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novlr · 10 months

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As someone who just finished writing their first original novel and wants to know more about the American publishing process, where should I start? Any advice? Blogs? Articles? Twitter users?

A Writer’s Guide to Navigating the Publishing Industry

There’s something undeniably enchanting about seeing your words come to life on the printed page and connecting with readers from around the globe. The allure of sharing your ideas, stories, or even your expertise with the world is the dream for many writers.

While the idea of publishing a book may seem exciting, navigating the publishing process can be a labyrinth. It requires a blend of passion, persistence, and a solid understanding of how to wade through the murky waters.

So, let’s take a look at the ins and outs of the publishing process and what you need before you start sending your manuscript out to the world.

Identify your genre and target audience

Before you start thinking about publishing, it is essential to identify your genre and target audience.

Knowing your genre will help you determine relevant publishers and agents who specialize in that genre. Understanding your target audience will help you tailor your writing to meet their expectations. For example, if you write young adult fiction, you will want to write in a style and tone that appeals to teenagers and young adults.

Publishers and agents are all about work that sells. If you can show that you know firmly where your book sits in the market and that you know the people your book will appeal to, you will have given yourself a head start. When you publish, your work ceases to be just about you and starts being about your readers.

Get feedback on your work from editors or beta readers

Feedback is crucial for any writer. You want to make sure your work is the best it can be before submitting it to publishers or agents.

If you can afford it, consider hiring an editor to review your work. If you can’t, then try joining a writing critique group or finding beta readers who can offer suggestions and feedback.

When you receive feedback, take it seriously and use it to improve your work. Don’t be afraid to ask your readers for specific feedback, and most importantly, never take their criticism personally.

Betas are your first readers, so try to choose people who read in your chosen genre. Don’t get friends and family to beta read for you, as they’re often not the audience you’re writing for and will find it hard to give you objective opinions. Also, avoid using only other writers as your beta readers, as they’ll often approach your work from a technical view, and not from a reader’s view.

You can learn more about how to get the most out of your beta readers in this post.

How to Get The Most From Your Beta Readers

Research Publishers and Agents

Researching publishers and agents is an essential step in the publishing process. Agents often have specialisations or work closely with specific publishers, so knowing that in advance can help you avoid a lot of wasted time, and save you from unnecessary rejections.

Not only will agencies have specific types of books they look for, but each individual agent within those agencies will also have specific genres they represent. For instance, a children’s book agency might have one agent who deals only in picture books, while another represents only YA. If you pick the right agency, but the wrong agent, you’ll get a rejection, so be sure to be diligent.

Research is also important because you want to find publishers and agents who work in your who are reputable. Not all agencies are created equal, so you want to make sure you’re vetting your agents. See who they represent, and also make sure they actually manage to sell books to publishers; there are, unfortunately, a number of scam agencies out there, so it doesn’t hurt to be diligent. Check online reviews, and ask for referrals from other writers.

Want a little more help on how to vet literary agents? We got you!

How to Vet a Literary Agent

Start Querying Agents

Once you have identified a list of agents and publishers you’d like to submit to, it’s time to start querying!

Agents, and publishers if you decide to submit directly, have very strict submission guidelines, so be sure to read them carefully in the research stage. And incorrectly submitted query will be an instant rejection.

It is essential to be patient during this process as it can take time to hear back from agents and publishers. If you’d like to learn more about querying agents, we’ve got a detailed outline in the Reading Room!

How to Pitch Your Novel to Agents Like a Pro

Don’t Stop Writing

While you’re waiting for responses from agents and publishers, it’s crucial to keep writing. Do not stop writing, even if the rejections come in. This might not be the book that makes it, but you’ll learn so much from the process that it’ll be even easier to navigate the next time.

Rejections will be part of the process, so be mentally prepared for that. But throwing yourself right back into the thing you love takes away a lot of the sting.

If you love to write, keep writing, and then keep trying. There are no quick wins when it comes to publishing. It’s hard work, and it’s not always joyful. So keep your eye on the prize, and make sure you stay on that horse. The world deserves to read your words.

Resources

Twitter is a great place to find information from agents. Agents will often post threads on what they’re looking for and will announce when they’re open for submissions. There are also fantastic Twitter pitch events that can help authors find agents. You can learn more about them here.

The Writers’ and Artists Yearbook is an annual publication from Bloomsbury that covers most of the big agents and publishers, going through their genre specialisation and submission guidelines. While the majority of the book is specific to UK agents, there is a useful section on US and overseas agents, too, that will list the biggest ones.

Before querying, try to keep up to date with industry news sites like Publisher’s Weekly or The Bookseller. That way, you’ll know what kind of books are trending and get a feel for where your book sits in the market.

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weiszklee · 1 year

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This whole debate on whether or not "transmisogyny exempt" (TME) versus "transmisogyny affected" (TMA) is a useful concept always seemed to me like the sort of inconsequential intra-trans-community quibbling which is best left ignored, especially by outsiders like myself. But I'm afraid I have formed an opinion on the matter and must now subject y'all to it, so here goes.

Julia Serano, who coined the term "transmisogyny", has mostly been vague on the issue, for example here:

they seem like potentially useful non-binary- and non-identity-based ways of discussing the phenomenon. But I’m admittedly not familiar with everything that others are saying or claiming under this newer rubric, so there may potentially be some points of disagreement.

Or in a twitter threat where as an indirect response to the debate she linked an older piece of hers about who faces cissexism (Spoiler: yes cis people can be targeted by cissexism, but please read the whole essay because the contextualisation and nuances she adds are important, even if you have to increase the zoom of your browser a bit to cope with the small font size). But I especially recommend reading a more recent one of hers on sexual stigma, mostly for being a refreshingly clear example of discussing transmisogyny without falling into dichotomizing patterns.

I basically see "trans misogyny exempt" as an unfortunate reversal of the conceptual development that the word transmisogyny represents. Transmisogyny is a very careful and exact concept (something you come to appreciate when you've been disillusioned one too many times by overly grand theories), it is literally only a way to talk about specific stigma which a specific group of people experiences. Sure, the edges are fuzzy, but that's about as good as it gets with social theories, and the fuzzy edges don't matter much, because the concept is not really about delineation. You can point to phenomena which are definitely transmisogyny, and you can point to phenomena which definitely aren't, and that's good enough. The word enables you to do theoretical work by quickly pointing to a defined grouping of experiences so that you can analyze the content and history and effect of those experiences.

This is a big step up from theories of privilege or theories of an oppressor-oppressed-dynamic, which are often oversimplified to the point of being distorting. Theories of stigma are just better suited for talking about the experiences of sexual and gender minorities (and many others), because thinking in terms of stigma makes it easier to conceptualise social costructedness, overlap, conditional acceptance, intra-community hierarchies, weaponization of shame, and so on.

Meanwhile "TME", when it isn't being used to silence certain opinions (for which purpose it is perfectly suited, but I hope we can all agree that this isn't very aspirational), has much narrower explanatory power. Probably there are some phenomena out there which can most easily be explained by referring to the circumstance of some people being TME, granted. But overall, if you know that I am exempt from transmisogyny, you actually know very little about me, so it can't explain very much. So why then is talk about it so widespread? Why do (for example) nonbinary people feel the need to clarify whether they're TME in the same breath as mentioning they're nonbinary? Sure, this fits into the general standpoint epistemology that is so unfortunately popular nowadays, but I'm not convinced that that's all there is to it.

An annoying hunch of mine of course tells me that this is all downstream of the misguided ~mid-20th-century fad to try and apply Marxist class analysis to things which aren't classes in the Marxist sense: Every instance of suffering needs an "oppressor class" to benefit from it, so if transmisogyny is a thing, then it must be those evil TMEs behind it. Like a pathological version of that Haruki Murakami quote: "I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning."

But I'd probably have to read a lot more before I could possibly assert this with any amount of certainty, so it remains a hunch for now.

#mine #transmisogyny

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brettbarnesmj · 7 months

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On April 16, 2019, a heated exchange took place on Twitter when Brett Barnes tweeted the following statement: "Hey dipshit, we were at court the day before we testified, waiting for the prosecution to rest. That's when I spoke to him. I didn't say I spoke to him at the ranch." This tweet was directed at another user who had exposed Taj Jackson for spreading falsehoods.

The crux of the controversy lies in Wade Robson's claims in the documentary "Leaving Neverland," where he alleges that during a pre-testimony dinner event, he witnessed Michael Jackson's daughter in distress. This experience played a significant role in solidifying his determination to defend Jackson during the 2005 trial.

However, Taj Jackson disputed Robson's account, asserting that the dinner actually occurred after Robson had testified, not before. In an attempt to support his standpoint, Taj Jackson brought Brett Barnes into the equation, claiming that Barnes corroborated his version of events. Unfortunately, this is where things took a deceptive turn.

Contrary to Taj Jackson's assertion, the truth is that the Robson family arrived at least one day before Wade testified. This fact can be confirmed through both Wade Robson's testimony and the testimony of his sister, Chantelle. In reality, it appears that Brett Barnes succumbed to the demands of Taj Jackson, a long-time critic of Wade Robson, and indulged in spreading falsehoods and misinformation to defend his uncle, Michael Jackson.

It is essential to understand and acknowledge the significance of truth and honesty in such matters. In this particular instance, it seems that Brett Barnes has unequivocally done wrong by spreading false information. The motive behind his actions appears to be influenced by Taj Jackson's agenda, rather than an honest search for the truth. Such behavior not only undermines the integrity of the discussion but also perpetuates a cycle of deception and misinformation.

As observers, it is crucial to approach contentious topics with objectivity and a commitment to discovering the truth, rather than being swayed by personal biases or allegiances. Only through a genuine pursuit of the facts can we shed light on the events that unfolded during that tumultuous period.

Let us remember that in sensitive situations such as this, it is of utmost importance to prioritize truth and honesty, even when it challenges our preconceived notions or threatens to shake the foundation of our belief systems. By doing so, we contribute to fostering a climate of integrity and accountability in public discourse.

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relaxxattack · 3 years

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hi im asking u this bc u seem to be bee duo enthusiast so

ive been calling c! beeduos relationship platonic because i thought that was what their cc’s said, and i thought they had said that they were uncomfortable with ppl shipping the characters. But ive seen a lot of posts that say their relationship is canonically romantic? and i absolutely do not want to come across as homophobic by watering down a mlm relationship to just friends because that happens so much in media so.

what is the canon state of their relationship / ur opinions on the platonic thibg

dont worry abt answering if u dont want to!! i see a lot of differing opinions and i trust yours :)

aw it’s totally fine, im flattered you asked me about this!

let me put it simply: it’s a whole mess, lol.

first im going to talk about what’s happened fandom-wide that caused differing opinions, and then i’ll explain my own opinion/interpretation. :]

(this got really fucking long im so sorry)

ranboo and tubbo initially proclaimed the relationship was romantic, specifically in argument with the wiki editors who had set it as platonic by default. (you can see this in the vod where they decide they’re canonically married— it’s very funny. chat tells them the marriage is already on the wiki, they check, tubbo is jokingly offended that it says platonic and asks if he needs to up the romance).

tubbo also makes jokes about adultry, which sort of implies the relationship is not necessarily a platonic one.

