But ho hum. This blog entry is not (solely) about me taking a dim view of some cartoon series which has no effect on my life whatsoever beside the occasional irksome email in my gmail inbox. No - this blog entry is about this story, which came with today's Google alert: http://christiandaily.com/article/steven-universe-season-4-news-storyboard-artist-leaves-social-media-after-being-harassed-by-fans/55485.htm. Yes, that's right: somebody connected with the show (which is, let's be clear, supposed to be a programme for children) has been harassed off Twitter by grown men and women (though I use that term loosely) simply because of what has happened in it. Viz:
Lauren Zuke, one of the storyboard artists and writers for "Steven Universe" decided to leave Twitter and delete her account after she experienced harassment from fans of the series who accused her of queer baiting.
Queer baiting is a term used to describe what LGBT fans perceive to be a media creator's attempt at wooing LGBT fans with no clear intention of showing a consummated LGBT relationship on television. A thread on Reddit reveals that a group of aggressive "Steven Universe" fans supporting the Peridot–Amethyst pairing (otherwise known as "Amedot") in the series believed themselves queer baited after the "Summer of Steven" episode "Beta" aired showing Peridot moving in and doing well with Lapis Lazuli, a newly converted Crystal Gem.
Zuke had shared art supporting a hinted romantic relationship between Lapis and Peridot (otherwise known as "Lapidot" to some) after the episode aired. This angered "Amedot" fans, believing that not only was Zuke queer baiting them but that the artist was favoring one ship over the other.
You see this sort of thing a lot, of course - it isn't really news, as Leslie Jones will tell you - but for some reason this instance of the phenomenon (I suppose "twitter mob idiocy" is the correct term?) particularly makes me wonder whether we are living in a sort of Last Days of Rome era, with the Visigoths and Huns waiting for us just round the corner with clubs. I mean, really. Let's count the layers of sheer awfulness here:
1) Grown men and women being so emotionally invested in a kids' TV series that they are willing to abuse somebody over it.
2) Grown men and women feeling so entitled, so childish, and so self-centered that they actually believe that they have a right to have a work of fiction reflect their own specific desires rather than that of its creator.
3) Grown men and women thinking that fiction ought primarily to serve political or cultural ends rather than those of plot, character development, drama, etc.
4) Amedot. 'Nuff said?
What is it about modern fandom that makes it so shrill and hateful? Is it simply not having enough going on in your own life that you have to invest your emotional energy in fiction? A lack of perspective brought on by lack of human contact?
Those seem too simplistic. What I've noticed about episodes like this is that they are basically nerd-dom's answer to the way in which football (that's "soccer" if you're reading across the Pond) fans behave. At the average football match it is perfectly normal to be surrounded by grown men and women who feel that it is not just acceptable but their right to hurl barbaric abuse at referees and linesmen, call opposition managers pedophiles, make threats of violence, and otherwise behave like a sort of unholy combination of a 13 year old boy and a gibbon in heat. It's all part of the pantomime of the experience, of course, and mostly harmless, but it seems to come from the same place that online abuse of actors or writers does. In the same way that fans of Steven Universe want the plot and characters to reflect what they want, and become aggravated and lose all sense of proportion when that doesn't happen, football fans want their manager and players to do exactly what they feel that they should be doing, and turn into shit-flinging chimps when they don't.
I don't feel enough of a qualified social anthropologist to explain this phenomenon in words, so I will summarize my argument with the following handy diagram, which I recommend you study in detail:
This is exactly the kind of thing I was getting at in my last comment on your previous post. It's amazing to watch the way people invest and war over things that you yourself don't care about. Honestly, it would be amusing to outline edition wars for someone who has 0 interest in RPGs. I'd love to hear what a social anthropologist would say about this stuff.
ReplyDeletePart of me thinks that maybe all the angst that people spent on quarrels over religion in the West in centuries past is now getting directed into cultural or sporting pursuits. People were quite prepared to kill each other over interpretations of the Bible. They are now almost prepared to kill each other over Steven Universe.
