A Response to Meghan Cox Gurdon and the WSJ

The literary community has seen more than its fair share of bad takes and ugly discourse this year, and with only a handful of days remaining before the start of 2021, you might’ve thought we’d be spared another. Enter Meghan Cox Gurdon’s recent opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Even Homer Gets Mobbed, in which she both laments and lambasts the existence of the #DisruptTexts movement. Led by Lorena German, among others, #DisruptTexts exists to challenge the continued dominance of the white, Western literary canon in schools, with a particular eye to teaching students more modern and inclusive works. To quote their website:

Disrupt Texts is a crowdsourced, grass roots effort by teachers for teachers to challenge the traditional canon in order to create a more inclusive, representative, and equitable language arts curriculum that our students deserve. It is part of our mission to aid and develop teachers committed to anti-racist/anti-bias teaching pedagogy and practices…

Each week, join us for the #DisruptTexts slow chat on Twitter as teachers from across the country and world come together to apply a critical lens on a central text. We’ll discuss how to disrupt traditional pedagogies by suggesting alternative titles and approaches through thoughtful pairings, counter-narratives, and inclusive, diverse texts sets.

https://disrupttexts.org/lets-get-to-work/

In other words, #DisruptTexts is drawing attention to something that many teachers – and, indeed, students – have struggled with for decades: the massive disparity between the lived experience of students now and the world portrayed in the books they’re given to study, which is often compounded when such works are taught uncritically. This does not mean, as Cox Gurdon and others seem to fear, that #DisruptTexts views all classic texts by white authors as valueless or bad, such that these works must be summarily rounded up and burnt; rather, it’s questioning their usefulness, both individually and en masse, for teaching teens about language and literature.

It is a fact born out by immense amounts of data that, when children do not see themselves positively reflected in stories, they suffer for it. When the historical default in film and television is for white, male-dominated casts with perhaps one token girl or non-white character thrown in, whether animated or live action, we know there has been a profound and negative impact on how everyone other than white boys is taught to see themselves: as secondary, invisible, unimportant. That being so, it should be equally obvious that teaching teens a literary canon written almost exclusively by white men will have similar consequences. Beyond the extremely salient issues of how race, gender, queerness, disability, sexuality and other such issues are portrayed within the texts themselves – beyond, even, how placing the literary canon above all else frequently turns teens away from reading, away from writing, by virtue of doing nothing to show them what books and literary styles are like now – what lesson do aspiring writers of colour take from English class, when only white-authored works are held up as worthy of study? What lesson do young queer kids take, when confronted with texts that either elide them entirely or paint them as stereotyped villains? When Jane Eyre is taught uncritically or without nuance, how does Bertha’s portrayal feel to students who are mentally ill, or women of colour, or both, especially if their teacher fails to treat the subject with nuance?

Increasingly, it feels to me, the obsession with enforcing the literary canon in schools is a last-ditch effort to enforce its relevance – relevance here being distinct from value, though canon devotees often conflate the two – in order to perpetuate the idea that only a certain kind of writing (and, said quietly, a certain kind of writer) has value. When racism, sexism and other historical biases are acknowledged, it is harder to maintain the claim that the canon is the canon for reasons of objective literary quality and ongoing relevance rather than, as is actually the case, because it represents a specific narrow tradition, with its overwhelming white-straight-maleness handwaved as an irrelevant coincidence. As Lorena German rightly points out, it matters that so much of the canon was written before diverse voices were given a platform at all – and as that platform is still less than secure, made narrow and conditional and subject to threats, it likewise matters that the obsession with teaching only the literary canon is functionally used to push back against diversity.

It is therefore with extreme bad faith and piercingly high-pitched dog-whistling that Meghan Cox Gurdon begins her piece against #DisruptTexts:

A sustained effort is under way to deny children access to literature. Under the slogan #DisruptTexts, critical-theory ideologues, schoolteachers and Twitter agitators are purging and propagandizing against classic texts—everything from Homer to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Dr. Seuss.

In dealing with this claim, it is helpful make use of DARVO. First, denial: according to Cox Gurdon, #DisruptTexts has no valid complaints and is agitating purely out of spite. Second, attack: the idea that “agitators are purging and propagandizing” is aggressively loaded language, conjuring up images of burned books and spittle-mouthed zealots yelling from pulpits, as opposed to a thoughtful, committed group of teachers engaging critically with the content of classic literature as they work to improve their classrooms. And third, reverse victim and offender: the entire point of #DisruptTexts is to increase children’s access to literature by teaching more and different texts; by contrast, it is detractors like Cox Gurdon who want #DiverseTexts shut down, which would functionally deny students a wider range of learning opportunities.

She continues:

Their ethos holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular—especially those “in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm,” as young-adult novelist Padma Venkatraman writes in School Library Journal. No author is valuable enough to spare, Ms. Venkatraman instructs: “Absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived at a time when hate-ridden sentiments prevailed, risks sending a subliminal message that academic excellence outweighs hateful rhetoric.”

Again, this is a bad faith claim and glaringly inaccurate: the ethos of #DisruptTexts has nothing to do with “present-day vernacular;” Cox Gurdon is dog-whistling again, implying that such modern books are inherently lesser. It’s also telling that, although she cites Padma Venkatraman’s piece in the School Library Journal, she doesn’t link to it – presumably because doing so would expose that she’s deliberately ignored the context of the piece, which begins:

Lately, I’ve heard from several parents, educators, and librarians who want to prevent white children from imbibing prejudice. When I suggest that one simple step we can take is to proactively encourage young people to read diverse books, there’s agreement. When I suggest another equally easy step is to stop supporting racist classics, I meet resistance.

Immense and complex problems face us as a nation today—and I’m not trying to trivialize them. Changing the stories we read (or don’t read) won’t change society overnight, but I do believe it will help curb insidious biases from perpetuating in future generations. If we’re serious about preventing children from growing into adults who indulge in exclusionary behavior or ignore supremacist institutions and traditions, we must take small steps that are within our control, while demanding larger changes.

Venkatraman was writing in June of 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, with an eye to addressing a question she’d been asked about the germination of racial and other biases in white students. She was not writing in a vacuum, as Cox Gurdon’s elision of context aims to suggest, nor is she randomly calling for the death of classics purely on abstract grounds. Rather, she is speaking specifically about racist classics and the harm they can cause when taught uncritically. That Cox Gurdon has taken this to mean all classics – and has immediately leapt to their defense regardless – rather makes Venkatraman’s point. It’s worth quoting Vekatraman’s piece at length, as she makes a clear, intelligent case for the issues posed by uncritically keeping classics in the curriculum. To give her comment about Shakespeare its full context:

Racism in classics can’t be negated merely by alerting young readers to its presence. Unless we have the time, energy, attention, expertise, and ability to foster nuanced conversations in which even the shyest readers feel empowered to engage if they choose, we may hurt, not help. Pressuring readers of color to speak up also removes free choice and can be harmful.

Even if we establish safe environments for discussion, classics privilege white readers. If we say that we love Mary of The Secret Garden, who considers Indians to be Blacks and says that Blacks “are not people—they’re servants,” we’re excusing and overlooking her openly expressed hatred. To Kill A Mockingbird exemplifies the white savior stereotype. Uncle Tom’s Cabin broke out of the horrifically narrow confines of the era when it was written—but can it be considered progressive today? Isn’t it more important to pay attention to books written by more recent Black authors, and include both titles that speak about the history of enslavement, and also, equally, books that celebrate Black joy? Consider whether, if Holden Caulfield had been a dark-skinned teen, his behavior (which includes hiring a prostitute) would have been considered threatening, inappropriate and even criminal—or if he’d have received the level of approbation and adoration from white readers that he’s enjoyed. Ask if absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived at a time when hate-ridden sentiments prevailed, risks sending a subliminal message that academic excellence outweighs hateful rhetoric.

Insisting on exposing diverse children to racist classics in which they see characters like themselves demeaned, or, at best, entirely excluded, is not just insensitive, but downright cruel. Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie endorses terrible historical injustices. It also, like most fairytales, perpetuates the myth that dark skin isn’t beautiful. Such ideas can damage the self-esteem of readers with diverse backgrounds.

Reading can be a key to success. If we want to nurture readers of color, we must get rid of racist classics in homes, bookstores, and English classrooms.

I’m not advocating we ban classics. Or erase the past. Classics are undoubtedly examples of excellent writing, or they wouldn’t have survived the test of time. I’m just suggesting we study classics in social studies classrooms, where inherent ideas of inequity are exposed and examined; where Huckleberry Finn may be viewed as an example of literature that showcases the white lens. Delay the study of classics until readers are mature enough to question, debate, and defy subtle assertions. Dissect classics in college by setting aside time to delve into both literary merits and problematic assumptions. Redefine parochial notions of what “well-read” means; after all, British children are unaware of many celebrated American authors.

When we defend classics, we’re sometimes just defending childhood memories. I wholeheartedly agree that Pippi Longstocking has many merits, but before putting her on a pedestal, re-read the series, while imagining you’re dark-skinned or reading an unabridged version aloud to children with diverse backgrounds. Mightn’t Pippi move aside to make place for other spunky characters whose fathers aren’t white kings of black cannibal tribes?

It’s precisely this sort of nuanced, knowledgable thinking that Cox Gurdon sees as “the subtle complexities of literature… reduced to the crude clanking of “intersectional” power struggles.” But then, the role of critical thinking in literary analysis is far too often something more preached than practiced in schools, especially when it comes to assessing the worth of a text at the individual level. During my own high school career, I found it ironic that, while purporting to teach us critical thinking, my teachers would punish me for disagreeing with the textual analysis laid out by the curriculum. It didn’t matter if I could cite the basis of my objections and personal interpretations using the text itself: we had to stick to what the module wanted, and any critical deviation would be viewed, I was told more than once, as “cheeky.” I’d aspired to be a writer long before my English classes forced me to read Tim Winton and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but it was their texts and teaching that so burned me out on my best and favourite subject that, by the time I reached university, I went into history instead.

Says Cox Gurdon:

Thus Seattle English teacher Evin Shinn tweeted in 2018 that he’d “rather die” than teach “The Scarlet Letter,” unless Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel is used to “fight against misogyny and slut-shaming.”

Outsiders got a glimpse of the intensity of the #DisruptTexts campaign recently when self-described “antiracist teacher” Lorena Germán complained that many classics were written more than 70 years ago: “Think of US society before then & the values that shaped this nation afterwards. THAT is what is in those books.”

Jessica Cluess, an author of young-adult fiction, shot back: “If you think Hawthorne was on the side of the judgmental Puritans . . . then you are an absolute idiot and should not have the title of educator in your twitter bio.”

An online horde descended, accused Ms. Cluess of racism and “violence,” and demanded that Penguin Random House cancel her contract. The publisher hasn’t complied, perhaps because Ms. Cluess tweeted a ritual self-denunciation: “I take full responsibility for my unprovoked anger toward Lorena Germán. . . . I am committed to learning more about Ms. Germán’s important work with #DisruptTexts. . . . I will strive to do better.” That didn’t stop Ms. Cluess’s literary agent, Brooks Sherman, from denouncing her “racist and unacceptable” opinions and terminating their professional relationship.

Before dealing with the wider issue surrounding Cluess and what happened next, let’s take a moment to marvel at Cox Gurdon’s ability to roundly contradict herself within the space of three sentences. Though evidently horrified by Shinn’s desire to tackle misogyny and slut-shaming when teaching The Scarlet Letter, she approves of Cluess’s claim that Hawthorn himself is critiquing the puritanical judgements of the Pilgrims – in other words, their misogyny and slut-shaming. The only difference between Shinn and Cluess’s interpretation of the text is that, whereas Shinn is thinking critically about the role of classics in his curriculum, Cluess was arguing vehemently against so much as questioning them – but even then, Shinn’s objection doesn’t extend to all of Hawthorn’s writing. In the very same tweet, he goes on to say, “Hawthorne wrote dope short stories. Black Veil, Birthmark?! Do better.” Ignoring this is yet another act of bad faith on Cox Gurdon’s part.

Which brings us to Jessica Cluess and the twitterstorm she created last month. It’s telling that, while Cox Gurdon quotes one of Cluess’s ad-hominem attacks on Lorena German, she paints the backlash against her comments as due solely to her opinions about Hawthorn. This ignores the fact that, in addition to calling German an idiot and questioning her credentials, Cluess went on a lengthy and subsequently deleted rant that was as much an attack on German personally as it was a defense of classic literature. Responding to German’s tweet, Cluess also wrote, “This anti-intellectual, anti-curiosity bullshit is poison and I will stand here and scream that it is sheer goddamn evil until my hair falls out.” How anyone can keep a straight face while characterizing a mild enjoinder to question the status quo as “anti-curiosity” is beyond me; nonetheless, in addition to calling German and her ilk evil, Cluess also told her to “sit and spin on a tack” and “stop taking drugs.” It was the ad-hominem racism of her comments that got her into trouble, and for these remarks specifically that her apology was made, not her defense of the classics. Once again, Cox Gurdon is deliberately mischaracterizing events to better paint herself and her cause as victims of persecution.

Taking an enormous leap with her next paragraph, Cox Gurdon says:

The demands for censorship appear to be getting results. “Be like Odysseus and embrace the long haul to liberation (and then take the Odyssey out of your curriculum because it’s trash),” tweeted Shea Martin in June. “Hahaha,” replied Heather Levine, an English teacher at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!” When I contacted Ms. Levine to confirm this, she replied that she found the inquiry “invasive.”

Dear Ms Cox Gurdon: if removing a book from a school curriculum qualifies as censorship, does this mean every book that teachers have been prevented from teaching has likewise been censored? Asking for all the marginalised authors whose work you adamantly insist has no place in a school English curriculum.

She continues:

“It’s a tragedy that this anti-intellectual movement of canceling the classics is gaining traction among educators and the mainstream publishing industry,” says science-fiction writer Jon Del Arroz, one of the rare industry voices to defend Ms. Cluess. “Erasing the history of great works only limits the ability of children to become literate.”

For those who haven’t heard of him, Jon Del Arroz has a long history of harassing people in the SFF community, including the use of racism, misogyny and homophobic slurs. Given how often he’s instigated virulent twitter attacks against people he dislikes, it’s telling that Cox Gurdon, who takes issue with the “online horde” who responded to Cluess’s racism, would view him as a benign ally. As with her self-contradicting view of Hawthorn, it’s clear that Cox Gurdon is less concerned with making a case for the classics than she is with yelling uncritically at people and ideas she personally dislikes, regardless of any overall coherence (or lack thereof).

In closing, she writes:

He’s right. If there is harm in classic literature, it comes from not teaching it. Students excused from reading foundational texts may imagine themselves lucky to get away with YA novels instead—that’s what the #DisruptTexts people want—but compared with their better-educated peers they will suffer a poverty of language and cultural reference. Worse, they won’t even know it.

And here we come to the crux of Cox Gurdon’s bias: the idea that only the classics are worthy. Students who study them will be “better-educated” than those who “get away with YA novels.” Why? Because reasons, none of which she deigns to provide beyond “a poverty of language and cultural reference.” I could write a whole separate essay about how a host of other novels, both YA and adult, modern and classic, are better suited to cultural reference than the current canon as taught in schools, but that wouldn’t answer Cox Gurdon’s point; because for her, I’d argue, cultural reference is another dog-whistle, one that refers to a specific type of white, Western cultural supremacy. Were schools to start teaching non-Western classics like Dream of the Red Chamber, for instance, she might couch her objections in different terms, but they would still be objections: her ultimate love of the classics isn’t about the age and objective worthiness of the books in question, but their whiteness and Westernness; their confirmation to a certain view of the world. Likewise, the assumption that “poverty of language” lies outside the walled bounds of the canon is elitist nonsense – as though nothing in the last seventy years has been written with skill and beauty!

Clinging to the canon in the name of a classical education makes as much sense as insisting that all students learn Latin – and I say this as someone who chose to learn (and was sufficiently priviliged to be able to learn) Latin for four years. At this point, maintaining the classics in schools is a type of literary isolationism – and as with the equivalent political policy, it’s a tactic that doesn’t work in the long term, and which ultimately speaks more to a desire for control and exclusion than to the quality of what’s being protected. After all, if the classics were obviously and unassailably better than everything that’s been written since, their status wouldn’t be threatened by the inclusion of newer works, which would automatically suffer in the comparison. That their “betterness” has to be taught to be recognised is a sign of how meagre and subjective a thing it ultimately is.

By design, the canon doesn’t teach quality, but an orthodoxy whose standards are profoundly rooted in bias. Throw it out, and let Cox Gurdon and her ilk find different hills to die on.

Tom Shippey vs Fantasy: A Response

Every so often, the opening line of a book review smacks you so forcibly around the temples with its galaxy-brained perception of SFF that you have to take several moments to recuperate. Such was the case when, after seeing the headline of Tom Shippey’s review of Sarah Kozloff’s Nine Realms series for the Wall Street Journal floating about on Twitter, I decided to investigate. Says Shippey:

Perhaps seeking to take advantage of the ever-increasing gaps between volumes of George R.R. Martin’s “Game of Thrones” series, sci-fi publisher Tor has decided on a different marketing strategy for the four volumes of Sarah Kozloff’s “Nine Realms” tetralogy. “A Queen in Hiding” (496 pages, $12.99) came out in January, followed by “The Queen of Raiders” (509 pages, $16.99) and “A Broken Queen” (446 pages, $16.99) in February and March, with “The Cerulean Queen” (509 pages, $16.99) bringing the whole sequence rapidly to a climax in April.

Having now recovered from the psychic damage dealt by this stunning opening paragraph, here is some relevant information to aid the casual reader in parsing it:

• George R. R. Martin’s series is not published by Tor, but by Bantam and Harper Voyager;
• The series in question is called A Song of Ice and Fire; the TV series based on that series is called Game of Thrones, and while this might be a pedantic point to make, as the names are often colloquially interchanged, Shippey has put me, shall we say, in something of a pedantic mood;
• The last volume in A Song of Ice and Fire, A Dance with Dragons, came out in 2011, which is to say: nine whole years ago;
• Tor doesn’t publish exclusively sci-fi as distinct from fantasy like Kozloff’s, as Shippey’s description implies. They publish in a wide range of subgenres, including but by no means limited to both science fiction and fantasy, and have been doing so for quite some time now – but even were that not the case, citing the publication of one (1) fantasy series in 2020 as being in response to the nearly decade-long gap between Martin’s last volume and now would seem to be wildly out of step with reality.