(theres definetly more in that stream alone but it’s been a long time since i watched it so i don’t remember a lot of it.)

the wiki, because of this, suffers from going back and forth on platonic and romantic, seemingly unsure where the joke ends and the canon begins, or if its canonically a joke! a mess, as you can already tell.

this gets more complicated as the marriage bit goes on: outsiders, such as phil and scott, both at one point say “platonic marriage”, which then ranboo and tubbo agree with. however, when chat asks them if they’re platonic, they say the opposite. so there is a lot of confusion there.

there’s also the difficulty of being able to tell streamers and characters apart. ranboo and tubbo both don’t like being shipped irl, and that’s their boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed. (they’re also minors, but tbh when they’re 18 in a year i will still be following their boundaries regardless of their legal age).

due to people not wanting to be accused of minor shipping, they started adding the platonic tone indicator to most of their drawings— basically a way of saying “no homo”. meanwhile, tubbo frequently on stream flirts with ranboo and makes quite a bit of nsfw comments towards him that are frankly hilarious.

this goes on for a while with nobody really sure what’s canon, but a lot of people assuming it’s probably platonic, until: the drama of the mods night. a few mods dmed all the wiki editors telling them ranboo wanted his canon character relationship officially set to platonic.

unfortunately for those mods; the very same day, a few hours later, ranboo on stream makes fun of puffy delivering him and tubbo “friendship flowers”. because, and i quote, “bruh. we’re literally married. this must be how the ancient greeks felt.”

in case you don’t know, the internet often jokes about how historians will call ancient greeks ‘very good friends’ when they are quite obviously gay. so in this context, ranboo is joking that people will call him and c!tubbo, who are married, “close friends”, when he doesn’t think they are.

basically, ranboo canonized romantic bee duo, the very same day the mods told everyone he’d wanted a platonic one.

chaos and drama immediately erupted everywhere. on tumblr, we were talking about how weird it was of his mods to do something like that without asking him first. we ALSO talked about how weird it was of them to assume that ranboo can’t make his own decisions, or assume teenagers cannot be in relationships without it being sexual. twitter did the same thing but in the opposite direction: called ranboo mods homophobic, or said they were mad ranboo felt pressured into making a romantic relationship canon ‘just so people could have mlm rep.’

i dont want to go into detail about the drama that happened that night because apparently official people follow me and i dont want to stir it up or have them come “clarify” things. im just saying what we talked about.

ranboo in typical ranboo fashion apologized quickly and seriously. he was deeply sorry for possibly offending anyone with how he’d portrayed his rp relationship with tubbo, and he also assured everyone the mod thing was just a miscommunication.

he said he would talk to tubbo and they’d decide once and for all whether it was platonic or romantic, and then announce so everyone would know.

it’s now been a few months and we've had no word from them on that development. we still have no clue.

now, here’s my opinion:

i want to take ranboos word for it that it was a miscommunication with his mods, but... we had it on good authority from people on the wiki team and people in the discord with the mods that (while it was happening) they were really going after the wiki admins, and also made some weird comments about it. that combined with the way ranboo seemingly had no clue (considering he canonized their romance that very same day).... it’s very. sus of the mods.

then there’s the canon we’ve got since then. although occasionally adults in the room have called it a “platonic marriage” and tubbo once (back when it first started) called it a “plankton tectonic” marriage, in roleplay it’s been... kind of not that. tubbo and ranboo make nsfw jokes about each other in character, and their characters also share a master bedroom and bed in the mansion. there's also the way c!tommy really thinks it’s a romance between them as well, and they agree with and play off that— for instance confirming that they “fell in love” when he asked, or ranboo confirming that they “make out on occasion”.

people will still put platonic on their art and posts, imo, because they’re worried about breaking ranboo and tubbo’s irl boundaries by looking like they ship them. or even just being accused of shipping real life minors. and that’s a valid fear to have.

the thing is though: c!bee duo are not cc!bee duo. they’re roleplay characters. cc!bee duo are not okay with being shipped, but they made their characters get canonically married, and call each other “husbands”. so it’s okay to write the word “husband” in your comic without adding “platonic” to it, i promise.

telling the ccs that their characters have to be platonic is... weird. it comes off as not only babying them, but also as saying teens can’t date without it being gross. which isn’t true.

(this is why seeing people overuse “platonic husband” so much bothers me. like, they ARE husbands. you can just say it. what are you trying to hide...?)

do i think they’re canonically romantic? ehh, its likely. it’s still okay to interpret them as platonic, because again, it’s hard to tell where jokes end and roleplay begins. like, maybe it’s jokes in the rp too, and c!bee duo are just friends. friends can and should be allowed to make jokes like that with each other! aro & ace marriages exist!

or, maybe it’s actually part of the rp, and they’re very much romantic. we don’t know!

some people say they could be a qpr (queerplatonic romance), which i could see. (a qpr is a relationship that fluctuates between, or can’t quite be sorted into, “romantic” and “platonic”. people in a qpr can do romantic things while having platonic feelings for each other). in my opinion this is a very valid interpretation as well!

CONCLUSION (sorry this got so long omfg):

are c!bee duo romantic?

its likely, but you can still interpret them however you like!

should i put /p on bee duo content?

ehhh? i find it annoying when it’s overused (as do others), but if you’re worried you can. its up to preference. putting it too much is weird though

should i put /p on things cc! bee duo do?

no. you’re not the one saying it so you can’t decide the tone tags for that. imagine you said something to your friend and a random stranger came up and was like “haha but that was /p right...?”

can i ship c!bee duo?

mmm. i’m not sure on this one. they are canonically married and very flirtatious, but the ccs don’t like being shipped and they’re close enough to being the ccs that actively shipping might be against boundaries.

can i treat c!bee duo as romantic?

yes. literally just don’t be weird about it. it’s not that hard! you can understand that two characters are husbands without making it weird

here’s the most important thing: boundaries. cc bee duo still haven’t told us what their preferences and canon is about this whole thing.

right now, i am assuming based on what they already show us they’re comfortable with, but! the second they give us any more info! all these opinions will change!

i am only going off what they do. i would never want to cross boundaries at all. i just wish they would make theirs a little more clear.

..... i hope that helped anon, i went way off the rails... i need to go to sleep.

#it’s late im so sorry for how much i rambled and wrote #i hope this helps you #bee duo #og post #there’s probably so many spelling errors i need to go to bed #i tried to fix some spelling so reblog this one ig #and not the old one

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kanotototori · 2 years

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On Father’s “I’d even sleep among monks” line

Quick TW: this post contains sensitive content so please proceed with caution.

So, while reading the raws for this chapter, I found this line of Father’s quite particular.

坊主と寝た事もあります。

What piqued my - and some others’ - attention was the と寝た, which translates roughly with “sleeping with a monk”, rather than just sleeping among monks. There is a subtle suggestiveness surrounding this line - it’s very vague probably for this reason.

This verb, “to sleep”, of course means to literally sleep but it can also mean to sleep as in to have int/ercourse with someone. What makes this line even more suggestive is Izanami’s reaction - the あらあら, an expression of surprise similar to saying something like “oh my!” - and Father’s preceding and proceeding lines: “I even stole and killed”, then the line about sleeping with a monk(s), then “Whatever it took to survive.”

However, my Japanese ability is still pre-fluency (far from fluency, actually LOL) so while this line sounded odd, I wasn’t sure. However, a very kind Japanese-speaking user who wishes to remain anonymous reached out to me with some context:

I went to read the raws and I think unfortunately he does mean sleeping in the other way... the と in front of 寝た is used in instances for se/xual relations with other people. If he was sleeping amongst other monks would use 眠った (or 他の僧侶間で眠った). There were a lot of abuse going on around the era, and him being a young monk seemed dangerous.

yeah, they used singular noun for monk, so it was more of a "There was a time where I even slept with a monk"

and yeah, i don't want to say 100% that this is definitely true, but I do think the implication is there, and from experience from speaking with others it's more commonly used that way

Oh and just to add on, if he were to use Neta (寝た) in a literal way, the end of the sentence would be "て寝た" too. So it really is the "と寝た" that's important

To repeat what I said on Twitter and elsewhere, this feels very significant, as in scraping the literal bottom of the barrel to survive.

Killing and stealing feels very much par on the course for what we know about Father but the implication of being so desperate as to sleep with a monk feels... the total opposite. Because that is a yawning power imbalance there. And Father has always been on the upper hand when it comes to power dynamics with pretty much any other personal relationship so this feels doubly staggering.

So yeah, some very important context, I feel like.

#noragami #fujisaki kouto

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laynemorgan · 2 years

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I think it’s awesome that you’re speaking out on killing eve, but where was this energy for the show you were actually a part of? it seemed like you were pretty indifferent then so it just feels a little off that you’re referencing it now in regards to a different show, I guess. in all fairness though it was years ago and I am glad you’re saying something now. what was it that changed your mindset? to your credit, I do also remember you directing people to another person who worked on the show who was incredibly kind, understanding, and willing to listen, and at a point when the people involved in the show who had straight up went on lesbian forums to gaslight their own viewers, showed no remorse and took no responsibility, he honestly did give me hope for future shows against all odds. I can’t remember his name, but he was amazing and genuinely helped a lot of people that were struggling. idk if you still talk to him or even remember what I’m talking about, but if so, tell him he’s a saint

Assuming this is about Lexa's death, nothing changed my mindset. I was as vocal as I could be back when Lexa died. Now, I'm as vocal as I feel comfortable being given how much time has passed and where my career is. I know that sounds frank and a little self preservation-y but It's always far more difficult to talk about shows you work on than other ones. Hollywood is a pretty tough industry especially for loud, vocal people making a stir, unfortunately. And despite it's progress in many ways it definitely is still the kind of club that doesn't love a splash. And many of the people high up in power are still stuck in very old school ways of what's acceptable and what isn't. It is incredibly difficult to move forward in your career and also not compromise your values. In some instances, I do what I can to support my community from where I am. At the end of the day, I have to keep doing my work where it's most important which is inside the rooms and in trying to move up the ladder to a place where I can make real change. If I had made a bunch of enemies in my first year in the industry, I never would be where I am now and so on. It's also considered frowned upon for assistants, staff members, etc to speak on behalf of the show or about the show or whatever in ways that can traced back to the show in an unofficial capacity. So that is why it was my instinct at the time to direct people to a higher up who had offered to speak on the matter. That's just the very complicated reality, unfortunately. And trust me, it's not the most fun position to be in especially when you want to be able to do more. But whether it's in the rooms, behind the scenes, on twitter, here on tumblr, or whatever, my eyes are always on trying to make TV better for the LGBTQ community in whatever way I can. I wish it didn't have to be so confusing. I wish there was a clearer way for us to be able to be clear about how we feel so that you can all hear support and voices reflected back at you that you deserve. But that's a place we aren't at yet, in my experience.

Also the name of the writer you're looking for is Javi Grillo Marxuach. He and I have been very very close friends since. He has always been my greatest ally and advocate in this industry and continues to be for you guys as well. I'm glad he was able to give you hope in that moment.

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cruelfeline · 4 years

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Anyone who hangs about Twitter potentially saw an unfortunate Hordak take cross their timelines today.

As is custom on this blog, I’ll be taking it apart for my own personal amusement (and for the amusement of any of y’all who like to watch me do so). I doubt the poster will see this, as they’re on Twitter and not apparently on here, but in case they do: this is for my own enjoyment and the enjoyment of followers; it absolutely does not need to be responded to if that’s not your cup of tea.

So, that little disclaimer in place, let’s see what we can make of this! Because this is on Medium, I’ll be using screenshots as quotes; just a heads-up.

So... this first bit isn’t really anything Hordak-related. It’s more... fandom drama, I suppose? Not really something I can pick apart. I can, however, give my own personal opinion on this sort of thing, for what it’s worth.

It’s true that people can and should be able to feel whichever way they wish about a character. And to talk about that character.

However: it is also true that people who dislike Hordak can be very unpleasant in making that known to those of us who enjoy him. Including descending into personal insults for no discernible reason. Add to that the fact that his character means a great deal to some fans for intensely personal reasons, and it is not difficult to see why some fans aren’t keen to see anti-Hordak content on their timelines, in their mentions, etc.

Censoring character hate isn’t a requirement, but in some circumstances, it can simply be a polite thing to do. It doesn’t take great effort, and it prevents people from experiencing just another bit of unpleasantness on their social media. And if you don’t want to do it? Well, that’s your right; but don’t be shocked when people voice their displeasure by replying to your words. Because that is their right.

And that’s all I really have to say about that.

Odd way to phrase things, really. These aren’t “reasons to forgive.” The first two scenes involve Catra’s asphyxiations and are things that would need to be forgiven, not things to forgive.

Though, y’know, I really only apply that to the first scene, where he assaults her without her necessarily doing anything wrong. Mind you, I believe he does it out of a combination of needing to maintain a hierarchy for safety purposes (this is a man who needs people to be afraid of him to maintain his own safety) and poor leadership skills mimicked from a narcissist, but it’s still a terrible thing.