DeleteThe groupings change. The impulse is the same. It's a very deep seated normal impulse because it feels good to bolster one's identity. While "Look at how crazy people get about X!" is interesting to me, "Does Y really warrant my own reaction?" is probably more important. I've experienced some disproportionate anger about things in my time, but I've at least I haven't tried to assemble a cyber mob.
DeleteJust realized that a huge amount of conflict within Christianity amounts to an edition war. King James supporters are pretty vitriolic some times...
DeleteI know you've got your tongue in your cheek but I was brought up as a Baptist, and let me tell you there is nowhere this stuff is stronger than in protestant sects which are 99.999% alike but obsessed with the 0.001% differences. There are people who are prepared to go to fisticuffs over whether versus X of chapter Y is properly translated in the NIV or whatever.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteI almost made a political statement. I'm mortified.
DeleteTo be clear, I'm discussing things in which the stakes are low. I'm not suggesting that no one has a right to be angry about serious problems.
DeleteThe pedagogy dispute between two 20th century classical guitarists probably won't lead to fisticuffs. I probably didn't need to get angry about it. Just another example. (Did edit a Wikipedia article however, for the first time. Hopefully the last.
@Scott - I admire your self restraint!
Delete@Hare - As we all know, for some reason it's much easier to get angry about issues that aren't serious than those that are. I get furious about bad punctuation. The Syrian War I treat with a sort of resigned sad shrug. Odd.
I was raised Catholic, but the combination of my strange curiosities and the black magic of the internet has led me to know about the Bible stuff you mention.
DeleteJust remembered the time I had the impulse to defend Catholicism on social media. A religion I have not believed in for about two decades. Like I said before, no one is immune.
It's the old joke about academia: the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so low.
Delete(To misquote Sayre.)
Steven Universe is fucking great. You would HATE it, though, oddly, you might like Peridot since your characters are extremely similar. She is not far of drawing a diagram like that herself.
ReplyDeleteI hate the name of it. It seems deliberately twee. That annoys me.
DeleteI agree with Patrick that Steven Universe is an amazing show. However, I think a lot of the people who ran Lauren Zuke off of twitter aren't actually grown adults. By and large I suspect that a lot of them are LGBTQA high school and college kids living in a world chock full of homophobia who have just learned the basics of critique. So they feel strongly and lash out. It was absolutely wrong what they did but it is also understandable.
ReplyDeleteI don't really think that "feeling strongly" is an excuse for lashing out. If anything I think there is really a bit too much "feeling strongly" around these days and not enough thinking calmly.
DeleteThe thing that strikes me so oddly about the "queer baiting" angle is that literally every non-human character on that show is queer.
DeleteOne of the most unfortunate things about human nature is that strong feelings, especially in large groups, can be exploited by those who seek power for its own sake. Always be wary of the ones whipping up the crowd, no matter what cause they claim to champion.
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granfalloon
ReplyDeleteYeah, but those referees really DO suck, don't they?
ReplyDeleteThis is...I think the word I'm looking for is "dismaying". A valid point about entitlement, and an interesting comparison between nerd and sports subcultures - couched in a sneering tone of moral superiority, which is apparently justified because you have no personal interest in a particular cartoon?
ReplyDeleteAnd possibly, your point 3 suggests, because you think that anyone gay who wants - is emotionally invested in wanting - stories about people like themselves are guilty of Political Correctness Gone Mad. Your brushoff of Jeff in the comments as making excuses for people who just need to sit down nd shut up - sorry, "think calmly", was it? - looks like it support that reading.
I could be wrong, and I'll absolutely apologise if so, but this looks ugly.
The only explanation is surely that I have the worst possible motives and am a raging homophobe, I suppose. Almost certainly also a racist and sexist. Not to mention ugly.
