Shorter was. But that also wouldn’t work because a nameless death doesn’t quite suffice for offing your main character, so. Yeah. Ash’s death is not a narrative consequence for killing others; it’s expressly framed as a tragic and cruel result of his inability to forgive himself for specific acts that were not his fault. 

Social Messages Part 1: LGBT relationships

While Banana Fish was written in the 1980s-90s (kind of a dire time for LGBT+ people in the United States with the AIDS crisis), the trope of “bury your gays” has received rightful criticism since, and the ending can definitely be seen as “bury your gays.” (A criticism that is not helped by what happens to the gay/bi character in Yasha.) In other words, while I think the themes, characters, and frankly issues of Banana Fish are generally timeless, the ending is the only part of the story that I don’t think ages well. As time goes by, it will probably get even more criticism because of current society finally moving towards being better in the portrayal of LGBT+ characters. 

*Because I want to complain and explain why I really don’t consider anything post-GoL canon: the follow-up picture book “New York Sense” doesn’t help the “bury your gays” impression either: Sing and Akira are certainly intended to be parallels to Ash and Eiji as Akira is brought to the US by Ibe and interacts with gangster Sing in “Garden of Light,” and while such framing is very ambiguous/bordering on not being there in GoL the follow-ups absolutely paint a romantic framing to their interactions in GoL. They marry and raise a son, popping up in cameos in Yoshida’s other works. Hence it runs dangerously close to reading as the heterosexual couple introduced in the epilogue got the happy ending while the gay couple we spent 19 volumes with did not. Since Sing is also still heavily involved with the mafia in all of the follow-ups, this again contradicts narrative justifications for Ash’s death as karma. 

While I very much like Akira’s character, her romance with Sing isn’t just uncomfortable because of the above issue--it’s also uncomfortable because she is 13 and he is 23 in GoL (though their relationship doesn’t have to be read as mutually romantic there, and I don’t read it that way) and according to “New York Sense,” they marry when she is 18 which... implies things that seems very, very out of character for Sing, the series’ moral compass, and dramatically contradicts the skeevy adults preying on kids theme. It can also raise some cringe-worthy questions about why it’s framed as okay for the heterosexual couple but negatively (as it should be) for the people--who are primarily men--who assault Ash (and there is noted to have been a woman who assaulted him in “Private Opinion”). Like with Yut-Lung’s death, I just... don’t accept this retconning as canon. It contradicts the themes of Banana Fish as a story so I don’t have to.*

Social Messages Part 2: Abuse Survivors

For people who have been through abuse similar to Ash’s, in which choices over basic things like life, death, and your own body are taken from you, it’s honestly cruel to show someone who has spent their entire life suffering just about to grasp happiness, and then they die. It is fully valid to find this completely distasteful, and I do too.

But for me at least, one aspect that circumvents... some of the distasteful implication that Ash really was broken by things he had no choice in is the fact that Ash triumphed over his abusers first. Yet of course, having him die afterwards still hurts people who read the story and see themselves in a character like Ash, as it can reinforce the idea that abuse defines your life. 

I do wish (though I don’t think there’s a moral necessity) that more authors/creators would acknowledge that, in creating characters whom you in theory want people to relate to, see themselves in, root for, care about, you’re asking people to suffer with them as they suffer and if they die, grieve for them. Given the heaviness of Ash’s arc and the specific nature of his suffering (especially since it was horrifically emphasized in the story’s last arc with Foxx), the fact that Ash didn’t in the end overcome the message that he did not have value is going to be very painful for readers/viewers. (Lao missed his vital organs, so Ash really chose to die instead of getting help, because he chose to believe Blanca over Eiji, which... I’m not sure it quite works.) If you could have narratively had it end happily (and it absolutely could have, and apparently Yoshida’s editor told her not to end it with Ash’s death), there’s room to say that going with the tragic ending is hurtful and bordering on irresponsible. 

Genre

That defeat of Ash’s abusers is the reason I don’t think Banana Fish is quite as tragic as other stories like, say, the first Tokyo Ghoul or Hamlet or Macbeth, though it’s certainly tragic. In those stories, every single characters’ flaws lead to them dying, and it offers a cautionary tale. Banana Fish is more in the vein of say, Romeo and Juliet, or even the movie Titanic (I’m not making a romance comparison, for the record), in that the main characters might die, but their choices and the people they loved and how they loved manage to save a city, in the case of Romeo & Juliet, or to save Rose in the case of Titanic. In Banana Fish, Ash did help Eiji live, even if Eiji would need time to process it after the set-back of Ash’s death. 

In other words, even if I’m unhappy with it and I am, I don’t consider Banana Fish’s ending nihilistic. It wasn’t “life sucks and then you die,” at least not to me. Life sucked, but it also meant something, even beyond Ash’s relationship with Eiji. Ash’s life had value. Through saving Sing in the story’s climactic battle, and then helping Max with that article that would save other child prostitutes, Ash saved younger versions of himself. That’s powerful. Not only that, but Ash found love and hope in his personal life as well with Eiji, Max, Shorter, etc., and through that genuine happiness. Even if he couldn’t fully grasp it, he knew it was there, and he died knowing there was genuine, true love, and therefore beauty, in the world too. And that, for me, comes across as far more hopeful than surface-level, cheaper happier endings. But still, the fact that Ash couldn’t fully experience this beauty and happiness because of the cycle of violence he had no choice about being involved in, plus a questionable character decision, does leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. (That questionable character decision, with the letter not having a full effect, makes tragedy seem a bit forced on Yoshida’s part.)