However! The second time? After he asks her about Shadow Weaver? This isn’t torture-fun-times. This is Hordak neutralizing a threat to the entire Horde. Because that is what Catra is in this moment: a threat to the security and wellbeing of him and the entirety of the Fright Zone. She lies about a critical mistake. She proves herself to not only have poor judgment in serious matters, but to be very willing to lie about it in order to guard her own selfish motives. While I can’t condone the method Hordak uses, I do wish people would stop using this second instance of punishment as some sort of proof-of-torture. He does not do this for no reason. He does it because Catra released a dangerous prisoner into the wild and lied about it. And his concerns over it ultimately prove correct.

This entire qualification doesn’t have much to do with whether he deserves forgiveness or not, but it’s a point I want to make because it combats this idea that Hordak did this to an innocent girl “for no reason” or “just to be cruel.” That’s simply not the case; no matter how unpleasant the method, Hordak is a military leader punishing a subordinate for seriously endangering him and everyone else in the organization. Badly. I don’t know what the equivalent would be in modern military, but Catra’s error is massive. It doesn’t make what Hordak does right, but it does give a reason other than a simple “he’s a bad, bad man.” So.

Adding this scene is... actually kind of odd because he doesn’t really do anything to Adora here. And also: this scene is... what’s the word... meaningful-in-hindsight, so to speak. Essentially: in this scene, Adora is claiming that Hordak is responsible for stealing her, for robbing her of a peaceful life with her family. And Hordak is claiming that he neither knows nor cares who she is, and that she does not matter to him.

The interesting aspect of this scene, and something that OP fails to acknowledge at all, is that both Adora and Hordak are wrong.

let’s see if I can talk about this without crying... nope, already starting to tear up

Hordak never stole Adora; Light Hope did. Hordak did not orchestrate this unfortunate life for her. Rather, Hordak, a lost clone dealing with his own insecurities and fears and problems, found an equally lost infant in a field and gave her the only home he really knew how to create (and one that, for its flaws, was still better than the absolute nightmare he was “raised” in). In all likelihood, given Light Hope’s lack of understanding of infants, he probably saved Adora’s life by doing this: without him, she may well have perished alone in that field.

Hordak likewise does remember her, eventually. And she is not inconsequential to him: by saving her, he ends up saving himself, and all of his brothers. By forging this near-unknown bond with her all those years ago, by choosing to take in an infant rather than letting her die, he plays a key role in deciding the fate of the universe.

This scene that OP sarcastically claims is a reason Hordak shouldn’t be forgiven has a sibling:

The fact that OP apparently fails to recognize this and realize that these are the only two moments in the series during which Adora and Hordak directly interact, that they’re a pair, means that OP misses the connection between the two and the significance of how they misjudge one another initially. It indicates a lack of understanding of the themes of the show: themes centered around connections with other people, love, and forgiveness. Which, given the contents of this essay, is unsurprising.

Moving on!

Y’know, whether or not one believes, in terms of definition, that Hordak is a colonizer (I personally don’t for pedantic and clone-cult reasons, but that’s not really relevant to this post), it’s interesting that OP notes how Stevenson confirms that he is... but conveniently leaves out the part where she confirms that he did it because he was brainwashed.

That’s... an important piece of information to leave out when discussing whether Hordak should be forgiven or not. A very important piece.

And it doesn’t really matter whether he’s a colonizer or a conqueror; the reason it comes up is because people seem very stuck in the mindset of “if it’s a colonizer, it must die” without acknowledging any sort of nuance. There’s also the question of whether what Hordak did actually caused the same sort of upheaval and lasting damage we see resulting from legitimate colonization, and all of the implications of that, but this isn’t really the place to go into that. Honestly, I don’t really think SPoP as a whole is the place to go into that.

No. Hordak is not the person who taught her all of these things.

Shadow Weaver is.

Hordak did not personally teach her that Princesses are evil. He did not teach her that wanton cruelty is fine in getting one’s own way. He did not feed her propaganda.

Actually, as an aside: can we even confirm that Catra ever thought that Princesses where evil? I mean... she works with Scorpia, and she has no apparent morals to speak of. She does as she wishes for her own personal gain, not because she displays any sense of “fighting the evil Princesses.” And in terms of disposing of Entrapta because she was “manipulated” into viewing Princesses as evil: Catra disposes of everyone. She manipulates and uses everyone. That is one of the key aspects of her arc: she uses and abuses people for personal gain. She does this whether they are Princesses or not: just see Lonnie, Rogelio, and Kyle. Add to this the fact that Catra, from the first season, knows that she and Adora have been lied to, manipulated, and that the Horde is in fact evil, and... this entire line of reasoning falls apart.

None of this is an attempt to “absolve Hordak of blame.” Hordak just... legitimately had no hand in raising any of the children. That was not his role (and while I know that this was confirmed by Stevenson at some point, I don’t have memory of where; potentially the last podcast?). And Catra did not operate on any sort of propaganda that she actually believed in: she simply used and disposed of people as she saw fit because she cared more about her own rise to power than she did about those around her. This was one of her major character flaws, and really? Trying to pin this on Hordak, or even fully pin it on Shadow Weaver? It absolves Catra of the blame, of the intentional bad choices she made (as emphasized by Adora) and thus weakens her entire arc.

All in all: Hordak may have created a poor environment for the raising of children, but of note is the fact that only Catra turns out this way. The other kids, whatever their problems, are not in the habit of manipulating friends, lying to them, using them, and then tossing them aside. That is a Catra Problem. Part of this can be attributed to Shadow Weaver (who only treated Catra in the poorest way), and part of it is just... Catra being not-the-best.

All right. Now we get to the really disingenuous portion of the essay.

First, as just stated: Hordak is not Catra’s abuser. Shadow Weaver is. Hordak had no hand in raising her. Hordak did not direct Shadow Weaver to abuse her. Hordak did not personally feed Catra anti-Princess propaganda, and even if he had, we know by the first season that Catra sees through whatever propaganda she was exposed to and has no actual moral objections to Princesses. But that’s not the main aspect of this portion that irks me.

The main aspect that irks me is that this is not the scene Hordak stans mark as abusive. And I cannot imagine that OP does not know this.

But let’s talk about this scene, for a moment, before getting to the actual, legitimate abuse.

OP talks about his scene almost flippantly: “Hordak finds out Catra lied about Entrapta, he becomes angry and attacks her with a clear plan to kill her.”

Yes. Yes, he "becomes angry.” He becomes angry and attacks because as far as he knows, Catra killed Entrapta. This isn’t some annoyed “you lied to me!” moment. He legitimately thinks Entrapta is dead because Catra sent her to Beast Island. OP just blissfully glosses over the fact that Hordak is attacking Catra in rage and grief because Catra, as far as either of them know, killed his only friend and then lied about it for approximately a year. Like... how do you gloss over that in discussing this scene? How do you gloss over the enormity of what Catra did, and the unimaginable pain Hordak experiences when finding out?

So. The writeup of this scene is poor. It misses all of the emotion, all of the reality of what Catra did and what Hordak felt. But! That’s not even the unfortunate part of this portion. Let’s get to the real disingenuity.

This is the abusive scene. This is that stomach-turning moment when Catra removes a disabled man’s ability to move with dignity and without pain solely to force him to escalate a war for her own personal benefit.

Hordak is not a danger to her here. Hordak has not been a danger to her for a while because he has been holed up in his private quarters, trying to deal with the emotional fallout of Entrapta supposedly betraying him. He wants nothing to do with Catra. He wants to lick his wounds and gather himself and somehow heal from this deep personal pain that’s been inflicted upon him.

And that’s a problem for Catra because it stands in the way of her using the war as a way to best Adora.

So Catra identifies Hordak’s physical weakness and exploits it for the purpose of spiting her ex.

The fact that OP completely fails to acknowledge any of this is... well. Disingenuous. Absolutely so.

The next portion of the essay talks about people feeling that Catra was too easily forgiven and isn’t really Hordak-centric; I won’t really go into it here. Moving forward:

Ah, one of the most annoying questions I see asked. Let’s, again, acknowledge and move past the fact that Hordak was not actually Catra’s abuser...

When, pray tell, was Hordak supposed to show this remorse? When? While he was serving on Prime’s ship, trying to forget the pain of losing Entrapta, of failing to prove himself, of losing everything? Should he have done it while screaming in agony in the purification pool? Should he have done so while alone on Prime’s ship, trying to serve quietly while piecing together his memories?

Not only was Hordak simply not in a position, narratively, to go into a whole remorse bit, but he had other problems. Like, life-endangering problems.

The appropriate time to go into his feelings on Etheria and the Princesses and All of That would have been after Prime’s defeat, upon Hordak’s re-introduction to Etheria... but then the show ended. So.

Agh, vulgar. Taking a brainwashed, conditioned slave and bastardizing his triumph at finally seeing himself as a real person, instead claiming that his intent was to glorify his own misdeeds. No. Just... no.

Again: this is not the time for guilt. And it is a demonstration of why guilt and remorse were not front-and-center in Hordak’s arc during season five: his arc was about finally realizing that he was his own person, a person worthy of identity and love and care and freedom. And this arc culminated in him separating himself from his abuser and declaring his personhood.

That is what this scene is: not Hordak reveling in his makeshift empire, or in the terrible deeds he’d committed, but in declaring himself his own person.

I should hope that he is proud of doing that. I’m proud of him for doing that daunting feat, of defeating his abuser and defying his god and recognizing that he is worthy of more than what Prime thought of him. And I recognize Entrapta’s role in it: not as the sole inspiration for his change, but as someone who showed him a foundation of love and acceptance, someone who introduced him to the idea that he was worthy of care and happiness and affection simply because he was a living being, no strings attached.

Trying to shoehorn in some sort of claim that this is about pride in his misdeeds, rather than joy at finally accepting his own sense of self is a massive misinterpretation of this scene, a misunderstanding of Entrapta’s role in Hordak’s arc, and... can I say it’s disingenuous again? Because I’m going to: it’s disingenuous.

All right; we’re at the end. And while the first sentence here is something I absolutely agree with - the decision to forgive Hordak is personal and subjective both for viewers and for in-show characters - the whole conclusion falls apart from there.

It highlights another glaring omission from OP’s arguments: the fact that Hordak is a brainwashed clone slave.

Hordak did not choose to “spend his life trying to prove his worth to Horde Prime.” He did not choose the method of said proving: that Prime would look kindly upon conquering rather than some other task. And he did not choose to have certain concepts and ideas (all beings must suffer to become pure; all creatures, no matter how small, have a place in service of Horde Prime; failure is when something ceases to serve a purpose) conditioned into him.

Hordak was manufactured as a cultist slave. He was “born” with hardware implanted into his body against his will to better control him. He was indoctrinated and brainwashed to the point that he believed that Horde Prime was his literal god - and in a way, Prime was, because he could mentally invade and possess and physically control the clones whenever he wished.

Hordak was not allowed to have a sense of self. He was not allowed to have a name. He was not allowed to express emotions. He was not allowed to live without that life serving to glorify Horde Prime. Hordak was so absolutely sick with this mentality that he saw himself as a failure due to physical disability and assumed it was his responsibility to fix that.

The idea that Hordak simply chose to do what he did, that he had the same foundational morality and mindset as any “normal” person might, shows a glaring lack of understanding even the basics of his narrative.

Yes: Hordak did bad things. But he did them for legitimately tragic, nigh-horrifying reasons that this essay just ignores for the sake of... I don’t know? Trying to justify OP’s distaste for the character? I am uncertain. But it’s a mark of a poor essay, of a poor understanding of the character, and is honestly just disappointing to read when the show itself tries so hard to drive home its wonderful, hopeful themes through Hordak’s story.

Whether one forgives Hordak or not is one’s personal choice, but I certainly hope one makes said choice with better insight into his character than this essay provides.

