On the Ground at AwesomeCon 2025

At the Walter E. Washington Convention Center for DC's ComicCon

Friday, April 4th, 2025

My introduction to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center was coming out of the Mount Vernon Square metro station and seeing doors marked as exit only. I was unsure where to go; however, I did see a large number of people dressed in cosplay so I had figured I was in the right place (on the Metro, I had shared my car with a man dressed as the classic Riddler). Seeing all the nerds in one place gave me hope, and I followed the nerd herd to the main opening of the convention center.

The center is a big, spacious building; the line for convention-goers to enter was winding like a snake through the building. There was a weapons check for cosplayers, which surprised me a bit (I didn’t dress as anyone—I had gotten this assignment from Arturo Serrano only on the Wednesday preceding the convention so I wouldn’t have had the time even if I were inclined to such things). From there, I made my way up the grand staircase of the entire building to the registration hall, where I picked up my badge. It was in this massive exhibit hall, mostly empty—it felt like an aircraft hanger, but all the planes were in the sky, doing who knows what, who knows where.

The registration hall was behind a major open area (called the ‘bridge’ in the official communications as it connected the two major buildings of the convention center) where there was a DJ who played all sorts of music during the event, and where people occasionally danced (although no dance I can do). What was really striking, though, about the bridge was that it was the great public square of the convention, where all the people here bedecked in such exquisite costumes were making their way hither and yon. I remember a guy dressed as the Heavy from Team Fortress 2 who I talked to briefly (I played that game a lot when I was in high school, and I recognized his gun as a Tomislav, which I used when I played Heavy), but I couldn’t work up the nerve to actually ask for his picture. Unfortunately I have no cosplay pictures for you as I am simply too shy to do that with any regularity. But being in that plaza (I can’t really think of a better term) was invigorating, just seeing the hustle and bustle from my kind.

My convention experience was one of panels; the only convention I am a regular at in any meaningful sense is Capclave, which is run by the Washington Science Fiction Association (to whom I pay dues) annually, and which is a very much a speculative literary convention, where there is no cosplay, no actors, no film, only nerds talking about books. As such I didn’t see any of the panels with actors on them, nor play any games. I am here for the books and my writeup, for better or for worse, will reflect that.

My first panel was on history and science in science fiction, with C. K. Westbrook, J. R. Traas, and Avrah C. Baren. This was a fun little panel where the topic was really something of a fig leaf. It wasn’t particularly methodological or rigorous but it allowed the authors to go on about things that interested them, something like a well-written essay collection. I enjoyed it.

My second panel was in the same room, on the Art of Worldbuilding with P. Djèlí Clark (whose work I adore), John Scalzi, R. R. Virdi, Timothy Zahn (whose work I also adore), Fonda Lee, and Seanan McGuire (whose Wayward Children series I adore). They talked about how writers integrate the world into their stories, and how to do that well. The best part, by far, was R. R. Virdi going on a long digression about comparative mythology, which ultimately persuaded me to buy one of his books. We need more interesting tangents about interesting things.

There was a very good panel about black holes, where I learned about all the strange anomalies thereof, and it was staffed by scientists. After that, in the same room, was a panel about investigating a few pages of an old German book from the eighteenth century about South American flora and fauna. It was an interdisciplinary look at this book, from scientific and artistic perspectives.

The final panel I went to that day was entitled Luke Skywalker and the Holy Grail, wherein the two panelists discussed the Arthurian roots of the Star Wars saga. The two of them (whose names I sadly do not remember and are not recorded in the AwesomeCon app) had a presentation that was rather short and the room collectively spent the rest of the time asking about incongruous parallels between the two (they said that the Arthurian equivalent of the Star Wars Holiday Special is The Green Knight and that the Arthurian Gonk Droid is the Holy Hand Grenade).

After that I took the Metro home.

Saturday, April 5th, 2025

I opened my day with the Lightsaber Show put on by the Saber Guild, a DC-area Star Wars reenactment group. The whole thing was essentially a play with a plot concocted to provide an excuse to wave lightsabers around. As such, the plot was a little thin, but it made up for it in both lightsaber-based theatrics and occasional humor (they riffed on the "Come to the Dark Side—We Have Cookies" meme to hysterical effect).

I spent much of the next time in the Dealers' Room, which is a massive exhibition hall in the basement of the convention center which looks like yet another aircraft hangar (is the Air Force planning to use the convention center in the event of civil unrest?). I bought two mock votive candles from Illuminidol, one with Astarion on it and one with Shadow the Hedgehog on it, for my sister and a coworker respectively (my sister was completely baffled by it, which was the intended reaction). There was something about the Dealers' Room that made geekiness feel very material, very plastic, as if it were a thing that you could hold in your hand.

I spent too much money on books in the Dealers' Room, because of course I did (whenever a friend of mine enters my room they are stunned by the number of books in there). I got to talk to Jennifer Povey, whom I have previously met at various iterations of CapClave, and upon hearing that I wrote for Nerds of a Feather, said that she loved our site (hats off to you, my fellow NoaF writers!). I also ran into JC Kang who I had met at DISCON, and whose book Songs of Insurrection is very good, and y’all should read. I also got to see the science demonstration of dry ice, which was spectacular.

There is only one complaint I have about the Dealers' Room and it has nothing to do with the vast majority of the dealers therein. It was due to the fact that AwesomeCon felt it acceptable or appropriate to let the United States Marine Corps have a table, and to advertise said table via the convention app. Those of you who have been reading my work on this blog have seen my opinion on the craven people in the American terror state that are eagerly helping the Israelis reduce Gaza to a wasteland, and no fandom organization should be giving them a platform to launder their reputation and possibly recruit (as luck would have it, a writer I follow posted a piece on the Sunday of the convention about why joining the US military in this moment is a bad idea). We have rightly ostracised the Russian state over Ukraine, and we should ostracize the American terror state over Gaza. Letting genocidaires present at an event like this is monstrous, and a complete abrogation of any ideals of tolerance and acceptance that the organization purports to uphold.

Then there was a panel called “SciFi in Real Space: A Talk with an Astronaut and Space Experts,” notably featuring astronaut Leland Melvin. The title didn’t really describe what actually happened as there was little discussion of fiction, but plenty of discussion of life on the International Space Station, which was worth the time. The astronaut mentioned that he could listen to satellite radio in space; I later asked him if the reception for the radio was better in space by virtue of being closer to the satellites, but unfortunately it is sent to Earth and then beamed back up.

After that, I went to the Latin Dancing for Nerds event run by Stephanie Metzger. This was more familiar to me than to many others because social partner dancing in its various forms is my physical hobby; I’m leaps and bounds better at lindy hop than bachata, the offering at this event, but I can hold my own in bachata (even if experienced bachateros see how bouncy my footwork is and say that I’m obviously a lindy hopper). The whole thing was run very well, although doing any sort of dance on carpet is inevitably problematic (I remember, back at DISCON, noticing that all the rooms called ‘ballrooms’ by the hotel were carpeted over, and it made me very sad for a moment).