DeleteNo, you are just an everyday, garden variety asshole. A kind most common on the Internet. Your martyrdom is as petty as the rest.
DeleteThanks!
DeleteYears ago I got hounded off of a Gamma World email mailing list for the blasphemy of positing that Yexils (a bat winged lion bug monster that exclusively eats polyester clothing) were kind of "trippy". The angered parties got to the point of writing out long posts about my getting brutalized for daring to speak out of turn and conjecturing that I was being sexually abused by my parents. It was shocking and hurtful and confusing to receive that sort of treatment over an opinion, but it was around 1996 and I hadn't yet realized that's what the internet was like.
ReplyDeleteNowadays I wouldn't bat an eye. It's just business as usual.
Do I think the culture is falling apart? No, the culture has always been falling apart even as it's been building itself and it just happens faster, harder, and stupider at internet speeds. You always have to factor in Penny Arcade's "Greater Internet F#ckwad Theory", which I call the AAA principle: Anonymity+Audience=Asshole
I recall reading that in early post-Roman days fans of a particular sport (I don't recall what. Maybe chariot racing.) divided into two fan/gangs called the "Blues" and the "Greens" and would knife each other in the stands.
I will chime in that Steven Universe is a wonderfully written and produced show.
Speaking to both Jeff and Luke's points and noism's response, I don't think feeling strongly and thinking calmly are mutually exclusive. If you feel strongly about something, it's better to go after your goals in a measured and humane fashion. (And lynch mobs are never measured or humane, no matter how justified the participants feel.)
Equating being told to calm down with being told to shut up kinda leads to escalation of conflict. It's like taking the safety off of your gun 'cos you're certain it'll always be pointed at the right targets. Case in point: Lauren Zuke has publicly stated she's gay, so the twitter mob accusing her of queer baiting weren't exactly shootin' straight (No pun intended...)
Like noisms, I've only encountered the show secondhand, but I'm aware that it has quite a fandom of young LGBTQA people, and that its positive representation is deliberate on the part of the creative team. For the fans to abuse people creating something they care about, aside from being indefensible, can only be counterproductive.
DeleteI take your point about escalation, and that there are better and worse ways to pursue your goals. But dismissing other people's viewpoint as invalid because they're being emotional and you're (allegedly) not, particularly about issues that are intrinsically emotional for them, is a well-understood abusive silencing tactic.
I wouldn't have assumed that of noisms on the basis of the appeal for calm alone, but on the heels of vague accusations of making things political...well, he's talking about identity politics, which means it's about the queerness. Dismissing even abusively angry queer teen fans as not calmly thinky enough about things which speak to their queerness is a very bad look.
So you're saying abusive anger is justified based on the angry abuser's identity?
DeletePerhaps invalidating a person's actions could be separate from invalidating the identity or motivation behind them.
Perhaps someone using their identity to justify counterproductive and hurtful actions as righteous could be an abusive silencing tactic in itself.
"So you're saying abusive anger is justified based on the angry abuser's identity?"
DeleteI had to reread that a couple of times and think about it hard, which is evidence enough that I'm tired and not communicating well!
It makes sense to characterise someone as an angry abuser, if they're angry and abusive. It makes sense to characterise abuse as angry, if committed in anger. But not, I think, or certainly not in all contexts, to characterise anger as abusive.
Under no circumstances whatever will I argue that abuse is justified. Anger itself, though? Anger can be justified. On the basis of identity? I'd say so.
Perhaps actions and their motivations are not indivisible - granted.
As to your third point, I believe I just expressed my concern that noisms just did exactly that?..so, granted.
So... noism's questioning of the motives behind the abuse directed at Lauren Zuke is in itself abusive, with questionable motives?
DeleteThe idea that expecting people to control their emotions to the bare minimum level of not being abusive towards others is itself "an abusive silencing tactic" is completely ridiculous.