#discourse #hordak #I wonder if I come off as too sassy in this but honestly this essay was a chore to read #so much was just ignored or misinterpreted #it was like a willful misrepresention of Hordak's character and I did not like it

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bao3bei4 · 3 years

Text

kpop music videos that gave their fans sexual brainworms

OR accidental fetish pop and its fringe fanbase: meditations on gendered desire

large warning here: i am someone who has been into kpop for the past 10 years. however, i have always been an extremely casual fan. i do write fic, but not rpf. if any of that makes you not want to hear me talk about kpop rpf (or you don’t want to hear about it in general), please keep moving.

anyway, obviously pop is corporate, soulless, and manufactured. but sometimes some truly bizarre shit gets past the committees and destroys a generation. these are their stories.

the video that started this is all is got7’s just right, released july 10th, 2015.

yes that’s all 7 members of got7 (one is out of frame) shrunken down for your viewing pleasure. they live in your room and tell you you’re just right.

this sheer fetish power of this video is nerfed only by how utterly sexless it is.

they’re styled like and dance like this. it’s a totally unironic sendup of the seminal work that preceded it by four years, “what makes you beautiful” by the white kpop group “one direction.” the chaste energy of the whole thing makes you legitimately wonder if the good people at jyp have just never heard of microphilia. (during a dramatic reading of this piece, here a friend interjected seriously, “i think it’s korean culture not to talk about things like this, fetishes in the workplace.”)

it’s for the best, honestly, though because the actress in the music video is lee ja in, who was 11 when the video was shot. considering that the members themselves ranged in age from 18-23 at the time, i think it’s actually very impressive that we only have to cancel one.

you receive absolutely no prizes for guessing that it’s jackson wang we’re sending to social justice prison. why’d he do this? no one asked.

at any rate, got7 fans, or “gans” (they actually call themselves igot7s which is too twee for me), have much to think about here: all 7 very small members of got7 sneaking into their room, possibly weird age play, and jackson wang eating a very large cake.

let’s see what they actually did.

twitter was actually very tame. the most charged thing i found was (unsurprisingly) from a bts fan (“ban”). i don’t actually know what it means, but i think it means something.

so, of course, i turned to the internet’s last bastion of free speech, where you can say whatever the fuck you want and receive cheers, or as the kids say, “kudos.” that is, i read fanfiction.

for those of you who don’t know your herstory, i started my journey at Asianfanfics.com, where, at the time of writing, there were 12,067 got7 stories. i want to start this by saying that i think feminism won, because someone was paying real human dollars to advertise their irene/wendy fanfiction on a banner ad, which is quite possibly a win for women for everywhere.

anyway, Asianfanfics.com’s search engine sucks ass (i kept on finding stories about different combinations of bts members worrying about their weight and being reassured by another member that were entitled “just right”), so i decided to look through all got7 stories written between july 2015 and december 2015.

but, alas, not a single got7 microphilia fic to be found.

also, some genre commentary while i’m here: i think the stories i respect the most are the “[y/n] is a ordinary girl who’s assigned to be got7’s manager! can she make them into superstars? as sparks begin to fly, can she keep it professional?” like fuck yeah that sounds like a kickass dating sim. it almost definitely already is one. i salute all the teens around the world for buying into the fantasy of dating a boy band member that they themselves sell you.

however, i don’t think i respect the “[member a] and [member b] are mafia/jocks and nerds/college students/high schoolers” concepts. in my opinion, the whole fantasy of boy band member is their personas, their hidden real personalities, their celebrity, and the show business setting. find a different intellectual property if you wanna write about school. i even respect the “yugyeom drank girl juice [not estrogen] and turned into a sexy girl” story more, because at least it knows exactly what it wants, and also because they’re all still boy band members. well, band members. shout out to yugyeom.

so, anyway, i looked elsewhere. at the time of writing, archive of our own only had 11,645 got7 stories, but it does have a better search, so it effectively has more. as an aside, i think it’s so funny, and mildly disorienting at first, that archive of our own separates the “music & bands” section from the “celebrities & real people” section. boy band members aren’t real people.

the first problem i encountered is that only 20 or so stories were written within a year of just right’s release. absolute cringe gans. don’t you care about your boys? there were zero stories tagged “vore” or “microphilia” either. stories containing the word “tiny” that were rated either “explicit” or “mature” were all normal (“normal”) size fetishization rather than, you know, just right.

however, i learned my lesson from twitter. i realized that what had happened was that watching this video had created sleeper agents, just waiting for their activation phrase. that activation phrase? bangtan boys. and yeah, lo and behold, there was one! unfortunately (fortunately?) it had nothing to do with got7, let alone just right, so i’m not going to talk about it.

basically what i learned is that this video may have actually been very normal, and my brain has just been destroyed by being too online at a young age.

however, there are plenty more videos in this genre. i present to you exo wolf, a banger from may 30th, 2013. i say banger, because in a comedic inversion, it’s actually fucking terrible.

this video is pretty self-explanatory in terms of why it might induce certain responses.

let’s get the formalities out of the way. this video, the member who’s getting cancelled is kai. he has braids in this video :/

also skating on thin ice: xiumin and chen. guys what was up with the whole exo-m thing? like, we’re gonna have a cpop subgroup, but it’s going to be part chinese members and part korean members that we’ll give a chinese name? unsurprisingly, the three exo members who have departed from the group are all chinese. they weren’t able to stand the microaggressions probably. but xiumin and chen remain uncancelled as an official chinese apology for five thousand of years of on-and-off invasions of korea. sorry guys that was kinda fucked up. our bad!

anyway, there are basically three avenues for exo fans to take: 1) humans with wolfish characters (usually wolf pack dynamics, which even wolves themselves don’t fucking use so i think all of you should shut up. the real omega here is your brain), 2) werewolves (duh), and 3) wolves with human characteristics (i.e. standard furry fare).

exo themselves let all these possibilities exist at the same time, superimposing them over each other, which is very woke and egalitarian of them. let’s see what the people decided. awoo.

Asianfanfics dot com had many stories in this vein. i feel very validated that this time i was able to correctly predict a fetish. that said, briefly returning to my earlier comment regarding alternate universes: it’s intense psychic whiplash reading about these vampires and werewolves, and going okay okay luhan is a vampire this that whatever, and then seeing the actual real performance photos the author attaches at the bottom of each chapter. bro i forgot these were actual people.... it breaks immersion so bad... i’m sorry, i just can’t believe that any of these dancing boys are having weird vampire sex with wings or whatever.

archive of our own also had many stories in this vein. and i think there are some important difference between the two sites worth talking about.

first of all, i think the higher engagement rate of archive of our own really enables some of the authors to get super bold. it makes Asianfanfics.com seem a little quaint, actually. like the wordcounts are waaay longer, for one. it’s uncommon for a story hosted on Asianfanfics.com to be more than a few thousand words long (most of them could easily be published in the new yorker), whereas some of these archive of our own people have written full length novels about if the members of exo were werewolves. i guess it’s just intensely demoralizing for the aff.com crew to get, like, three comments per story.

the second big difference is that i’m noticing more common themes between the ao3 crew’s writing. like stan intertextuality, or plagiarism, or whatever, but they seem to be implicitly engaging with each other’s characterizations, storylines, and tropes. i think it is because they probably all follow each other on twitter. (i have been active on twitter for three weeks now so i am an expert on fanfiction twitter.)

anyway, like not that i am a particularly big gan (cannot even list all the members), but these people seem to have reached a very specific consensus on how jackson wang, for instance, would react in a variety of situations that really surprises me? if i were to sit down and write a got7 story, i think the fuckboitude, the douchebaggery is a big part of his charm. not to be nationalist or anything, but for god’s sake, he’s from hong kong. but these people have him as very sensitive, lots of protective instincts. not that i understood what anyone on aff.com was doing with his character either, but they did all seem to be doing different things. “kudos” to that, i guess.

but: exo. wolf. i searched the “wolves” tag. this filtered the list down from 33459 stories to 52 stories. and the “wolves” tag was very different from the aff.com “wolf” tag. for the most part, aff.com liked stories where a member was a wolf (usually shapeshifting), feral boy, lots of y/n, lots of y/n dating a feral boy who is secretly a wolf.

ao3 really, really, really likes alpha/beta/omega stories. sorting by the most popular stories, only five on the first page weren’t a/b/o. and one of them was a cis f!baekhyun story, so i think the intended effect was communicated. anyway, let’s talk about some of the themes.

first of all, i’m disappointed. today’s bonus cancellation is of ao3 “wolves” writers. why the fuck are you drawing so heavily from european wolves?? there are wolves in asia!! you don’t need to keep giving their packs and ranks weird latin names. i will kill you. i hate italy. korea literally has a native wolf. i hate all of you!!! if you want to write caucasian wolves go watch that dumbass cw show!!!! my god.

the second theme (the first one was white supremacy) is that no one wants to be a wolf who fucks. i think that we need a sex positivity movement, or something, for omega rights. like, are all of you doing okay? you’re queering misogyny by inventing new genders to oppress. another level to “no one wants to be a wolf...” is the “who fucks” part. there are so many consent issues. and not even in like, a sexy intentional way? in a “i genuinely do not think this author understands how their writing comes off” way. unfortunately i am sensitive to untagged sexual coercion, and there was a lot of that.

at any rate, the aff.com wolves were at peace with being wolves, very self-actualized. the ao3 wolves know that every minute they spend alive on this bitch of an earth is suffering, and also sex.

the third theme is the evolution of y/n. y/n, who, in a startlingly woke move for aff.com, is almost always korean, is a girl main character stumbling into love, boy bands, and wolves (i think it’s because aff.com is oldschool kpop fandom, so therefore heavily asian itself in userbase). but y/n is not the main character in ao3 stories. she is the straight best friend. in what i think is a hilarious move, ao3 authors invert the gay best friend paradigm to give the gay main character a straight girl as best friend. she usually calls him “a gay,” she has lots of thoughts on boys, and she knows his sexuality better than he does and before he does. (sidebar: if all the men are gay, and all the women are straight...)

there’s a really fun twist to this, though, because the main character is always a self-insert in fanfiction. but where older fanfiction like aff.com was at peace with this and literalize it via y/n shenanigans, modern fic writers who haven’t finished distangling their complicated relationship with wanting to be a man who loves other men instead simply imbue their main character with their essence. a little voodoo doll sehun, with a lock of y/n hair.

this creates a deeply ambivalent relationship with gender in these stories. the main character is usually an omega, but one who resents being an omega. their body and its parts is usually described, if at all, as ostensibly intersex (except more offensively), but in practice, these discourses inscribe a trans body. (nb: i think cis writers approach this in a really fucked up fetishizing way, but i hope by this point we know that that goes without saying) it’s incredibly straightforward to read this, and see the underlying desires and fears in a heady cocktail of unfiltered writing that’s deeply confessional. you know when freud had people say whatever the fuck they wanted and figured they’d eventually free associate into releasing their subconscious into reality? yeah.

okay, and while we’re on the topic, let’s talk f(x) nu abo, released on may 4th, 2010.

this is a blitzy, maximalist, amped up dance hit that even has its own applause and cheers built in. it’s so fucking annoying, and i love it.

this song is on here because the second most popular kpop a/b/o story on ao3 is called “nu abo” except it’s about bts. that’s offensive enough in its own right. write something about f(x) (702 works). when will women win the right to have their own self-lubricating holes.

anyway, even though f(x) is probably innocent in all of this, i’m still cancelling amber liu.

for queerbaiting. who told her to look like ruby rose but hot? and for what? i’m also cancelling her for racism, but that wasn’t in this video.

moving on to a double feature: vixx voodoo doll and vixx chained up, released november 19, 2013 and november 9, 2015 respectively. this is because while voodoo doll is more formative, i think the fans who write fanfiction today got into kpop more recently, so we are casting a wide net.

anyway, voodoo doll is jam packed with weird pseudo-medical imagery, blood, vivisection, bondage, puppet shit, femdom, sharps, piercings, asphyxiation, dollification, stabbing/penetration metaphors, and a really sick and catchy dance. god that looks like the list of tags on the a/b/o wolf stories.

for this song, we’re cancelling you, for being way too into this song when you were 13.

vixx voodoo doll made me goth i guess! insert that pic of the your music saved me sign, except it saved me from getting into emo or pop punk probably.

chained up, comparatively, is much more tame. the only thing of note about it is that there are around 10 completely different chokers and choker looks the members wear in this music video. also they’re singing about being chained up, but that seemed a bit obvious.

we could argue that voodoo doll is gay while chained up is gay (derogatory); that voodoo doll is queer while chained up is gay; that chained up is a sensitive masterpiece of omega4omega sexuality. but we’re not going to.