I want to quote Arthur Miller’s “Tragedy and the Common Man,” and I’ve highlighted parts I think explain how I feel about Banana Fish and Ash’s character (in particular, why I don’t think a tragic ending necessarily sends a nihilistic message, at least not to me):

The Greeks could probe the very heavenly origin of their ways and return to confirm the rightness of laws. And Job could face God in anger, demanding his right and end in submission. But for a moment everything is in suspension, nothing is accepted, and in this sketching and tearing apart of the cosmos, in the very action of so doing, the character gains "size," the tragic stature which is spuriously attached to the royal or the high born in our minds. The commonest of men may take on that stature to the extent of his willingness to throw all he has into the contest, the battle to secure his rightful place in the world.

There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism. Even the dictionary says nothing more about the word than that it means a story with a sad or unhappy ending. This impression is so firmly fixed that I almost hesitate to claim that in truth tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and that its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker's brightest opinions of the human animal.

For, if it is true to say that in essence the tragic hero is intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality, and if this struggle must be total and without reservation, then it automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.

The possibility of victory must be there in tragedy. Where pathos rules, where pathos is finally derived, a character has fought a battle he could not possibly have won. The pathetic is achieved when the protagonist is, by virtue of his witlessness, his insensitivity, or the very air he gives off, incapable of grappling with a much superior force.

Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief-optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man.

This applies to basically all tragedy, of course, but I think some tragedies are more hopeful than others. And I see that struggle in Ash’s, and a hope in Banana Fish that I don’t see in other more nihilistic stories. Ash fought to reclaim the humanity that people tried to deny him, and through Eiji realized his humanity was there all along. 

Anyways, these are my complicated, all-over-the-place feelings on the ending. It’s fine for people to feel strongly either way, but also understand that when discussing such a heavy, fundamentally triggering work, it’s good to be sensitive to where people are coming from and interact with differing opinions with empathy. Many of us relate to characters like Ash, Eiji, and Yut-Lung, and since you don’t know where someone is coming from, let them express their feelings, and be kind. 

I’ll post another meta on thematic impressions on Banana Fish later. But to each their own. Also please note, again, this is really just my opinion. 

#ash lynx #banana fish #banana fish ep 24 #eiji okumura #asheiji #yut-lung lee #yue lung lee #sing soo ling #shorter wong #lao yeon-tai #lao yen-thai #banana fish meta #banana fish ending #ramblings #akimi yoshida

[gayasinstupidpodcast]

What’s up gamers!!! Our fourth episode plowed through the chaos of thanksgiving holidays and is Here w/ some Facts and Opinions about creating shit and being LGBT and how being LGBT influences creating shit. HEADS UP we recorded this while I had a cold so my voice is probably a little off, but ik Isaac put SO much work into the editing so it would be ready on time and we have recorded statements from some amazing artists (transcriptions under the cut below!) & this is honestly one of my favorite episodes we’ve done so far, so give her a listen if you’re gay or enjoy fun things!

BIG thank you once again to everyone who participated in this month’s episode!! Your contributions are so valued and so beautiful!!

You can find us on the Itunes Podcast App/Webpage at Gay As In Stupid Podcast! You can also find our episodes uploaded to Youtube and Soundcloud!

You can also follow us on twitter at gayasinstupid!

Further Reading on LGBT Artists

Montage of a Queering Deferred: Memory, Ownership, and Archival Silencing in the Rhetorical Biography of Langston Hughes

The Political Provocations of Keith Haring 

Pop art politics: Activism of Keith Haring 

E M Forster’s Gay Fiction

Alok Vaid-Menon Tells Us What It’s Like To Be Femme In Public

Shea Diamond Speaks Her Truth

Aaron’s 2018 November Recs!

Alok Alok Vaid-Menon is one of my favorite poet/activist/performance artists out there! Their writing and stage presence is gorgeous and witty in a way that’s SO clever and still feels like you’re in a room trading jokes you don’t need to explain with your closest trans friends. The way they balance their art creates a real, deeply touching experience that feels very essential to our world.

Miles (2016) Miles is set in 1999 and is a coming of age story about a gay teenager trying to get a volleyball scholarship for college in Chicago. It’s not revolutionary and it’s not over the top dramatic, but it’s funny and honest and it makes me feel nice. Definitely the movie to watch when you’ve just been through something emotionally taxing and need a light crying session and some mediocre pastries.

Isaac’s 2018 November Recs!

The Adventure Zone I know half of you already kin the Mcelroys while the other half either don’t know or don’t care, but the Adventure Zone is one of my most favorite things in the world. It’s a DND podcast (yes, all episodes are transcribed, and they have a graphic novel for the first arc of Balance with a second one on the way!) by three brothers plus their dad, and not only does it have the most amazing story and is ungodly funny, but TONS of gays (Griffin went ape with those Lesbian NPCS)! And just because they can! Same with trans characters. It’s a story where they just exist, and that’s really important to me because in a lot of media LGBT have to almost prove why they deserve to take up space. And it’s not just something that goes on in their first campaign, Amnesty also has those sweet sweet gay! I could talk about this podcast for hours, so if you needed that final push to give it a listen, THIS IS IT!

Stardew Valley You get to farm and be gay. And if THAT hasn’t sold you on this charming video game, then maybe the super cute graphics, beautiful soundtrack and a handful of interesting characters will! TBH I spend so much time playing this game it’s concerning. It’s just such a fun way to relax, and I just really REALLY like video games were I can chose to be gay. Like. God Tier. YOU CAN HAVE CROPS AND CHICKENS AND BE GAY C’MON YALL!!

The Amazing Quotes And Artists Featured!