DeletePublic debate in 2016 in Western societies is completely dreadful regardless of the content of the politics. That's what I meant by there being too much "feeling strongly" around. Everybody it seems "feels strongly" about something, and also feels that it entitles them to vent their spleen wherever they feel like, whenever they feel like, and against whoever they feel like. I'm not sure when precisely it became unfashionable or "abusive" to insist that people behave like grownups and control their strong feelings, but I'm not about to change my view on that.
I'm absolutely not making an argument that abuse is okay. What I am is worried about the reasoning on display behind *this* argument:
Delete1: that the fans is question are "grown men and women", and that their actions spring from childishness,
2: a good observation about sense of entitlement that I'd be perfectly happy to make myself,
3: "why have they got to make eerything political",
4: oh, fine, the portmanteau character name thing is silly and usually makes dreadful ugly words, but you realise it comes from celebrity "journalism", right? "Brangelina"? They didn't invent it as a thing. And I realise that it's for humourous effect, but it's a repetition of the accusation of childishness, no?
As I've already said, Jeff originally raised the point that from what we know of the fandom - hell, from the awful way they've acted over this - the people doing this are very probably *not* adults, and quite probably queer.
And when Jeff made the point, in reply, noisms...talked past it, about "calm".
Taken together, that's, let's see - a group of adults, with a agenda, who need to calm down about it?
So how's this for fannish entitlement: I've got a copy of Yoon-Suin on my bookcase, which I bought with my own money, and I'm only human - so I'd like to believe that if I ever found myself waiting for a delayed train or whatever, and noisms (or the creators of any other thing I like) happened to be there, we could have a nice chat and go our own ways afterwards thinking well of each other. A sincere belief in The Gay Agenda would be a dealbreaker for me, so I'd like to believe that that's not what's on show here. (Which is entirely plausible - if I thought that what's written here demonstrated that, rather than possibly suggesting it, I'd have cut my losses and left without commenting, never to return!)
I'm sincerely hoping that noisms will tell me that it's not the case, that I've inferred something that's not in fact there. In which case, as I said, I've got a sincere apology standing by for suggesting it.
Abuse is not justifiable. Coming down on abusers *for abusing someone* is fine with me. But if, *if* the thought process is actually "see what the gays and their agenda did", that's...not, as far as I'm concerned, coming from the moral high ground.
It's not about the "Gay Agenda". It's about agendas. The idea that works of fiction should primarily serve an agenda (any agenda) in my view undermines the fiction. And if the creators of fiction end up feeling as though they have to serve an agenda (any agenda) before serving the interests of plot, character and drama, then the fiction is critically weakened and will surely die.
DeleteI don't really appreciate the feeling that I have to answer to anybody for possibly hinting that I might have a Wrong Opinion about something, especially as here when it feels as though you are doing the classic internet comment thing of assuming that I am starting from a position of bad faith and arguing from there. But if it makes you feel better about buying Yoon-Suin I do not have a sincere belief in a "Gay Agenda" nor any problem with gay characters appearing in Steven Universe.
I'm really, truly sorry for making you feel that way. (I suspect that in any face-to-face conversation, this entire exchange would have as been as simple as: "Oh, but you're not suggesting...?" "No, I'm not," and that would have been the end of it.)
DeleteAnd, as promised, I'm sorry for picking on the things you *did* say and asking "Are these the negative space around a Wrong Opinion?" I won't make excuses for myself; it's not pleasant behaviour.
I enjoy owning Yoon-Suin (and reading your blog!) - rightly or wrongly, a different answer might have diminished that (and I wouldn't have come back here). So I'm selfishly, fannishly glad I don't have to find out! Thank you for the things you do and the words you write.
You're welcome. Not a problem - the internet is really not an ideal communicative tool.
DeleteFans care a lot about work of fiction. Fans get unreasonably pissed when work of fiction doesn't do what they wanted it to. Yawn. As your football example shows, this isn't exactly something new.