we’re going to talk about what voodoo doll fanfiction was and was not. first, Aff.com had plenty of it. however, i was extremely disappointed to see that much of it did not hew to the spirit of vixx voodoo doll. my god, the voodoo doll becoming the one preying upon you disgusts me. the fantasy of the voodoo doll is that of absolute power. the idea that the doll itself has agency? instantly breaks the fantasy. i’m even not into voodoo dolls and i’m offended.

i also don’t think it’s part of the voodoo doll fantasy to release the doll. the only story on there that involved Y/N kidnapping vixx members like in the music video was unavailable because the author deactivated their account. come back qxeen what did you see.

i think this got off track, actually, in that i was mostly wondering why these people imprinted differently onto vixx voodoo doll than i did. like i don’t think you’re supposed to actually like straightforwardly absorb the morals and aesthetics of music videos like it’s propaganda. however, it’s more entertaining if you do. i hope ao3 doesn’t let me down.

out of the then 5932 works in the vixx fandom (the least out of every group so far, excluding f(x) because they’re women), 59 of them included the word “voodoo” somewhere. that’s 1%. i legitimately can’t tell if that’s high or not.

after some more cursory reading through the first page of popular results, my big takeaway is that people watched that video and wanted to be tortured and enslaved? but not, like, in a sexy way where the torturing is the point, the way where the point is to suffer bravely and beautifully, to endure the world’s harms like jesus on the cross, and then to fall into the arms of a beautiful boy who may or may not be the one hurting you in the first place.

there’s a certain predictability to these fantasies. like it’s not even masochism, which would be fun at least, it’s literally just like the desire to be beautiful, even as you suffer. and i do find that a little boring. (but, i mean, you can’t help being a woman!)

sidebar: on chained up. what’s interesting about chained up, is that most of the then 38 “chained up” works (likely because the video has no storyline) are about the members fucking during chained up promotions. no one’s ever actually chained up, but whatever. it’s fine. it’s fine!

anyway, here, more than ever, the nature of desire is stripped bare. i’ve written before [elsewhere in the unreleased tshirt cinematic universe] on how kpop boys are, through fandom, re-formed as white, or more strongly, i guess, blank slates. it’s really interesting to me how so much of this dynamic of projection is enabled by the fact that they’re asian men. they’re infantilized, feminized vessels; they’re seductive, but childlike, oblivious to their own charms, so nonthreatening; they have uncontrollable desires for sex, they’re scared of sex. and above all else, white women submit themselves to them, insert themselves into them. basically kpop fans tend to rework old school yellow peril and emasculation fantasies to reenact their own desires, often white, often cishet on them.

what i am saying is that there’s another thesis about forced feminization and its racialized subtext in here. obviously gender is a racialized construct to begin with, but like it’s fascinating to argue that when white women remake asian men according to their own desires, that is, into themselves, they (hopefully) unintentionally echo these old fears about the sexual order.

it illuminates, it seems, the underlying dynamic in the denigration of asian men, which is of course the fear of miscegenation. now, my breathtaking ability to make everything about me aside, miscegenation is interesting because it presents a racial synthesis, beginning to collapse and trouble the artificial designations of purity. so we make asian men into white women, and end up with an unsettling hybrid. i’m sure this has deep implications for me personally.

but i think we already knew that quite a few of these people had yellow fever, so let’s talk about the gender dialectic at play. basically, the above dynamic, of making men into women (whether literally, in body; or subjectively, in mind; or even relationally, as they are objectified into passive vessels for your desire) coexists with the ostensibly converse dynamic, in which the straight women desires to be a gay man. these aren’t necessarily in conflict: it could easily be that these are different writers writing different stories, that both are ways of expressing discontent with existing in a raced, gendered body, or even that the end product of both is the same.

it’s been a while without a picture. all of you now have the legal right to hunt and kill me for making a d&g joke.

anyway, what i want to talk about is how these two fantasies can coexist. that by making a man into yourself, you can speak on your own desire in a passive way. my normal interest is analyzing forced masc fantasies (albeit in chinese opera lol), and they bear little to no resemblance to this kind of fantasy. this kind offers plausible deniability, of course, because wanting things is embarrassing. but also the fantasy isn’t about wanting to be a man, it’s about having no choice but to be a failed one. the gender pessimism running through these stories is palpable. basically andrea long chu wants what wolf fanfiction writers know: everyone is an omega, and everyone hates it.

at any rate, this racialized dynamic is one that i wasn’t sure how to bring up throughout this piece, mainly because there is no definitive way for me to tell the race of any individual writer, beyond just like the clear and present vibes that i receive. but i think it structures a lot of the fantasies contained in this essay. (i felt more comfortable bringing up the gendered dynamic, because it was fairly trivial to find out the current gender of the person writing each story i was reading.)

obviously we should return to the specter haunting this conversation: the very much alive david eng. i think this sort of argument is familiar to readers of racial castration, especially his chapter on m. butterfly. btw sorry for mentioning that play 2 out of 3 posts on this blog. i have problems.

let’s talk about the parallel imagery between the depiction of gallimard’s final speech and the fanfiction i’ve described above. in it, gallimard makes himself into his own dream woman, dressing in yellowface and robes, the costume of puccini’s original madame butterfly. and he laments his lost love:

there is a vision of the orient that i have. of slender women in chong sams and kimonos who die for the love of unworthy foreign devils. who are born and raised to be the perfect women. who take whatever punishment we give them, and bounce back, strengthened by love, unconditionally.

in that, i see the self insert, and i see the sufferer of vixx voodoo fic. the fantasy that gallimard has about asian women is repeated, this time about asian men and a helpless identification with them. and on some level, gallimard’s women do have something very compelling to identify with: they suggest that there’s a way to endure white male violence without sacrifice, and even more potently, to enjoy it on some level.

but onward to the titular racial castration. eng argues that gallimard’s wilful ignorance of song’s true gender is a psychic castration -- song’s masculinity is diminished so that his own can be enhanced within their relationship. this, eng believes, acts out “richard fung’s contention that in western imaginary ‘asian and anus are conflated.’” this process stabilizes the relationship between the asian man and the white woman: they occupy the same place within the sexual dyad.

this is, i think, why some people are addicted to writing from the bottom’s perspective. again -- not implying that irl bottoms don’t exist or that bottoms are psychically castrated lol -- but rather that you can fantasize about this ideal asian man that you can come to embody. in kpop rpf, rather than it being between a white man and an asian man (unless someone’s started writing chad future fic), it’s between two asian men. so this transformation is performed. whiteness is always intruding and so i think eng is helpful here to making it visible again.

this essay isn’t a callout or actual cancellation or anything like that, i do wanna be clear. i guess i just like talking about fantasies, even the embarrassing ones, and where they come from. i think oftentimes in fandom spaces, we write a lot of stories off as idfic, and i think virtually every single one of the stories i referenced to write this fairly uncontroversially fall into that category. but i think calling something an “id” something or the other naturalizes the satisfaction it gives as purely instinctual and unconscious, when i do think there are deeper narratives at play. while i didn’t ever actually reference the base here (sorry), i do think it’s worth talking about how real world power shapes & maintains the superstructure, and thereby our fantasies.

anyway in conclusion, maybe i was the one with sexual brainworms the whole time.

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sailorspazz · 3 years

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10 Dance Vol. 6 Special Edition overview

Volume 6 of the 10 Dance manga was released in Japan on March 18th, 2021. As with volumes 4 and 5, there are both regular and special editions available. In this post, I will provide an overview of the release, including observations on changes that were made to the chapters compared to how they were printed in the magazine, plus summaries and select scans of content from the special edition booklet.

It is often the case that when chapters come out in the manga magazines, they aren't always fully polished, and since I became highly familiar with this run of chapters from the summaries I made, several things immediately jumped out at me as I went through the book. First of all, though chapter 29 was split into two parts and released in subsequent months in the magazine, these two halves were combined into one chapter, with no indication they had ever been separate. I assume that they were always intended to be one chapter, but since the full chapter was not completed before the deadline (and it was a month when 10 Dance was being given the cover image, so not possible to delay its release), it was simply split over two months instead.

For visual changes, the most common alteration was scenes that originally had little or no screentone having it added in:

There were also some instances of either slight panel redraws, or complete replacements with new panels. None of these were from particularly important scenes, so it could just be Inouesatoh or someone on her team didn't like the look of the original panels and wanted to change them. The following example has a bit of both, with Suzuki in the upper left corner being replaced, and his eyes being redrawn in the lower panel:

Personally, the most amusing addition I noticed was when Max was thinking about throwing a party. Originally, we didn't see what he was envisioning, but in the volume, an addition has been made in the background: the New Year's piece Inouesatoh drew with sexy men dressed as cows, except now they're bunnies!

As for dialogue, it appeared to be almost the same in both versions throughout. Some minor exceptions include a spot I found where the dialogue was put in a different order, swapping Sugiki’s lines between this panel and his first line on the following page (in addition to another altered panel example):

As well as in this shot of Suzuki describing how they tug at the thread that connects them through their dance. Whereas before it put the word “dance” next to the part about tugging on the thread to specify what was meant by that, it was deleted in the volume. And while it was originally described as “affirming that we’re connected”, this was also tweaked a bit to be, “affirming our connection”.

There were a couple instances of character names being different from when they appeared earlier in the story. In this volume, two characters who were last mentioned back in volume 2 (Lucas Calvo, one of the champions at the table in Blackpool, and Deeks, who Ernie said hated Sugiki because he "stole" his girlfriend), either from typos or intentional changes, weren't the same as before. Lucas' last name was written with a 'g' sound (ガルボ) instead of a 'c' (カルボ), and this change carried over to the volume. On the other hand, Deeks' (ディクス) name got transposed as Disc (ディスク) in the magazine, but was fixed in the volume.

There was a typo that unfortunately made it through to the volume (but could perhaps be fixed in future printings). In chapter 34, when Norman is testing Suzuki's skills, he flashes back to Sugiki taking the national title from him several years earlier. The text in this scene, written in English, incorrectly states that Suzuki won the championship, rather than Sugiki.

The volume also includes the usual additions that are not present in the magazine, such as the under the cover flap comic, and Inouesatoh’s notes about each chapter.

The cover flap comic (which looks very much like a sketch, compared to previous ones that have had more complete art), features the Shinyas during a practice session earlier on in the series in December, where Suzuki complains that Sugiki’s Latin just isn’t sexy. Sugiki suggests that he can practice being sexy by wiggling his butt around to write a message in the air. Suzuki worries that if he starts writing out “love” or something, he’ll have to run away and escape. Sugiki gets started, and Suzuki calls out each letter that he can make out from his elegant butt bouncing. After figuring out he’s written “M-E-R-R-Y”, Suzuki guesses that he’s writing “Merry Christmas”. Sugiki gets mad that he said it aloud before he finished writing his message, and says he’s going to leave. Suzuki says, “Wait, I love you,” as narrative text says that this somehow turned into a love story in one panel.

And here are some tidbits I found interesting/amusing from the chapter notes:

She thinks readers who are fans of pecs will like Saichi.

She’s not sure if readers will love Max or hate him, but she personally likes him (sorry Sensei, I kinda hate him lol)

As of chapter 32, a portion of the art is now done digitally.

The epic “last dance” scene from 33 was something that she had planned since the beginning of the series, and it ended up being 8 times the cost for a typical chapter.

Special edition booklet:

The special edition comes with a 48 page hardcover booklet that includes a variety of different extras, divided into 8 sections called “heats”.

Heat 1 is a newly drawn, 12 page parody manga. Back in September 2020, Inouesatoh put out a request on Twitter for fans to send in their suggestions for an erotic side story. Putting the characters in a high school setting was the most requested scenario, so she chose this idea as the basis for the story. The title is “And All That Jazz” (the premise makes this somewhat confusing to summarize, so keep in mind that I’ll mostly be describing their actions based on the soul rather than the body, but will use quotation marks if it’s about other characters and who they think they’re addressing. It’ll all make sense, I promise...I think :P)

(The title page actually depicts the ending of the story, so I’ll come back to it later). It starts with Suzuki narrating his introduction, saying that he’s a transfer student to the Standard Academy. He really doesn’t get along with a guy named Sugiki, but for some reason, the two have now switched bodies with each other. Sugiki opens his shirt and inspects his new physique in front of other students, as Suzuki yells out asking what the hell he’s doing to his body. They look at themselves wearing each other’s expressions, Sugiki seeming surprised his mouth can gape open like that, and Suzuki wondering what happened to his body’s facial expression muscles. The bell rings and Sugiki heads off to class, as Suzuki is baffled that he can act so calm about this.