Meg | instagram | esty

“My identity as a bisexual woman influences my art in many ways. As a woman, i create art about the issues that effect me, such as abortion and gender equality, in order to resonate with the people that matter most to me. As a bisexual individual, my subjects often appear from a gaze that falls outside of the stereotypical eye. My figure drawings and portraits all come from a place of admiration, and don’t fall into the stereotype of the male gaze or womanly care- they are the space inbetween, equally sexualized and normalized. I feel lucky to be a bi gal in the art world because it is a place that is my own to create in. There are so many queer artists that i look up to such as Mapplethorpe and Warhol, and many female artists i can cite as influence (Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith, and Louise Bourgeois to name a few). My identity gives me a whole new world of content to draw from and allows my work to resonate with a wider audience, and I really think that any artists goal is to reach and touch as many people as possible.“  

Cameron | twitter | instagram 

“I don’t think that it influences the form really, but it definitely influences the subject matter! (Much as I hate to admit it, my identity influences the majority of choices I make in life.) I write a lot of poems about lgbtq related things and religion, as well as other stuff too. I was raised catholic, so realizing that I was “different” at more than one point in my teen years was scary AF. Being a member of the lgbtq+ community and also trying to still feel like I belong, or wanting to, in a religious community is hard, the two things are usually at a crossroads in my life so writing about them makes it easier for me to get through. My hope is that someday someone reads what I wrote and finds some peace in their own life/experience.” 

Vince | art instagram

“Well, being transgender I feel like I’m constantly aware of the lack of representation of my community, and I feel like it might be because of that I tend to experiment with showing all sorts of different type of people in my work. Because there’s so much diversity in the world, why not showcase that?”

Fox | art instagram  

“Oof…I’m gay so my characters always be gay. Gotta Fill the void in media w my own bullshit so I don’t have to rely on straight showrunners who will inevitably discard the character since they themselves seem to have no personal attachment and treat lgbt characters as disposable extras. Bc if I don’t at least attempt to create representation in the field I’m going into then I can’t rlly complain about the lack of it right? If I don’t try and change it I can’t complain about the lack of change so being an lgbt artist is lowkey Big Pressure to be revolutionary in your work but sometime…..I just wanna draw funkey animeal and that’s aight too”

Jen | twitter | instagram

“As a female bisexual poet, I worry often that my poetry and art will be too niche to be appreciated. I’ve spent years editing my poetry down to its barest bones in hopes that someone will relate to it. Changing pronouns back and forth because I worry that if I do talk about a woman, the poem will be stripped of its context and suddenly be about my queerness when in reality it never was. When I write about love and people I have dated and have crushed on, I want the poem to exist outside of the gender of who I love. I fear my authorial death will result in a complete misinterpretation of what I mean. When I write, it truly does not matter to me if I am writing about a woman or a man. If I feel what I write and I can make someone else feel it too does it matter that I also love women? I write what matters to me overall, regardless of gender, I try to make my poetry as true as possible. Sometimes, when I catch myself over editing I try to take myself back to the moment, to the person, what I loved about him or her. “

Lain | art instagram

“My LGBT Identity has significantly impacted almost all of my art, especially my work over the last two years. Ever since I have allowed myself to accept that I am trans and began my transition (6 months on T!), the impact that my Roman Catholic upbringing has had on my bisexual trans identity has bled into my artwork. Because of the way I was raised, accepting and allowing myself to be authentic has been an upward struggle. And what better way to process and document struggle than art?  

Much of my recent work has had a focus on the trans body, particularly the “sanctity” of self-actualization and the god-like power that comes with accepting and creating yourself in the unique and exceptional way that LGBT people must in order to live authentically. Two of my pieces on this topic were actually recently exhibited at UWM in the Trans-lucent exhibition, and will remain there until December 15th (I think). I got sick and tired of never seeing trans representation, so now I am creating that space that I crave in my own work.”

Kobe | instagram | soundcloud

“My art from is very influenced by my LGBT identity. It is very influenced by my LGBT black Identity. I think that whenever an artist makes their art (in my case writing music, singing, dancing) they should incorporate as much of themselves as possible. I think my LGBT identity definitely adds a sense of representation as well. I want people like me to listen to my music to know they aren’t alone. So it influences my work a lot. “

Nat | art instagram

“I think the fact that I am part of the LGBT+ community influences my art directly. Even though I don’t draw as often as I wish, I believe both my drawings and college projects (I am a 3d art/animation student), and my creativity in general is inspired by my personal experiences as a gay woman and common things experienced by the community. I try as often as I can to bring representation of some kind in the things I do, mainly personal projects. I also feel that it influences me on my motivation to keep creating; whenever I listen to, see drawings, watch movies or see whatever form of artistic expression from LGBT+ artists it gives me the energy to keep going, to keep creating.”

#gay as in stupid podcast #lgbt podcast #lgbt artists #gay art #trans art

[houxlislitspace]

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

“I understood what I could.” That’s how I would frame my experience with this novella. The plot and meaning and aren’t ambiguous or impenetrable by any means! However, as someone who is a white American and neurotypical, there were things I missed. Moreso the former than the latter, due to the shorthand and nuances that Kang should be taking for granted. I read a translation, but as it is such a delicate, limited, freeing art, it was only for the words.

On Goodreads.com, someone asked if being a vegetarian in South Korea was really seen as bad. This question didn’t pass my mind when I decided I wanted to read this, naive as I am. The answer said something to the effect of “it’s not unusual, but unless it’s for the sake of a named medical issue, it’s seen as selfish and attention-seeking.” I’m so happy I stumbled onto that, because it made me realize how out of bounds me reading this was putting me. I knew that I didn’t know things that I didn’t know about, didn’t even think to see that they were there to know about, if you follow me. I knew this in a extremely general sense, but it was the first time it was made so apparent. So, that’s how I started this book- looking for differences rather than similarities from my own experiences and view-point.