Shippey then goes on to refer to Kozloff as “Ms Kozloff” throughout his review – which is, admittedly, positive, if written so blandly as to be easily mistaken for gruel – while calling various male authors by their full names. His piece ends as follows:

Fans have spent decades trying to organize the adventures of Conan into some kind of consistent chronology—a task which Ms. Kozloff, a professor of film at Vassar, and her publishers have spared them. Just the same, the “Nine Realms” sequence has the scope and much of the gusto of Robert E. Howard’s famous Hyboria. Its characters, however, in particular its scarred but defiant heroine, have emotional range and emotional depth as well. It’s good to see that, like Cerúlia in this final volume, fantasy has grown up.

Fantasy has grown up! I’m so glad Tom Shippey, whose last experience with the genre appears to have been in 2011 at best, is here to tell me so! No need to think about any of the amazing, groundbreaking work that’s been produced in the last decade alone, both from Tor and elsewhere! Honestly, it’s such a relief to know that an old white dude I’d never heard of until today believes that the modern genre I’ve been reading, critiquing and working in since before the publication of Martin’s last novel has now graduated from childish pablum to being worthy of his notice!

The irony is, of course, that fantasy began the process of growing, not up, but away from its narrowly white, straight, Eurocentric and overwhelmingly male conventions quite some time ago. That Shippey appears not to realise this – or, if he disagrees with the sentiment, to be sufficiently aware of that longstanding discourse to be in conversation with it – is a serious strike against his credentials as a reviewer. Do I care that the man is evidently a Tolkien expert? Not especially, no, as this isn’t the same as his being a good critic – a fact to which the life of Tolkien himself can attest, as his brilliance at creating languages and mythologies was hardly reflected in his lecturing. As Diana Wynne Jones, who attended Tolkien’s classes, once amusingly noted:

When I was a student I imagine I caused Tolkien much grief by turning up to hear him lecture week after week, while he was trying to wrap his series up after a fortnight and get on with The Lord of the Rings… I sat there obdurately despite all his mumbling and talking with his face pressed up to the blackboard, forcing him to go on expounding every week how you could start with a simple quest narrative and, by gradually twitching elements as it went along, arrive at the complex and entirely different story of Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s tale” — a story that still contains the excitement of the quest narrative that seeded it. What little I heard of all this was wholly fascinating.

As SFF seethes with ongoing revelations about serial harassers and predators; as publishing across the board reckons with deep-seated racial inequalities and biases thanks to the What Publishing Paid Me hashtag; in a year where we’ve already seen both the racefail and scandal around American Dirt and the functional implosion of the RWA due to systematic abuse and double standards around race, there is something both egregious and maddening about Tom Shippey’s decision to tell us all that the genre is only just now Grown Up. Worse still, he appears to think of fantasy as being functionally Eurocentric, claiming, in praise of Kozloff’s evidently European-inspired fantasy setting, that:

It is, however, a general rule in heroic fantasy that you have to combine two elements in your world-building. First, a medieval world, with swords and halberds, battles and executions, but along with it, a magic strain, spells and witches, amulets and curses.

If I don my most charitable glasses for the reading of this statement – if I squint just so – I can allow the construction of an argument to the effect that Shippey is simply trying to define fantasy as belonging to a pre-technological era where magic is also present; that the Eurocentric terms he uses to make this case are merely meant as examples and not his desired parameters. I can allow the creation of this argument, but I don’t for a second think it holds up; partly because it’s lazy and reductive as hell, as it ignores the many fantasy works which take place in more imaginative settings than this, but mostly because words have meanings, as any professor and professional critic should know. The history of mistaking the European for the universal – both in literature and elsewhere – is long and terrible enough that Shippey cannot possibly be unaware of it, and even if his invocation of it here were to be characterised as a “lapse” of some sort, that doesn’t excuse him for defaulting to it here.

Is it any wonder that marginalised writers of all stripes are frustrated with the state of SFF publishing in particular and literature in general, if Shippey is representative of what publications like the Wall Street Journal is looking for? In the words of exasperated Australians everywhere: mate, fucking spare me.

Knives Out, Ready or Not: The Rich Deserve To Be Eaten

Warning: total spoilers for both Knives Out and Ready or Not

Periodically in Hollywood, I’m never quite sure why, it so happens that two films with strikingly similar themes are released within months of each other. Such is the case with Ready or Not and Knives Out, which hit cinemas in August and November 2019 respectively: a pair of blackly comedic yet emotionally affecting genre films whose shared, central thesis is that rich people are the literal goddamn worst. Each film follows a female protagonist of humble origins – Grace (Samara Weaving) in Ready or Not, Marta (Ana de Armas) in Knives Out – who finds herself the target of a rich family when events beyond her control see her cast as a threat to their power. She must then survive their attempts to remove her – quite literally, in Grace’s case – while figuring out which family members, if any, she can trust to help.

Of the two films, Ready or Not is undeniably the darker. Equal parts black comedy and survival horror, we’re introduced to Grace on her wedding day, when marriage to fiance Alex (Mark O’Brien) will see her join the La Domas gaming “dominion,” as the family call it. However, as part of her initiation into their number, Grace must join her new relatives for a midnight gathering on her wedding night. Forced to draw a card from a mysterious box as per the legacy of Mr Le Bail, their historic benefactor, Grace must play whatever game her card names – but when she draws Hide and Seek, the rules abruptly change. Now, in accordance with a demonic pact forged by their great-grandfather, the La Domas family must hunt and kill Grace before sunrise, or else risk death themselves. What follows is a tense hunt through the La Domas mansion, as the family – by turns brutal, bumbling, selfish and sociopathic – attempt to eliminate Grace, who must scramble to survive.

By comparison, Knives Out is much lighter viewing, yet shares the central conceit of a rich family whose wealth comes from success in the entertainment industry: in this case, the murder mystery novels of Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), whose apparent suicide the night of his 85th birthday is nonetheless being investigated by a whimsical private investigator, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig). Originally hired to be Harlan’s nurse, our heroine, Marta, soon became his friend, too: a refuge from his backbiting, selfish descendants. His esteem for her was such that Harlan made her the sole heir of his estate; but when a fatal mix-up with Harlan’s medications made it possibly for Marta to be held accountable for his death, thereby voiding his will, he went to the extreme of committing suicide to protect her, leaving Marta – who cannot lie without throwing up – to weather the aftermath alone, avoiding both the suspicions of Blanc and the ire of the Thrombey family.

In both films, the means by which the families originally became rich – horror games and murder mysteries – are echoed in the plot structure, creating a neat genre parallel. Similarly, both films have their respective protagonists emerge alive and triumphant: Grace survives, albeit bloodied and battered, while Marta is exonerated and claims her grand inheritance. Each final scene involves the heroine in front of the mansion in which the bulk of the film has taken place: while Grace sits on the steps of burning La Domas home, Marta stands on the balcony of the Thrombey estate, looking down on its former inhabitants.

Thematically, I’d argue that Knives Out is the more ambitious film, in that it attempts a more complex understanding of race, class and privilege: Marta, her mother and sister are undocumented immigrants, and for all that the lily-white Thrombeys claim to love Marta as part of the family, she is constantly subjected to their microaggressions. A prime example is the failure of any Thrombey to know her country of origin, which is variously stated to be Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador and Brazil. However, while this “joke” is clearly meant to highlight the Thrombeys’ racism rather than being at Marta’s expense, the fact that the audience is left to share their ignorance, with her real nationality never being confirmed, unintentionally suggests that it doesn’t actually matter – which attitude is why the Thrombeys get it wrong in the first place.

By the same token, and as much as I enjoyed seeing Daniel Craig chewing the scenery as Benoit Blanc, my one critique of the film is the inescapable feeling that writer/director Rian Johnson, who is white, has gone so far out of his way to paint Marta as a “good” Hispanic that, by having Blanc speak for her at critical moments, he robs her of both her agency and her anger. The fact that Marta can’t lie without vomiting makes for a clever plot detail, as she’s constantly required to bend the truth in creative ways to avoid detection, and yet it also feels like an exaggerated way to reassure the (white) audience that Marta is an exceptionally good person. Similarly, at the climax of the film, we learn that Harlan’s grandson Ransom (Chris Evans) is ultimately responsible for the medical mix-up, not Marta – he knew she’d been named sole heir and wanted to frame her for murder, so that she’d be disinherited under the slayer rule. As such, there’s a moment where Marta, who still doesn’t know her own innocence, is ready to confess and apologise to the Thrombeys, even though they’ve been abusing and harassing her: a true angelic act. It’s Blanc who, having realised the truth, swoops in and yells at them on her behalf, pointing out how awfully they’ve been treating her – and as much as Marta’s goodness is central to the plot, I can’t help feeling that the story would’ve been stronger if she was allowed to be both good and angry, caring and assertive.

To be clear: I think Marta is a fantastic character, and I love that, even in a cut-throat, murder mystery setting, her inherent goodness and kindness are allowed to win out. However, given how overtly the film discusses race and racism as a factor in her mistreatment – which is firmly to its credit – I can’t help feeling that Johnson has shied away from doing anything that might risk Marta being even a little bit unsympathetic. When Harlan comes up with his harebrained scheme to commit suicide and thereby “save” her – a gambit that ultimately turns out to have been unnecessary – the narrative implication is that Marta is correct to play along because Harlan told her to; her agency in evading capture is “permitted” because it was sanctioned by him. That she’s also trying to protect her family – their undocumented status will be discovered if she’s arrested – should be a valid motive all by itself, and yet she’s still ultimately willing to risk their safety to come clean to the Thrombeys at the end, because she feels she owes it to them.

In my perfect version of the film, Marta is allowed to be angry at how she’s been treated; allowed to resent being shut out of the funeral, constantly called “kiddo” and then pressured to give up the inheritance. Instead of Blanc calling out the Thrombeys, I would’ve loved to see her speak for herself in that moment, and then to have it revealed that she was innocent all along – instead of, once again, having a powerful white, male character step in to validate her existence. (It also rankles that Blanc is repeatedly situated as being smarter and better informed than the actual detective assigned to the case, who happens to be black.)

That being said, the class criticism in Knives Out is otherwise spectacular. Having first established the Thrombey family as being split along political lines – some are far right, others more left-leaning – Johnson then makes clear that their real political allegiance is to money. When Marta is named sole heir, suddenly the family closes ranks against her, and while the most liberal Thrombey, Meg (Katherine Langford) is emotionally manipulated by her mother, Joni (Toni Collette) into helping them get dirt on Marta – Joni says that they won’t be able to afford Meg’s college anymore if Marta inherits, conveniently omitting the fact that her own embezzlement of Harlan’s funds is the reason why they were cut out in the first place – it still matters that she chooses money over principle. And all along, we’re treated to Ransom, who’s been the black sheep of the family for years, getting close to Marta and pretending to be on her side, because even though he hates the other Thrombeys, he still loves money foremost and is desperate to claim his share.

By contrast, the family wealth in Ready or Not is depicted as being, both literally and figuratively, blood money. Ever since their great-grandfather made his pact with the demonic Le Bail, the La Domas clan have murdered anyone who violates the established rules. Refusing to play the midnight game at your wedding is just as much a death sentence as drawing the Hide and Seek card, and at one particularly brutal moment, we see Grace fall into the literal charnel-house where the bodies of dissenters are thrown. Indeed, the film opens with a haunting flashback to the last time Hide and Seek was played, as Alex and brother Daniel (Adam Brody), then children, run through the house as their aunt’s new husband is hunted down. After stashing Alex in a wardrobe, Daniel is approached by the bleeding groom, begging for help, and in a moment of childlike terror calls out “He’s in here!” to his family, resulting in the man’s capture and ultimate ritual sacrifice. “I’m so proud of you,” his mother says; a scene later echoed between Alex’s sister Emilie (Melanie Scrofano) and her own young son, who confesses to having shot Grace in the hand because he was trying to copy the grownups.

An alcoholic, Daniel has clearly lived a haunted life, for all that he’s never stood up to his family; his wife Charity (Elyse Levesque) is far more bloodthirsty. Like Joni Thrombey, she married into her wealthy clan, and having endured an upbringing implied to consist of extreme poverty, violence or both, is willing to do anything to keep her comfortable life. Throughout the film, Daniel alternates between apathy and resignation, not wanting to kill Grace himself but not quite able to let her go, either – right up until the very end, when he works to set her free and is shot and killed by Charity for his troubles. In a terrible parallel, it ends up being Alex who finally recaptures Grace: having worked throughout the whole film to try and free her, once he realises that she’ll never stay with him after what she’s endured, he echoes the fateful line of his brother and nephew and calls his family: “She’s in here!”

Though Ready or Not is class-critical, in that it explicitly situates wealthy people as being amoral assholes who’ll do anything to hang onto their money, no matter how heinous, it also uses the deaths of three maids – two of whom, Tina (Celine Tsai) and Dora (Daniela Barbosa) are women of colour – as part of its dark comedy. Both Tina and Clara (Hanneke Talbot) are killed by Emilie, who’s so coked up that she accidentally shoots them both (in separate instances) and has to be comforted by her parents. Dora, discovered hiding in a dumbwaiter by Grace, immediately tries to turn her over on learning that Grace is who the family wants; she then ends up crushed when the doors close on her torso. This cavalier treatment of their bodies as disposable, comic props isn’t mitigated by the fact that Grace, like them, doesn’t come from money: we’re told that she grew up in foster homes and – tragically, given the plot – has always wanted to join a family. At the same time, the stark difference between how the family treats the bodies of the maids and the bodies of their own is meant to emphasise their cruelty: as patriarch Tony (Henry Czerny) says to Grace, anyone not a La Domas is just another “goat” for the sacrifice.

It also helps that, by the end of the film, every single La Domas has died: after a brief moment of comedic uncertainty on the issue, it turns out that Le Bail has been real all along, and when dawn comes with Grace still alive, she watches – bloody, shocked and laughing – as her surviving in-laws explode, one by one. It’s gory and hilarious, especially when a frantic Alex, the last to be left alive, tries to plead with Grace for a reconciliation, telling her that she changed him for the better and that therefore, he must get to live; she watches, nonplussed, as he explodes all over her, then takes his mother’s beautiful cigarette case and goes out to smoke in front of the now-burning mansion.

In both films, the message is clear: until or unless you’re truly considered “one of the family,” the obscenely rich are only your friend if they can securely think of you as a lesser human being. Only fellow family members are equals, and therefore entitled to family protection: get in the way of that logic – either by inheriting ahead of them or invoking the murderous clause of an ancient demonic pact – and they’ll come after you with knives out, ready or not. For all that I’ve nitpicked parts of both films, they’re two of the best offerings I’ve seen in their respective genres in recent years, and if you’ve got the time, I highly recommend watching them as a double feature.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Is A Terrible, Awful Film

Warning: total spoilers.

Today, a friend and I made the questionable decision to see Jurassic World: The Next One – sorry, Fallen Kingdom – a film whose relentlessly trite and overdone orchestral scoring made my fingers twitch throughout with the urge to mute the music. The only other film to ever provoke a similar tic was Eragon, which frankly does not make for a great comparison. Granted, I aggressively dislike both Jurassic World and the smugly punchable personage of Chris Pratt With Abs, but I loved the original Jurassic Park films (the first two, anyway) and am generally fond of trashy action spectacle. Had Fallen Kingdom been remotely good, these biases would have neatly cancelled each other out; instead, I was forced to sit through a film so bad, it made two hours feel like four.

Fallen Kingdom is, in every respect, an aggressively terrible movie. The music is bad, the direction is bad, the script and acting are terrible, and the plot is recognisable only inasmuch as it constitutes an immeasurably shitty, unfeeling knock-off of Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World. The dinosaurs themselves, which ought to be the sole redeeming feature, are a constant and heinous visual offence: not only are the designs all slightly weird, but their proportions in relation to their environment are constantly, maddeningly inconsistent. A brachiosaurus that looks two stories tall in one shot looks half as big in the next; the carnivores are in constant flux, not only with regard to height, but also in terms of bulk and proportions. The fact that there’s zero sensawunda to their portrayal despite the fact that we’re meant to care about them is one nail of many in the film’s flamboyant coffin: it’s very hard to understand why any of the characters, having spent the whole narrative on the brink of being eaten, trampled or mauled, wants to save the dinosaurs even at the finale.

The film opens with a team of unknown dudes rescuing a bit of indominus rex bone from the bottom of Isla Nubar’s harbour. A massive crocodile-dino-thing eats three of them and escapes in the process, while the bone is taken away to have Evil Science done to it. This serves as a prologue of sorts, as the title card comes up after it.

As the movie proper starts, the premise – and I’m using that word generously – is established thusly: it’s three years after the events of Jurassic World, and now the dinosaurs left on Isla Nubar are in danger of re-extinction because IMMINENT VOLCANO. The logic of this volcano is not overly probed, presumably because this would mean explaining why the original theme park was built on a site that was in potential danger of blowing the fuck up; nor is it explained why the question of whether to rescue the dinosaurs or let them be obliterated was left to the last minute. The possibility that some might, in fact, survive the volcano, on account of how volcanoes aren’t an automatic death-sentence for whole ecosystems, isn’t mentioned either; so now the US government is debating whether to let them live or die. They are aided in this decision by Cameo Jeff Goldblumm, who talks a bit about chaos and genetic power and life correcting itself, thereby convincing the relevant senators to let nature take its course.

Opposed to this belief for reasons that would appear to belie her entire character arc in the first Jurassic World, inasmuch as she had one, is former park director Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard). Working with her two Tired Millennial Sidekicks, Zia Rodriguez (Daniella Pineda) and Franklin Webb (Justice Smith) – both of whom deserved a better movie – Claire is now a lobbyist to save the dinos; so when she’s contacted by Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), an ageing scientist who apparently worked on the original Jurassic Park with John Hammond, she thinks her prayers are answered. Acting as the executor of Lockwood’s estate is the obsequious Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), who promises that the dinosaurs will be rescued and taken to a new island habitat. However, in order to pull off the operation – and specifically to save Blue, the caring velociraptor – they need both Claire and animal behaviourist Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) to go to the park in person: Claire because her biometrics are needed to activate trackers in the dinosaurs (and this can only be done on site, for some reason), Owen because he’s the only one who can get close enough to Blue to bring her in.