Sugiki perfectly reads a passage aloud in English class, something everyone (including the teacher, who looks like Norman) find unusual coming from “Suzuki”, as they wonder where his usual hearts are. Suzuki makes the decision to enjoy living as Sugiki for a bit, and is shown getting flirty with several girls. He notes that the more serious personality in his regular body is also strangely popular, though with a very different crowd.

A student named Alberko (Alberto in a girl’s uniform) shows up and says that “Sugiki” was supposed to have lunch with her(?) today. Suzuki says that he thought Alberko was going out with Dorou (a masculine alteration to Dolores’ name). Ernie and Suzuki watch as his harem falls apart with Alberko running amok. Ernie comments that both “Sugiki” and that transfer student have been acting weird all week, and he asks if something happened. Suzuki internally reflects back to one week earlier, when he was relaxing in bed in the infirmary. Sugiki comes in and accuses him of skipping class, and Suzuki tells him to mind his own business. He thought this would turn into one of their usual fights, but he can’t believe that actually happened instead...

After school, Sugiki asks Suzuki if they can go home together today. As they’re walking, Suzuki asks if Sugiki realizes what it was that made them switch places, and Sugiki says he does. Suzuki says that in that case, they know how they need to fix it, and they should go over to his house. Sugiki asks for clarification of whose house exactly he means by that.

As they start to get undressed, Suzuki says that he always thought his mom and sisters were annoying, but after a week apart he really misses them. Sugiki promises that he’ll make sure he can see them soon. Suzuki claims that he’ll be the one making Sugiki come, and Sugiki asks how he can talk like that when he was the one who looked like he was about to cry when Sugiki first touched him in the infirmary.

Sugiki peeks into Suzuki’s pants and wonders if he won’t get hard unless he touches him. Suzuki thinks it’d be weirder if he could get hard while looking at his own face, and wonders if Sugiki has AI in his crotch or something (Sugiki contends that it’s not his body). They fool around with each other until they finish, and Suzuki wonders why they didn’t change back yet. Sugiki suggests that maybe it needs to be just like the last time to count as a complete set, when they went at it until they fell off the bed, so both agree that they need to go for one more round. This then ties back to the title page, where they’ve finally managed to get back into their old bodies, but have now sprouted cat ears and tails.

Heat 2 of the booklet is 8 pages long, and contains short comics and illustrations that were not previously included in the volume releases. The comics include “How to 10 Dance”, a one-page comic with the Shinyas demonstrating the tango. Their privates end up touching, and Sugiki seems highly amused, gleefully asking Suzuki how it feels. Suzuki says that he was the one who got all bent out of shape over that back in volume 1, and tells him to lay off the sadist mode since they’re not dancing Latin right now. The second comic is “2nd Step”, and shows a glimpse of how the Shinyas were with each other after Suzuki gave the go-ahead for kissing. In fact, Sugiki ends up kissing him so much that Suzuki’s lips get sore and swollen. Sugiki then tries to kiss his neck as an alternative, but Suzuki’s not having it. The third comic depicts Suzuki’s first time in a public bath, where he realizes that Japanese people aren’t fully shaved everywhere like he is. Some of the old guys talk to him and slap their balls with their towels, and Suzuki, seeming a bit confused, gives his own balls a slap, too. After the comics are a selection of illustrations that were never used in the volumes, including this one from a Real 10 Dance event in 2018:

Heat 3 is 18 pages, and contains a variety of colored versions of both chapter covers and scenes from the manga, a couple of which I’ll share below:

Heat 4 includes 3 pages of insight from the professional dancers who consult for the manga, in which they explain the moves shown in specific panels.

Heat 5 is a single page look at Inouesatoh’s work space.

Heat 6 is 3 pages worth of advertisements that have been used to promote the series, including things like ads that were posted in subway stations:

Heat 7 is a single page look at the storyboard for chapter 1 of the manga.

Heat 8 is a single page showing the covers for foreign editions of the manga (Taiwanese, Korean, North American, and French).

Finally, there’s one last page with a thank you message from Inouesatoh, including an absolutely precious illustration of the Shinyas in happier times.

And that’s that! This really is an incredible release, and I’d definitely recommend picking up the special edition if you can. CD Japan offers direct international shipping, and I’ve also seen that Kinokuniya lists it as “available to order” currently (though they don’t appear to have stock on hand, so might take longer).

#10 dance #10dance

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richincolor · 3 years

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SomeThoughts about Netflix's Shadow & Bone

This past Friday, the highly anticipated Shadow and Bone series premiered on Netflix and fans of the Grishaverse all over the world logged in to watch their favs come to life. There was much discussion of the inclusion of numerous characters from throughout the Grishaverse and that diversity was a focus in the casting of the show, especially Jessie Mei Li who is biracial, therefore changing the main character’s ethnicity to biracial Shu Han. Unfortunately, that decision didn’t pay off to well due to the showrunner’s handling of Alina’s ethnicity. Twitter blew up as people shared their hurt and warned others about what to expect.

I had planned to watch the show and happened to see one such warning before I watched the series so I was prepared. I watched a couple of episodes, then called it a night. The next morning I was unsettled and reached out to my fellow contributors here on Rich in Color. No one had seen it yet, but Jessica said she was planning to as well. As we chatted, I felt that our conversation should be shared with our readers, so Jessica and I decided to write our thoughts down and have a conversation after she watched a few episodes herself.

Oh, and spoilers abound!

First off, before we dive into this conversation: Have you read the Grishaverse series? How much did you know about the story going in?

K. Imani: As everyone knows I love fantasy so I’m open to reading all sorts of fantasy books. I read the Shadow & Bone series a few years ago and enjoyed it. When the Six of Crows duology came out I read those too and actually enjoyed those better than the original series. Why - more diversity? It also expanded the world and the different perspectives of “Grisha” like folk from other cultures. It was very clear from the writing that Bardugo realized her first series was very lacking in diversity and worked hard to change it. I actually re-read both series during quarantine, so I had a fair idea of what the Netflix series would be about.

Jessica: I’ve actually never read a single Grishaverse book! I know, shocking. I only knew two things about the series going into the show: 1) Six of Crows is a heist book? 2) Ben Barnes is a person who exists.

The cast announcement for any show is always so exciting, and Shadow and Bone was no different. How did you feel about the casting -- before and after you watched the show? What did you think was done well, and what did you think could be improved?

K. Imani: Before watching the show I was actually a bit confused about some of the casting choices. I didn’t understand why 3 of the main Six of Crows characters were in the show and I honestly did not make the connection to Alina and Mal being biracial. Knowing that the Grishaverse is “Russian-based” and knowing that some ethnic Mongolians are considered Russian I just found it cool that the show cast a person who didn’t fit a Russian stereotype. Oh boy was I way off! Overall I was pleased with the casting and think all the actors did a great job. I liked the few changes they did make with casting actors of colors for other roles to round out the diversity of the world.

Bringing it back to Mal, I was confused as to if he was supposed to be coded as biracial. I missed the reference in the show, but I did read somewhere that he was supposed to be as well and that is what bonded him to Alina. If that’s the case, then how come Alina was the only person to experience racism? That thought continues to sit on my heart because it shows that the writers did not really think through how they wanted to express racism and included it for the wrong reasons.

Jessica: My reaction was basically, “I’m happy that other people seem happy!” since again, I had no context for the show. Casting on Netflix shows often seems to be a case of “cool, this is some exciting casting… but definitely could be better and even more intentional.”

K. Imani: “More intentional” That is the word right there! Making a story more diverse is wonderful and fully reflects the world we live in, however if you just randomly do it without thinking it through it comes off as insensitive. I know Leigh Bardugo used this show as an opportunity to make her story better (and I do not begrudge her of that fact) but when one doesn’t think it through, the criticism that is being expressed is a direct result.

Jessica: Sidenote -- I ended up watching a booktube video titled “Darker Jesper, Fat Nina, Shadow and Bone Casting Thoughts” on booktube channel Chronicles of Noria about the casting. Highly recommend checking it out. I also recommend this profile on Jessie Mei Li, who talks about being gender nonconforming.

Did any changes in the Netflix adaptation stick out to you? Were there changes you liked or disliked?

K. Imani: My favorite part of the adaptation is how well the show runners included the Six of Crows characters into the narrative. The storyline completely worked for me and connected the two stories together. I really enjoyed the Arken storyline (and the character tbh) as it was used to flesh out the world of the Grishaverse, which made the series much more interesting. I also liked the change of making Ivan and Fedyor a couple instead of just Darkling’s henchmen as it humanized them and actually made me like Ivan because they were so cute together. Though how that will come into play after the events of Episode 8 will be interesting. I’m a sucker for the Enemies to Lover trope so I loved that Nina’s & Matthia’s story of how they came together was included here. In either Six of Crows or Crooked Kingdom (I don’t remember), it was told as a flashback, but I loved that it was moved here as their “origin story”, so to speak, and how it connects to the events of the Alina timeline.

What I didn’t like...the casual racism. It really bothered me and left me sad the next morning. For example, a certain poster shown in the first episode had me physically cringe and I was upset that 1) the production designers even created it and 2) no one, at no point, said that was a bad idea? Come on! It was horrible to see and I can imagine the hurt an AAPI would experience seeing that. And then, it got worse. Racial slurs thrown around a couple of times in the first couple of episodes to show that Alina is an outsider. They were jarring and took me out of the narrative. Having read the books I knew there was tension between the Ravkans and Shu Han, so I could understand what the show runners were trying to do, but it was actually never explained in show, hence making the racism feel random and just there for shock value.

Jessica: I saw tweets going around alluding to the racism Alina (and other characters to a less frequent extent) faced, so I braced myself for it. I’m only a few episodes in, and the instances so far were brief… but it just didn’t feel right. The foundation for this portrayal of racism wasn’t laid properly. And if the work of laying the foundation and really digging into what it means for the overall worldbuilding doesn’t happen… then why include it at all? Especially if it might be painful for certain viewers? I’m sure harm wasn’t the intent, but that’s the impact. Why not leave it out and let the show be escapism?

K. Imani: Jessica, the eyes comment took me out, not gonna lie. I audibly screamed. Anyone who has experienced a racist comment based on their looks felt that in their gut which is horrible when watching a show for escapism.

Jessica: Yeah, the eyes and rice-eater comments were especially frustrating. On top of it being a reminder of the racism Asians experience daily… it doesn’t make much sense. Like, canonically, do people in Ravka not eat rice? An American’s conception of racism isn’t necessarily going to make sense in a (Imperial Russia-inspired) fantasy world. But maybe I’m missing something since I didn’t read the original books.

And the eyes comment… whoof. When I was a kid, other kids would make fun of my eyes and ask me to, like, count seagulls because surely, I couldn’t see out of my eyes… And the other kids were also Asian! Internalized racism is so real. It’s disappointing that Shadow and Bone would include this experience as, I don’t know, discrimination flavor text. Surely there were better ways to portray discrimination that made sense within the Grishaverse…

Ellen Oh really said it so well: “If a writer is going to show racism against Asians, it's important to balance it with the beauty of all that makes us Asian also.” Where is the balance? Where is the nuance? Even if Alina’s Shu Han mother isn’t alive, couldn’t Alina have had a treasured Shu Han pendant? Just spitballing here. There were so many possibilities.

K. Imani: Exactly. I agree with Ellen and unfortunately there is no balance. That’s what makes it so hurtful. The focus is on how bad it is that she’s biracial and how bad the Shu Hans are for no specific reason. Because Alina is an orphan and grew up in Ravka, she unfortunately has no connection to Shu Han culture (or at least what is shown on screen) so all that she identifies as is Ravkan who just happens to look like a Shu Han person, but she doesn’t exhibit any pride in being Shu Han. Her ethnicity is just another obstacle to overcome which is all the more cringeworthy and why having Alina be biracial just to be biracial without thinking it through ended up being so problematic. Having her be biracial and using casual racism as an “obstacle” that she has to overcome is such a shallow interpretation of racism and shows the writers didn’t do the work to really think about the why the racism exists.