Next up was a panel on Beast of the East: Urban Legends, Hauntings, & Filming Locations presented by L. R. Staszak, Matt Lolich, Neil A. Cohen, and Matt Blazi—I knew a good bit of these, such as the Bunnyman and the Mothman, but they were so entertaining in their back-and-forth that the whole thing was fun regardless. It also exposed to me how many filming locations are nearby, and the industry around filming locations as tourist traps.

Then there was a panel on Real Life Superheroes: Nonfiction in Graphic Novels presented by Todd DePastino, Bill Maudlin, Maximilian Uriarte, and Wayne Vansant. I wasn’t expecting this panel to be so military-focused but it was interesting all the same, with talk about theory and various interesting historical stories. I also ran into my good friend Sean C. W. Korsgaard, and we ate at the Ben’s Chili Bowl in the convention center for dinner.

Next up was a panel on Haunted DC, hosted by Scott Larson and Kennedy Simpson. Simpson works for the Congressional Cemetery and told a story that can only be described as stranger than fiction. In 2002, the Cemetery got a call from an unknown person who asked “Do you want William Wirt’s head back?” The call subsequently dropped. The Cemetery is the burial place of Mr. Wirt, the Attorney General under presidents James Monroe and John Quincy Adams and a famed man of letters, and also was the presidential nominee by the Anti-Masonic Party despite the fact that he was a freemason. His head had been stolen from the Cemetery circa 1900 (based on the qualities of the box containing said head) and had ended up in the collection of a skull collector(!!!) in New Jersey who had recently died in 2002; the call was from the executor of his will. After testing that the head was indeed that of Mr. Wirt, it was interred with the rest of him. Simpson said that the working theory among Cemetery staff was that his head was stolen due to his fame as an intellectual meeting the phrenological fad of the turn of the twentieth century, by people who wanted to know what made him tick.

The last of that day was what was billed as a discussion on Moral Ambiguity in Modern Villains but really was one guy talking with the audience on said subject. In fairness, it was an interesting discussion, although it was hobbled by an unwillingness to really get political about it

Sunday, April 6th, 2025

The first panel of the day was one with Zoraida Cordova and Timothy Zahn discussing their work in the new Star Wars expanded universe. It was very interesting popping the hood and seeing what made the two writers tick, having enjoyed both of their works (Zahn follows only Harry Turtledove in being the writer whose works I have read the most of). During the Q&A I hijacked the Star Wars panel to ask if Zahn were planning to do anything with the universe in his Conquerors trilogy, and he said he was working on something which I hope sees the light of day. I later got to talk to him briefly in the dealers’ room and I tried not to fanboy too hard, and inevitably failed.

Then there was the comedy show Multiverse Got Talent! hosted by Steve Katz and with a few other comedians. The jokes were only sometimes nerdy, but were often funny enough that I was entertained. My favorite was Angel Penn, whose shtick is that he is an alternate universe version of Eminem who is Black and an anime fan. It was a very odd combination but it ended up working.

The next panel I went to was called Plot and Pacing, which had Fonda Lee, Seanan McGuire, M. L. Rio, John Scalzi, R. R. Virdi, and P. Djèlí Clark. It started about pacing but went into a wide-ranging discussion of writing processes. The most striking part was when Scalzi said that he did not do drafting, which shocked everyone in the room. He went on to clarify that he does not bother writing second, third, fourth, etc. drafts of his novels, a practice he says is a relic of the age of typewriters when one had to literally retype the entire draft multiple times. With word processors, he tinkers in a single document over an extended period of time, which is a similar amount of revision with less repetition. Once this was explained, the room understood him, and looking back at it, this is how I wrote my academic papers from middle school through my undergraduate degree, so I can’t really fault him for that. It does raise interesting questions about how writing should be taught in a world with ubiquitous word processing software, but I am no pedagogue.

The last event I attended at the convention was a live recording of the Dugongs and Seadragons podcast, which was a rollicking time travel adventure set in Antarctica. I had never attended such an event, nor listened to such a podcast, beforehand, but the experience was engaging with a good dungeon master and an experienced cast.

After that, I went home, found dinner near the metro, and then collapsed for several hours. It messed up my sleep schedule for the ensuing week but it was so much fun it was worth it. I had heard of friends going to AwesomeCon before, being a staple of DC-area geekdom, and this was my first experience. I do not believe it will be the last.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Review: Extraordinary Visions: Stories Inspired by Jules Verne

A curious experiment in probing the minds of fans

More or less a year and a half ago, the North American Jules Verne Society posted a call for submissions to a planned anthology of short stories inspired by Verne's oeuvre. These could be sequels, prequels, sidequels, or original pieces using the same vibe or setting. The result is the book Extraordinary Visions, which contains thirteen stories from across the Anglosphere.

What this collection contains is the purest form of fanfiction—and here I must be very clear that by "fanfiction" I don't mean anything derogatory. These stories consciously seek to honor and perpetuate Verne's style, buttressed by the state of scientific knowledge that existed during his lifetime. This is the highest form of flattery Verne could have hoped for from his readers; indeed, one can read Extraordinary Visions as a historical register of the state of English-speaking Verne fandom at this moment of the 21st century. However, in terms of literary quality, the success of the experiment is mixed.

The Dominion of All the Earth, by Joseph S. Walker, a belated epilogue to Journey to the Center of the Earth, suffers from too much loyalty to the original text. The dialogues try for antique but come off as stilted and verbose. The protagonist has done all his actions prior to the story proper, leaving him only with the role of sitting and listening to seven pages of exposition, and that's the end. If we judged this text by today's narrative conventions, the first criticism would be that this is not a protagonist propelling the action; this is a protagonist having the action dumped onto him.

However, when considered as what it really tries to be, an epilogue to the original novel, it fits perfectly. On its own, this story can't boast much in the way of structural quality (nor can the novel), but if we imagine this story printed at the end of the novel, extending the plot beyond its original non-ending, it helps it reach the completion Verne couldn't give it.

To Hold Back Time: A Baltimore Gun Club Adventure, by Michael Schulkins, more a stealth remake than a true sequel to The Purchase of the North Pole, also shows the limitations of prioritizing faithfulness to the original. In speech, mannerisms, personalities and interests, this story achieves a credible recreation of the Baltimore Gun Club, one of the most suffocatingly ultramasculine creations of literature. However, this outdated vision of scientific progress still finds resonance. The scenes where the Club's entrepreneuring gentlemen meet to plan the improvement of human life via the all-purpose power of firearms bring to mind today's equally overconfident tech bros, obsessed with moving fast and breaking things.