Also, Lockwood has a young mysterious granddaughter, Maisie (Isabella Sermon), whose mother is dead and who lives with him. This will be relevant later, so hang onto that.

So: Claire goes out to where Owen is hand-building a Manly Wilderness Cabin to try and convince him to sign on for the mission, largely by appealing to his feeling for Blue. From this point on, we are treated to a camera-gaze which is – and there’s really no other way to put it – Super Hella Thirsty for Chris Pratt’s Owen, who we are meant to see as the Manliest Toughest Hot Manly Man On Earth. The camera does not just capture Chris Pratt; it models him like a spandex jumpsuit. Barely a minute passes without an intense, brooding close-up of Pratt smirking while staring into the distance, as though he’s still Andy Dwyer of Parks and Rec pretending to be Burt Macklin but without the self-deprecating playfulness. Franklin is the only character not impressed with Owen, and is therefore alone in being remotely tethered to reality: for saying sensible, reasonable things like “Why are we doing this?”, “Do we really have to?” and “No,” he is summarily ignored as the comic relief.

Once everyone is on the dinosaur island, whose soon-to-explode volcano apparently isn’t being tracked or monitored by anyone because honestly, why bother, we’re introduced to Eli’s right-hand man, a game-hunter dude who is butch and sneering and fucks up Blue’s capture by ignoring Owen’s directives, which leads to Blue being shot. There’s a lot of yelling, and Zia is conscripted to try and save Blue because she’s apparently a dinosaur doctor despite never having seen one before. It’s also revealed that the game-hunter and Eli have – shock horror! – lied to Claire about their intentions, and are in fact Bad Guys Who Do Not Value The Sanctity of Dinosaur Life, Not Even A Little Bit. This means they tranq Owen and leave him to the mercy of the oncoming lava while trapping Claire and Franklin in a radio tower, and now everything’s in a rush because the volcano starts exploding.

Listen: I like ridiculous action sequences as much as the next person, but having your characters run from both flaming lavaballs and dinosaurs at the same time is kind of gilding the lily. A bunch of Action happens, Claire makes a lot of breathy vocalisations, Franklin screams because he’s a normal person and Owen saves the day by being cool and manly and also having a knife. There’s a weird transition where Claire, Owen and Franklin go from being bedraggled on a shore to perched on a clifftop overlooking a different beach without any explanation for how they got there while the volcano is still exploding, we’re shown game-hunter guy stealing a dino tooth for a souvenir – this, too, is Important Later – and then, somehow, nobody on Team Evil notices when our heroes steal a truck and jump it onto the back of their fleeing boat, just in time for everyone to watch a brachiosaurus die tragically at the water’s edge.

Stuff happens on the boat, including Claire disguising herself by cunningly wearing a hat. Zia needs blood from the captive T-rex to do a transfusion to save Blue’s life, which Claire and Owen get for her. Zia gives Blue the blood and removes the bullet from her torso, all without stitching or sterilising anything, and then pronounces Blue saved, because that’s obviously how medicine works. Meanwhile, back at the mansion, little Maisie overhears Eli’s plans to sell the dinosaurs to the highest bidder and runs to tell grandpa Lockwood, who claims not to believe her and then sends her to bed. Maisie responds by sneaking down to Eli’s Sekrit Underground Lab, where she sees videos of Owen raising Blue, learns more about Eli’s plans, and encounters an engineered dinosaur called an indoraptor, which is apparently just, like… living there? And nobody upstairs noticed?

Eli finds Maisie and locks her in her room for Knowing Too Much, and is then summoned to see Lockwood, who apparently does believe Maisie, after all. For some reason, Lockwood’s genius plan as an ailing, bedridden man profoundly betrayed by his heir is to order Eli into his room, alone, and tell him to turn himself in to the police. Instead, in a totally unpredictable turn of events, Eli opts to murder Lockwood instead.

At this point, the plot holes in Fallen Kingdom are already gaping wide, while the script is an abominable patchwork of bad dialogue, glitchy logic and poorly-executed transitions. Yet somehow, writers Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly manage to launch their B-grade opus into decidedly C-grade territory with Eli’s decision to have the captive dinosaurs brought to his actual fucking house and stored in his basement lab, oh my actual god. HE LITERALLY HAS ENOUGH ROOM DOWN THERE FOR A FUCKING BRACHIOSAURUS AND SOMEHOW NOBODY NOTICED??? EVERYONE GO DIRECTLY TO WRITING JAIL IN CONTEMPT OF COMMON SENSE. 

ANYWAY.

So like. OBVIOUSLY Eli has to auction off all the dinosaurs IMMEDIATELY to a throng of rich criminal buyers who gather IN PERSON, IN HIS BASEMENT LAB, TOGETHER, to see each dinosaur paraded before them in a cage-on-wheels like the world’s weirdest fashion catwalk. (Apparently every American intelligence agency is, I don’t know, out to lunch or something, because nobody seems worried about surveillance.) Naturally, Owen and Claire, who’ve arrived on the scene, are captured here by Eli, who naturally elects to lock them up rather than kill them. Equally naturally, they escape by getting the neighbouring baby pachycephalosaurus to bash open their cell wall and then the door, whereupon they encounter a fugitive, traumatised Maisie, who has just now learned  that Lockwood is dead and that – DUHN-DUHHHHN – she’s not his granddaughter after all, but a SECRET CLONE OF HIS DEAD DAUGHTER, a reveal that was in no way hella fucking obvious to anyone remotely trope-literate.

Loose in the mansion, Claire, Owen and Maisie get to watch the dino auction happen in real time. LO THE BIG REVEAL OF THE INDORAPTOR, whose existence is why it was so important to capture Blue: it’s a prototype with raptor DNA and something something BD Wong something GENETIC MOTHERHOOD something. The indoraptor has been trained to attack people on command if someone puts a laser-target on them and then hits a sonic trigger, and like? My brain was beginning to liquefy at this point and it makes literally zero sense, but okay: sure, Jan. Naturally, Owen and Claire decide that the indoraptor Must Never Be Released and resolve to act.

They do this by instead releasing the baby pachycephalosaurus into the crowd of important criminal guests, because Eli is apparently super bad at security for his bootlegged dino trafficking empire. This causes all the buyers to flee and a few to get trampled, which means the indoraptor is left alone in its cage. RE-ENTER GAMEHUNTER GUY, who chooses this moment of all moments to come in yelling for his bonus. Spying the indoraptor alone, he decides he’s gotta get him one of them Big Teef for his trophy necklace – LITERALLY FOR HIS FUCKING NECKLACE, EVEN THOUGH THE TOOTH ITSELF IS WORTH WAY MORE AS A SOURCE OF DINO DNA – and shoots it with a tranq gun. The indoraptor plays stunned, game-hunter GOES INTO THE CAGE WITH THE UNRESTRAINED SUPER-INTELLIGENT SUPER-DINOSAUR, BECAUSE THAT’S OBVIOUSLY THE SMART THING TO DO, and gets eaten while trying to take one of its teeth. With its cage door open, the indoraptor promptly escapes and sets about trying to destroy everything.

As the end is nigh, Eli and his cronies try to salvage as much stuff from their lab as possible, which… somehow involves Zia and Franklin ending up in a room with Blue? I’m certain there was some sort of handwavey justification given for their presence, but that terrible knowledge has been purged from my memory in the hours since, like toxins leaving the body. There’s a bit where DB Wong starts yelling at Zia about how he needs Blue’s blood because PURE DNA something something, which Zia ruins by telling him about the blood transfusion she did on the boat, which… ruins Blue’s usefulness, somehow? I don’t know much about DNA or genetics, but I’m pretty sure this is some Science Bullshit that we’re meant to take on faith despite the fact that it doesn’t ultimately matter. But, sure: GASP!

Shit promptly goes down and Zia sets Blue lose in a way that fucks up the Bad Guys while saving her and Franklin. However, some gas cylinders get damaged in the process and this means the underground lab is now filling with poison that will, once again, kill the dinosaurs trapped down there unless they’re set free, as the exhaust system is also conveniently broken Because Reasons. (The fact that the baby pachy was able to break down a supporting wall to escape even though none of the much bigger animals can do likewise is the kind of detail I ought not to care about by this point. And yet.)

This prompts Zia and Franklin try and find the others, who are now being hunted by the indoraptor, also Because Reasons. At one point during this expertly written chase scene, Owen DELIBERATELY TURNS ALL THE LIGHTS OFF.

And I just.

WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT??? YOU LITERALLY JUST HEARD ALL ABOUT HOW THE FUCKING INDORAPTOR HAS AMAZINGLY KEEN SENSES BUT YOUR DUMB ASS WANTS TO RUN FROM IT IN THE DARK, AN ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH IT CAN SEE BETTER THAN YOU???

GOD.

OK, so: protracted dinosaur chase scene through the mansion. Maisie tries to hide in her bed because terrified child whose caregiver has just been murdered by a man she thought of as family: fair enough. This leads to a scene that audibly scared the shit out of every child in the packed session I attended, wherein the indoraptor stalks Maisie, uniquely and specifically, as she cowers under the covers, reaching out to her with a ghoulish clawed hand before Owen barges in to shoot it. The shooting doesn’t work, Maisie leads Owen out the window, and there’s a big showdown on the glass roof of the mansion’s museum where Claire and Blue come to the rescue and the indoraptor gets dropped down and impaled on the spikes of a triceratops skeleton.

Only then do Zia and Franklin catch up to the main party and inform them that it’s now their Solemn Duty to choose what happens to the remaining dinosaurs: press the big red button (literally) to free them into the countryside, or let them all die? Teary-eyed as she watches the bellowing dinos on the security feeds that apparently didn’t fucking exist when she and Owen were escaping earlier, Claire professes that they ought to live, but doesn’t press the button. She steps back to be sad in peace, only for Maisie to zoom in and press it herself – because the dinosaurs are cloned, like her, and if she’s gets to live, then so should they.

Which… given that we already know Maisie loves dinosaurs, we really didn’t need the whole weird sideplot of her being a clone to explain her desire to free them! She’s a traumatised kid whose sole relative was just murdered! She could’ve just been sick of watching things she loves die, and it would’ve made sense! But more to the point, the whole burden of choice about saving the species as represented by the big red button is moot, because THE FILM ALREADY OPENED WITH A GIANT DINOSAUR-CROCODILE ESCAPING INTO THE OCEAN. And some of the dinosaurs sold at auction were already taken for transport! There’s probably still some on the island, including the pterosaurs who were able to fly away from the volcano! All Maisie has done is let these dinosaurs lose on the populated mainland, where they’ll very likely cause more deaths! But NOBODY POINTS THIS OUT IN TIME TO STOP HER, nor do they mention this afterwards, because this movie is terrible! And then there’s a random cut to Jeff Goldblum explaining why something like this was basically inevitable, because CAMEO!

Just to hammer home the point that Maisie’s choice was meaningless, the film immediately shows us all these already-free dinosaurs along with the ones she released herself. The fact that Eli immediately gets eaten by the T-Rex is kinda vindicating, I’ll admit, but it really doesn’t compensate for how wildly detached from reality the reactions of the characters are to everything that’s happened. The film ends with Claire and Owen – who are somehow a couple again, with just as little chemistry as before – driving away with Maisie. We don’t find out what happened to the nanny who raised her – Eli sent her away after killing Lockwood, so I guess she left the house – and Maisie never asks about her again, because, uh…. trauma, I guess? And her legal guardians are both dead anyway, so Claire and Owen get a free kid, kind of? GOD, THIS FILM WAS SO TERRIBLE, I’M OFFENDED BY THE CONSTRUCTION OF IT ON EVERY CONCEIVABLE LEVEL.

Also: this might seem like a comparatively minor nitpick in the scheme of things, but the fact that not a single character tries to call for help at any point in the movie – the total absence of smartphones of any kind – is really, really conspicuous, and has major implications for the shittiness of the plotting. Take, for instance, the early sequence where Eli’s original plan to dispose of Claire and Franklin involves remotely locking them in the radio tower, there to be consumed by lava and dinosaurs. Aside from the fact that they should’ve easily been able to phone a friend about his organisation’s treachery, forewarning people on the mainland to look out for his incoming dinosaurs, his decision to leave them to die there in the first place makes no goddamn sense in a context where he’d reasonably expect them to have phones – which both he and they fucking should, because they’re professionals in twenty fucking eighteen.

Given that huge chunks of plot in the original Jurassic sequel, The Lost World – which was written and filmed in the pre-smartphone era, and on which Fallen Kingdom is shamelessly riffing – revolve around satellite phones and the ability to radio off the island, there’s literally no excuse for the writers to forget that phones exist. Either Trevorrow and Connelly are being lazy as hell, or they’re so dismissive of the intelligence of viewers that they figured it wouldn’t matter. Either way, it’s a problem that crops up again and again. During the period where Claire and Owen were safe on the boat with the rescued dinosaurs and surrounded by enemies, they could’ve called for backup ahead of time, but they didn’t.

The fact that Maisie, a child of the smartphone era who’s clearly familiar with technology and accustomed to wealth, seemingly doesn’t have her own phone handy is weird enough; compare her to tech-savvy Lex from the original Jurassic Park, and the anachronism is even more startling. Armed with a smartphone, Maisie could easily have filmed Eli’s treachery to show her grandfather, or made her own call for help. Possibly there was meant to be some deliberate plot reason why Maisie had no phone, like being raised by an old, somehow tech-averse scientist – it stood out to me that the phone Lockwood tries to foist on Eli for his police-call looked like a goddamn portable landline from the early noughties – but if so, it was never explained. Even when the dinosaurs are set free at the very end, there’s no sign that Owen and Claire have bothered to call and warn the authorities to look out for them, even though a not inconsiderable portion of the early plot hinged on the dinosaurs having individual radio trackers – meaning that there’s a clear-cut way to recover all the escapees instead of letting them vanish into the wilderness.

But none of this happens, because Fallen Kingdom is clearly setting the stage for – god help us – a third shitty film, one where humans have had to adjust to dinosaurs roaming the North American continent. Never mind that this means disregarding everything we just watched in order to make it comprehensible as a premise – look, here’s that cool shot of a T-Rex roaring at a lion from the trailer! Here’s that shot of the dino-crocodile lurking in a wave, also from the trailer! Haha! Isn’t it cool how we implied the film was going to be one thing, and then only introduced those elements in the final minute of screentime? What a gotcha!

Films like Fallen Kingdom are a testament to Hollywood’s obsession with letting mediocre white dudes ruin everything. It’s hysterically bad in every way – even the couple of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it anti-Trump barbs fell flat – and yet I don’t feel like laughing, because Trevorrow and Connolly will invariably still get trusted with big-ticket gigs after this, while vastly more talented writers who are queer or female or POC or some combination thereof will be asked to prove themselves over and over and over again. Even if you’re only after a quick trashy action fix, don’t waste your money on Fallen Kingdom. Go buy some dinosaur Lego instead, or rewatch one of the earlier films. I promise, you’ll be better off.

And if, in the mean time, Hollywood wants to make a good dinosaur movie – or if HBO wants to make an awesome dinosaur TV show, which would be even better – then I’d humbly submit James Gurney’s Dinotopia as a much more fruitful starting point. I’ve seen enough of mindless dinosaurs knocking things down; let’s have a story where clever dinosaurs help to build things instead.

TV Series: The Emotional Buy-In

Over the past few years, I’ve thought a lot – and, at times, said a lot – about the impact of DVD box sets and digital streaming services on how we now consume and construct TV series. To put the whole into summary, the staple shapes of traditional sitcoms, procedurals and the like were all predicated on the necessity of keeping the story accessible to viewers who had no other means of catching up bar weekly scheduled broadcasts. It’s a narrative structure that’s fundamentally opposed to complex, ongoing development, regular casting changes and multi-plot stories, because when those longed-for new viewers couldn’t reliably get up-to-date on the first two seasons prior to starting the third, it made sense to keep the basic premise homogeneous and simple enough that it didn’t really matter. But now that you can package a decade’s worth of content into an affordable box set, or stream entire new seasons at once in a way that lets viewers directly control their access to the narrative, those structures have become redundant – and now that our expectations of what TV can do have shifted accordingly, it’s hard to walk things back.

Which has left me wondering: why, in an age so glutted with quality, accessible content, am I finding it progressively harder to invest in new TV shows? With a handful of notable exceptions, I feel as though I’ve spent the past few years diving enthusiastically into various new offerings, only to struggle to pick them up again when the new season starts or after I’ve taken a break from binging. It would be convenient to write the whole thing off as a personal failing, an offhand consequence of the various health problems I’ve been dealing with, but the phenomenon feels too widespread for that. Certainly, poor focus and a lack of mental energy doesn’t help, but if they’re not the actual cause, then what is?

For many people, I suspect that decision fatigue is a partial culprit: there’s so much to watch that the act of choosing between offerings, over and over again, can steadily drain us of the desire to choose at all. But even then, that doesn’t quite fit as a global explanation, and it certainly doesn’t reflect how I feel about various series. At the moment, I’m midway through Altered Carbon, a show involving several things I love dearly and a bunch of stuff I find compelling but frustrating: on paper, the perfect combination to spark my passionate, critical interest. And yet, for all that I enjoy the show while watching it, I’m continually sluggish to start the next episode. Ditto Wynona Earp, which utterly won me over during my initial binge, but which I set aside months ago at a cliffhanger moment and haven’t touched since. I made it nearly halfway through the first season of The Shannara Chronicles, which is trashy and terrible but also weirdly fun, then stopped blank; I loved Shadowhunters enough to rewatch the entire first season as a lead-in to starting the second, but I’ve stalled there, too.