In addition to talking about what was done well and what went wrong or felt off about certain representation, it’s important to look at the “how.” How did this happen?

Jessica: I read on Twitter that one of the show writers is Korean and biracial -- which is awesome! I was really heartened to hear that. But at the same time, this highlights how important it is to have multiple marginalized voices in the room who can speak with some level of expertise. I don’t know the decision-making process that went into including this sort of surface-level, simplistic version of real world racism, but I wonder if anyone, at any point, said “is there a more nuanced and original way to portray this?” or “how will this affect Asian viewers?” Did someone bring it up, and they were overruled? What happened?

This absolutely isn’t a judgment on the Asian writers or staff on the show. When I’ve done collaborative writing, there were times I caught an issue and said “we need to be more sensitive about this” -- and there were other times when my teammates pointed out something I didn’t notice. It happens! That’s why it’s so important to have multiple marginalized perspectives when creating something -- especially when it’s a work as impactful and far-reaching as a Netflix show. Placing the burden of complex, nuanced representation on one, or a scant handful, of marginalized creators is just not going to work… and it’s not fair to the creators, either.

Frankly, this is a problem in so many industries -- film, publishing, games... there are so many “diverse” shows, games, etc with all-white or majority white teams. Good, nuanced representation can only happen when BIPOC / marginalized creators are the majority and have power behind-the-scenes. (This is why I’m really excited to watch the show Rutherford Falls -- half the writers room are Indigenous writers, as is the co-creator!)

K. Imani: Exactly! It’s great that one of the writers is biracial and Korean, but if she’s the only one how much input did she really have? I’m by no means knocking her experience but, say for example, that particular poster in the first episode. No one else behind the scenes found it problematic? There are many steps to a production process and that poster, if there had been more diverse voices present on the production staff instead of just 1 writer, would have been flagged as a huge problem and redone. The poster was supposed to be a “short cut” to show Ravkan/Shu Han tension but instead it came off as so profoundly racist and unnecessary. There are many other non-racist ways to explore the tensions between the two countries that could have been explored instead of just jumping to racism. And...as someone on Twitter pointed out, we never see the tension between the Ravkans and the Shu Han, but we openly see fighting between the Ravkans and the Fjierdans, so why were they not vilified to the same extent?

Jessica: Right. I’m definitely not saying racism can’t be portrayed in fantasy ever. But if you’re going to do it, make it make sense within the world. Don’t just use it as shorthand for “this character is Other.” I mean, experiencing racism isn’t what makes me Asian…

K. Imani: Boom! I’m going to repeat that for the people in the back...experiencing racism is not what makes a person Asian or Black, and if you are going to have racism in a work of art, be sure to provide balance to show all the other aspects of a person of color’s life.

Since we’re talking creators behind-the-scenes… which YA fantasy books by Asian authors do you think would make great Netflix shows or movies?

Jessica: I’ve got a list about a mile long, but I’ve cut it down to my top four:

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong

Forest of a Thousand Lanterns by Julie C. Dao

The Tiger at Midnight by Swati Teerdhala

The Epic Crush of Genie Lo by F.C. Yee

You’re welcome, Netflix execs who are totally reading this blog. Hop to it!

K. Imani: I second the Tiger at Midnight series! I loved the first two books and can’t wait for the conclusion in June. While not YA, the City of Brass series would make an excellent Netflix series. Anything Maurene Goo writes would be fun rom-coms (because we need those too!).

Jessica: I mean, with To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before complete… Netflix clearly needs to start adapting Maurene Goo’s books.

K. Imani: Yes, the people demand it! I don’t care which book, just grab one of them and get the production started.

On a final note, I do want to say that despite the criticism the show rightly deserves, there was much about the show that was enjoyable. The storytelling was strong and moved at a good pace, the costuming was on point, special effects worked seamlessly into the narrative, and even small touches such as how the Grishas used their small science was visually interesting. Book adaptations are always hard to pull off well and the Shadow and Bone production team did a good job overall. Their intention towards adding more diversity is a step in the right direction, but just didn’t do enough. Let’s hope they learn from their mistakes and improve for season 2.

#shadow and bone

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daturanerium · 4 years

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okay. i’m seeing a lot of misinformation being spread about the whole “veth is homophobic” thing and as someone who’s active on that side of the fandom i’d like to clear up some stuff because this has been blown way out of proportion.

1. “veth is homophobic” has always been a joke shared among this subsection of fandom. it’s been around for months and has about the same energy as me calling something homophobic when it inconveniences me (ie, no energy; not at all serious). very few, if any of us actually believe veth (or sam) is homophobic. as far as i/we are aware, homophobia doesn’t exist in exandria! we’d like to keep it that way.

2. a lot of us in this little subsection used to be huge nott/veth fans, including me. i was a whole nott stan for like a year and a half! we’re confused, sad, and disappointed with veth’s current characterization. her sudden change in....just about everything feels very uncomfortable and forced to a lot of us. characters are allowed to have flaws, we’re not denying that! it’s just that, to us, a lot of veth’s many flaws don’t make sense or fit with her character and situation. and that makes us sad, because veth was a character we really used to like.

3. re: veth and beau’s relationship issues. veth has always been a little antagonistic towards beau, unfortunately. it seems like their rift has only grown within the last few episodes. now, again, character relationships shouldn’t be perfect and conflict in games is interesting! i think the main issues lies in not having any known basis; veth’s negative words and actions towards beau seem to be coming from nowhere. it’s disappointing to watch. if veth had a reason to act negatively toward’s beau we would be a lot more content with the situation. but, as things currently stand, we are unaware of any reason why veth is acting this way.

4. re: “shipping discourse”, which is a term that shouldn’t be used for this situation. the problem that a lot of fans are having with veth isn’t about beaujester or beauyasha or beau-whatever. it’s about veth knowing about beau’s crush, saying “i’ll do some work!”, and then actively trying to push fjord and jester into a relationship. whether or not you think jester still has feelings for fjord doesn’t matter; it’s clearly making jester uncomfortable and annoyed, and her “work” has almost seemed to turn into an obsession. veth has done a lot of odd/uncomfortable stuff around relationships and romance (her pushing f/j despite neither fjord nor jester having asked her to, her constantly making sex jokes out of the blue, her writing a letter to astrid without caleb’s permission and later making jokes about him reuniting and having sex with her, etc.). on their own, these instances look pretty harmless. but when you put them together, we start to notice a trend of veth being inconsiderate towards other people’s relationships in favor of herself. now, what i said before still stands: character flaws are important in fleshing out a character and allowing them to grow. the problem is that we really haven’t seen veth grow in this sense at all. she’s been (to a certain degree) inserting herself into relationships for a while now. so, when beau confessed her feelings for jester to veth, we assumed that it would go the same way--veth would see an opportunity to play matchmaker and snatch it up, since this is a trend we’ve been witnessing happen to other potential relationships in the group. but instead, veth essentially forgets about it, instead pushing f/j even more. last episode we even saw her pretend to be the traveler and write suggestive things about fjord in jester’s sketchbook. the question quickly became: what’s different about beau’s crush on jester? why did veth latch onto jester’s crush on fjord and caleb’s past relationship with astrid but completely ignore beau’s crush on jester? i’ve seen a lot of people say “beau didn’t want her to interfere!” and that’s true, but the thing we’re noticing is that someone not wanting veth to interfere hasn’t stopped her before. why is it stopping her now? so, tl;dr: our problem isn’t with “our ship not being canon”. it’s about a lesbian being treated differently than m/f relationships in-game. that’s where the hurt and suspicion comes from--the implications and context make the situation a little more noticeable, and to some upsetting. (it would be nice if sapphics, especially lesbians, could voice our opinions and criticisms without them being reduced to “shipping discourse”. unfortunately, i don’t think that will be stopping anytime soon).

5) re: “death threats”. i haven’t personally seen any directed at sam but if they’re out there i would like to sincerely apologize for them. we do not stand for anything of the sort. i have also seen some threats directed at my friends who are a part of the side of cr twitter that is currently in focus since the “discourse” has gone mainstream. it’s frightening to see, but thankfully it hasn’t happened a whole lot. some of us have tagged sam in various threads/tweets about our concerns with veth (with varying levels of passion and professionalism). we do not condone death threats in any way shape or form, and anyone who sends death threats does not represent us.

so, tl;dr: current cr discourse actually revolves around veth’s current inconsistencies in her characterizations and actions. this “discourse” has been around for a lot longer than most people realize, and most of it comes from a point of love for veth’s character and potential. and, of course, we don’t condone death threats.

if anyone wants clarification, examples, etc, feel free to reply and/or message me. i wanted to keep this post fairly short but i can go into more detail if you’d like!

sincerely,

emmy, @acefjords (a former veth/nott stan)

#critical role #cr discourse #there's a whole other post i could do about s*m but that's discourse for another time #please feel free to hmu with any questions!

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linklethehistorian · 3 years

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New Working Link to DarkestJay’s English Translation of Fifteen & Commentary on the Discrepancies Therein (PLEASE READ)

Information below the cut for length, as well as spoiler information relating to my article.

If recently you’ve tried to access DarkestJay8686’s English Translation of Fifteen on WattPad through the link I provided at the beginning of my article, you’ve probably already noticed that that link is, unfortunately, very dead; the reason that this has happened is because, sadly, as of late, they — and other translators in the fandom who also post their works to WattPad — have been facing a struggle with their works constantly being flagged on the site and forcibly removed for copyright reasons multiple times over, forcing them to eventually give up and move their content somewhere else where it would be safe from harm.

Upon learning of their arrival on a new, safer platform, I had considered simply exchanging the old link out for the new one at the beginning of my article, where it was before, and altering my notes to reflect this, and I’m sure that I still will as soon as I can find the time to rework everything properly, but in the meanwhile, there’s something I’ve also badly needed to discuss with you all about these translations for some time, and what better time and way, I thought, than to do it in this post where I provide you with the new link?

I’m sure that many of you reading both my article and their translation have noticed that back in the Arcade scene, there was something I had mentioned happening in the novel that didn’t quite match up with DarkestJay’s presentation of those events — namely, Sheep being the first to leave the building, instead of Dazai and Chuuya; well, that difference is actually quite important as one of the main reasons why, while their work may overall be excellent and I do encourage everyone to read it regardless, I still personally would never recommend making it the only thing you read if you want to truly understand Fifteen and all of its events 100% correctly.

Yes, I am saying exactly what you think I’m saying: my information within my article was NOT incorrect — Jay’s translation of the scene, however, was, and if you don’t believe me, you can go read Lea’s translation of the scene and see it for yourself.

Now, before I say anything else, I want to make this 100% clear: I in no way am intending to imply that Jay’s work on the whole is anything but exceptional, nor am I even remotely saying that you shouldn’t read at all; in fact, I highly recommend you do read it in its entirety, because despite a few small mis-steps, as someone who owns two copies of the original Japanese light novel, has read many an English translation, and knows this story extensively well, I will be the first to very enthusiastically say that this translation is actually quite good and very, very helpful overall — an absolutely essential resource for anyone who does not speak the original language but still wants to read, experience and understand Fifteen as if they could. I am extremely, extremely grateful and appreciative of their hard work in making that possible for all English speakers, and I don’t ever want to come across as anything else or make it seem like any of that is any less than true.

That being said, though, it nevertheless absolutely cannot and should not be your only resource on the matter, because if it is, you will unavoidably end up being misled on some matters — unintentionally, of course, but still misled all the same.

Because this was translated well after the anime came out — unlike Lea’s partial but nonetheless equally wonderful translation, which came into existence very shortly after the novel was first handed out in theaters alongside DEAD APPLE, a whole year before the animated adaption was even a concept — DarkestJay’s translation does have some points where it is extremely clear that said television show’s rather poorly handled and highly inaccurate interpretation very heavily affected the OP’s perception of things, and thus caused the OP, Jay, to incorrectly interpret and translate certain parts of some scenes and/or dialogue that otherwise might not have been super clear to someone not fully, extensively familiar with the language.