This time, the Club's big idea is to give themselves more free time each day "for extended gunnery practice" by slowing down the rotation of Earth. How, you ask? With huge, carefully positioned cannons, of course. The story delivers the bits of humor that can be expected from such a premise, but the plot follows the beats of The Purchase of the North Pole so closely that the reader will not be surprised to find a similar ending that happens for similar reasons, with the added disadvantage that this ending requires experienced cannoneers to commit an elementary mistake about how recoil works.

A Drama in Durango, by Alison L. Randall, is a more original story, even if it's partly inspired by A Drama in Livonia and less directly by Master Zacharius. Its protagonist is a fan of Verne's books who lives in the age of cowboys and uses the same logical methods of Verne's characters to solve the case of a wandering bank robber who turns out to be linked to a much larger conspiracy. The plot is woven impressively tight, with each step in the chain of secrets, betrayals, plans and counterplans fulfilling its function in harmonious order.

Old Soldiers, by Gustavo Bondoni, is rather problematic. It's set decades after the ending of The Steam House and deals with the reconstruction of its mechanical elephant so that it can be used in World War I. Although the idea of defending France from the Kaiser's troops with a steam-powered robot is a potent premise, that adventure is only reported in a late flashback by a minor character; we don't see it happen. The focus of the story is centered instead on an Indian man who worked as a servant of the British pilot of the Steam House, and who even in his last years continues to feel for his old master a reverence that is disturbing to read. The abusive power dynamic between colonizer and colonized is never addressed, and the rightness of arming the British Empire with a huge metallic fighting machine is simply taken for granted, as it was in the original novel. Add to these problems the two lead characters' fixation with manly emotionlessness and the story's unquestioned pro-militarism, and the result is a deeply uncomfortable read.

Want of Air, by Janice Rider, is another story about Verne fans. With a gentle touch over the wounds of grief, the author draws a poetic parallel between a widow and a son comforting each other during a winter night and an episode in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas where Nemo and his crew are trapped with only a few hours of oxygen left. This story gets the closest to the stated spirit of the anthology in that, instead of playing with Verne's fantastic machines, it goes straight to the more vital topic of readers' shared love for Verne and what that shared love can bring to your life.

Nellie and Jules Go Boating, by David A. Natale, alludes to a real-life incident. In 1889, American journalist Nellie Bly embarked on a solo trip around the world, in an (eventually successful) attempt to complete it faster than Verne's imagined 80 days. During one of the stops in her itinerary, she happened to be close to Verne's house in France, so of course she took the opportunity to meet him and discuss the adventure she was undergoing. No one knows what they said to each other. This story imagines what might have happened in those brief hours.

The premise is a good one, but the dialogues suffer from the frequent appearance of untranslated French in the middle of lines supposed to be transcribed in English for the reader. Also, for a story about a woman's determination, independence, and accomplishments, there's a bit too much of focus on Verne's relationship with his father. Those sections distract from the events that are actually of interest, and are written with less technical finesse than the rest of the text.

The Highest Loyalty, by Mike Adamson, is a standard rescue adventure starring Captain Nemo. He receives a call for help, he helps, the end. The briefly mentioned backstory, where the Nautilus was part of the Underground Railroad carrying Black people to freedom, would have been far more exciting to read than the plot that is instead told here.

Embrace of the Planets, by Brenda Carre, is a surreal potpourri of Verne references, as well as a multilayered dramedy about the stories we keep about ourselves and that not everyone deserves to hear. Bonus points for Doctor Who vibes.

Rust and Smoke, by Demetri Capetanopoulos, plays with the possibility that Captain Nemo's diaries might have been found ashore in Norway, but not recognized for what they were. This story carries a bittersweet aftertaste of how quickly the most precious memories can fade into the indifference of time.

Gabriel at the Jules Verne Traveling Adventure Show, by Joel Allegretti, captures with the sincerity that can only come from first-hand knowledge that primordial experience of being a child who meets the worlds born of Verne's imagination for the first time and naturally, as we all once did, wants to become part of them.

Tyranny Under the Sea, by Christopher M. Geeson, presents a terrifying scenario: what if a fragment of the Confederacy had survived in a secret city on the ocean floor? And what would a slave revolt look like in such a place?

Trumpets of Freedom, by Kelly A. Harmon, merges the plots of Robur the Conqueror and The Lighthouse at the End of the World into something less tragic than either. Vasquez, the lighthouse keeper, has built mechanical workers to help him with his daily tasks, which makes him exactly the type of unconventional thinker that Robur is eager to befriend.

Raise the Nautilus, by Eric Choi, is the blood-pumping adventure you want a collection like this to end with. The British Empire has its hands full, what with fighting the Kaiser in Europe, so what good would it do to send warships to the South Pacific in an improbable attempt to salvage what could remain of Captain Nemo's shipwrecked invention from the ruins of the Mysterious Island?

It is to be commended that this story takes the time to consider the moral tensions inherent to having British soldiers steal the life's work of an enemy of the British Empire. Unlike in World War II, the Great War had no good/bad divide: all parties were criminally culpable. The single-minded, never-ending pursuit of bigger and bigger guns is hinted at in some dialogues. However, the story stops short of attributing any tactical advantage to possession of the Nautilus; one central character explicitly predicts that, in the new kind of war that the 20th century has brought, even Nemo's advanced weaponry will make very little difference regardless of who captures it. So, in the end, the core question this story hinges on is not whether the British will remain unconquered by the Germans, but whether Nemo will remain unconquered by the British.

Extraordinary Visions is a worthy read despite the uneven selection it's composed of. It especially piques my curiosity that the most innovative, thoughtful and creative of its stories are those written by women. If I may be allowed a very rough generalization, the men wrote about interacting with Verne's settings and characters, while the women wrote about what Verne means. Verne himself might have felt more at home with the first style of writing, but both are compelling ways of exploring the legacy of one of science fiction's biggest forefathers.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Southard, Steven R. and Hardesty, Matthew T. [editors]. Extraordinary Visions: Stories Inspired by Jules Verne [BearManor Media, 2023].

Review: Space Craze

A sojourn through the history of star-spangled science fiction

Gene Roddenberry called outer space ‘the final frontier,’ and those three words have become an iconic tagline of his most famous creation; after all, he pitched Star Trek as ‘wagon train to the stars.’ Such a comparison, of the gulf of space with the American West, is so common that we tend to forget how quintessentially American that conflation is, indeed how very American the science fiction genre has been. All that, and more, is the subject of the 2022 nonfiction book Space Craze: America’s Enduring Fascination with Real and Imagined Space Flight by Margaret A. Weitekamp.