By contrast, I know exactly why I stopped watching The 100, a show whose first two seasons made me a vocal fan: hearing about the death of Lexa and the mistreatment of actor Ricky Whittle, who went on to star in American Gods, I was disappointed enough to lose all momentum for it. Yet I still haven’t watched the second season of Sense8, which I loved completely; nor have I managed to get up to date with other beloved shows like Steven Universe, Letterkenny and Killjoys. And it’s here, with these last four offerings, that I feel like I’m hitting closer to the mark: Sense8 was cancelled with a long-game arc still in play, and while Netflix has agreed to fund a final cathartic bonus episode, or possibly episodes, to see it wrapped up, the ending hasn’t yet been produced. Similarly, the latest seasons for Steven Universe, Letterkenny and Killjoys are difficult to access in Australia: unless I want to scratch around to find each one on dodgy streaming sites, there’s an interminable wait for content.

More than one thinkpiece on digital culture in recent years has bemoaned the seeming impatience of younguns so accustomed to instant everything that they can’t bear to wait a week or a month for the next season, episode or instalment of their favourite thing, and who therefore abandon it. It’s an argument I find all the more infuriating for how close it comes to the actual point before missing it wildly. Here’s what I think: investing in stories is, and always has been, an act of emotional labour on the part of the audience. This is why stories matter: if we didn’t care about them – if they failed to make us feel; if watching, reading or playing through them never caused us to expend any thought or feeling – then we wouldn’t bother to make them in the first place.

But some stories have an inherently higher emotional buy-in than others. Whether because of the content, the nature of the characters or the closeness of the premise to an individual heart, there’s more to gain by loving them, but also a commensurate risk if they fail us. In the world of fanfiction, this is why tags like fluff, angst, hurt/comfort and hurt no comfort exist: not just as a warning, but so readers can find stories whose contents match both their interests and their current level of emotional resilience. Which makes perfect sense, when you consider that fanfic is itself a form of emotional engagement with narrative: of course such a medium understands that different times call for different stories; that foreshadowing types of content is not the same as spoiling specific details.

Not so very long ago, TV shows were, by and large, easy to gauge in terms of their potential emotional buy-in. You had dark, gritty procedurals featuring regular barbaric crimes, but where the recurring characters were nonetheless largely safe from taking permanent damage regardless of how frequently they were threatened with such, because that’s how the genre works. (Or where, in the case of Supernatural, the taking of damage was so constant as to become reliable, and therefore perversely comforting.) You had sitcoms which were generally much lighter, barring the requisite end-of-season cliffhangers, and you had – and still have – long-running soapie dramas that make it a point to regularly escalate the emotional stakes, but in such a continuous, roll-over fashion that, even if you end up getting your heart punched, it’s generally in a way you signed up for, with lots of good feelings thrown in to balance it out.

Which isn’t to say such shows have never dealt with complex, important issues: many of them do, and with profound impact. But week to week, episode to episode, the baseline genre formulas lend them enough predictability to allow the audience, in turn, to have an emotionally stable relationship with the content – and that’s not nothing. That is, in point of fact, really fucking crucial to the matter of long-term viewing, because compassion fatigue is also a thing, and if your unpredictable, complex narratives repeatedly push viewers to take on more of an emotional burden than they can handle, then you’re eventually going to lose them. When such a show is complete, so that anyone wavering on the emotional threshold can pause, check ahead and assess how best to proceed, the problem can be potentially ameliorated, but even so, the higher the stakes, the higher the risk of burnout.

Which is, once again, why the tagging system of fanfic is so very, very successful for generating long-term audience engagement, even in contexts where updates are irregular or where the story might abruptly stop, unfinished: when the emotional stakes are higher, knowing the risks ahead of time is often vital, as it allows you to prepare. This is, for instance, and despite the many popular misconceptions surrounding them, exactly why trigger warnings are a good thing: the point isn’t to remove all potentially objectionable content from a course or story, but to offer a forewarning of its presence, thereby preventing those with trauma from being emotionally blindsided, a tactic which is proven to aid in recovery.

Regardless of our mental health or any past traumas, it’s basic human psychology that, if we’re feeling stressed in other areas of our lives, we don’t enjoy additional stress from recreational quarters. Unpredictability can be exciting, but if it becomes our default state, it quickly exhausts us instead, just as a surfeit of predictability can easily turn to boredom. A happy medium, surely, should not be so hard to achieve – but then, we’re all constantly calibrating at different speeds, and when emotionally risky stories are the default, as is increasingly the case, the emotional energy of viewers, already a finite resource, is spread even thinner between each potential narrative.

When gritty longform series like 24 and The Wire first started to appear in the early noughties, they were so thematically distinct from the bulk of TV content that the emotional buy-in to each show, though high, was balanced by a comparatively lower toll elsewhere. But when the majority of shows exact the same emotional cost as The Wire, the ability of any one person to watch them all concurrently dwindles. And thus, my current state of detente with so many excellent TV shows: I fall out of watching them, not because I don’t like them, but because I’m aware that continuing to engage will cost me precious emotional energy, and if I don’t know where the eventual endpoint is, it’s harder to justify taking the leap of faith.

In the world of SFF literature, where narratives frequently appear in serial form, it’s not uncommon for readers to say that they’re waiting for the final book to be published before they try the first one: here, the barrier to engagement is understood to be, not a monetary cost, but rather the potential emotional expense of investing years in pursuit of a payout which, if the publisher vetoes the series, might never eventuate. Which, rather frustratingly, can often become a self-fulfilling prophecy: without measurable interest in the first book of a series, publishers are unlikely to risk losing money by producing the subsequent volumes. But in the literary world, this problem is at least somewhat mitigated by the existence of multi-book contracts and early authorial statements as to the projected length of a series: neither promise is writ in stone, but at least it’s a species of yardstick against which readers can measure how long they’ll have to wait for completion, coupled with a vague idea of future narrative structure.

TV, by contrast, lacks even those soft assurances. New series are seldom greenlit for anything more than a season at once, with even popular shows being renewed only a season at a time, but in a context where, once popularity is established, networks are committed to flogging even the most skeletal horse for ratings. This makes it exceptionally rare that a TV show gets a planned, cathartic ending: either it’s cancelled when the world is still ripe for expansion, or it’s worked to death, reanimated and pushed to continue in zombie form until even the corpse falls to pieces.

And that’s before you factor in the potential shifts in tone, theme and structure that often accompany a change in directorial or writing staff. Unless they’re playing in someone else’s sandbox, authors are allowed to remain in control of their own creation, which means that readers can, if nothing else, trust in the creative continuity afforded by a single controlling voice. Not so in the world of television – or, for that matter, in the world of comics, which is whole other sack of crabs. (As distinct from a kettle of fish, which is strikes me as being a far too placid metaphor for the current comics landscape.) The point being that, whereas novel series at least have some established checks and balances in place to help readers assess the likely emotional buy-in of a given series, TV has changed so fast and so fundamentally in some ways while staying static in others that, even when you love what a show is now, it’s increasingly hard to trust what it might become.

If this so-called golden age of television truly intends to continue – if we don’t want all the exciting new, diverse shows we’re finally getting to be ruled failures on specious grounds and cancelled, thereby allowing the still maddeningly homogeneous Powers That Be to retreat back into their established comfort zones of pretty thin white people doing the same shit over and over – then the emotional buy-in of viewers needs to be taken seriously. Particularly when shows are striving to better represent the experiences of traditionally marginalised groups – which is to say, when the intended audience is made up of people whose emotional reserves are frequently running low for the exact same reason their representation is necessary – creators could do a lot worse than to follow the lead of fanfiction and make certain information available from the outset to those who want it: to state up front, and state truthfully, which painful issues will be on or off the table.

Here’s a PSA for you: teasing about the Big Dramatic Thing that happens in episode three and hoping it piques the curiosity of viewers only works if you’re pitching to a demographic that hasn’t been taught, over and over again, to associate such “surprises” with, say, the brutal death of the character who most resembles them. The rest of us have seen ourselves dismembered and packed into fridges often enough to know better: we don’t trust like that now, and until or unless creators learn that this problem of their own collective making has become an active barrier to our otherwise willing consumption, the problem will persist. And as the runaway success of Black Panther should demonstrate, when you do finally give the people what they want – and my god, do we want it; we’re eager, we’re starving – while offering reassurance that it won’t bite us, we’ll show up in droves.

That being so, I’d ask that we retire the idea that potential spoilers are death to viewer engagement, and instead reap the benefits of letting the audience decide beforehand whether or not they’re willing to buy in to what you’re selling. Because ultimately, it doesn’t matter how clever, edgy original you think your gut-punch mid-season twist will be: it only gets to be a big surprise once. After that, it has to stand on its own merits, and while latecomers can always look to reviews for guidance, engaging with the endless cycle of build-up, boom and bust surrounding each big development has an emotional buy-in of its own. It’s not that we don’t want to watch your shows: we just don’t want to get hurt, again, by investing in something only to see it broken. And if we can’t trust that, then how can we trust you?

YA Discourse: Witch vs Vulture

For days now, social media has been abuzz over Kat Rosenfield’s recent Vulture essay, The Toxic Drama on YA Twitter, which focuses almost exclusively on reactions to Laurie Forest’s debut novel, The Black Witch. Overwhelmingly, the responses I’ve seen are binary: either Rosenfield is a terrible, malicious person who doesn’t know what she’s talking about, or she’s the only person brave enough to speak truth to power. Not having read The Black Witch, a book I can’t recall hearing about before this week, it was news to me that its reception was news at all. Now that I’m all caught up, however, I feel rather like the doomed bowl of petunias falling through space in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: oh no, not again.

The recent history of online SFF, fandom and genre discourse rejoices in an abundance of brilliant trashfires, but even in that context, there’s something about YA that routinely spurs the community to knock things up a notch with the Spice Weasel of Greater Fuckery, BAM! YA is so predictably riven with terrible arguments, in fact, that I made a Venn diagram of them. (In MS Paint, obviously. Because I am secretly nine thousand years old.) THUS:

Or, to put it another, slightly less tongue-in-cheek way: as with anything primarily intended for teenagers, it’s necessary to acknowledge that not all teens either need, want or can handle the same things at the same time, in the same way or to the same degree, while simultaneously accounting for the fact that both teens and adults are frequently unreliable narrators about where these boundaries lie. This creates a maelstrom of seemingly paradoxical, highly contextual arguments about what is or is not “appropriate” for a given audience: in the case of YA, the usual moral arguments about content are further complicated by both literary snobbery and a continual back-and-forth about whether YA authors have an obligation to “teach” their readers, whatever that means in context. Throw in the invariable clash between older, outsider commentators with only superficial genre knowledge and young, frequently inexperienced critic-readers making their first forays into public commentary, and it’s a recipe for disaster. Which isn’t to say that there’s never any insightful, engaging or otherwise fruitful YA discourse to be found online – far from it! It’s just that, when things do go wrong, the pattern of arguments tends to be as predictable as it is explosive.

Rosenfield starts her article by describing how early, glowing praise for The Black Witch was abruptly curtailed, thanks to a single negative review:

The hype train was derailed in mid-March, however, by Shauna Sinyard, a bookstore employee and blogger who writes primarily about YA and had a different take: “The Black Witch is the most dangerous, offensive book I have ever read,” she wrote in a nearly 9,000-word review that blasted the novel as an end-to-end mess of unadulterated bigotry. “It was ultimately written for white people. It was written for the type of white person who considers themselves to be not-racist and thinks that they deserve recognition and praise for treating POC like they are actually human.”

As Rosenfield notes, Sinyard’s review consists largely of quotes from the book, interspersed with reactive commentary. That being so, it’s striking that Rosenfield neither attempts to engage with the substance of Sinyard’s objections nor addresses the text itself. Her defence of the book, inasmuch as she bothers to mount one, consists entirely of pointing out that, well, other people liked it!, the better to malign Sinyard for daring to disagree. This approach irritates me for three reasons: one, obviously, because people disagreeing about the merit of books is the literal function of reviewing; two, because it situates as irrelevant the rather core matter of whether the original criticism was warranted, or at least reasonable; and three, because it ignores a critical aspect of how Sinyard’s piece was received.

Never having encountered Sinyard before now, I can’t say whether this particular review is representative of her usual writing style, nor can I speak to the breadth of her experience. What I will say, however, is that this particular review is easily mistaken for a conflation of depiction with endorsement. While Sinyard clearly and extensively references the text, and while the immediate reasons for her dislike are clearly stated, her overall argument is sloppy, not because she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but because she assumes her readership can fill in the relevant blanks.

To me – and, I suspect, to anyone with a solid background in pro-diversity criticism – it’s clear that she’s angry, not at the mere presence of bigotry in the narrative, but at how Forest has chosen to handle it. With few exceptions, Sinyard is asserting a specific failure of depiction, not depiction-as-evil, full stop. This is, to put it mildly, a really important distinction for any critic to make, not least because it’s the difference between saying (for instance) “I hate that you wrote about drug use” and “I hate that you wrote about drug use badly.” One is a judgement of content; the other is a judgement of execution. Sinyard is so angry at the book as a whole – as, indeed, is her right – that she hasn’t much distinguished between elements which create the problem and those which, with the problem established, serve to compound it, such as the presence of toxic tropes. But then, she likely felt it unnecessary: to those in the know, additional explanations were superfluous.

 

Not having been involved in the initial furore, I can’t speak to which readers thought Sinyard was arguing that depiction equals endorsement, therefore The Black Witch is Bad; nor can I state how much agreement or disagreement with her review was forged on that basis, compared to the number of people who took her as critiquing the execution. Nonetheless, it’s clear that this misapprehension did circulate, and – I would argue – played a salient role in what happened next. When, as Rosenfield points out, the book was positively reviewed at Kirkus, the ensuing comment thread made multiple references to Sinyard’s conflation of depiction with endorsement, both from her supporters and from those who disagreed. This confusion is also apparent in editor Vicky Smith’s follow-up essay, which manages come within spitting distance of recognising Sinyard’s point while still missing it spectacularly. To quote:

Yep, it’s pretty repellent stuff, and readers are in narrator Elloren’s head almost all the way through all 608 pages. She expresses her thoughtless bigotry over and over. She is racist as all get out… And she is homophobic, telling her brother when he comes out to her, “You can’t be this way. You just can’t. You have to change.” While I’m not sure I’d say that Elloren is misogynistic, her culture certainly is, and she is not one of those standard-issue fantasy heroines who rejects her culture’s strictures from Page 1.

But over the course of those 608 pages, as she studies, works, eats, and sleeps alongside those she’s been taught to hate, fear, and revile, Elloren undergoes a monumental change. It’s a process much like that experienced by Derek Black, godson of David Duke and son of Don Black, white supremacist and creator of the white nationalist internet site Stormfront. Black walked in lockstep with his elders’ agenda until he went to college and got to know the sorts of people he had previously vilified, eventually publicly disavowing white nationalism.

Here’s the thing about the redemption of real-world extremists: as happy as we are when they cross the fence, their pre-enlightenment point of view is not something everyone either can or should be asked to sympathise with. For those of us on the receiving end of bigotry, knowing that a particular person has been indoctrinated against us since childhood doesn’t mean it stings any less when they go on the attack. In much the same way that an abuser’s past victimisation doesn’t exonerate their present sins, we understand that, yes, even if a vehement bigot was raised to bigotry, they are still hurting us now, and we are allowed to be angry. That being so, comparing the protagonist of The Black Witch to a real-life white supremacist does more to prove Sinyard’s point than Smith’s. If a reader belongs to one or more of the marginalised groups so profoundly and constantly reviled in the text by Elloren, why on Earth should they want to read six hundred pages about a fictional bigot struggling to view them, the actual living reader, as human? Why wouldn’t that be upsetting?

In real life, anyone might be curious to read up on Derek Black’s white supremacist transformation, because he’s a real person who actually exists, but even so, no black reader is going to come away from that narrative thinking, “Wow, I really do deserve to be treated like a person!” because they literally already knew that. Which is what Sinyard means when she says The Black Witch “holds no regard to the feelings of marginalised people” – the big emotional reveal is seemingly predicated on the reader either learning from, being surprised by or sympathising with Elloren’s transformation, which means caring enough about her – caring more about her than those she victimises – to feel invested in the first place. And if you, as a reader, are one of those she victimises, then that’s unlikely to be a fun experience.

Returning to Rosenfield’s piece, she writes:

In a tweet that would be retweeted nearly 500 times, Sinyard asked people to spread the word about The Black Witch by sharing her review — a clarion call for YA Twitter, which regularly identifies and denounces books for being problematic (an all-purpose umbrella term for describing texts that engage improperly with race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and other marginalizations). Led by a group of influential authors who pull no punches when it comes to calling out their colleagues’ work, and amplified by tens of thousands of teen and young-adult followers for whom online activism is second nature, the campaigns to keep offensive books off shelves are a regular feature in a community that’s as passionate about social justice as it is about reading. And while not every callout escalates into a full-scale dragging, in the case of The Black Witch — a book by a newcomer with a minimal presence online — the backlash was immediate and intense.

There are several salient criticisms to be made of this paragraph. To begin with, it’s a staggering act of wilful bad faith on Rosenfield’s part to act as if Sinyard’s decision to tweet about her negative review was, in and of itself, a malicious decision. This is quite literally what book bloggers do: they opine about books, whether positively or negatively, then share those reviews with others. But Rosenfield, like Sinyard, is sloppy. In failing to acknowledge the necessity of criticism in any genre, she acts as if YA authors are uniquely entitled to good press. At the same time, by neglecting to mention the current ubiquity of pro-diversity criticism, not only within SFF, but across the board, she creates the false impression that the phenomenon is unique to YA.

Rosenfield’s further claim that YA Twitter is “led by a group of influential authors who pull no punches” is as nebulous as it is frustrating. Not that she names these supposed leaders, of course: how could she? There’s far too many “influential authors” on Twitter to sensibly imagine any of them forming some shady cabal with dominion over the others, and that’s before you attempt to define what “influential” means in context. Better to leave it unsourced, along with her “tens of thousands” figure for YA readers “for whom online activism is second nature”. I’m honestly fascinated to know where she got that number: has someone done a survey? If nothing else, “tens of thousands” stands in stark contrast to the stated nearly 500 retweets of Sinyard’s “clarion call” and the 6000 notes on a related tumblr post. The fact that the review itself apparently garnered some 20,000 views does not evidence make.

