#also im NOT trying to start discourse or w/e but this fandom barely has any black people as it is so a lot of stuff like this goes unchecke | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

gullethead · 3 years

Note

what is your opinion on tamsyn muir discourse (and also what is the discourse)

THANK you. okay warning for discussion of fictional sexual assault, real life CSA (not something she did), plus 2012-era homestuck fandom typical stuff

please rb this btw, unless you dont want to, in which case dont. also if you have any corrections or additional information to consider please add by all means

disclaimer: im not in the habit of writing essays defending whichever internet personalities i like. ill admit theres potential bias, given that i read the books before i learned about this, but im really being as objective as possible and i just think people are taking a misguided or half-formed stance on this. if you still dislike her or w/e after this thats, like, perfectly in your rights. im not defending an adult woman on the internet, im explaining the facts as ive seen them and understand them. additional disclaimer that i havent experienced sexual assault at all myself

okay so tamsyn muir is currently well-known as the author of the locked tomb trilogy (aka gideon the ninth and harrow the ninth), but for a certain section of tumblr shes also well known as urbanAnchorite, and used to be a big name fan on here up until around 2014 - pretty close to everything here is going to be from roughly 2011 through 2014, except for an interview im gonna get into, so 7-10 years ago. i was only vaguely aware of her until after i got into the locked tomb and saw people talking about this. with that in mind:

so the MAJORITY of the discourse revolves around a single fic she wrote on AO3. her account has 19 works in homestuck, and some of them are Kinda Weird to Pretty Bad in retrospect, but being completely honest this is the only one that isnt completely stock standard for homestuck fandom in that time period. like if we started casting stones about ten year old fandom stuff we'd be here all day

here is the fic (warning for CSA)

in most of the posts about it ive seen, theyve described it as a "rapefic," but actually reading it, it's a lot more nuanced than that description implies. its a dark story where a grown man abuses a girl, from the man's perspective, and the story ends with him being killed by her friend. the description of the assault is treated very seriously by the story and barely even touches on any actual sex, before immediately cutting to him being killed. its lolita if humbert got shot to death; the title itself comes FROM lolita

(sidenote - it was inspired by a prompt on kinkmeme, but that doesn't really mean anything vis a vis being intended for sexual enjoyment, and according to the note actually went against the spirit of the request)

ive seen fics, lots and lots of fics, that would qualify as the term "rapefic." it tends to be pretty fucking obvious when someone is using sexual assault as a fetish, and this is Not That

tamsyn herself actually responded to this in an excellent interview early last year. she gets into some Fandom Mom type language, but essentially says what i said above. in it, she also says this:

It’s not the first time I’ve been accused of being a paedophile. I grew up gay in the nineties. Homosexuality and paedophilia were enmeshed in society’s minds. When I came out, I got told that I shouldn’t be around children. I was used to that because it was common discourse, and it hurt like all hell, but it didn’t shock me. When I got called a paedophile by Twitter I got clotheslined. My support network had to get in pronto. I was very ready to have a hot date with a length of rope, a date I have arranged and cancelled multiple times over my life. I have had lots and lots of therapy over the years for various conditions, some of them lifelong and some not, but when that Twitter call-out happened it was hard to want to live. I thought I knew so intimately what I was doing with my fiction; my therapist was always so supportive of me writing about it. I have not been open about being a CSA survivor because, again, I grew up in the ‘90s. ‘Lesbian’ and ‘CSA survivor’ is just carte blanche so a whole queue of people can tell you, I HOPE ONE DAY, WITH LOVE AND SUPPORT, YOU CAN BE STRAIGHT. It was like, right this way to the invalidation booth. I didn’t even tell most of my girlfriends! I told one! It’s not a topic of discussion between me and my family; I am relying on them not reading my interviews so it can remain where it belongs: thoroughly undiscussed!

with this context it becomes... a lot more nuanced of a topic. an author who experienced CSA in addition to growing up in a cultural climate where gay people were pedophiles by default, especially growing up catholic in a rural community, wrote a work about childhood sexual assault (which also happened to be fanfiction) as a way of working through it for herself, which is... something a lot of artists do with their art? and in return she got a massive blowback on twitter accusing her of pedophilia and demanding she talk about a massively traumatic moment in her life

this is the major sticking point of the discourse, im not gonna get into anything else on this post, but this is my view of it. if you disagree or have anything to add then feel free to add on. again, i know what it looks like, but im not trying to uncritically defend a stranger just cause i like her book. this is the conclusion i came to after doing a lot of digging for myself

#the locked tomb #tamsyn muir #also by the by im not an 'anti-anti' or whatever so go fuck yourself in advance and log off. please #i think theres nuance to be had in that conversation but its not whatever the fuck that is

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