Ironic, since the narrative places us in the heads orbiting the mentally ill main character. I found disgusting similarities in the basest of assumptions made about people who live with and suffer from mental illness. The husband, our first narrator, was the best to put in the forefront for this exact reason. The vegetarian’s breakdown is stressed and clear. Basically everything the people around her do make her condition worse. The frame work empathizes that the main character makes the decisions herself. First it’s things like refusing meat and taking off her shirt in her home, and it slowly devolves from there. This could be read as the narrators refusing to take responsibility for abuse, or, as the back of the English translated book states, they are liberating moments that the narrators seek to suppress and control. Those with mental illness are vulnerable, because people who are neurotypical don’t know how to view them that unknown becomes fear which becomes resentment (this is a simplification and an umbrella statement). To have the narrator(s) be everyone close to the main character except the main character herself is a brilliant and heartbreaking decision. Those with mental illness are silenced or never given the chance to be heard. The main character answers questions pertaining to her actions several times, but due to the natures of the narrators they either choose not to listen or condescend her.

When I pointed out my ethnicity and my mental health, I did so to frame where I was coming from entering this heavy novella. I was not barred from experiencing and connecting to the story or the viewpoints, but there are elements ingrained that I don’t even know to see.

I come out the other side of this book with more questions than answers, not so much about the story but about my sense perception. Overthinking only becomes so once the ideas are made circular; a farmer only tilling one acre out of the sixty more available to him (rotate your crops!). Thinking a lot about what we consume, especially especially especially the context it was written in, will only open doors to new ideas rather than close them.

I can talk about authorial intent vs. personal viewpoint, but that’s the difference between a critical analysis and a review. I don’t feel like editing this because that’s what stops me dead in my tracks for any work, so this space is going to be for rambles about books. Welcome to my revamped blog. Thank you.

#the vegetarian #han kang #book review #books #writing #booklr #literature #novella #fiction #lit

[him-e]

hi i’m really confused why people who hate ben say the first order/ben is/are nazis? like ???? how does that even exist or work in this story? am i just dumb and don’t ~see it~? i hope you don’t think this is me baiting you into something else (regarding your last ask) that’s what made me ask this since it mentions nazis in the article. i really am just confused since i loved tlj and didn’t see any problem with it.

It’s okay, don’t worry. First off, don’t let the discourse get in the way of your enjoyment of fiction, especially when it’s comprised essentially of guilt-tripping, manipulative buzzwords. 

Now. The nazi coding in the First Order (and the Galactic Empire in the OT) is there—from the uniforms to the insignia to Hux’s speech to the troops in TFA, everything screams “evil space nazis”—but it’s mainly for the aesthetics. It’s window dressing. It’s a literary trope. 

It’s make up, essentially, a shortcut to help the audience identify easily the bad guys as, indeed, Bad Guys. It’s the equivalent of dressing up your villains as monstrous, stinky orcs in tolkienesque fantasy. That’s because Star Wars is a mash up of different literary and cinematic genres, and one of those is classic WWII movies from the ‘40s and ‘50s, the ones that established the trope of nazis as action/adventure/historical drama villain material. The original trilogy in the late ‘70s was targeted to a young audience, an audience entirely born after wwii, who grew up with the imagery of nazi as fictional villains rather than present, tangible real world threat.

So basically the nazi imagery in Star Wars is a homage to a certain movie genre and its tropes and trappings more than a political statement. And the sequel trilogy deconstructs those tropes, which adds an extra layer of distance from actual political discussion of *real life* nazism. (please note that both TFA and TLJ were written before Trump’s election and before alt-right became a pressing matter in the us political scene).

This doesn’t mean Star Wars doesn’t have a political message. It absolutely has one, and it’s powerful precisely because it’s universal, not necessarily localized to this or that specific ideology or political climate: it’s a statement against imperialism, militarism and antidemocratic oppression, which applies to WWII nazi Germany just as much as it does to other (present-day) dictatorships or to the current rise of populism across the world, BUT most of all it refers (in its original intent) to post-wwii US’ politics. In fact, despite the undeniable pseudo-nazi-fascist aesthetics, George Lucas conceived the Empire as a parody/criticism of the united states’ imperialistic politics in the 60′s–70′s and of the Vietnam war, with Palpatine as a Nixon-like figure.

The superficial nazi metaphor, decontextualized from the other influences and taken in isolation as the only possible real world parallel to the First Order, is neither a particularly deep nor an accurate political reading of it. I would also add it comes from a shallow, imprecise idea of what makes nazism different from other fascist ideologies. Consider this: the most defining aspect of the nazi party—the belief in a superior race and the systematic extermination of Jewish people through the Holocaust—has no recognizable in-universe equivalent neither in the Empire nor The First Order ** (we can guess both are sorta racist—the term would be speciesist—towards non-human species, given the fact that you can’t see a single alien among their ranks, but it’s never a Plot Point, and in any case I hope nobody is under the impression that alien, aka non human or subhuman, creatures can be an acceptable metaphor for Jewish people. Right?). 

** and by the way: no, the destruction of Alderaan or the Hosnian System is not an equivalent to the Holocaust. The intention there was to wipe out a political/military target, not an entire race because of their race. The real life equivalent to the death star and starkiller would be the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Guess who dropped those?