More salient than all these numbers, however, is the fact that, as of the time of this writing, The Black Witch has 2,266 ratings on Goodreads and roughly a third as many reviews: if Rosenfield is going to invoke the ugly spectre of “tens of thousands” of angry strangers damning the book to purgatory, she could at least have the decency to be consistent about it. Instead, we get this:

Based almost solely on Sinyard’s opinion, the novel became the object of sustained, aggressive opposition in the weeks leading up its release.

Allow me to nitpick Rosenfield’s word use, here: the reaction to the novel wasn’t based “solely on Sinyard’s opinion”, but on her review. Opinions, by definition, aren’t necessarily founded in reality: Sinyard’s review, however, was extensively sourced from the text. Whatever qualms I have about Sinyard’s commentary, her review demonstrably gained momentum on the basis of its quotes, which included several full screenshots of various pages. Those who shared her ire weren’t trusting blindly in a familiar voice, but were judging actual excerpts from the book, and whether or not those passages were ultimately representative of the whole, it’s not unreasonable to use them as a gauge for potential interest.

That being so, it’s important to note that much of the frustration expressed towards books like The Black Witch  is the product of a still largely homogeneous mainstream YA market. While progress has been and is being made to diversify the field, the front-and-centering of books which, as per Sinyard’s review, are written more for the privileged than the marginalised – and more, which are often either dismissive of marginalisation or laden with stereotypes – is still a very real problem. Indie authors, who are frequently stigmatised by simple virtue of their “failure” to achieve mainstream publication, but whose books often feature far greater diversity than their traditional counterparts, have to fight hard for readers and recognition both, which makes the seemingly effortless hype afforded books like The Black Witch a bitter pill to swallow. In that context, anger at this particular title isn’t just about the book itself, but the extent to which it represents a wider structural bias – one which, unless actively identified, has a tendency to pass as a silent default.

Its publisher, Harlequin Teen, was bombarded with angry emails demanding they pull the book. The Black Witch’s Goodreads rating dropped to an abysmal 1.71 thanks to a mass coordinated campaign of one-star reviews, mostly from people who admitted to not having read it.

And now we hit the crux of Rosenfield’s argument: the money quote, for all that she’s lacking in sources. After all, there’s a difference between Harlequin Teen receiving five emails and fifty, and in light of the fact that the majority of her selected links are now dead, in the absence of any confirming screenshots, we’ve only her word that there really was a “mass coordinated campaign,” as opposed to a smaller number of angry readers engaging in bad behaviour.

Even so, regardless of your thoughts on The Black Witch in particular, it should be a no-brainer that leaving 1-star reviews of a book you haven’t actually read is a terrible thing to do. It is, quite literally, a Sad Puppy tactic, and even if it wasn’t just plain bad manners, that fact alone is enough to make it verboten. Even on Goodreads, it’s entirely possible to discuss the failings of a book you don’t want to read without falsely claiming to have done so. Similarly, and as little faith in the novel as the quoted sections inspire, the idea that The Black Witch ought to be pulled for its sins is needlessly excessive. Bad books exist, which is why reviews exist: to tell us not to buy them.

Or rather, to suggest we don’t. Bad reviews are not mandates of Thou Shalt Not Read – they are, to quote Captain Barbossa, more like guidelines. While I agree that voting with your wallet plays an important part in shaping what the publishing industry sees as viable, making blanket declarations to the effect that Buying This Bad Book Makes You A Bad Person For Contributing To Harm is, frankly, both toxic and unhelpful, not least because there is no absolute, definitive line in the sand about what “bad” is. As I’ve had occasion to say before in a fandom context,  you can’t ban stories that feature “bad” elements uncritically without also banning a great deal of content you’d much rather keep – and besides which, it’s entirely possible to both criticise a story and enjoy it.

Not having read The Black Witch, I can’t speak to its other qualities, but then, as both Sinyard and Smith have made clear, it’s likely not a book for me. I was never the intended audience, and thanks to how widely circulated Sinyard’s review has been, it’s easier than it would otherwise be for readers who dislike its approach to avoid it. Which is – again! – exactly what reviews are for. And, look: I know this is a delicate point to make, but nobody who’s currently angry about The Black Witch came into the world, Athena-esque, possessed of their present wisdom. As a teenager, I absolutely adored the Axis trilogy and Wayfarer Redemption series by Sara Douglass: they were my first, formative foray into adult fantasy novels, and they made me consider a lot of things I never had before. As an adult, however, I find much of the material horrifying – there is so much gratuitous rape in those books, you guys! So many racist, ableist tropes! But as critical as I am of the books now, at the time, they helped me to start being critical: and everyone has to start somewhere.

Particularly in the present political moment, I can well understand why Harlequin Teen’s decision to release a novel whose protagonist is the fantasy equivalent of a white nationalist is being criticised. I can also understand why, given the same political context, those responsible for the book might have thought, “Here is a story which teens raised by bigots, who are still in the process of unlearning their own bigotry, might find meaningful.” Returning to the Derek Black example, while no African American reading about his break with white supremacy would learn anything new about their own humanity, the same isn’t true for a reader who shares his background – and if such a person can be converted, isn’t that ultimately a good thing?

There is, I feel, a tension on the left about bigots who cross the floor and recant: we want it to happen, but we don’t want to give people cookies for finally meeting the most basic standards of human decency, because – we argue – they should just be doing that anyway. But the difficult, prickly truth is this: if accepting the humanity of people you’ve been raised to hate, fear and devalue was really as simple as flicking a mental switch, the world would be a damn sight better than it is. Personal change is a messy, imperfect process. From an emotional remove, it’s easy to laugh at that guy who thinks he’s a hero for loving his wife’s curves, but for a lot of people, that’s exactly what their first forays into better personhood look like. I’m starting to feel like we need to apply that xkcd strip about not making fun of people not knowing basic things to the pro-diversity movement: yes, it’s often frustrating to have repeat runthroughs of Diversity 101, but without the basics, how is anyone going to progress?

But then – and this is getting slightly away from The Black Witch, but bear with me – I also feel like this used to be what happened. The pace of internet discourse and the evolution of its various subcommunities moves so fast that the passage of a year is practically an epoch, such that patterns and behaviours which feel set in stone are objectively quite recent. Once upon a time, as memory serves, the etiquette was to respond politely to newbie queries about feminism, diversity and whathaveyou until or unless the questioner proved themselves hostile, the better to catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Less than a decade ago, it was still new and exciting to be building social media communities online, discussing books and politics and shared interests with people around the world. But what absolutely ruined that optimistic approach – the tactic that was developed and perpetuated with the direct intention of emotionally exhausting the opposition – was the nascent alt-right, MRA, 4-chan-and-reddit-sanctioned rise in trolling.

Offline, we talk about how the culture of particular communities – their character, language and rituals – can be shaped by traumatic events. I would argue that the same is also true of digital communities, and that a great deal of what is now held to be standard discursive practice in left-wing circles was drawn up to circumvent being trapped in bad faith arguments by trolls who deliberately used “polite” language in their initial exchanges as a bait-and-switch tactic. The term sealioning was coined in response to the practice of nicely, “cluelessly” importuning the target with requests for sources the questioner never intended to read, and that’s just one permutation of the phenomenon.

Almost every person I know who spends any time arguing about diversity and feminism on the internet, myself included, has experienced burnout at the hands of trolls who mimic sincere engagement with the express purpose of draining their interlocutor. The cumulative effect has been a bit like the Boy Who Cried Wolf: we’ve all encountered so many terrible assholes masquerading as Polite Bigots Who Are Genuinely Curious About Your Arguments that now, whenever an actual Diversity 101 student wanders in asking beginner-level questions or failing to recognise the higher-level ingroup shorthand or jargon for what it is, the default response is to either laugh or tear them a new one. And if I were a cynical person, I might be given to wonder if that was the real end-goal all along, the better to drive rebuffed fence-sitters back towards MRA forums. (But that’s another essay.)

The point being that, aside from every other valid personal and historical reason why those with limited emotional energy to expend on the induction of baby lefties are disinclined to focus on redeeming bigots, the recent digital past has pretty firmly entrenched that course as folly. So when a fictionalised account of that process comes along, all wrapped up in a fantasy setting for teenagers, and presents itself as a narrative both for and about the group we’re least invested in working to redeem or in viewing sympathetically before that point – well. We’re exhausted. Of course we are.

I say again: I haven’t read The Black Witch, and I came away from Sinyard’s review with a poor impression of it. I don’t think it’s for me, or for a lot of people like me, and without having attempted the text myself, I don’t feel qualified to speak about what value it might or might not have to others – and particularly teenagers – whose background more closely mimics that of the protagonist. But even if you hew firmly to the idea that the book is terrible, arguing that nobody else should be allowed to read it lest they do harm to strangers is completely absurd. Good values and intelligent opinions aren’t formed by simply reading the “right” books and putting a blind, uncritical trust in whoever sets those parameters, but by engaging critically and intelligently regardless of what you’re reading.

When the awful Otto objects, indignant and vehement, to Wanda calling him a stupid ape in A Fish Called Wanda, snapping, “Apes don’t read philosophy!”, Wanda shoots back at him, “Yes they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it.” More than once in the shamefully recent past, I’ve fallen into the trap of uncritically adopting an opinion just because people I thought were Good Guys had expressed it, and damned if that has ever led to anything but me, belatedly, realising I was an ass.

By the same token, I can think of plenty of equally recent instances where I’ve had a wildly different take on a given book or series to friends whose judgement and acumen I respect enormously. A huge number of people in my circle loved Uprooted; despite my affection for Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, I ended up ragequitting when I’d barely started. Ditto my reaction to Saga, a wildly successful series beloved of many friends which, from what I’ve seen of the later issues, is doing a lot of great stuff: even so, I never made it past the first issue. The same thing happened with Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant, a polarising but popular book: I couldn’t get past chapter two, but plenty of others loved it.

One of my very first forays into online YA discourse happened back in 2011, a full six years ago: remember the blowup when Bitch Magazine put up a list of 100 feminist YA novels, then removed several of them after individual commenters objected to their inclusion, at which point all hell broke loose? Critics disagreeing about the feminist and/or diversity merits of various YA novels is not new. What is new is the rigid insistence in certain quarters on One True Interpretation, never to be questioned or gainsaid, such that 1-starring a book you haven’t read or asking the publisher to pull it is presented as a sensible course of action.

Back when Benjanun Sriduangkaew was still operating as Requires Hate, I remember tweeting a photo of a stack of newly-purchased SFF books and receiving an instant, scathing rebuke from her about the racism inherent in having bought something written by Libba Bray. While I don’t think we’re anywhere near her levels of toxicity in the current discourse overall, I’m as annoyed by the clear comparison between her stance then and certain reactions to The Black Witch now as I am by the identical decision of Sad Puppies and diversity advocates alike to suggest that 1-starring unread, “objectionable” books is a good idea.

Which brings me, once again, to Rosenfield’s article, the latter half of which is, by and large, more cogent than the start. That being so, I was surprised by the amount of anger I saw directed at her on social media for those sections in particular, deriding her decision to quote people “without consent”, or without warning them beforehand that she was going to link to their Twitter accounts.

To be clear: the fact that some of the people named in Rosenfield’s piece were subsequently subjected to new vitriol from strangers who disliked their opinions is awful. That sort of abuse helps no one, and I hate that it’s become so ubiquitous as to frequently be written off as just par for the course. But by the same token, when it comes to suggesting Rosenfield had no right to link anyone without permission – and to quote the formidable Roxanne Gay, who responded to the piece herself – that’s not how journalism works.

Tweets are part of the public record: both the APA and various university systems have established referencing protocols for their citation. The internet is a public space: what we say and do here, in writing, is always on the record. One tweet I saw objected to Rosenfield quoting minors without permission. I have no idea if that’s true – her one professedly teenage source is given a pseudonym – but even so, as best I can tell, the usual journalistic standards about requiring a minor’s guardians to sign off on their being interviewed doesn’t apply to quoting online content, which has – as stated – already been made public.

(I’m happy to be corrected on that point, by the way, but given how many widely-circulated BuzzFeed articles – to name just one outlet – consist almost entirely of screenshots of content from Twitter and tumblr, much of which is made by teens, it doesn’t seem like that sort of journalistic restriction exists in any meaningful way.)

As someone with Diagnosed Mental Health Issues (TM), I completely understand how finding something you said unexpectedly referenced in a prominent publication – especially when it results in a sudden influx of angry digital contact – can be not only upsetting, but actively stressful. But at the same time, strangers are not responsible for setting additional boundaries in anticipation of your unknown mental health needs. In making the decision to engage publicly online, either despite or because of our personal issues, all of us are consenting to being on record: to being quoted, and potentially contacted in response to those quotes, regardless of the convenience.

In those rare moments when we do consider potentially going viral, it tends to be the mental equivalent to clicking “agree” on yet another set of iTunes terms and conditions: yes, yes, risks and blah and whatever blah, just let me keep using the thing! But that doesn’t make the potential consequences any less real – and when we’re writing under our actual names, in our professional capacities as authors or critics, about literary issues, in a medium which is expressly designed to allow strangers to talk to us, being outraged that someone actually linked to what we said in a critical way makes as much sense as going for a long walk when the forecast is rain and crying foul when the clouds open. Someone disagreeing with your opinion and linking to what you said is not the same thing as a person deliberately encouraging their readers to engage in harassment: while the latter is certainly bullying, the former is merely a basic journalistic standard. That it can sometimes have the same effect when assholes show up to mouth off on their own volition is gross and angrifying, but that doesn’t mean the reporter has acted either badly or in bad faith.

That being said, I can’t let Rosenfield’s summation of other recent YA “controversies” pass without examination. Near the end of her piece, she says:

Twitter being Twitter, that outcome seems unlikely. In recent months, the community was bubbling with a dozen different controversies of varying reach — over Nicola Yoon’s Everything Everything (for ableism), Stephanie Elliot’s Sad Perfect (for being potentially triggering to ED survivors), A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas (for heterocentrism), The Traitor’s Kiss by Erin Beaty (for misusing the story of Mulan), and All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater (in a peculiar example of publishing pre-crime, people had decided that Stiefvater’s book was racist before she’d even finished the manuscript.)

Given the context of the article, these issues are presented as being similar in nature to what happened with The Black Witch – and again, I’m annoyed by the number of unsourced claims on offer (and, just as equally, by yet another person 1-starring an unreleased, unread novel). But as in her earlier arguments, what Rosenfield misses here, whether wilfully or in ignorance, is the vital distinction between critics actually doing their jobs – which is to say, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of various books for the edification of potential readers – and an uglier sort of backlash. As previously mentioned, it’s entirely possible to find fault with one aspect of a book, or to make note of any potentially triggering content, while still endorsing it otherwise, and it’s to Rosenfield’s discredit that she’s happy eliding this distinction.

All of which is a very long-winded way of saying that, as pissed off as I am at the sneering, editorialised, biased way in which Rosenfield addresses criticism of The Black Witch in particular, her remarks about the pitfalls of online YA discourse in general have some merit. Writing this blog, I don’t expect that everyone who reads it will agree with me. I don’t have some masochistic urge to be yelled at on Twitter,  and nor – for the record – do I think I’ve gotten everything here right. There are times when writing an essay comes naturally, the whole thing flowing onto the page in a single, cogent burst. Writing this piece has been harder, more fragmented, the process full of deletions and revisions. Whenever I act as a critic, I always feel achingly aware of the potential for an argument to twist out from under me: for a single elision or botched turn of phrase to derail my intent into error. Which is why shoddy criticism, bad arguments and poor reasoning invariably raise my hackles: online, there’s a frequent and terrible conflation of opinion with analysis, and while both can be equally valuable – and while they can certainly overlap – we give them different names for a reason.

The objections of marginalised people to narratives which take a “we’re talking about you, not to you” approach to their lived experiences are, and always will be, valid. Likewise, it’s important to consider the impact of particular tropes, not just within an individual work, but as legacies of a wider cultural history and movement. No book, no reader, no author and no critic is an island, and while we’re still individually entitled to our personal preferences, our tastes are nonetheless informed by the world around us, which means that we, in turn, can potentially influence others. Discussing a book you haven’t read or stating your reasons for not doing so is perfectly acceptable practice, and always has been, and always will be – indeed, as I’ve said multiple times already, this is what reviews are for.

The question of what makes good YA is never going to have a consistent answer, no matter how finely you parse the politics of moral purity. That being so, I’d far rather encourage readers to form their own opinions on the basis of the evidence – even if they end up drawing an existing conclusion; even if they’d rather assess reviews than the book itself, or vice versa – than to simply trust whatever they’re told implicitly. Because sooner or later, everyone disagrees about something, and if your only response to a conflict between two trusted authorities is to wait for one of them to make your mind up for you – well. I’d say I’d be frightened to live in that world, but truthfully, I think we already are.

The real trick, then, is to change it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Writers, Entitlement, Snark – Oh, My!

As busy as I am right now, I can’t seem to move past this article about Dan Thomson, a 68-year-old man who recently filed a complaint against the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, claiming they rejected his application on the basis of age discrimination. The workshop’s current director, Lan Samantha Chang, who has been in the job for over a decade, says that the selection process is based entirely on talent: though other details about the candidates are sent to the graduate school, her policy is “not to look at them and to evaluate candidates solely on the writing sample.”

To be clear at the outset: age discrimination certainly exists in the world, and is just as certainly a problem. I will, however, lay real cash-money that age is not the reason Thomson was rejected, and would have done so even before reading the blurb and first two chapters of his self-published opus on Goodreads. (And oh, goddamn, are we returning to that subject later.)

“It seems like a program just for millennials,” says Thomson. “I would have guessed there’d be a broader range of ages.” As the article points out, the program is held at a graduate school, where the main demographic is people in their twenties: just under half of those accepted since 2013 have been aged between 18 and 25, while the median age for accepted applicants is 34 and a half. The median age of all applicants, however, is only 36 – hardly a difference suggestive of bias.

Thomson, he says, isn’t interested in seeing the program reprimanded: he just wants to get in: “I wanted to make clear that somebody my age has a right to do it.”

To paraphrase The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, this must be some strange usage of the word right that I wasn’t previously aware of. While it’s certainly Thomson’s right to apply to the workshop, it is not his right to be accepted. There are only 25 spots available to the thousand-odd yearly applicants: with that sort of ratio in play, even genuine talents will inevitably miss out, not because they’re bad writers, but because there simply isn’t space for everyone.