Weitekamp is perhaps the most qualified person on the planet to write such a book; she is the chair of the Space History Department at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C., a place I spent so many happy hours with my dad as a child growing up in the DC suburbs (although I probably made my dad sit through the planetarium movie too many times). Every chapter, she starts with a discussion of a piece of memorabilia in the museum’s archive that she has personally handled, grounding the book in a reality that many of us have seen if only second-hand.This book is, ultimately, a cultural history of America’s love affair with the heavens, the story of the dreaming that led to that one small step for a man.

Weitekamp clearly knows her stuff; she goes all the way back to the nineteenth century and the earliest literature that could be described as ‘science fiction.’ It allows her to do what she does best in this book: contextualize works of fiction that many of us have read or watched, indeed loved, but never thought of the world it came from. She talks about the strong influence of Westerns on early science fiction, and how its fingerprints are still felt today. She talks about the evolving role of extraterrestrials as the ‘other.’ She goes into great detail about the influence of Buck Rogers and the tropes that it spawned. One particularly striking moment is when she gets to the 1970s and is talking about the original Star Wars. She mentions a Black critic in California who calls that film, now a beloved classic (by myself included) as the most racist film he had ever seen, because it implied that no people of color would exist in the future (fortunately, this would improve in franchise history, but I can’t deny that the original is very white in its cast).

As I previously remarked with the chapter openings, she also does a wonderful job of humanizing this history. A lot of the book is about the history of science fiction fandom, from the earliest conventions to the myriad websites of today. I joined my local science fiction society in 2019, and I believe I am still its youngest dues-paying member; I was stunned to learn that people I was talking to had met Isaac Asimov. With the long view Weitekamp provides, you can see the world of fandom from an age where you could read every SFF book released that year evolve slowly into the world of today, with a plethora of work to lose yourself in.

There’s a part of me, though, that wishes Weitekamp were a bit more radical. A big theme here is the notion of frontier and its role in American mythology. Recent works on the American frontier, such as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth: from the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, and John Grenier’s The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier 1607-1814 have problematized the rosy, white-centric view of the frontier, rather revealing the truth that it was, to put it bluntly, a successful continent-scale genocide, a history that has defined America’s self-conception ever since (it makes sense, then, that a country that has never known a day of peace would create military science fiction).

This is a period of wholesale annihilation of entire peoples that is the basis of so much of America’s literature of futuristic dreaming. Weitekamp discusses Garrett Putman Serviss’ novel Edison’s Conquest of Mars, a novel that ends with the white male protagonist releasing floods to commit genocide against the Martians, because they are a ‘dying race.’ In his book A History of Bombing, Sven Lindqvist contextualized that book, among with many others, with the history of waging war on entire peoples that started in the colonial world and culminated in the Holocaust. Indeed, the American West was one of the great inspirations for Hitler’s plan for Eastern Europe (for the curious, I recommend Carroll P. Kakel’s book The American West and the Nazi East), a genocidal process of ‘civilized’ white people exterminating the ‘inferior’ natives and creating an idyllic land of hardy soldier-farmers living off the land. I’d imagine that an employee of a government-funded museum cannot be so candid about such history, but I feel like this was a missed opportunity (or the subject of another book - Lindqvist touches on this nasty history in the formation of apocalyptic narratives in American culture, but not enough to sate my curiosity).

Space Craze is a good, solid history of American science fiction, albeit whitewashed in the way that our mainstream history usually is. As a history of people, who played with toys and went to conventions and loved dreaming of new worlds, it is astounding, and I recommend it to every science fiction fan.

--

The Math

Highlights: seeing how SF fandom became what it is today

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

'Ghostbusters: Afterlife' is the latest round in a conversation we're tired of having

It's become a vicious cycle: we keep begging movie studios to do something original, and they keep refusing to learn from their bad choices

How to properly grapple with the fearsome cultural weight of the original Ghostbusters is a question that the franchise has acknowledged before. In 1997, the beloved cartoon The Real Ghostbusters was followed by an unexpected sequel: Extreme Ghostbusters, in which paranormal researcher Egon Spengler recruits a new team of young heroes to continue the fight against supernatural menaces. This show was darker and less goofy than the previous one, a necessary course correction given how The Real Ghostbusters had attempted, starting on its third season, an ill-advised shift toward a family-friendlier tone. Notably, the series finale of Extreme Ghostbusters is about Egon reconnecting with his old pals and going out to chase ghosts like they used to, annoying the new team with their obvious mid-life crisis and condescending attitude. Most of the humor in this two-part episode is done at the expense of the original team, portraying them as so self-absorbed and meddlesome that we can't wait to see them go. The villain is defeated by the collaboration of both teams, but not until the seniors acknowledge that the torch has been passed.

That degree of self-awareness is lost on Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the latest result of filmmakers' current state of utter terror of their own audiences. Just like Disney took the overblown hatred thrown at The Last Jedi seriously and gave us the insipid Rise of Skywalker, Sony Pictures let the vitriol about the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot scare it into delivering a safe, reassuring, bland, reverential, unimaginative, inoffensive-yet-fully-offensive pat on the head for all the entitled manchildren who couldn't accept women wearing a proton pack and spent the last half decade demanding that the studio go back and fix it.

This attitude of "go back and fix it" has done serious damage to the movie industry. When James Cameron returned to the Terminator franchise with the explicit intention of erasing everything after T2 (Cameron actually said the words "we’re pretending the other films were a bad dream," which by now ought to be taken as a prophecy of doom in Hollywood), hardcore fans cheered, only to be treated to the underwhelming Dark Fate. Even today, many fans still demand that George Lucas be brought back to supposedly save Star Wars, forgetting how the prequels are made entirely of bad choices. The same bizarre cult of personality forms the backbone of the #RestoretheSnyderverse movement.

Hidden beneath the rage and the hyperbole is an interesting discussion about the nature of authorship and canonicity. The fixation on canon stems from a misplaced need for veracity that belongs in historical studies, not in fiction. It actually matters if Nelson Mandela was freed and elected president of South Africa, and did not, as many misremember, die in prison. It does not matter if Superman gets married in one storyline and is back in high school in the next. To offer a not wholly unrelated example: each region of India has their own myths about the gods, and the Hindu attitude is to deem all of them valid. Conversely, in the Western world, there's only one official canon of Scripture, even though in the early Christian times there was an immense variety of gospels in circulation, and there were bitter disagreements about which selection of books were meant to belong to the One True Canon. The latter approach is the one taken by fans who demand that all pieces of a franchise fit together in a single, neat, agreeable lore. Viewed in this context, it's not surprising that genre canon is being treated with a reverence that crosses into dogmatic fanaticism. The Ghostbusters franchise repeats the fatal mistake of the Terminator franchise in adopting the position that only the Holy Word of Reitman is true.