So what makes a nazi analogy effective, exactly? Just generic imperialism and world domination? Evilness™? War crimes? The use of weapons of mass destruction? Aren’t other real life ideologies and military superpowers guilty of those things too? How do you strip a fictional representation of nazi ideology of its most important and atrocious aspect, antisemitism, and still expect the audience to take that metaphor literally? 

Spoiler: it isn’t supposed to be taken literally.

It doesn’t have to, in order to speak to the heart of the audiences all over the world. The nazi coding might be superficial, but this doesn’t mean that the First Order as presented by the new trilogy isn’t absolutely, unequivocally bad. Why is it bad? The narrative doesn’t get too specific about it—in fact many criticized how vague the politics both in tfa and tlj are—but we know they’re bad: they have a rigid militaristic structure, they blow up planets and entire solar systems, they oppose democratic-looking entities called the Resistance and the Republic (names are important just as coding is), they summarily execute prisoners. We just KNOW that those things are bad—we aren’t sure what their political vision is (beyond obvious galactic domination. To quote GRRM, what is the First Order’s tax policy?), but if they do those things, it must be bad, period. That’s all we need to know to understand this story.

The nazi aesthetics help broadcasting this evilness to the audience loud and clear, because we’re all children of the same culture that (thanks to the aforementioned movies and tropes) taught us to instantly recognize those black-dressed, seriously-looking guys marching in lines and swearing allegiance to an ominous-looking red-and-black symbol as evil incarnate (except we fail to recognize fascist and nazi ideology when it manifests in other, less obvious forms).

BUT here’s the thing that antis constantly get wrong, like abysmally wrong. While the First Order is portrayed as bad and unsympathetic, Kylo Ren/Ben Solo isn’t. 

Kylo Ren being made of a different cloth was clear since TFA (you cannot deny the truth that is your family) and insisting to claim otherwise at this point is willfully misinterpreting canon and loudly communicated authorial intent.

Aside from the stormtroopers (who were groomed into their role and are used as cannon fodder by the Order, and who I think will be eventually liberated by Finn), Kylo is the one part of the First Order who is clearly REDEEMABLE, because his nature is essentially extraneous to it. He’s a Skywalker. He’s the last of a breed of wizard-warriors who worship the Force and whose political views, for better or worse, will be always secondary to the way they perceive this energy in the galaxy and their role in it. His enormous power might be dark, but it’s not evil, and right now he’s misplacing it in the hands of an evil organization which he erroneously considers as a chance to bring “a new order” to the galaxy.

Is Kylo a nazi, or at least is he as superficially nazi-coded as the rest of the first order is? Let’s see:

there is no indication of Kylo being racist (or speciesist). Classist? Hell yeah, you can see it mostly in his interactions with Rey (which are, however, complicated and in part contradicted by the fact that Kylo seems to respect and value force users more than “regular” people, including those on his own side). Racist? There’s zero reason to believe that. Or at least there’s no satisfying in-universe equivalent of real world racism emerging in Kylo’s character.

the only group of people Kylo wants to exterminate (like Snoke, and like Anakin before him) is the Jedi order, but the Jedi aren’t an ethnicity or a species. You aren’t born a Jedi. You become one. Destroying the Jedi order is a purge, not a genocide. It’s like killing all the members of a political party, or the supporters of a religious heresy. STILL BAD! (and definitely something nazism, as many other dictatorships, did.) But not steeped in racism or eugenetics. It’s interesting that upon meeting Rey and discovering her force powers, Kylo proposes to teach her. He doesn’t have a problem with force sensitive people per se, he has a problem with those who adhere to the Jedi order. This grudge against the Jedi exists in the context of the eternal hostility between lightsiders and darksiders in star wars canon. It’s not the first time that one side of the Force tries to completely destroy the other, and yes, the Jedi have tried to exterminate the Sith too.

Kylo’s outfit marks him as different than the rest of the First Order, and specifically different from Hux (who is, in many ways, the epitome of the “evil gay nazi” trope, which in turn is a bastardization, mostly for the lulz and/or for fictional purposes, of nazism). Kylo doesn’t wear an uniform or display any official first order insignia indicating that he is, indeed, a believer of that ideology. His TFA costume is reminiscent of a monk or a knight templar (see also how his saber is essentially a red cross shape) while also evoking the classic image of the Grim Reaper (when he’s in full cowl+mask attire), while his TLJ one, while not very different from its earlier version, gives him a dark prince vibe, with the long, willowy black cape and the elegant shorter tunic resembling a medieval/renaissance doublet. Not a lot of nazi coding here, and believe me, how a character looks is very, very important to convey this sort of messages.

So.

What makes a(n allegedly) nazi-coded character convincing, aesthetics aside? 

His politics.

Do we know what Kylo’s politics are? 

No.

If the First Order’s political vision is vague because it works essentially as a stand-in for “evil organization” and we don’t need a lot of details about it, Kylo’s political views are more than vague, they’re non-existent. That’s because Kylo isn’t a political figure, at all. He got involved with this organization because his dark side master was the Supreme Leader, but we have no way of knowing whether his political ideas really align with those of the First Order, or if he has any at all. We believe they must align, to an extent at least, because why would he stick with them for so long if they don’t. The problem is that Kylo is too fucked up to discuss him this way. We actually see in TLJ how he keeps doing things that “split his spirit to the bone” just because his master asked, and because he sees no choice. He just keeps rolling like a wrecking ball towards complete (self) destruction. He’s a mess. He’s the opposite of a political thinker.