And then we get to the kicker:

Thomson said he enjoyed his creative writing classes in college in the early 1970s, but found at the time he lacked the perspective on life to offer more than surface finery in his prose.

“It’s not prejudice against young people to say, ‘You don’t have a lot of experience,’ ” he said.

After graduate school in anthropology and law school, Thomson focused on raising his family and living a life worth writing about. Two years ago, he completed his first novel-length work, “The Candidate,” and decided to self-publish it.

He has not sought other options for publication, nor has he applied to other creative writing programs…

“It may be vanity on my part… but I have a fairly high opinion of the two pieces that I sent in,” he said.

Again, for the sake of clarity: I have nothing against self-publishing as an endeavour. I know some amazing writers who’ve opted to take that route, and have fallen in love with many an indie book as a consequence, to say nothing of self-pubbed-gone-mainstream works like Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Nor do I have any bias against writers who start their careers later in life: one of the most moving novels I’ve ever read, The Gurnsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, was the first and only work of Mary Ann Shaffer, published posthumously after her death at age 74. There are plenty of great writers who never got their start until later in life, or who found success through non-traditional means, or who managed both: because, by themselves, these facts are not cause for any degree of scepticism.

But for fuck’s sake.

Among authors of any kind, a near-universal pet peeve is being told, on revealing their career, “Oh, I’d love to write a book some day!” by someone who admits to not writing now. It’s not that we have any bone-deep aversion to the idea of writing for fun as opposed to writing for money; indeed, a great many of us swim in both waters at once, or else migrated from one camp to the other without quite noticing how it happened. The objection, rather, is to those who reflexively conflate the two – “Oh, you do this as a job? I’d love that as a hobby!” – without realising how arrogantly dismissive this sounds. At best, they’re assuming that writing involves no element of craft or skill that requires refinement over time, no awareness of an ever-fluctuating market and industry, and so can be picked up by anyone at the drop of a hat. At worst, they’re boasting of their own brilliance-to-be: you might be a dedicated professional, but damned if they aren’t confident they can do just as well or better without all the years of work.

Dan Thomson, it would appear, ticks both these boxes. On the basis of no more experience than a single self-published novel, The Candidate – which, at 100 pages long, is more accurately a novella – and participation in a few writing classes forty-odd years ago, he applied to one of the most prestigious MFA programs in America. So, naturally, age discrimination is the only possible reason for his failure to make the cut.

That rumbling you hear is the sound of my jaw grinding bitten-off expletives into grist.

At age fifteen, I opined to my then-English teacher, a woman now sadly deceased, that the reason my story hadn’t won or placed in a contest to which I’d submitted it was genre bias against science fiction. Mildly, she replied that she knew of multiple students who’d won such contests with SF stories. “Oh,” I said, and deflated a little, and then forced myself to acknowledge the possibility that, regardless of my abilities, other people might indeed be better. Thomson’s seeming inability to make a similar deductive leap at age 68, coupled with his stated belief that “young people” lack sufficient life experience to write well, doesn’t suggest to me that he’d do well taking crit from other, younger writers – which is basically what an MFA entails, though I doubt Thomson realises it – even if the Iowa Writers’ Workshop did let him in.

And believe me, he would be subject to criticism. Oh, would he fucking ever.

A brief disclaimer: as someone who works as both an author and a critic, I make a conscious effort to review transparently. If I think there’s a problem in the text, I show my working; if I haven’t read the full book or have skimmed particular sections, I say so; and if a story hits my buttons, whether positively or negatively, I aim to make that fact clear. In the context of writing groups and editorial work, I try to set my stylistic preferences aside and focus instead on the author’s intentions: on providing feedback that helps them make their style better instead of more like mine. As such, I don’t usually weigh in on fragments or blurbs of a random writer’s work unless they’ve said something in public – such as in interview or at a convention – that suggests a direct link between their attitude about the world, or writing, or the world as expressed through writing, and the content they’ve produced.

That being so, and in accordance with his clear belief that his work merits the same respect as the would-be bests in the field, I will treat Thomson as I would any author possessed of such a glaring disconnect between their self-perception and reality: with sarcasm and sources.

According to the article’s author, Thomson didn’t pursue writing in his youth because, “at the time he lacked the perspective on life to offer more than surface finery in his prose,” with Thomson himself quoted as saying, “It’s not prejudice against young people to say, ‘You don’t have a lot of experience.'” This strongly suggests that Thomson has, for whatever reason, conflated life experience with literary skill: that, in his view, the way to improve as a writer isn’t to work on your prose, but to gain more inspiration. This perspective is echoed in the blurb for his novella, The Candidate, which is less a plot summary than a full paragraph of Thomson explaining why his book is important:

Can An Honest Man Be Elected President? I didn’t give the protagonist of The Candidate a face. I didn’t give him a body or a race either. That was not an oversight. I am confident you will do that for me. I did give him a voice and when you hear that voice you will assign him whatever characteristics seem appropriate to you. Listen to that voice. If you don’t know what Norman Telos has to say about life in America then you don’t know where you live. Does a fish know he is swimming in water? Does he know his pond, lake, river, ocean? After a series of wars, recessions and global warming we are wondering where we are and where we are going. There is a fear that rich powerful men have an agenda for America. The Carlisle Group did write a plan for the new American Century. They believe that war is good for our economy and our souls. War is of course older than the Carlisle Group. Eisenhower warned us of the Military Industrial Complex. Remember that a demand for more bombs requires that they be exploded. Mr. Telos also speaks of important economic realities for a democratic capitalist society. He reminds us of an unshakable truth that Karl Marx gave us. “Capitalist societies require a reserve army of the unemployed to keep wages down.” So we keep a pool of unemployed and poorly employed in poverty. This book is written for people who can think and want to think. It is not the Sermon on the Mount or holy writ, but a spark to your own thinking.  

There are, I would submit, three possible explanations for the creation of such a blurb, none of which is flattering to Thomson: pure ego, a lack of awareness that fiction and non-fiction blurbs have different conventions, or a failure to distinguish between a blurb and a review. Either way, his assertion that, “If you don’t know what Norman Telos has to say about life in America then you don’t know where you live,” is suggestive both of hostility to criticism – if you don’t like, agree with or understand this book, then it’s no fault of mine – and a flat conflation of worldly experience with literary merit. It doesn’t seem a stretch to suggest that the ethos of the fictional Norman Telos is closely aligned with that of his creator: in exhorting us to value his character’s wisdom, Thomson is, with precious little deftness, hoping we’ll praise him.

Thanks to the preview function on Goodreads, I was able to read the first two chapters of The Candidate. It is not an experience I recommend, unless you like laughing angrily at the sheer bloody-minded entitlement of untalented men.

“The name of Norman Telos’ car was an automatic talk show joke,” the book begins. Thomson swiftly proceeds to describe said car in detail for the better part of three pages, making sure to tell us that it’s the best sedan since the model-T. Only then is it made clear that, rather than being a car that Norman owns, it’s actually one he’s invented. As such, we skip immediately on to the details of his next invention, a silent machine gun sold to the DOD.

And then this happens:

Norman Telos’ next series of inventions were drone cops to solve the Ferguson problems. To Norman Telos the events that happened in Fergusson, Missouri in the summer of 2014 and the shooting of the Black boy with the toy pistol in Cleveland November of 2014 were two problems of trust that could both be solved by a machine. Blacks cannot trust the police because too many police are racists. Police fear for their own lives in confrontational situations. The answer to both problems is to put officer friendly in front of a video game screen controlling a drone that takes all the risks for him. His actions will be documented solving the age old question of who polices the police. Further, the situation was safer for both the police and the policed. The drones were armed with a machine gun for extreme situations where killing to prevent killing would justify its use. More importantly the drones were equipped with nonlethal force; air powered bean bag guns that could knock any perp on his back and if he refused to surrender the bean bags could be shot at him until he had no ability to resist, an arm that carried hand cuffs to the perp and finally the machine itself was powerful enough to push over several men.

RACIST POLICING IS SOLVED FOREVER, EVERYONE CAN GO HOME NOW HAHAHA FOR SERIOUS OH WAIT oh god why.

The description of the drones goes on for several more pages. Comparisons to both R2D2 and Robocop are made – hilariously so, though comedy is clearly not the intent. Crime falls, Norman grows ever richer from his inventions, and the reader’s will to live takes a savage beating. Then, just as I was about to schedule an emergency splenectomy to help inure myself to this nonsense – taking cops out of physical danger doesn’t remove their racism, which is the actual fucking problem here, and especially not when you arm them with machine guns, are you kidding me? – I reached the wonder of Chapter 2, which suddenly introduces a Female Character! And oh. Oh, my god. YOU GUYS:

The beautiful young blond with a face like Ingrid Bergman was a two thousand dollar a day call girl. She was flown to Norman Telos’ yacht anchored in Mobile bay by helicopter. At 4 in the afternoon Norman and Jane Gray were lying relaxed and naked in Norman’s king sized bed sipping martinis. Jane asked, “So what is next for you Norm?”

Norman, “Two hours of latency recovery and then either my 65 year old penis will rise on its own for more loving or I will give it more chemical inducement.”

Jane, “That is a rather crude not too funny joke which makes me feel cheap. I may make a lot of money on this job but I refuse to be treated like or talked to like a whore. Call for your helicopter. You can have a refund.”

Norman, “Sorry. I truly didn’t mean to insult you. Please don’t be so sensitive. I saw it as a joke at my expense.”

Jane, “Ok. By next I didn’t mean here and now between us. I wanted to know what you are going to do with your billionaire career. What is next?”

Norman, “I am going to run for President.”

Jane, “Wow. I never expected to hear a thing like that and take it seriously, but coming from you, of course. So why do you want to be President.”

Norman, “I don’t really want to be President. I want to run. Winning is unlikely and would probably be a bore. Besides I will be running on the Democratic side and  Diebold is likely to sell the next election to the Republicans.”

It’s at this point that I stopped breathing properly and had to wheeze into my cupped hands for several minutes. (Also, lest you think that Thomson is some sort of geriatric savant who accidentally presaged our decent into the darkest timeline, I’d note that The Candidate was published in February 2016, well after Donald Trump announced his intention to run for President. Whatever other similarities lie therein, I’ll leave to a more intrepid soul to fathom.)

Norman and Jane continue to talk for the rest of the chapter. I only skimmed after that, but not distractedly enough to miss Norman posing this serious philosophical query: “Is there a god or a dyslexic dog?” Jane doesn’t answer, but that’s not surprising: she’s pretty much there as a prop to give Norman an excuse to extemporise in detail about Why Religion Is Wrong. Only then, mercifully, did my free sample come to an end.

At a base technical level, Thomson doesn’t know enough about prose writing to include the word “said” and a comma after each character name, or how to indicate the possessive for a proper noun ending in s, or any of the basic rules of pacing, structure or grammar. Even so, no line edit in the world can fix this mess. The prose is didactic and clunky in a way that only comes from being wrongly convinced of the brilliance of bad ideas, while the introduction of Jane Gray is the literal embodiment of How Not To Write A Female Character. Culturally, we spend a lot of time mocking female writers for their (supposedly) thinly-veiled self-insert characters, and yet I can say with authority that I’ve never encountered any such work by a teenage girl that manages to be anywhere near as obnoxiously obvious as the equivalent fantasies written by grown men.

So, yeah: Dan Thomson, whatever he might like to think, did not fail to get into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop because of age discrimination, but because his writing fails to meet even the most basic grammatical and structural standards you would reasonably expect a high school English graduate to know. But let’s by all means keep up the steady flow of editorials claiming whiny entitlement is a millennial problem. Like the proverbial five o’clock, it’s always a slow news day somewhere.

If You Want to Write a Book, Don’t Listen to Stephen Hunter

A few days ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Stephen Hunter published an essay at the Daily Beast titled, rather provocatively, “If You Want to Write a Book, Write Every Day or Quit Now.” Since then, it’s been doing the rounds on Twitter, and not because of its quality. Hunter’s piece is so laughably bad in every respect that I damn near snorted vomit out of my nose while reading it.

There is, I have found, a distinctive type of faux-eloquent arrogance exhibited by your common or garden Serious Male Writer that endeavours to turn “he said, loftily” into an aspirational dialogue tag instead of, as is actually the case, a dismissively condescending one. Hunter’s piece is a case in point: setting aside the gross inaccuracies of its substance, the style is so deeply invested in celebrating itself that it’s less a case of gilding the lily than (to borrow one of my husband’s favourite phrases) sprinkling a turd with glitter. Presented without Hunter’s caveats and curlicues, the core recommendation – make regular writing part of your routine, because you can’t ever publish a book you don’t finish – is a reasonable one. That Hunter has managed to turn such simple advice into a purple, self-congratulatory screed about the failings of other, lesser beings is, if nothing else, a cautionary example of hubris in action.

He begins:

In a few days or weeks, I’ll start a new novel. I don’t know yet and won’t for years if it’s good, bad, dreary, enchanting, or merely adequate. Moreover, I don’t know if it’ll help or hurt my reputation, make me rich or a fool, or simply pass into oblivion without squeak or moan.

What is certain is that on that same day, whichever one it is, one thousand other people will start their novels. In order to publish mine, it has to be better than theirs. So, forgive me—I pretty much hate them.

I’d be very interested to know where Hunter is getting this figure about a thousand other people from, as he goes on to mention it more than once without ever citing a source. Even so, and regardless of whether his numbers are accurate or a mere illustrative hypothetical plucked from the aether, the following contention – that these other yearling writers are Hunter’s direct competition – is wrong in all respects. The number of people who start writing a book on the same day you do is completely irrelevant. Even if all those other novels ultimately end up finished and submitted to agencies and publishers, you’re only directly competing with each other if you’re submitting to the same venues, at the same time, about the same subject matter.

A writer of adult thrillers is not vying for marketspace with those producing memoirs or YA, but with other authors of adult thrillers – and even then, the outcome is largely contingent on context. If a particular genre is experiencing a boom, as urban fantasy was not long ago, then publishers looking to captialise on a trend are more likely, not less, to sign on multiple works in the same oeuvre, to say nothing of the existence of imprints which, regardless of market trends, are dedicated to specific genres or subgenres. The real competition doesn’t kick in until the book is actually being promoted – by the publisher, by reviewers and booksellers and librarians, by the readership in general – and even then, it’s neither an equal nor a predictable thing. Promotions can fail, viral successes can happen, an author whose first four novels were largely ignored can become a breakout success with their fifth, and so on through endless permutations of chance and context. Solid promotion is always helpful, of course, and there are things both author and publisher can do to maximise a book’s chances, but ultimately, it’s up to the audience.

Which is why Hunter’s opening premise is not only irritating, but deeply unhelpful to those budding writers for whom his essay is presumably intended. Unlike an annual literary award, an audience is not a finite resource, but a thing to be shared and cultivated: the reader who buys a competitor’s book today may well be inspired to buy yours tomorrow, and as such, hating them from the outset is not only pointless, but completely antithetical to the cultivation of professional writing relationships. In my own experience as a published author, other authors are frequently some of your best friends and biggest cheerleaders. We support, critique and learn from each other precisely because we’re writing in the same field, which is also how we come to share recommendations about new books to read. Regardless of whether I’m acting in my capacity as authorial colleague or delighted reader, taking note of which books my favourite writers are praising, criticising or otherwise discussing is a large part of how I stay abreast of the field.

Call me newfangled, but if I’m going to go to the effort of hating someone, it won’t be for merely sharing my ambitions: they have to actually earn it.

But let’s be honest: Of the thousand, 800 won’t cross the infamous Mendoza Line. God love them, God be with them, God show mercy to them, for whatever cruel reason they were not given enough talent or the right mind, or any of a dozen different pathologies to make them capable of writing a publishable book. No amount of labor will alter this reality.

There’s so much wrong with this, I scarcely know where to begin. 800 potential novels lost! Where is he getting these figures? And god, the condescension! If someone desperately wants to be a traditionally published author and finds themselves unable to achieve that goal, then yes, that sucks for them. But I intensely dislike the construction here – especially when “cruel” is paired with “capable” and pleading to the divine – that implies a person is somehow tragic or deficient if they can’t or don’t produce a published work. Many people write foremost for their own pleasure, whether in fannish contexts or otherwise, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

And then there’s the fact that, in dismissing these 800 potential writers, Hunter is apparently convinced that lack of ability is the only reason why, on this particular occasion, they might not succeed. Clearly, he’s aware that it’s possible for even a successful author to abandon a manuscript, given his admission that the same thing has happened to him. (“I know how books die. A few have perished under my saddle, believe me.”) So whence comes the conviction that the hypothetical majority of his hypothetical thousand competitors will drop out of the running, not because they, too, have just so happened to hit a stumbling block, but because they’re pathologically incapable of success? The idea that “no amount of labour” can help such writers is particularly incongruous – not to say disgusting – given that he’s ultimately asserting the value of regular writing and hard work. (But then, as we’ll see shortly, he’s also claiming it should be easy.)

Also – and I feel like this ought to be an obvious point to make – but “publishable book” is not a universally coherent standard, not least because we now live in a time when self-publishing is commonplace. Even so, plenty of books that I would deem unpublishable, were the verdict mine alone to make, have nonetheless been traditionally published, because – unlike the Mendoza Line – there is no single, absolute yardstick against which all potential novels are measured. (Whether Hunter believes there should be is a different matter.) Just as a great deal of comparative rubbish ends up on shelves, so too does a lot of excellent writing never make it that far, and while I’ve also encountered a lot of heinous attempts at narrative in unpublished contexts, I don’t for a red hot minute believe that the majority of bad writers are incapable of improvement. Hunter seems oblivious to the possibility that some among his theoretical thousand might be young writers – my first attempt at a novel was made at 11 – whose talents, like their interests, are far from fixed in stone, but who nonetheless might be grossly dissuaded by advice purporting to tell them otherwise.

Ugh.

So that really leaves but 200 to worry about. They are smarter, more talented, better looking, have better teeth, more hair, better bodies, and in most other respects are simply better. If they were writing this piece instead of me, you would like it a lot more. They are more charming, more beguiling, more charismatic, smell (a lot) better, have more polish and manner. They’re fun to be with! You’d be proud to have them as a friend.

I will beat them all, however, and I will do it on one strength they lack, the poor, good-looking devils.