Even worse, this disregards the franchise's own ethos. For all its flaws, the original Ghostbusters at least made the progressive statement that ordinary, working-class people could become heroes by dedication and effort (as bumbling and unprofessional such effort may be). Afterlife, instead, is an aristocracy where only the legitimate progeny of the heroes (and of the filmmaker) deserve to inherit the legacy. This feeds into a toxic possessiveness that shuts off possible avenues for innovative storytelling.

The many ways Ghostbusters: Afterlife fails to entertain have already been dissected in ample, gory detail. It's been called "a soulless ode to nepotism," "dead on arrival," "manipulative and ethically dubious," "nostalgia whack-a-mole at its worst," "a nightmare colored in shades of sepia," "an ouroboros of nostalgia cannibalizing itself," "a dungeon of necrophilia," "a slimy, stinking corpse of a sequel," and (my favorite) "a gloomy nostalgia trip through the ruins of American culture." There's no diplomatic way of putting it: a movie made this badly should be a career-ender.

But Ghostbusters isn't done with us. This is a conversation we cannot avoid, however much exhausting it is to have to tell angry Gen-Xers that the way they remember the 80s is very biased and that the rest of us shouldn't have to care about their hair-sprayed, mini-skirted, shoulder-padded, neon-lit, lead-fueled memories anyway.

So, time for a little bubble-bursting: the character of Peter Venkman in the original Ghostbusters is an insufferable narcissist, a parasitic excuse of a friend, and a serial sexual predator (and in the second movie, a xenophobic bigot) who would have been kicked out of academia (not to mention out of polite company) decades before we meet him in the first movie, and the fact that the actor who played him was brought into the 2016 reboot for the sole purpose of blasting him out a window was a fully deserved catharsis.

You need to do some serious work on your adulthood if your childhood is even capable of being retroactively "ruined." No movie, however much cherished, deserves to be treated as sacred and untouchable. The original Ghostbusters oozes with erotic subtext that is missing from devoted fans' starry-eyed recollection of their first viewing. The movie reaches its climax with the heroes smeared from head to toe in creamy white goo, and the second movie, even more overt in equating heroism with intercourse (see: Louis Tully), is obsessed with a different type of goo that is bluntly coded female (as in bright pink and highly emotional). When fans demand a sequel that respects Ghostbusters, it's hard to comprehend what exactly they find so respectable.

This phenomenon is not new. Haters of The Last Jedi protested that it didn't respect Star Wars, but what you get when you make a movie worried with respecting Star Wars is the nervous people-pleaser that is Rise of Skywalker. The same thing has happened with Ghostbusters: Afterlife. It's embarrassing to see a studio agree to perform any humiliation demanded of it, and it's depressing to consider that this won't be the last time fan feedback will intimidate filmmakers into abandoning all self-respect (it's no wonder that "don't be yourself" is made into a motif in Afterlife).

Even if we try to be generous and analyze it apart from its connection to the franchise and (for the sake of argument) apart from the torrents of discussion surrounding it, Ghostbusters: Afterlife fails at the basics of storytelling. We begin by following the story of Callie, a single mother who moves with her two children to a rural town in the middle of Nowhere, Oklahoma because they're penniless and the only thing they have left is the badly kept farmhouse where her estranged father died. Her son Trevor barely has a role beyond being a hormonal creep, but Phoebe, her genius daughter, quickly discovers that there's something not quite right about this place. There are unexplained earthquakes, and ominous rock carvings, and self-moving chess pieces, and people who call themselves "Podcast." As it turns out, her mysterious grandfather was not a jerk, but a hero who died trying to capture an evil deity before it could consume the world.

Phoebe reconnects to her family's heritage with the help of literally the first acquaintance she meets in the town, a summer school teacher who happens to know some geology and who by the magic of plotting chance is a big adoring fan of her grandfather's exploits. But once he's provided the mandatory exposition (with the implied moral that today's adults do their children a grievous disservice by not telling them about the Ghostbusters), this character ceases to be any help at all. Despite being the only person in the state of Oklahoma who even knows what a ghost trap does, his first impulse upon finding one is to poke it with a stick and irresponsibly release an undead monster that immediately runs to the ominous rock carvings to help bring the end of the world. The next thing our heroic teacher proceeds to do is get possessed by a dog demon, engage in a sexual ritual that couldn't possibly have been consensual, and... that's it.

So let's check up on the kids. The role of Phoebe was given to a decent actress, but the way she's written makes her the least believable portrayal of neurodiversity since Sheldon Cooper. Her petulance gets boring very fast, and her relationship with her mother is adversarial to the point of emotional wounding. One might say, in Phoebe's defense, that she comes from a difficult family background. Not only did her grandfather leave with no explanation; her father is also to blame. It's completely understandable to break up because you don't like your partner anymore; it's monstrous to break up because you don't like your child. However, that doesn't suffice to build a defense of Phoebe, because the movie has no interest in exploring that angle. The massive amount of trauma in her backstory is glossed over in the service of ancestor worship.

On her brother Trevor's side, the seams of the story become even more strained. He's not so much a character per se; he's more of a recognizable face that's useful for selling tickets. He has an instant crush on a girl who only keeps him around to play mean pranks on him and who by the magic of plotting chance is related to the only other adult in the town. The rest of the characters are treated as background decoration, which makes it hard to believe in the stakes when an ancient horror crawls out of its pit.

Said horror takes the shape of an androgynous fashionista who doesn't seem much interested in conquering; she likes to sit and pet her demon dogs and look menacing until someone comes to tell her bad jokes and steal one of her dogs. In the final battle, in which a family that have only behaved in a mean and resentful manner to each other have suddenly learned to cooperate, the young heroes prove incapable of completing the job, and a team of retired Ghostbusters come out of nowhere to show the kids how it's done. We meet the disturbingly wordless specter of the dead grandfather, who seemingly gets forgiven for simply showing up, and...

Yes, and... this movie doesn't even bother having a proper ending.

Where does this leave us? Yay because the monster is gone, boo because the heroic family is still destitute. Yay because the kids uncovered their true place in the world, boo because their own effort had no part in building it. Yay because the lonely mother landed a hot boyfriend, boo because he's a terrible teacher who makes zero effort at his job and despises his students. Yay because we got a girl Ghostbuster, boo because the only way Afterlife could think of to make the concept of a girl Ghostbuster palatable to the rage mob that savaged the previous movie was to remove from her character design all physical and behavioral markers of femininity.

In sum: seen on its own merits, it has none. Ghostbusters: Afterlife is not exciting, or scary, or funny, or interesting. It's just a very, very bad movie. But when we bring all the context back into the discussion, it becomes something worse. It's a capitulation to the rage mob and a validation of its abusive tactics. It's a vulgar stroking of the audience's nostalgia buttons. It's a set of manacles fastened around the creative potential of the franchise. It's a childish attempt to remove from memory the actually good 2016 reboot (and the actually good 1997 cartoon).