Antis insist to see Kylo as the embodiment of the first order when he’s actually (probably) the seed of its destruction. He exists at the margins of the organization, as a scary, but essentially extraneous presence, who follows his own rules and whims (proof of this is Hux’s seething hatred and distrust for him). We now see him rise as its Supreme Leader, but he, like Snoke before him, is an outsider, a custodian and wielder of an ancient magic/religion that the First Order is very willing to use for their own profit, but seems to be inherently skeptical of. And this conflict is 100% going to come to fruition in IX, make no mistake.

Framing Kylo as a nazi is such a massive misunderstanding of how his character is constructed, his role in the story and what he’s meant to represent to us. And of course it creates a VERY unfortunate dissonance in the fact that we’re EVIDENTLY meant to sympathize with him and root for his redemption. 

This is a character who isn’t meant to represent a political allegory, but an existential one. He’s an archetypal figure—the prodigal son, now become the Usurper. His political views remain largely unexplained and unexplored because they don’t matter. What matters is the archetypal ball of negative, destructive energy he represents, as well as the psychological horror of his personal and familial drama, which is the bulk of his motivation in everything he does. Kylo lashes out because of his unresolved trauma with his family and with Snoke, not because he knows what he’s doing or because he wants to achieve a specific goal. Even at the end of TLJ, he’s using the First Order war machine as a weapon to enact his personal, and deeply masochistic, vendetta against Luke, who tried to murder him, and Leia who (in his mind) rejected and betrayed him for the Resistance. He’s also externalizing the blind terror, the hurt, the confusion of having just killed his mentor and long time abuser to save someone who (from his point of view) only used him and then dropped him like a sack of potatoes (yeah, that would be Rey).

There’s no sound military strategy or even logical thinking in his almost delirious attack on the resistance base on Crait, to the point that even Hux is appalled. This isn’t a man who is pursuing a political ideology. This is a deeply broken individual who is fumbling to deal with some major unresolved issues from his past and childhood and who for some reason believes that burning everything to ashes is the only way to achieve some sort of peace. The “order” he wants to restore is more on a personal scale than on a galactic one. The galactic scale is always a byproduct of the personal, as it’s always the case with these thrice damned Skywalkers, tbh.

so to summarize

the nazi aesthetic is superficial and is meant to convey that the first order is Evil

the political message of sw is more universal than “fight the nazis”, not because the nazis aren’t bad, but because the nazis aren’t the only form of political evil people should fight against, and depending on where and when you are in the world, there might be more immediate forms of imperialism and oppression that the local audience might want to see reflected in the First Order (note that the current nazi discourse is incredibly westerncentric and especially us-centric, because that’s where we’re unfortunately experiencing a resurgence of these ideologies, but other parts of the world might have their own oppressive powers to fight that have nothing to do with nazism)

the First Order is 100% evil but Kylo isn’t integrated within it, and even as the Supreme Leader he represents an outsider

Kylo’s relevance in the story is broader than his affiliation with the First Order

in fact, the main themes of his character aren’t political at all

Kylo matters as an archetypal and tragic figure, the continuation of the very archetypal and tragic familial saga of the Skywalkers

Kylo is neither a “literal” nazi nor nazi-coded

insisting that Kylo is a nazi makes you (not you, anon, those who propose this interpretation) look stupider and stupider as it becomes increasingly clear that he’s a HUGELY sympathetic character who is on a redemptive (and romantic) arc

seriously, disney ain’t gonna “normalize” nazis

stop saying that

stop worrying about that

this is the least of your problems

the first order will eventually be destroyed as it should be. Kylo, who is not a nazi, will not

end

#anon #asks #sw asks #sw** #//// #// #sw wank #tlj wank #tlj for ts #sw for ts #kylo ren for ts #kylo** #nazi mention #reductio ad nazi #the first order #space politics #sw discourse #tlj discourse #anti kylo bs #villains #nazi coding #antisemitism tw #racism tw #wank for ts #fandom wank

[nostalgebraist]

Just remembered a conversation with my old undergrad thesis adviser (early 2010), where I was getting close to done, and he remarked “you may be discovering a certain compulsive element in yourself”

That was very much the sort of thing that sounded natural and non-patronizing coming out of his mouth (physics prof in his 70s, with the reputation of being a “deep thinker” and the elderly gravitas to match), and it was also clearly true.  I was thinking about this as I wrote more labored exposition for my graduate thesis.  I was thinking my writing probably sounded like it did in my undergrad thesis (7 years ago!), and on a whim I re-read some of my undergrad thesis, and it did.  Because I always want to clarify everything conceptually, spelling out “there is this and then there is this and here’s an analogy that helped me understand how they are different,” saying why we’re doing X and not X’ by launching into a list of all the ways X and X’ differ or might differ, breaking everything down into discrete distinct cells with explicitly explained boundaries between each and its neighbors

I’m not a wizard with mathematical manipulations or with vaulting abstraction, and I’m not especially “creative” in mathy stuff, either.  If I am good at anything it is taking the stuff people have already said, thinking over it for way more time than anyone else would need to understand it “for practical purposes,” and then spitting out a lovingly compulsive account the stuff they said as a formal structure -- one presented in long-winded prose, not in actual specs

I’m just not very good at attaining the “for practical purposes” sense of any technical concept that people are expected to in the mathematical sciences -- if I try to, I get a concept formed the wrong way, and I make bad inferences from it, and I end up the dim bulb in the room.  (I do try, and that is what happens.)  Either I don’t get it, or I get it, and once I get to the latter state, I can at least explain the thing in a way that doesn’t make me feel like a dim bulb.  A way I’m proud of.  I explain the fuck out of those things.