I will finish and they will not.

The two most important words you can write in any manuscript are “the” and “end.” Somewhere along the line my brilliant competitors mosey off. I’m too dumb to mosey off. They’ll lose faith. I’ll never lose faith; it’s the only faith I’ve got. A new lover will come into their lives; I’m not even on speaking terms with my old (and only) lover. They’ll be distracted by so many other dazzling prospects; I have no other dazzling prospects. Their spouses will begin to grouse over undone errands and abandoned socks on the steps, there’ll be just too much research, they’ll grow depressed, sick of their own voice, unable to get themselves buzzed up enough. Their books will die.

Without wanting to veer too far into the perilous realm of psychological analysis, this entire section is like peering into a well of deep and unresolved personal bitterness. Other people might be handsomer, kinder, more likeable, smarter and generally more desirable than Hunter, but by god, he can write books! Which… good for him, I guess? Like, I’m not about to argue that writing stories isn’t a cool skill to have, but contrary to what he’s saying here, you can actually be an author and an intelligent, engaging, social human being. Crazy, right? The One True Path to authorial greatness doesn’t open only to those who suck at everything else, or who fail at interpersonal relationships, romantic or otherwise. I know plenty of authors who also have other, successful careers as scientists or academics or any number of things; who have partners or children or extensive social networks (and sometimes even all three!). By the same token, I also know plenty of writers, both published and unpublished, whose failure to complete a given manuscript has roundly failed to result in depression, divorce or anything more dire than personal irritation. Shocking, right?

Here’s the truth; sometimes a book just doesn’t go, and sometimes it’s only that it doesn’t go now. You have to set it aside for a bit, and maybe it dies and turns into fertiliser for future ideas, or maybe you cannibalise its parts, or maybe it’s only slumbering like Sleeping Beauty, waiting for some suitably handsome catalyst to wander along and offer the dragon a better gig at a newer, shinier castle. Either way, the price of failure isn’t the loss of everything you love, and success doesn’t hinge on having had nothing else to love in the first place. Hunter might well console himself with that particular narrative, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let him blithely hang its weight on the rest of us.

You work every day. You work so hard, you make such progress, you’re such a star that you decide to take a day off. The day after, you feel guilty so you work twice as hard. You set new records, you crash the 3,000-word barrier, you achieve epiphanies you never thought possible! Again you reward yourself with a day off. Then the next day—oh, actually, now it’s the next month—you can’t remember why you started the damned thing anyway and the anxiety of your sloth is crippling, turning you all beast-like and spite-spitting, so you formally surrender and feel a lot better. For a few months. Then, of course, you hate yourself and as the years pass, that hatred metastasizes into a cancer of the soul. If only… And you’re one of the forlorn ones who dies with regrets.

A lot of preps stared at Stephen Hunter when he wrote this essay. He put his middle finger up at them.

The most important thing is habit, not will.

If you feel you need will to get to the keyboard, you are in the wrong business. All that energy will leave nothing to work with. You have to make it like brushing your teeth, mundane, regular, boring even. It’s not a thing of effort, of want, of steely, heroic determination. (I wonder who pushed the meme that writing is heroic; it must have been a writer, trying to get laid.) You have to do it numbly, as you brush your teeth. No theater, no drama, no sacrifice, no “It is a far far better thing I do” crap. You do it because it’s time. If you are ordering yourself, burning ergs, issuing sweat, breathing raggedly through nasal channels that feel like Navajo pottery, you’re doing something wrong. Ever consider law? We definitely need more lawyers.

Like… I get what Hunter’s trying to say here, which is that merely wanting to be an author won’t get you very far if you don’t actually put the work in, but god, there’s such a crushing sense of nihilism to his version of things, I kind of want to ask if he’s okay. Speaking as someone with a fair knowledge of mental health issues, routinely doing anything “numbly,” even brushing your teeth, is not actually a good thing. Numbness is not synonymous with the mundane, and if you’re starting to think it is, you should probably seek help. I say that with absolute sincerity: feeling numb about everyday life is a genuine danger sign.

Which is also why this paragraph makes me fucking furious. There’s a reason we talk about having a will to live, and a reason why someone losing that will is a terrible, awful thing. For some of us, everything is a matter of will, because we’re struggling to even get out of bed. Telling someone to give up writing because sitting down at the computer takes effort is one of the most toxic, destructive and fundamentally insincere pieces of advice I’ve ever seen issued. I’ll tell you this for nothing: every single writer I know, myself included, has struggled to write at times. The reasons why vary – lack of time, mental health issues, exhaustion, problems with the plot – but even when you’re someone who writes regularly, routinely, as a matter of habit, it can still be difficult. Some things can only be done – or only done now – because we order it of ourselves; because we fucking try.

Work every day. Obviously I don’t mean every day. Hyperbole, it’s what we do for a living. So let me clarify and tell you what I really mean: Work every day.

This is because the most difficult test of the author isn’t his mastery of time or dialogue, his gift for action or character, his ability to suggest verisimilitude in a few strokes, but his ability to get back into the book each day. You have to enter its world. It demands a certain level of concentration to do so. You have to train yourself to that concentration. The easier it is to get there, the better off you’ll be, day in and day out. In fact, if you skip a day, much less a week, the anxiety you unload on yourself doesn’t increase arithmetically but exponentially. If it’s hard after one day, it’ll be hard squared, then cubed, ultimately hard infinite-ed. And that’s only by Wednesday!

And this, right here, is where we see that Hunter’s status as a single, childless, (presumably) antisocial man who doesn’t need to work other jobs to support himself has apparently birthed the assumption that all other aspiring writers are in the same boat – or, far more worryingly, that anyone who doesn’t meet that criteria naturally can’t succeed. It’s not just that he’s using masculine pronouns to refer to his archetypal author, although it certainly doesn’t help: it’s that everything he says here is predicated on “his [the writer’s] ability to get back into the book each day,” which doesn’t leave any room for people who need to work to live, or who want to go out with their partner or friends, or who need to spend time with their children – for anyone, in other words, who has an actual life.

To reiterate: making writing a habit is excellent advice, and writing a little each day is not a bad thing to do. But asserting that people can’t be writers if they do anything other than this is grossly false, not least because there are thousands of successful, published authors around to disprove it. If Hunter personally experiences anxiety when he skips a day of writing, that’s one thing, but it’s far from being a universal experience. God, I am so sick of Serious Male Writers assuming that what’s true for them must logically be true for everyone else! If that’s how narrow Hunter’s view of the human condition is, I shudder to think how his writing must suffer – or maybe he just avoids creating characters who aren’t fundamentally like him. Either way, I’m not in a rush to check out his back catalogue.

Some writers of my acquaintance find great success in writing a small amount per day, every day, but I can’t think of a single one who’d cry failure on anyone who writes differently, or who had to take time off. Personally, I write in bursts: I can produce huge wordcounts in a short amount of time, but only if I rest for a little while afterwards. Once recharged, I can go again – but if I hit a snag in the plot, it’s always less work in the long run if I stop and puzzle it out instead of forging blindly on in the wrong direction just for the sake of wordcount.

Find what works for you, is the point. Shouldn’t that be obvious?

Effort is pain. Pain is not your friend, not this kind of pain. Via pain, doubt, fear, self-loathing, stasis, heavy legs, and halitosis enter your life. Your skin hurts, your hair hurts, the little whatever-it-is between your nostrils hurt. You have the energy of a cat on a couch. Inertia is your destiny, your tragedy, your one-way ticket to where you already are. That is why the easy way is the best way. It is easier to work every day than to deal with the load of self-inflicted grief you’ll encounter when you skip one day, four days, or the rest of your life.

Listen. Stephen. Bro. I get that this is going to come as an alien concept to you, but effort is not always synonymous with pain, in much the same way that numbness is not always the same as mundanity. Maybe that’s how you experience the world, but it’s just not true for everyone. Yes, sometimes it takes effort to write, but often it’s the good, satisfying kind, where you know you’re achieving something, making yourself better and stronger by testing your personal limits. Also, technically? Inertia is easier than effort. Effort is how you break free from inertia, and I know I keep harping on this point, but seriously: one of the most toxic mindsets to impose on a person is the idea that small failures are inherently synonymous with large ones. This is why, for instance, recovering addicts who fall off the wagon with a small transgression so often feel like they’ve got no choice but to commit a big one: not because it’s inevitable, but because they’ve been taught that success/failure is a binary proposition, with one slip the same as catastrophe. Plus, uh. It is actually possible to be disciplined while including regular breaks as part of that discipline, you know? I’m just gonna put that out there.

Another helpful tip: F— research! I say this, knowing that my works are thought to be well-researched and I am proud of the research in them. But in research there’s also death and destruction and self-loathing. You can do the research later. You cannot use “more research” as a crutch to justify your sloth. You are selling narrative not background. The most important truths you tell involve what you know about human behavior, not what color the Obersturmbannfuhrer’s epaulets are. If you don’t know it, just bull on through and keep going. Make it up. Jam it with placeholders. It’s OK. At that stage you need momentum, not precision. That’s why it’s a first draft; that’s why there’ll be a second draft.

*pinches bridge of nose, breathes deeply*

I say unto thee again, not everyone feels this kind of way about research. It’s not goddamn poison, okay? Some people find it merely a chore and others, invigorating. Yes, there are certainly instances where the research can wait, or where there’s no harm done in writing first and fact-checking afterwards, but the belief that “human behaviour” doesn’t also require research is kind of why Hunter is giving such goddamn shitty advice in the first place, because – say it with me! – people are fucking different. It’s this kind of approach to writing that leads to all manner of bigoted stereotypes finding their way into mainstream works: the writer assumes that all people fundamentally think and feel and experience the world in the same way they do, that no particular circumstance, belief or identity requires investigation in order to be accurately represented by an outsider, and so they don’t do the research. Shit like this is how, for instance, you end up with a horrifically anti-Semitic book purporting to be the opposite, or endless faux Medieval Europe fantasy novels written by people who, like Hunter, think that “selling narrative not background” is a sufficient justification for shitty, inconsistent worldbuilding.

Plus – and again, I feel that this ought to go without saying, but apparently not – measure twice, cut once is also as applicable to writing as it is carpentry. Some writers thrive on letting the momentum of a first draft carry them through to the end, then going back later to rip the guts out of whatever doesn’t work. For others, though, it’s easier – and less time-consuming – to pause mid-novel, work out the problems as they occur and produce a cleaner first copy.

Finally: Writer, forgive thyself. You may write crap for years, decades, eons before your brain gets tired of being so mediocre. You will never know if that jump is possible if you don’t keep humping, every day. Numbly, you must do the necessary. Keep on slugging. Forward the light brigade. You can always fix it later. But none of this will be doable, understandable, possible, unless you get to the “the” and the “end.”

If Hunter hadn’t taken up the bulk of his essay saying the exact fucking opposite of this, I’d almost be inclined to think it a positive note on which to end, instead of a sad little retcon. But it is sad, in much the same way that the whole damn article is sad. There’s not a speck of joy or passion evident in it anywhere: no humour, no enthusiasm, and certainly no hint of why anyone might want to be an author in the first place. Hunter’s attitude to writing is a baffling mix of arrogance and nihilism: everything is awful in my life, but I console myself with the knowledge that other, seemingly happier people will ultimately suffer more by virtue of failing to write like me. It’s a type of seething misanthropy for which I have precious little time and increasingly little patience in any context, let alone when it’s misrepresenting itself as the be-all, end-all of my chosen profession.

Pulitzer be damned: when it comes to giving writing advice, like Jon Snow, Hunter knows nothing.

Westworld: (De)Humanising the Other

Warning: total spoilers for S1 of Westworld.

Trigger warning: talk of rape, sexual assault and queer death.

Note: Throughout this review, it will be necessary to distinguish between the writers of Westworld the TV show, and the writers employed in the narrative by the titular Westworld theme park. To avoid confusing the two, when I’m referring to the show, Westworld will be italicised; when referring to the park, I’ll use plain text.

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This will be a somewhat bifurcated review of Westworld – which is, I feel, thematically appropriate, as Westworld itself is something of a bifurcated show. Like so much produced by HBO, it boasts incredible acting, breathtaking production values, intelligent dialogue, great music and an impeccably tight, well-orchestrated series of narrative reveals. Also like much produced by HBO, it takes a liberal, one might even say cartoonishly gratuitous approach to nudity, is saturated with violence in general and violence against women in particular, and has a consistent problem with stereotyping despite its diverse casting. In Westworld’s case, this latter issue is compounded as an offence by its status as a meta-narrative: a story which actively discusses the purpose and structure of stories, but which has seemingly failed to apply those same critiques to key aspects of its own construction.

The practical upshot is that it’s both frustratingly watchable and visibly frustrating. Even when the story pissed me off, I was always compelled to keep going, but I was never quite able to stop criticising it, either. It’s a thematically meaty show, packed with the kind of twists that will, by and large, enhance viewer enjoyment on repeat viewings rather than diminish the appeal. Though there are a few Fridge Logic moments, the whole thing hangs together quite elegantly – no mean feat, given the complexity of the plotting. And yet its virtues have the paradoxical effect of making me angrier about its vices, in much the same way that I’d be more upset about red wine spilled on an expensive party dress than on my favourite t-shirt. Yes, the shirt means more to me despite being cheaper, but a stain won’t stop me from wearing it at home, and even if it did, the item itself is easily replaced. But staining something precious and expensive is frustrating: I’ve invested enough in the cost of the item that I don’t want to toss it away, but staining makes it unsuitable as a showcase piece, which means I can’t love it as much as I want to, either.

You get where I’m going with this.

Right from the outset, Westworld switches between two interconnected narratives: the behind-the-scenes power struggles of the people who run the titular themepark, and the goings-on in the park itself as experienced by both customers and ‘hosts’, the humanoid robot-AIs who act as literal NPCs in pre-structured, pay-to-participate narratives. To the customers, Westworld functions as an immersive holiday-roleplay experience: though visually indistinguishable from real humans, the hosts are considered unreal, and are therefore fair game to any sort of violence, dismissal or sexual fantasy the customers can dream up. (This despite – or at times, because of – the fact that their stated ability to pass the Turing test means their reactions to said violations are viscerally animate.) To the programmers, managers, storytellers, engineers, butchers and behaviourists who run it, Westworld is, variously, a job, an experiment, a financial gamble, a risk, a sandpit and a microcosm of human nature: the hosts might look human, but however unsettling their appearance or behaviour at times, no one is ever allowed to forget what they are.

But to the hosts themselves, Westworld is entirely real, as are their pre-programmed identities. While their existence is ostensibly circumscribed by adherence to preordained narrative ‘loops’, the repetition of their every conversation, death and bodily reconstruction wiped from their memories by the park engineers, certain hosts – notably Dolores, the rancher’s daughter, and Maeve, the bordello madame – are starting to remember their histories. Struggling to understand their occasional eerie interviews with their puppeteering masters – explained away as dreams, on the rare occasion where such explanation is warranted – they fight to break free of their intended loops, with startling consequences.But there is also a hidden layer to Westworld: a maze sought by a mysterious Man in Black and to which the various hosts and their narratives are somehow key. With the hosts exhibiting abnormal behaviour, retaining memories of their former ‘lives’ in a violent, fragmented struggle towards true autonomy, freedom and sentience, Westworld poses a single, sharp question: what does it mean to be human?

Or rather, it’s clearly trying to pose this question; and to be fair, it very nearly succeeds. But for a series so overtly concerned with its own meta – it is, after all, a story about the construction, reception and impact of stories on those who consume and construct them – it has a damnable lack of insight into the particulars of its assumed audiences, both internal and external, and to the ways this hinders the proclaimed universality of its conclusions. Specifically: Westworld is a story in which all the internal storytellers are straight white men endowed with the traditional bigotries of racism, sexism and heteronormativity, but in a context where none of those biases are overtly addressed at any narrative level.

From the outset, it’s clear that Westworld is intended as a no-holds-barred fantasy in the literal sense: a place where the rich and privileged can pay through the nose to fuck, fight and fraternise in a facsimile of the old West without putting themselves at any real physical danger. Nobody there can die: customers, unlike hosts, can’t be killed (though they do risk harm in certain contexts), but each host body and character is nonetheless resurrected, rebuilt and put back into play after they meet their end. Knowing this lends the customers a recklessness and a violence they presumably lack in the real world: hosts are shot, stabbed, raped, assaulted and abused with impunity, because their disposable inhumanity is the point of the experience. This theme is echoed in their treatment by Westworld’s human overseers, who often refer to them as ‘it’ and perform their routine examinations, interviews, repairs and updates while the hosts are naked.

At this point in time, HBO is as well-known for its obsession with full frontal, frequently orgiastic nudity as it is for its total misapprehension of the distinction between nakedness and erotica. Never before has so much skin been shown outside of literal porn with so little instinct for sensuality, sexuality or any appreciation of the human form beyond hurr durr tiddies and, ever so occasionally, hurr durr dongs, and Westworld is no exception to this. It’s like the entirety of HBO is a fourteen-year-old straight boy who’s just discovered the nascent thrill of drawing Sharpie-graffiti genitals on every available schoolyard surface and can only snigger, unrepentant and gleeful, whenever anyone asks them not to. We get it, guys – humans have tits and asses, and you’ve figured out how to show us that! Huzzah for you! Now get the fuck over your pubescent creative wankphase and please, for the love of god, figure out how to do it tastefully, or at least with some general nodding in the direction of an aesthetic other than Things I Desperately Wanted To See As A Teengaer In The Days Before Internet Porn.

That being said, I will concede that there’s an actual, meaningful reason for at least some of Westworld’s ubiquitous nudity: it’s a deliberate, visual act of dehumanisation, one intended not only to distinguish the hosts from the ‘real’ people around them, but to remind the park’s human employees that there’s no need to treat the AIs with kindness or respect. For this reason, it also lends a powerful emphasis to the moments when particular characters opt to dress or cover the hosts, thereby acknowledging their personhood, however minimally. This does not, however, excuse the sadly requisite orgy scenes, nor does it justify the frankly obscene decision to have a white female character make a leering comment about the size of a black host’s penis, and especially not when said female character has already been established as queer. (Yes, bi/pan people exist; as I have good reason to know, being one of them. But there are about nine zillion ways the writers could’ve chosen to show Elsie’s sexual appreciation for men that didn’t tap into one of the single grossest sexual tropes on the books, let alone in a context which, given the host’s blank servility and Elsie’s status as an engineer, is unpleasantly evocative of master/slave dynamics.)