This movie pulls a back muscle with how hard it winks at the viewer. The repetition of the same villain with the same plan and the same methods as in the original movie is an appalling display of subservience to lore and plain unimaginativeness. The needless completion of Ivo Shandor's origin story is exemplary of the worst tendencies of explainer culture, which confuses mysteries with mistakes. The camera fetishizes every piece of merchandise prop with such awe that one expects the frame to include price tags. The ending includes a "go back and fix it" redo of dialogue from the original movie that was uncalled for and ultimately inconsequential to the fight. The post-credits scenes land with all the obnoxious box-ticking of Chewbacca's medal. And one can almost hear Phoebe say "I'm all the Jedi" when Harold Ramis is digitally dragged from the grave for a moment of cheap fanservice that is contemptible beyond words.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife has nothing valuable or memorable to add to the main continuity it so anxiously defends, shows no awareness of the raunchy tone that made the original a classic, and sets a disturbing new precedent for the dynamic between fans and filmmakers. That this was avoidable (they could simply have ignored the rabid manchildren and produced sequels to the 2016 reboot) makes the result even more lamentable. Instead of a loving homage to a generation of cinema, what we got is an era-definingly bad movie.

Nerd Coefficient: 2/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

CoNZealand Fringe Transcript: Your Fave is Problematic: A Perennial Fandom Dilemma

During CoNZealand, a group of fans put together a set of panels, which took place outside convention hours, which would be available for free via Youtube and offer a taster of the Worldcon experience to those unable to participate in CoNZealand's programming hours, or hadn't bought a membership but were interested in the kind of content provided. The result was a set of 15 panels over 6 days, archived and available for all at www.conzealandfringe.com.

As a fringe event in the tradition of Edinburgh Fringe and other international collateral events, CoNZealand Fringe was conducted entirely outside core programming hours and spaces, and panels were not official CoNZealand programming. CoNZealand Fringe is not endorsed by CoNZealand.

Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together is pleased to host the transcripts of CoNZealand Fringe panels for fans who are unable to watch the videos or prefer a written format. This is the transcript for Your Fave is Problematic, which ran on Wednesday 29 July 2020 at 6pm BST/1pm EDT/10am PDT/5am NZST (next day) and is available here. Other panel transcripts are available via our transcript hub.

Your Fave is Problematic: A Perennial Fandom Dilemma

Panel Description: So you’ve found a new piece of media you really enjoy, and it’s going great! Except, all of the characters just happen to be white, cis and straight, with not a disabled body in sight. Somehow, all the mothers are dead, all the girlfriends have been fridged; that’s a lot to write off as an accident. Maybe new information has come to light about the media creator, and you can’t watch without thinking about it. What can you do? Our panelists explore the many ways fans choose to engage with problematic work without excusing the inexcusable: from critical analysis and transformative works, to walking away if they need to.

Host/Moderator: Noria (she/her)

Panelists: Shaun Duke (he/him), Foz Meadows (any), Russell A Smith (he/him), Jeannette Ng (she/they)

Noria: … I know like, I'm just like it's so cute the screening...

Shaun: [two thumbs up]

Noria: Ah!

Russell: And we're live!

Jeannette: [waves]

Noria: We're live! [laughs]

Jeannette: Hello.

Russell: Hello!

Noria: Yes we are! Yay! [laughs] Hi everybody, welcome, welcome!

Shaun and Foz: [wave]

Noria: I wish I could say welcome in various language. But I know welcome in Yoruba. [laughs] And that's it, so we are going to just stop at welcome. Hello everybody. [audio issues] It's nice to see everybody here.

[Pop-up from Sky5angel: hi guys!]

[Pop-up from Miklis Writes: hello!!]

Noria: OK so everyone can see. Good, we're good. We are good. So I would say once again hello everybody I am certain you already saw the title so you know why we're here, we are here to talk about y'know: our problematic faves. Your problematic faves. Our problematic faves. Some people's problematic faves where we are like, nope, this is some trash fire garbage and we're walking away from it. You know. You know it. So. I'm Noria. [laugh] You're on my channel, it's Noria Reads, I tend to talk a lot but I'm moderating today so we're going to keep the talking to a minimum. I have amazing guests as you can see, we're all here to talk about it, and I'm just going to leave them have them introduce themselves to you. To the world. Because, you know, it works best that way. So you have the floor. Who wants to go first? [laughs]

Shaun: [raises hand]

Noria: Okay. Okay.

Shaun: So hi, I'm Shaun Duke, I'm one of the hosts and producers of the Skiffy and Fanty Show which is up for a Hugo this year.

Noria: [silent clap]

Foz: Woo!

Shaun: Thank you, very cool. It's pretty neat. And I guess other than that, I'm also a teacher, I work as a professor in digital rhetoric and writing. And I have studied many things by very racist people, so I think I will have much to say today.

Foz: Hi, I'm Foz Meadows, I'm an Australian living in California, I'm an author, blogger, fanwriter, fanfiction writer, and I have a Hugo that I won last year for best fan writer -

Noria, Shaun, Jeannette: [silent claps]

Foz: so I don't entirely suck at ranting on the internet apparently! [laughs]

[Pop-up from Ellana Rose Thornton-Wheybrew: "I have studied things by many racist people" – I think that sums up academia so well.]

Russell: Hi, my name's Russell, I write books I have jumped into weird history investigations. I have been working on various head heritage bits and pieces as well, and I'm one of the co-presenters on the Brave New Words podcast, and sometimes we also do books. Other than that, yeah, I'm a fan, I sometimes read things, I watch lots, and play stuff too.

Jeannette: Hello, my name is Jeannette Ng, I wrote a book called Under the Pendulum Sun, it's about missionaries in fairyland, and it's all right. I got up on stage and called Campbell a racist - a fascist last year and apparently that was a big deal

Shaun: [silent cheering]

Noria: [laughs]

Foz: [silent claps]

Jeannette: I most recently wrote an article about Korra, which I'll probably reference here.

Noria: That is awesome, okay. Like. Wow. I feel like such a fan, just because it's just I'm surrounded by people who very vocal especially with the problematic aspects of fandom and being able to call them out and that just brings me so much joy

[Pop-up from socrates: Call them out!!!]

Noria: And yes we have people in the chat who are very, very down for that, so I think we're gonna have a lot of fun. I think to start off the conversation, because - especially because, Shaun, you started by talking about the fact that you have had experience in calling out racist shit in academia, and I remember when I was first looking at this panel the first thing that came to mind was: it's so funny, when was the first time right that you recognised a problematic aspect in a fandom? And say recognise, you know while we're kids and we're enjoying stuff, we don't see because it's always so layered and we never get that chance to have that experience. So when was the first time that it actually hit you that "Yo, this is some racist bullshit." [laughs] I'll just ask that! So yes.