In the folder for my undergrad thesis, I opened up a text file, and it was full of many earnest notes to myself, categorizing the papers I was reading (in terms of “software,” “problem,” and “sophistication,” the latter referring to a three-point, precisely defined scale for model complexity I had invented earlier in the notes), trying to reconcile statements I’d read in papers or textbooks that seemed contradictory (I have since learned that academics sometimes write things that are not strictly true, because the intended reader will “know what they mean”), noting down conceptual things I didn’t understand and then the solutions I’d figured out.

I forgot just how much systematic thought I put into that thing!  I wonder if anyone ever read it.  (I’m not whining about this; I knew at the the time that no one reads undergrad theses.)  I mean, I didn’t even finish doing the scientific thing I actually set out to do anyway.  But the exposition of the background material (which comprises 80% of the text) was good, in that compulsive way!  When I had to, say, describe the models I’d been reading about in the literature, I did invent a precise definition of the “type of model” they were and give it a made-up name and corresponding acronym, but you know, that was a sensible thing to do!  It helped!

Just in the course of writing this post I remembered that, when I’d been horribly confused by the very informal textbook for a first-year graduate course, I briefly took to writing up my own set of TeXed notes, written like a textbook with an authorial voice (“so future students won’t have to be confused,” I thought bombastically).  I only got 11 pages in before giving up, and the thing is full of stuff like

Scaling arguments are formally similar to perturbation theory arguments. The difference is that in a scaling argument, we do not consider small deviations from an “unperturbed problem,” but instead cause certain terms in a problem to become small by pulling out factors that reflect estimates of the size of each term in the problem. Typically there will be no identifiable “basic” state relative to which “small deviations” are occurring.

(Later, “the scaling procedure” is specified as a 6-point list.)

Of course, there’s a certain group of people in this territory who love to insist on strict conceptual clarity -- the pure mathematicians.  But I like applications (and, TBH, am just not that abstract of a thinker).  You can get books and papers that present a given application “for mathematicians,” but with those the conceptual clarity hitches a bunch of other baggage for the ride.

I’m starting to feel more and more affinity for the programming/CS world, because it tends to be compulsive about concepts and their boundaries the way I am -- in my case just by nature, but in programming you need to be that way, both (trivially) because you have to state things precisely to program a computer, but (more interestingly) because bad abstractions quickly start causing real consequences and real headaches for real people, and “carelessly conflating two very similar categories” is not a pedant’s pet issue but the kind of thing that actually makes things break.

#blah blah blah #mathpost #late night bull session

[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

Genius or manchild? Reconsidering Steve Jobs after his daughter's book

The statement from Steve Jobs' widow arrived via email, unrequested, in the middle of Labor Day. "Lisa is part of our family, so it was with sadness that we read her book," it began, the "we" referring to Laurene Powell Jobs and her sister-in-law, the novelist Mona Simpson. "The portrayal of Steve is not the husband and father we knew," it continued. "Steve loved Lisa, and he regretted that he was not the father he should have been during her early childhood." 

It's what any PR expert would call "getting ahead of the story" — the story being Small Fry, an autobiography by the Apple founder's first child Lisa Brennan-Jobs, daughter of Christine Brennan, which was released the next day. Never mind that Lisa was technically part of Steve's family circle before either Laurene or Mona (younger birth sister to Steve, who was put up for adoption). If you get your riposte in first, the advice goes, you control the narrative. 

SEE ALSO: Lisa Brennan-Jobs shares tangled memories of her imperfect father, Steve Jobs

But as any journalist would tell you, it's the kind of statement that gets our spidey senses twitching, more for what it wasn't saying than what it was. It didn't refute any specific allegation in Brennan-Jobs' book. It didn't have anything to say about Powell Jobs telling Lisa "We're just cold people," or her regret that she married Jobs too young, or any one of a dozen scenes in which she does little to prevent her husband's controlling, heartbreaking, manchild-like behavior toward her stepdaughter. 

As I discovered when I sped-read the thing so you don't have to, the statement had nothing on the book. Small Fry recounts simple scenes in Lisa's life in an unhurried fashion, with a novelist's eye for detail. (She openly admires her author aunt Mona, even after Mona writes a fictional version of Lisa's life without asking.) In contrast with most tell-all autobiographies, this one actually suspends authorial judgment. 

What a relief that is, especially in 2018. Lisa Brennan-Jobs is the anti-Omarosa. Her book is an even-handed, surprisingly poetic, quietly devastating record of the witness that she bore, and is now sharing with us. 

This testimony will make most readers think differently about Jobs. And in the age of Trump and #MeToo, Small Fry is another good example of why we should stop forgiving or enabling powerful men who act like assholes toward women and refuse to grow up.  

"You get nothing!"

From an extract in Vanity Fair and an interview in the New York Times, we already knew a few of Small Fry's more shocking moments. Jobs bullied and gaslighted his daughter throughout her childhood — at first denying his paternity and child support payments, then repeatedly denying that he named the Apple Lisa computer after her. The lie tortured Brennan-Jobs until Bono, of all people, made him 'fess up. 

But the shock of the big stuff is nothing compared to the accumulation of small details, through which you feel you're living Lisa's childhood and teenage years. She went to live with her father and Powell-Jobs during middle and high school, on condition that she stop seeing her mother. Her self-doubt and loneliness are painfully, almost claustrophobically real. She develops a tic where she can't control her hands, and breaks many glasses. She feels unable to breathe when her father pays her attention or affection. (More often he didn't, even point-blank refusing to swing by her room and say goodnight to her.) 