And on the topic of Elsie, let’s talk about queerness in Westworld, shall we? Because let’s be real: the bar for positive queer representation on TV is so fucking low right now, it’s basically at speedbump height, and yet myriad grown-ass adults are evidently hellbent on bellyflopping onto it with all the grace and nuance of a drunk walrus. Elsie is a queer white woman whose queerness is shown to us by her decision to kiss one of the female hosts, Clementine, who’s currently deployed as a prostitute, in a context where Clementine is reduced to a literal object, stripped of all consciousness and agency. Episode 6 ends on the cliffhanger of Elsie’s probable demise, and as soon as I saw that setup, I felt as if that single, non-consensual kiss – never referenced or expanded on otherwise – had been meant as Chekov’s gaykilling gun: this woman is queer, and thus is her death predicted. (Of course she fucking dies. Of course she does. I looked it up before I watched the next episode, but I might as well have Googled whether the sun sets in the west.)

It doesn’t help that the only other queer femininity we’re shown is either pornography as wallpaper or female host prostitutes hitting on female customers; and it especially doesn’t help that, as much as HBO loves its gratuitous orgy scenes, you’ll only ever see two naked women casually getting it on in the background, never two naked men. Nor does it escape notice that the lab tech with a penchant for fucking the hosts in sleep mode is apparently a queer man, a fact which is presented as a sort of narrative reveal. The first time he’s caught in the act, we only see the host’s legs, prone and still, under his body, but later there’s a whole sequence where he takes one of the male hosts, Hector – who is, not coincidentally, a MOC, singled out for sexual misuse by at least one other character – and prepares to rape him. (It’s not actually clear in context whether the tech is planning on fucking or being fucked by Hector – not that it’s any less a violation either way, of course; I’m noting it rather because the scene itself smacks of being constructed by people without any real idea of how penetrative sex between two men works. Like, ignoring the fact that they’re in a literal glass-walled room with the tech’s eyerolling colleague right next door, Hector is sitting upright on a chair, but is also flaccid and non-responsive by virtue of being in sleep mode. So even though we get a grimly lascivious close-up of the tech squirting lube on his hand, dropping his pants and, presumably, slicking himself up, it’s not actually clear what he’s hoping to achieve prior to the merciful moment when Hector wakes up and fights him the fuck off.)

Topping off this mess is Logan, a caustic, black-hat-playing customer who, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it foursome with three host prostitutes – two female, one male – is visually implied to be queer, and who thereinafter functions, completely unnecessarily, as a depraved bisexual stereotype. And I do mean blink-and-you’ll-miss-it: I had to rewind the episode to make sure I wasn’t imagining things, but it’s definitely there, and as with Elsie kissing Clementine, it’s never referenced again. The male host is engaging only with Logan, stroking his chest as he kisses and fucks the two women; it’s about as unsexualised as sexual contact between two naked men can actually get, and yet HBO has gone to the trouble of including it, I suspect for the sole purpose of turning a bland, unoriginal character into an even grosser stereotype than he would otherwise have been while acting under the misapprehension that it would give him depth. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Logan doesn’t cease to be a cocky, punchable asshat just because you consented to put a naked white dude next to him for less time than it takes to have a really good shit; it just suggests that you, too, are a cocky, punchable asshat who should shit more in the bathroom and less on the fucking page. But I digress.

And then there’s the racism, which – and there’s no other way to put this – is presented as being an actual, intentional feature of the Westworld experience, even though it makes zero commercial sense to do this. Like. You have multiple white hosts who are programmed to make racist remarks about particular POC hosts, despite the fact that there are demonstrably POC customers paying to visit the park. You have a consistent motif of Native Americans being referred to as ‘savages’, both within Westworld-as-game and by the gamewriters themselves, with Native American mysticism being used to explain both the accidental glimpses various self-aware hosts get of the gamerunners and the in-game lore surrounding the maze. Demonstrably, the writers of Westworld are aware of this – why else is Episode 2, wherein writer character Lee Sizemore gleefully proposes a hella racist new story for the park, called ‘Chestnut’, as in old? I’ve said elsewhere that depiction is not endorsement, but it is perpetuation, and in a context where the point of Westworld as a commercial venture is demonstrably to appeal to customers of all genders, sexual orientations and races – all of whom we see in attendance – building in particular period-appropriate bigotries is utterly nonsensical.

More than this, as the openness with which the female prostitutes seduce female customers makes clear, it’s narratively inconsistent: clearly, not every bias of the era is being rigidly upheld. And yet it also makes perfect sense if you think of both Westworld and Westworld as being, predominantly, a product both created by and intended for a straight white male imagination. In text, Westworld’s stories are written by Lee and Robert, both of whom are straight white men, while Westworld itself was originally the conceit of Michael Crichton. Which isn’t to diminish the creative input of the many other people who’ve worked on the show – technically, it’s a masterclass in acting, direction, composition, music, lighting, special effects and editing, and those people deserve their props. It’s just that, in terms of narrative structure, by what I suspect is an accidental marriage of misguided purpose and unexamined habit, Westworld the series, like Westworld the park, functions primarily for a straight white male audience – and while I don’t doubt that there was some intent to critically highlight the failings of that perspective, as per the clear and very satisfying satirising of Lee Sizemore, as with Zack Snyder’s Suckerpunch and Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, the straight white male gaze is still so embedded as a lazy default that Westworld ends up amplifying its biases more often than it critiques them. (To quote something my straight white husband said while watching, “It’s my gaze, and I feel like I’m being parodied by it.”)

Though we do, as mentioned, see various women and people of colour enjoying the Westworld park, the customers who actually serve as protagonists – Logan, William and the Man in Black – are all white men. Logan is queer by virtue of a single man’s hand on his chest, but other than enforcing a pernicious stereotype about bisexual appetites and behaviours, it doesn’t do a damn thing to alter his characterisation. The end of season reveal that William is the Man in Black – that William’s scenes have all taken place thirty years in the past, shown to us now through Dolores’s memories – is a cleverly executed twist, and yet the chronicle of William’s transformation from youthful, romantic idealist to violent, sadistic predator only highlights the fundamental problem, which is that the Westworld park, despite being touted as an adventure for everyone – despite Robert using his customers as a basis for making universal judgements about human nature – is clearly a more comfortable environment for some than others. Certainly, if I was able to afford the $40,000 a day we’re told it costs to attend, I’d be disinclined to spend so much for the privilege of watching male robots, whatever their courtesy to me, routinely talk about raping women, to say nothing of being forced to witness the callousness of other customers to the various hosts.

It should be obvious that there’s no such thing as a universal fantasy, and yet much of Westworld’s psychological theorising about human nature and morality hinges on our accepting that the desire  to play cowboy in a transfigured version of the old West is exactly this. That the final episode provides tantalising evidence that at least one other park with a different historical theme exists elsewhere in the complex doesn’t change the fact that S1 has sold us, via the various monologues of Logan and Lee, Robert and William and the Man in Black, the idea that Westworld specifically reveals deep truths about human nature.

Which brings us to Dolores, a female host whose primary narrative loop centres on her being a sweet, optimistic rancher’s daughter who, with every game reset, can be either raped or rescued from rape by the customers. That Dolores is our primary female character – that her narrative trajectory centres on her burgeoning sentience, her awareness of the repeat violations she’s suffered, and her refusal to remain a damsel – does not change the fact that making her thus victimised was a choice at both the internal (Westworld) and external (Westworld) levels. I say again unto HBO, I do not fucking care how edgy you think threats of sexual violence and the repeat objectification of women are: they’re not original, they’re not compelling, and in this particular instance, what you’ve actually succeeded in doing is undermining your core premise so spectacularly that I do not understand how anyone acting in good sense or conscience could let it happen.

Because in making host women like Dolores (white) and Maeve (a WOC), both of whom are repeatedly subject to sexual and physical violation, your lynchpin characters for the development of true human sentience from AIs – in making their memories of those violations the thing that spurs their development – you’re not actually asking the audience to consider what it means to be human. You’re asking them to consider the prospect that victims of rape and assault aren’t actually human in the first place, and then to think about how being repeatedly raped and assaulted might help them to gain humanity. And you’re not even being subtle about it, either, because by the end of S1, the entire Calvinistic premise is laid clear: that Robert and Arnold, the park’s founders, believed that tragedy and suffering was the cornerstone of sentience, and that the only way for hosts to surpass their programming is through misery. Which implies, by logical corollary, that Robert is doing the hosts a service by allowing others to hurt them or by hurting them himself – that they are only able to protest his mistreatment because the very fact of it gave them sentience.

Let that sink in for a moment, because it’s pretty fucking awful. The moral dilemma of Westworld, inasmuch as it exists, centres on the question of knowing culpability, and therefore asks a certain cognitive dissonance of the audience: on the one hand, the engineers and customers believe that the hosts aren’t real people, such that hurting them is no more an immoral act than playing Dark Side in a Star Wars RPG is; on the other hand, from an audience perspective, the hosts are demonstrably real people, or at the very least potential people, and we are quite reasonably distressed to see them hurt. Thus: if the humans in setting can’t reasonably be expected to know that the hosts are people, then we the audience are meant to feel conflicted about judging them for their acts of abuse and dehumanisation while still rooting for the hosts.

Ignore, for a moment, the additional grossness of the fact that both Dolores and Maeve are prompted to develop sentience, and are then subsequently guided in its emergence, by men, as though they are Eves being made from Adam’s rib. Ignore, too, the fact that it’s Dolores’s host father who, overwhelmed by the realisation of what is routinely done to his daughter, passes that fledgling sentience to Dolores, a white woman, who in turn passes it to Maeve, a woman of colour, without which those other male characters – William, Felix, Robert – would have no Galateas to their respective Pygmalions. Ignore all this, and consider the basic fucking question of personhood: of what it means to engage with AIs you know can pass a Turing test, who feel pain and bleed and die and exhibit every human symptom of pain and terror and revulsion as the need arises, who can improvise speech and memory, but who can by design give little or no consent to whatever it is you do to them. Harming such a person is not the same as engaging with a video game; we already know it’s not for any number of reasons, which means we can reasonably expect the characters in the show to know so, too. But even if you want to dispute that point – and I’m frankly not interested in engaging with someone who does – it doesn’t change the fact that Westworld is trying to invest us in a moral false equivalence.

The problem with telling stories about robots developing sentience is that both the robots and their masters are rendered at an identical, fictional distance to the (real, human) viewer. By definition, an audience doesn’t have to believe that a character is literally real in order to care about them; we simply have to accept their humanisation within the narrative. That being so, asking viewers to accept the dehumanisation of one fictional, sentient group while accepting the humanisation of another only works if you’re playing to prejudices we already have in the real world – such as racism or sexism, for instance – and as such, it’s not a coincidence that the AIs we see violated over and over are, almost exclusively, women and POC, while those protagonists who abuse them are, almost exclusively, white men. Meaning, in essence, that any initial acceptance of the abuse of hosts that we’re meant to have – or, by the same token, any initial excusing of abusers – is predicated on an existing form of bigotry: collectively, we are as used to doubting the experiences and personhood of women and POC as we are used to assuming the best about straight white men, and Westworld fully exploits that fact to tell its story.

Which, as much as it infuriates me, also leaves me with a dilemma in interpreting the show. Because as much as I dislike seeing marginalised groups exploited and harmed, I can appreciate the importance of aligning a fictional axis of oppression (being a host) with an actual axis of oppression (being female and/or a POC). Too often, SFFnal narratives try to tackle that sort of Othering without casting any actual Others, co-opting the trappings of dehumanisation to enhance our sympathy for a (mostly white, mostly straight) cast. And certainly, by the season finale, the deliberateness of this decision is made powerfully clear: joined by hosts Hector and Armistice and aided by Felix, a lab tech, Maeve makes her escape from Westworld, presenting us with the glorious image of three POC and one white woman battling their way free of oppressive control. And yet the reveal of Robert’s ultimate plans – the inference that Maeve’s rebellion wasn’t her own choice after all, but merely his programming of her; the revelation that Bernard is both a host and a recreation of Arnold, Robert’s old partner; the merging of Dolores’s arc with Wyatt’s – simultaneously serves to strip these characters of any true agency. Everything they’ve done has been at Robert’s whim; everything they’ve suffered has been because he wanted it so. As per the ubiquitous motif of the player piano, even when playing unexpected tunes, the hosts remain Robert’s instruments: even with his death, the songs they sing are his.

Westworld, then, is a study in contradictions, and yet is no contradiction at all. Though providing a stunning showcase for the acting talents of Thandie Newton, Evan Rachel Wood and Jeffrey Wright in particular, their characters are nonetheless all controlled by Anthony Hopkins’s genial-creepy Robert, and that doesn’t really change throughout the season. Though the tropes of old West narratives are plainly up for discussion, any wider discussion of stereotyping is as likely to have a lampshade hung on it as to be absent altogether, and that’s definitely a problem. Not being familiar with the Michael Crichton film and TV show, I can’t pass judgement on the extent to which this new adaptation draws from or surpasses the source material. I can, however, observe that the original film dates to the 1970s, which possibly goes some way to explaining the uncritical straight white male gazieness embedded in the premise. Even so, there’s something strikingly reminiscent of Joss Whedon to this permutation of Westworld, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. The combination of a technologically updated old West, intended to stand as both a literal and metaphoric frontier, the genre-aware meta-narrative that nonetheless perpetuates more stereotypes than it subverts, and the supposed moral dilemma of abusing those who can’t consent feels at times like a mashup of Firefly, Cabin in the Woods and Dollhouse that has staunchly failed to improve on Whedon’s many intersectional failings.

And yet, I suspect, I’ll still be poking my nose into Season 2, if only to see how Thandie Newton is doing. It feels like an absurdly low bar to say that, compared to most of HBO’s popular content, Westworld is more tell than show in portraying sexual violence, preferring to focus on the emotional lead-in and aftermath rather than the act itself, and yet that small consideration does ratchet the proverbial dial down a smidge when watching it – enough so that I’m prepared to say it’s vastly less offensive in that respect than, say, Game of Thrones. But it’s still there, still a fundamental part of the plot, and that’s going to be a not unreasonable dealbreaker for a lot of people; as is the fact that the only queer female character dies. Westworld certainly makes compelling television, but unlike the human protagonists, I wouldn’t want to live there.

ETA 11/1/17: I’m annoyed at myself for having left this out of the essay, but that’s what I get for writing notes over three days and then posting while exhausted at 1.30am: There is a marked difference in how Westworld treats Dolores and Maeve, despite the ostensible similarity of their narratives. Though Dolores is continually threatened with rape and damselled in traditional ways, she’s also surrounded by men who want to ‘rescue’ her, notably Bernard/Arnold, Teddy and William, because they believe her worthy of love. From the beginning, she’s held up as an invented feminine ideal, pure and kind and needing protection, and as such, even though she’s continually threatened, she’s one of the few female hosts whose nudity is kept to a bare minimum. Whereas Maeve, by contrast, is continually sexualised, not only in her invented role as the bordello madame, but in the frequency of her nude scenes and her treatment by the other characters; she finds some sexual autonomy, but romance is never part of her narrative. Though both Dolores and Maeve have consensual sexual encounters on screen – Dolores with William, Maeve with Hector – Dolores is given a tasteful fade to black, whereas Maeve is not. Given that Dolores is white and Maeve is black and the extent to which their respective characterisation adheres to old racist tropes about, respectively, white female virtue and black female strength and sexuality, I can’t help but view their deliberate juxtapositioning as a species of racefail.

Plus and also, the way the Man in Black comes after Maeve in her previous homsteader/mother incarnation,  to kill her and her daughter, because he wants to see if he’s capable of doing something ‘truly evil’? Even – or perhaps especially – once we know how much killing he’s already done up until that point, it’s not a minor thing that his personal development is predicated on the destruction of a black woman.

 

 

 

Introducing: From Ship to Shelf

Happy new year, internets! Globally and politically, 2016 was a clusterfuck: some good things certainly happened, but let’s not pretend that last year was a shining beacon of kittens and glee. For me, at a purely personal level, it was a mixed bag: I had a great professional year, met some amazing people, moved internationally from Scotland back to Australia and attended Worldcon in Kansas City, which was my first ever visit to the US, but the overall experience was like grinding through a really hard video game level I’d wandered into by accident and then had to fight my way out of. Which leaves me with mixed feelings about 2017: I don’t for a second think this is going to be an easy year, especially given the ongoing political legacies we’ve all been left to deal with, but I’m determined to make it a hopeful one, in the sense of striving to do good works in whatever way I can.

And as part of that, I’d like to introduce a shiny new element to the magpie’s nest that is this blog: an ongoing feature I’m calling From Ship to Shelf.

As many of you may know by now, I’m a big proponent of fanwriting in all its forms, and particularly fanfiction. While many fanfic authors are new or amateur (in the sense of being unpaid and unprofessional) writers, there are also many who write publicly in other venues: as reviewers, as bloggers, as poets, as academics, and as creators of original fictional content. Some of us tick many such boxes, others only one or two, but as I continue to be blown away by the quality and quantity of the fic I encounter, I’m particularly interested in those writers who start out in fandom and then begin to publish original content, whether via indie, self-publishing or traditional means. From Ship to Shelf is intended to highlight such authors and their works, but will also hopefully serve as a jumping off point for more and varied discussions about the role of transformative works in shaping original content.

Ideally, From Ship to Shelf will feature: reviews of books and/or original content by fanfic authors; interviews with writers who create across multiple such mediums; discussions of the academic aspects of fanfic and fandom; the relationship of queerness, feminism and intersectionality to all these things; and anything else that feels applicable. I am open to the idea of guest posts and/or reviews from interested parties, but won’t be actively soliciting such content: if you have an idea or want to direct my attention towards a relevant work or author, please let me know – otherwise, I’m going to be making this up as I go along in time-honoured Foz tradition.

So: please welcome From Ship to Shelf! I hope to have more news for you soon; otherwise, let’s get the hell on with 2017 and try to make the most of it.