Shaun: Okay. So I think for me -

Noria: Maybe I should go first -

Shaun: Oh okay, whichever direction.

Noria: No no no, please, Shaun please. You have the floor.

Shaun: The first time I think I realised that there was a racism problem in science fiction fandom more broadly was probably when I took an American Studies course in college about African science fiction, African-American science fiction, and realising that was a thing that existed. Which is a bizarre thing to realise, but y'know when you're reading and you don't really pay attention to what you read and you're just picking up books that's got spaceships on it, when you're a kid you don't really think about who's writing this, you don't go "Oh who's this Asimov guy or who is so-and-so" and then taking that class taught me that these problems exist in this community and there's a whole other world of stuff to explore, and then that just takes you down a rabbit hole. Especially if you're in academia, where you're just suddenly going down all of these bizarre holes into some of the most racist problems that exist within fandom more broadly. Jeannette has obviously raised some of those problems as well - and actually, all of us, I think, probably have. So, that was the moment that I realised that there was an issue, and it took me a few years to realise what to call that issue, beyond saying that this stuff isn't being given attention. So. I'll kind of stop there.

Noria: Thank you.

Foz: If I can jump in, I don't know if anyone's listening to this instead of watching it, but I am a white people. And I grew up with the obliviousness of a white people -

[Pop-up from Scott Edelman: I was glad I was able to thank you for that, Jeanette, at the Hugo afterparty!]

Foz: - about being a white people. And you just have that thing of, what you are is the default that you have in your head, and when you're broadly represented like whiteness is in everything, it doesn't occur to you that something's missing, because it's not something that's personal to you. So I'm genderqueer, but I will also talk about being a woman or growing up as a girl, and that was the thing that I noticed, was that "Oh here's a story that is all guys and no girls," or girls are there but they're doing a very specific restricted thing, or "Oh hey, let me internalise that sort of misogyny of not all girls, but just me: I'm special and exceptional because I have a sword." Which is annoyingly prevalent in certain parts of even modern fantasy sometimes, which is very weird. So I was, like, embarrassingly adult before I realised the - before I really even became conscious about social justice issues frankly. Even having come out as bi at high school... Australia, or the part of Australia that I grew up in, it's a very different racial mix, to for instance, where I live at the moment or where I lived in the UK. It's very white, the predominant non-white population is Chinese-Australian of varying generations. Essentially from my personal experience black people were mythical, basically, because I had never encountered anybody in real life. That was, just from where I lived, and so it was I was an embarrassingly adult age before I was at the point to look at science fiction and fantasy or fandom or anything that I loved and be like "Oh hey, this is super white and maybe that should be examined and poked at and called out." And then since then I've been trying to educate myself about it, but I think I have to acknowledge that where I come from is a position of privilege in that regard and failing to notice it is common for a lot of people who grow up similarly. And it's the blind spots don't transfer, so I could be recognising "oh hey this is really straight, that I'm reading" or "really male", but that doesn't make the leap to oh that's really white because that's the part of you that you're seeing represented. So

Russell: Yeah. Just jumping in a bit on that, just to add really, I think even if you are one of the minorities affected, depending on the system and institutions you grow up in and around, it can be difficult even to notice when things are coming at you as well. I mean just a bit of background on me, I went to a fairly posh secondary school, which was I got in by passing a couple of lucky exams and possibly charming a couple of the teachers, I don't know. I had a rough time in that school from day one, and I never - and it was years -

[Pop-up from The Book Finch: Foz, I definitely relate to that experience, having grown up in an extremely homogenous country.]

Russell: It was years after I left that I even half began to look at why I thought the entire time it was me. But yeah, growing up in that, and there's kind of some pathway onto a factory of a - going into further school system from that I was never really comfortable being a part of and I didn't know this at the time. It's amazing what you are trained to not notice. So.

Foz: Yeah, particularly in posh school environments, so for my last three years of high school I was able to go to private school because a rich relative died and left us money, literally that was the reason why. And it was a very white school, I did have some friends who were people of colour there, and there were like Chinese-Australians or Vietnamese Australians and Australians of various other... people of colour in the school. But, my god, the racism was just constant for them. When I look... And of course most of them weren't in a position to call it out, or if they did call it out it couldn't - it wouldn't change because the institution was so white. And I look back now and I'm horrified by how much I even participated at times just by not knowing that that's what it was or not thinking it mattered and you look at it now like "Oooh, burn that to the ground." It's not a good environment when that happens.

Jeannette: I think there's a certain itch, because I grew up in Hong Kong which was a British colony, so I'm both incredibly British but also have - but also grew up in a society that was not majority white, and produced a lot of media starring characters and people and written by people who weren't white. But also I had a very different - Hong Kong media and English media are very different to me because I'm not fluent in Chinese. I can speak and understand Cantonese but I can't read it, so I can't, didn't grow up reading novels for example. But, not the point. The point I'm trying to make is, [sigh], I've always been very interested in that little itch, of that feeling of like "this thing is set in Hong Kong, but it doesn't read like the Hong Kong I recognise, why is that? This reads wrong to me." And I think I've always been kind of interested in the tropes, the kind of fallacies that stories get into. We used to [laughs] play a drinking game whilst reading, like, trashy romance novels. It's kind of like a Mystery Science Theatre but we would drink alcohol - it was a thing we did at uni, OK - and one of the categories was that "Did not wiki it" kind of feeling of "You're an American, you've clearly not been to London, this is not what people in London sound like, this is not what people in Ireland sound like, this is not what Irish people sound like, this is not what Hong Kong people sound like," and so forth. And very much we grouped all of them into the same box at the time, and this kinda feeling, and I think that we didn't have a term for why it feels bad to be represented in a way that you felt was untrue, and not all of the things in that box were racism or sexism and so forth, but they all felt a certain way, and now I'm kind of untangling them again. But that itch was there for a long time. And I like prodding it, I like trying to pull that apart and undersatnd it, and yeah. Drinking games.

Russell: I mean even, yeah -

Jeannette: We were called Lord Sin's Loinfire Club. We had a blog.

Shaun, Foz: [Laugh, silent clap]

Russell: I mean even with London, or name just about any city, there's many Londons depending on who's looking and where. Some of the stuff you see on TV or books.

Jeannette: Even looking at the BBC. I mean, Ben Aaronovitch, wrote Rivers of London, he loves saying that you know, it's all written from white people from the provinces imagining this all-white London and it drives him nuts. I remember him saying I think he quit writing for them or got stuck out because he called some producer very racist and also a swear word.

Russell: Yeah, I think that's -

Foz: Oh no, a swear word! The worst word!

Jeannette: Sorry?

Foz: I said "Oh no, a swear word."