Stuck in a cold bedroom because Jobs wouldn't fix the heat, made to wash all the dishes because he wouldn't fix the dishwasher (in high school, Lisa finally called a repair guy herself), babysitting her young half-brother whenever Laurene and Steve wanted her to, she comes across as a real-life Harry Potter — or, as she thought of herself at the time, Cinderella.

Brennan-Jobs' self-awareness in shaping her story is part of what makes her seem a reliable witness. "I was both the one hurt and the narrator of the hurt," she writes after telling a neighborhood boy her Cinderella story. "I would learn which complaints worked and which ones didn't trigger much sympathy in others." 

Fundamentally, however, she is guileless and straightforward. She's lonely, she tells her father again and again. Even with a therapist sitting right there with them, it elicits no response.

Brennan-Jobs' mother almost comes off worse than Jobs. A wannabe artist who drifted from hippie boyfriend to hippie boyfriend, Christine openly admitted — usually with screaming and swearing — that she wasn't up to the task of motherhood. One time this happened when she was behind the wheel of a car. Brennan-Jobs stayed as quiet as possible, praying to a crack in the windscreen to keep them safe as her mother swerved across the road. 

Lisa was lost, confused, and yearned for a connection with her remote, famous dad. But he blew up at her more often than he charmed her with trampolines and roller skate outings. "You get nothing!" he screamed at her when she asked for one of his many discarded Porsches. He became mad at wealthy neighbors who paid her way through college when he refused to do so. He made Lisa's friends cry with his insults, and he verbally assaulted waitresses while Mona and Laurene sat by, silently. 

Then there's the sex stuff, which ... if it doesn't cross a line, it sidles right up to it. According to Lisa, he liked to point out to his child daughter that the Stanford tower "looks like a penis," and repeatedly told a story about a friend masturbating while watching Ingrid Bergman sunbathe. He draws his daughter a bath and later tells her she should masturbate. 

And in the book's ickiest scene, he made Lisa watch as he began practically simulating sex with her stepmother, Powell Jobs. (He did much the same thing with his previous girlfriend, a woman named Tina, whom he later regrets leaving for Powell Jobs; Tina tells Brennan-Jobs that such ostentatious making out "was what he did when he felt uncomfortable.")  

If I was Powell Jobs, I wouldn't want to remember my spouse that way, either. But we all have different memories of the dearly departed, especially when it comes to someone as mercurial as Jobs. 

The child inside

I interviewed Jobs around a dozen times in the 2000s, when Apple was still just another tech company, before the iPhone secured his legacy. His tactics during an interview largely consisted of telling the reporter why their questions were "stupid." If you could withstand 20 minutes of this behavior, or if you started to use reverse psychology to get good quotes out of him, he'd suddenly smile: You were okay, you got it, you were in the club.

The other compelling memory I have of Jobs is him leaving a restaurant in Palo Alto. In jean shorts and a black T-shirt, with a plastic takeout bag in one hand, he idly made airplane shapes with his arms as he walked down the street. Exactly like a child.

The hectoring, reality-controlling Jobs that Brennan-Jobs writes about feels like one of the most true depictions we have. People longed to be drawn into his orbit for the good moments, the flashes of brilliance or mere attention, for which they slogged through the bad.

But maybe that isn't good enough any more. Maybe "Time's Up" not just in Hollywood, but also in the tech world. Maybe we need to stop spreading the lie that genius can only come from jerks.

In his 2012 authorized biography of Jobs, Walter Isaacson spends a lot of time considering this question: Would the Apple founder still have been a great man with a legacy of killer products if he hadn't been so cruel to his employees? If he hadn't become a millionaire in his mid-twenties? Did parking his Porsches in the disabled spots for his entire career make the iPhone happen any faster? What if he hadn't quit Apple in a snit in 1985? If he hadn't spent a decade down the rabbit hole of his failed next company, NeXT, might the modern world have arrived a little earlier?  

What if he'd used his powers to motivate and inspire people with sternness, but also with love?

Brennan-Jobs tells how her father used to carry a picture of her around in his wallet, denying she was his kid even as he showed her off to others as the kid of a friend he was helping out. "He loves you," her mother said. "He just doesn't know that he loves you." It took the emotionally stunted Jobs a long time to learn what love meant. We can speculate on the reasons why, and to what extent his adoption had anything to do with it; we can also speculate whether that's just making excuses for behavior that was clearly abnormal. 

At the very end of his life he apparently knew it: He cried and apologized on his deathbed, Brennan-Jobs tells us. He repeated the words "I owe you one" over and over. It's practically the textbook definition of "too late." 

She has forgiven him, and the book ultimately leaves any questions of worldly remedies to the reader. But the final pages do contain the closest thing we get in this non-judgmental book to a judgment on her turbulent father (emphasis mine): 

This is on all of us as a society, but men especially. We should stop giving our fellow men license to be jerks — for the sake of everyone around them, for the victims like Lisa, but also for their own sake. The more that men in positions of authority act poorly, the more they're missing out. 

See Steve Jobs through his daughter's eyes and you're left with a profound sense of pity. He was a genius who didn't get what the whole family thing is supposed to be about, and he acted horribly. Nobody dared call him out for being a brat. In the future, when public figures and business leaders behave this way, we need to be less afraid of shining a spotlight on this behavior as it's happening. 

Or as Jobs itself might put it, we need to learn to think different. 

WATCH: Elon Musk opens up about the toll Tesla takes on him

#_author:Chris Taylor #_category:yct:001000002 #_uuid:a425c0c7-193e-3556-977d-bfc2468f5eba #_lmsid:a0Vd000000DTrEpEAL #_revsp:news.mashable