ReplyDeleteSomething, something, ... fall of Western civilization?!?
I'm very surprised to read this sort of hysteria here.
I'm always mystified when people think I'm being entirely serious on the blog. Is it something about humour not crossing the Atlantic very well?
DeleteProbably.
DeleteBut really -- is this post entirely un-serious?
DeleteNevermind. That's a stupid question.
DeleteNot entire un-serious. Of course I am not serious about it being justified to dismiss Steven Universe out of hand. Nor am I serious about this really being a signal of the fall of Western civilization. Or about Amedot.
DeleteI am serious about fans needing to re-examine their sense of entitlement and understanding of fiction, and about the crossover between nerds and sport fans.
The difference here is that (one might argue) part of the "entertainment value" of a sporting event is the fan interaction. You can watch a game on your TV, but if you pay money to show up at the stadium part of the experience is cheering (and sometimes booing) during the match, no?
ReplyDeleteThere are extremes of poor etiquette/sportsmanship of course that a rational person would deem unacceptable (I don't start fights with folks wearing the other team's jersey in the stands, for example) but cursing and groaning (or cheering and "high-fiving") is as much part of the experience as drinking $12 beers.
Interfering with a TV writer's writing though, is kind of like running onto the pitch and interfering with the goal-tending. But I hate social media, so I'm biased...I'm hoping Twitter and whatnot collapses before civilization does.
This part is a rather new form of entitled behavior I've noticed more and more on the internet, especially with social media and comment sections offering fans unprecedented access to the creators of the media they consume. With some web comics I follow it seems like the author is constantly in a low grade conflict with the fans in their comment streams.
DeleteEven as a very small time creator of content myself I've had to tell viewers/readers, sometimes forcefully, that I'm not taking requests or suggestions for my work. It really is like trying to play a piano concerto and having audience members trying to sit down on the bench next to you and bang out their own tune.
@JB: Yeah, that's a good point actually. There is a distinction in that sense. I think the similarity is just the levels of vitriol. The kind of things people say on social media to people they dislike is really quite strikingly similar to the kind of abuse that gets hurled in a football stadium.
DeleteOne thing that interests me is the difference between sports. Football/soccer fans are notorious for being extremely abusive. But go to a rugby or cricket match and the crowd will be nothing like that and will be very family friendly.
@BJ Johnson: That does seem like a new thing, doesn't it? It is hard to imagine Dickens getting letters demanding he change his plots or characters...but then again, maybe he did and I'm just parading my ignorance.
DeleteWell in traditional print media, letters full of unsolicited story ideas for established authors would never make it past the editor's circular file. So any pre-internet examples of fan suggestions are most likely lost to the ages.
DeleteIf you want to get less irrelevant alerts, you can change the alert to include something like -"Stephen Universe".
ReplyDelete[note the 'minus' sign]
DeleteExcellent! Thanks.
DeletePeople are taught that artists don't have rights and should kowtow to public opinion. Especially when "political correctness" is involved.
ReplyDeleteIt's disgusting, but not surprising.
An excellent example of politically correct (attempted) censorship is when the radical feminists of Gamergate harassed Anita Sarkessian for giving conservative commentary on video games.
Deletebefore this devolves further into pseudo-political quagmire.
ReplyDeletebackgrounds on the steven universe are drawn by the sam bosma. you can see his RPG and fantasy friendly work here http://sbosma.tumblr.com/
he is also author of the super fun YA fantasy series called (wait for it) fantasy sports (for now basketball and beach volley). the series follows an adventuring somewhat d&d-ish protagonists as they travel around and engage in fantasy-infused sport events. so - steven universe > sam bosma > fantasy sports > soccer. voila, the very heart of your cross-section.
Haha, nice.
DeleteFunnily enough I have been thinking for ages about some sort of RPG involving fantasy sports that sounds vaguely similar to that.