Specifically, as I mentioned above, there is the one particular instance among the many that I can easily point out: due to the pre-knowledge of the anime’s awful take on the story, there is a point in this translation where Jay simply assumes it to be true that Dazai and Chuuya were the ones to leave the Arcade, with Sheep calling out to their retreating backs, and thus incorrectly translates it as such, when in fact it unfolds in exactly the opposite manner in the original version of the tale; likewise, there are also many bits of dialogue throughout the entirety of the book where the perceived “understanding” of the characters’ nature’s as the show wrongly presented them caused Jay to take the liberty of wording things in certain different ways, or make certain alterations to the type of punctuation used that Jay believed suited them, rather than leaving them in their unaltered states, as they were intended to be read.

This is the major issue with going into a project like this with this kind of confirmation bias; no matter how good your intentions may be, because you expect that you already understand something or know what’s going to happen, you’re much more likely to think it’s safe to cut corners, and rather than carefully researching the context, tone, and other specifics and particulars of every line before you write it out and post it — the way you would if you started with a completely blank slate and no idea of what would happen in it — you will more often than not just assume that it plays out in the way you expect it to if it seems close enough, and quickly go with that presumption as if it is fact without bothering to make 100% sure of it.

Again, no offense to OP, because translation work is very hard, and as I said, overall, it is a wonderful translation and I do think it’s well worth the read, but problems like this are why I personally recommend anyone reading this to also check out Lea’s translated summary with excerpts and translation of the bonus chapter in conjunction with Jay’s, as Lea’s came out long before a Fifteen anime was even a concept and, as such, was completely unbiased — therefore being an excellent source to check facts against where possible.

Of course, there are definitely also some points where both translations are different but neither is actually wrong — as while Lea’s is less literal about every phrasing so it’s not super awkward sounding in English and flows better to read, Jay’s is almost always more literal instead, and thus differences in personal preference for wording can easily diverge while still getting the point across fine in both — but these instances are much different from the ones where it is clear Jay actually slipped up, so I’m sure you won’t have trouble defining them. As much as I would like to be of help in this regard, I must sadly inform you that I will not personally be pointing out all of these slip-ups here at this time, nor do I have any plan to do so at any time in the foreseeable future. for I have neither the time nor the desire to go about critiquing a fellow fan’s work when I’m already dedicating enough time and energy just to writing about the mountain of mistakes that the anime made without also adding more difficult and unnecessary extra work onto that.

If you have any questions about a particular line in the translation and if it indeed is correct, you can absolutely feel free to send me an ask about it and I will try to help you with it to the best of my ability, but beyond that, I will not be engaging with the matter much farther than I already have.

(However, on one last note, I will, for now, add that — as I expect this might become a point of much contention and is something that will come up in my article later on, anyway — the “it must be because I love you” scene that you will find in Jay’s translation is actually not exactly one such instance where a mistake was made, at least in regards to the “‘I love you” bit; if you’re curious about the exact details of how that all works, you can read about it in my post here. So yes, that does indeed exist, and you are free to take it in whatever way you want. I’m not personally an SKK shipper myself, but if that’s your thing, then good for you — go for it and enjoy it; it can be canon support for your ship if you want it to be.)

Thank you for reading, and, as promised, here is the link to Jay’s new account, as well as their Twitter, and where you can currently access their translation of Fifteen. Enjoy.

[See the recent related addendum]

[View the masterlist of my article]

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shijiujun · 4 years

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On Translations

Once again, I’m just plain incensed by dumbasses who think it’s okay to firstly, steal someone else’s hard work and secondly, think they’ve got some right to edit that person’s work because they think they’ve got a better grip on English (not true btw) - It didn’t happen to me (well, as far as I know) and I’m not in the Guardian fandom and I don’t personally know the person who’s dealing with this ridiculous shit, but oof am I angry after seeing the tweet.

Just saw on twitter that some asshole stole a translator’s works (Guardian, Chinese to English) and edited it - Yes it’s just like the MDZS saga a few weeks ago when some white person who doesn’t have any Chinese language knowledge, tried to ‘improve’ translations done by another person who actually knows what they’re doing in both Chinese and English - And then put in on Wattpad with a ridiculous letter and intro where they said: “Great things can be made greater” to explain why they edited the English of the original translation.

“Great things can be made greater,” said the thief.

“I hope my actions will be appreciated,” said the thief again.

Like wow, once again, the audacity - There’ve been extensive arguments on translations since the MDZS saga a few weeks ago and obviously the fan who took ExR’s translations and ‘made them better’ stupidly stepped on a landmine by fucking with the MDZS fandom that has a longer history, more resources and clout than the amount of time she’s been exposed to MDZS via CQL, and got bitch-slapped by the rest of the fandom where there exists a majority of fans knowing clearly what to do and not to do.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of all fandoms, especially smaller ones - The user i saw is a translator for Guardian and the mofo 1. Stole their translations 2. Edited the translations to ‘better english’ 3. Wrote that they don’t know who did the original translations but “they know where to find me” *cue my eyeroll* 4. And after op commented to say please credit at the very least in May, they’ve been ignored so far - but luckily they’ve got some supporters as well to help report the mofo.

Aside from the ridiculous thievery (not crediting, blatantly lying and stealing, being an arrogant, indecent person stuck on that high horse) of course, the “I believe that great things can be made greater” is a fucking load of bullshit in this instance, and I mean taking someone else’s translations and adding your own spin to it because you think you’ve taken tests in English as a first language in school all your life (fuck off, a lot of these translators did too), that you’ve got some superiority over English or because you think it reads funny?

Granted, most fan translators don’t put up flawless translations (once again, these translators are FREE LABOUR), but you get it for free and you don’t have to (and can’t) read the original text, so suck it up.

Moreover, the disgust that I feel at the claim that the thief’s work is now ‘greater’ is extremely visceral - It’s not a greater piece of work because the thief stole it, period. No one asked for the thief’s help.

(In case you guys are curious the stolen post on Wattpad is here: https://my.w.tt/7dehLj7D56 and if you’d like to report just follow the instructions)

On Chinese to English translations:

1. If you don’t have good grasp of the original language, you have no right editing the translated work after, regardless of language. Until you can clearly understand the original idioms, context, characters etc. or have at least lived with the language for a substantial part of your life, honestly, just stop, you’ve got no right!

Sure, some translators aren’t as good as you like them to be, but the argument is always, well, you wouldn’t even have this minimal translation if they didn’t do it, so yay you’re like a few sentences and words closer to the text than you were before. If it’s really that bad, hopefully there are better translations and you can ignore the one you’re looking at, but the same rules apply across all translations!! Don’t disrespect the translator (especially when they’ve done nothing wrong except try to give you access to more content).

2. For Chinese, it’s even worse because the language is known for its hidden nuances and complexities within just two to four characters that, when translated into English, can sometimes take up to two long sentences to explain. That’s why sometimes shit reads funny. It’s not that these translators can’t do English, but Chinese to English acrobatics is beyond your comprehension, hell sometimes it’s beyond translators’ comprehension, so thanks for editing something you’ve got no idea about. This user Bee made a very good argument thread IMO about this on Twitter which I suggest people read

3. Adding your edits to a translated piece of work especially without permission or discussion with the translator, honestly who the fuck are you to do that? Either work your damn ass off by painstakingly translating the original and then editing it however you like, or just... enjoy the free content. Chinese BL novels (in this instance and as in many instances i’ve seen) and some of these translators have been around for longer than you’ve been in the fandom, so suddenly when you have an interest in the content, in a culture and language that you’ve never seen before, are unfamiliar with and have zero knowledge about, you think that as a fan you now have the right to edit someone else’s work that was already done correctly?

The fact is if the translator wrote a bogus line in the English translations, you wouldn’t have known, and when you upload it as your own and ‘improve’ it, you would be a joke, but you didn’t read the original text did you, so what makes you are any sort of authority to edit the translations?

4. Of course this is not to say that non-Chinese speaking people can’t enjoy the same content or have excellent, poignant discussions and understanding over the content, but honestly a lot of translations don’t capture 100% of a Chinese novel because the nuances are just that complex, and translators do their best to convey it regardless - This is why RESPECT FOR THE TRANSLATOR IS IMPORTANT. And I don’t mean simply paying lip service and typing “we respect all translators for their hard work on this work”, and then disrespect it entirely by not crediting, by the simple act of editing without permission etc.

Respect their interpretation and translations, because it can differ from translator to translator translating the same sentence (and people who don’t speak the original language want to compete with that, I don’t understand?!)

5. Honestly, considering how people are still arguing on the semantics of the Bible for example, not only in its original language but also in English alone - if people can’t agree on every sentence of the holy text and what each sentence means to different people, fan translators get a fucking pass

6. I read in Bee’s threads where someone disagreed with their argument of ‘only people who understand the original language can translate and edit’, saying that it’s okay if the editor doesn’t have a grasp of the original language - I understand that yes, someone else’s English might truly be better (for e.g. actual editors but also please don’t proclaim that you’re one just because you think the translator hasn’t lived with English for most of their lives or whatever), but even then, the editor has to work really closely with the translator because the translator is the primary source of the translation i.e. they know exactly what is going on in a particular sentence in their heads that may not have been translated fully, so how can non-Chinese reading editors truly understand the translated text on its own, editing in silos?

7. Perhaps in actual publishing houses that deal with official translations, this is a fallacy that is ever-present and editors do that anyway without understanding the original text (not sure about this, I’m bringing up the point for consideration, hypothetically putting this out here), but my issue with ‘editors’ in the fan translations space is that they come off sitting on some high horse because they think they’re better in English than you are (which of course yes, might be true, but then read points 1-6 again)

8. A thief is a thief, don’t put up an open letter or disclaimer explaining your motivations. It’s plain and simple, you stole someone else’s work, claimed it for your own and are riding on the great (sometimes not so great but still great, if you get what I mean) work that the translator did. You don’t get to claim ownership for any part of it, even your edits. And once again, “original work belongs to the translators” without actually naming the translators? Fuck off.

9. God, I hate Wattpad and Instagram (okay sometimes Twitter but Twitter seems to be a halfway point) - The Sanctuaries for Lazy Content Thieves Where The Platform Endorses Their Shitty Behaviour

10. Aside from translations, I’ve also seen assholes stealing like shitposts and jokes - These are the hardest to prove as well and it’s almost impossible to claim ownership when someone steals your jokes. Thieves only wish they had as creative a brain as some of you (didn’t happen to me but to a mutual) do. The audacity. The audacity! if the work was actually done and paid and recorded, if TurnItIn.com was available for fandom posts, these thieves would be out of gas.

11. Fan translators are not obligated to answer to any of their readers when it comes to why they translated something a certain way. You don’t like it or don’t agree with it, simply ignore, close the tab and go find another translation you like, it’s that simple. Nowadays readers 1. Threaten/Diss the translator directly and rudely 2. Steal the work 3. Add their own spin on it without understanding the original content and say: Yay! Look at this I made it so much better so give me some attention

*****

The point of this post is not to claim ownership over any fandom or content just because translators or Chinese-speaking/reading people in the fandom know the content better. It’s also not to say that non-Chinese speaking/reading people can’t enjoy, understand, have great discussions over original Chinese content, because just from MDZS alone you can see that they can. Of course there are also individuals who might not be able to speak the language but are familiar with Chinese culture etc. because they’ve studied or lived it well, or maybe they’ve actually watched decades of Chinese drama to be able to analyse it properly now, all that’s awesome.

Also, I’m all for people who are learning Chinese (or any language for that matter) to translate something as practice. That’s great, that’s good, that’s to be admired!!

It’s non-Chinese speaking/reading people who claim they know the original content better than translators without any discussions, claiming some superiority over the content because they think the translation is not done well enough without doing any of the ground work that I really have an issue with (and also the fuckers who steal of course XD).

*****

And unfortunately I had too much time on my hands today and got pissed off after seeing the tweet so some of you have to read through this drivel XD

#translations #guardian #mdzs #rambles #stealing #again XD #not me this time #but then again i keep seeing my stolen shit so it's pent up anger #HAHAHAHA #you'd think i would have learnt #but i also think it's important to get angry each time it happens #even if it's tiring and futile?#if in 100 complaints only 1 gets answered #then that's 1 less mofo and thief who got away #you know?#idk sometimes

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