Jeannette: The other thing I think which is quite interesting to me is that I encountered a discourse early on written by Asian-Americans and obviously their experience of racism and anti-Asian racism is very different from that which I am familiar with. Or and - perhaps to my shame, for a long time, I didn't really understand their experiences, because they would be sensitive to topics and issues that I did not respond to. And, some of those things I still kinda think they're wrong, but also appreciate that they have a very different lived experience to me, because they didn't grow up in Hong Kong, they don't have this background, and their culture and things that are racist and stereotypical in an America centred way are very different from what they would be in the UK or Hong Kong.

Russell: Yeah.

[Pop-up from Ellana Rose Thornton-Wheybrew: I read the first Rivers of London novel, and it's so local to me I was like "Oh I've been to that exact shop!" but it still didn't match my experience – too straight, abled, white, etc.]

Foz: One of the biggest problems fandom can have sometimes - I think I saw a post about it recently on tumblr - but the idea of competing needs basically, within fandom. Whereas - it just confuses me that a whole concept, particularly around something like shipping but more generally, where the whole point of fandom in a plurality of opinions and a plurality of interpretations, but people will get bogged down in the idea of the one true interpretation or the one correct way to argue a thing or what is right and what is problematic. And it'll be like, OK, yeah, sometimes there's a more clear-cut argument about, for instance, who is the bad guy in a piece of media, but that's a really simplistic example. You look at something like "Is this good representation of a particular group?" and say "Well, yeah for a diaspora community this particular representation is really really powerful and really really important, but from someone from, say, the mainland group they're looking at it like "This is really American." I mean =

Jeannette: I mean, Crazy Rich Asians is probably one of the archetypal examples.

Foz: Yeah

Jeannette: Of something that a lot of the - especially the American diaspora community really connected with, and is problematic for a whole host of reasons

Foz: Yeah

Jeannette: Because of how it depicts Singapore and how South Asian people are in it basically as a punchline, and [sigh] but and I think kinda spooling back to my thing about the itch you feel, sometimes we feel that itch and sometimes we try to apply language to explain that feeling. Something is wrong and I need to explain it, the problem is that sometimes the label we apply to the thing that is wrong is not the correct label. Like, this ship really squicks me out. Is it squicking me out in a way that means no one should ever ship it ever again and no one should ever mention it in the universe, or is it an "OK, people, tag your thing", or even a level of "it squicks me but that doesn't mean -"

Foz: It squicks everyone out.

Jeannette: "-producing content about it is always bad?"

Russell: If you're watching or reading -

Foz: Yeah

Russell: Something is bugging you, but you're not necessarily -

Jeannette: What is bugging you, what is it, why, and what should you do about it. An obviously the power as well, because people who write fanfic is very different from people who are making the show itself or writing the book itself or financially benefiting from these things, and the problem is within fandom, I think when we're calling out problematic things, there is a slight tendency to prioritise targets that you can actually affect.

Foz: Yeah.

Jeannette: So getting another fan to take down their fanart or fanfic, that is a thing that you genuinely meaningfully do, you can indeed harass them off the internet, but you probably can't get the writers of Supernatural to make your ship canon.

Foz: It's exactly that, and it has that has the paradoxical effect if once again if you're trying to support marginalised representation and marginalised creators, you end up punching down more often than you punch up, because the people who are actually trying even if they get it wrong are more likely to listen to the criticism, or those who are new to the industry, or those who are, as you say, fan artists or fan writers or individuals, they're more accessible because they're not behind several levels of corporate bullshit in order for you to talk to them on the internet. And if they actually care, they're more likely to say "Oh maybe I should take the thing down, maybe I should stop." Whereas somebody like the absolutely vile human that is, like, Perlmutter, head of Marvel, nobody's going to stop watching Marvel or reading Marvel because of him even though he's literally the worst and he's the one ultimately deriving heaps of financial benefit from it, but he's inaccessible. You might as well try to punch god because it doesn't do anything.

Jeannette: I'm not trying to make it out that you know, small creators or fandoms or fantartists are beyond critique, but I think it becomes it becomes very frustrating that you feel like you're not actually wanting to punch this specific artist, you're actually - they are standing in for the larger system that you are feeling powerless to affect.

Foz: Yeah.

Jeannette: And sometimes we're talking about trends and spaces, which kind of goes into fandom and how - like, Tumblr's tagging system was very bad for developing tag communities.

Foz: It's still bad.

Jeannette: It's still bad, but if you click on the tag you will see everything.

Foz: No you won't see everything, that's half the problem, you'll click in the tag and it's like, I know this is mentioned but it's -

Jeannette: In all the wrong ways! In precisely the wrong ways! But in the sense that I'm given to understand the anti communities because people felt they couldn't escape from certain types of content or couldn't hide themselves away to a place where - to not see it.

Foz: There is that, but I also think there's an element to it of people taking discourse - the dread Disc Horse like we're having now - that people taking the view that if something is criticised and the criticism is reasonable, therefore it should be a hard rule, and it completely erodes nuance and it completely erodes the the idea that actually people have competing needs and competing investments in fandom. So what is good for one person might be bad for another and you can actually examine things on a case-by-case basis, and instead you've got this thing saying, you've now got these groups arguing "Oh, absolutely anything that does X and if one bad person is involved in a thing, then the whole thing's bad," and just attempting this very evangelical idea of moral purity, where you can't be touched by anything bad, or you are bad. And it just doesn't work functionally and becomes very frustrating to deal with that.

Russell: As a result of that, it can get absolutely crushing to have any kind of discussion on fandom in a large audience because somebody will jump on your for nothing. Which probably isn't nothing, you know. So yeah. I mean, on that note, and seeing if they're talking about, y'know, a very very obvious example a very obvious example would be Star Wars, especially the shall we say divisive nature of the recent trilogy.

Noria: [laughs]

Jeannette: Fuck Star Wars.

Russell: Where do we stand on Star Wars? I realise that each of those movies is its own panel and I realise -

Jeannette: Russell I'm not going to talk about Star Wars.

Russell: - I can't, I can't, I'm sorry I've been sitting on this because I've gotta go. I mean yeah we could have, there's panels on any of the last three, but yeah, but sorry, Jeannette I know what it is as well it's... yeah. What did they do with that last episode? I mean, it's relevant to this, because - it's entirely relevant to this panel, because problematic plus toxic fandom can lead to some quite extreme back dialling of characters we need to see more of.

Shaun: This gets to the bigger problem of that dreaded word discourse, where the idea is that in a fandom you're not all necessarily agreed but you're having conversations and disagreements and you're supposed to be working through things, and maybe you hit a point where you're like "we don't agree on this but that's fine", but in some fandom communities the arguments over the things different groups think are controversial get to that point where it's like Russell was saying, you either mention something and it's suddenly like a sea of people coming to destroy you with their tridents, and it gets to the point where the fandom seems so toxic that it's exactly what Russell was saying, there can then be suddenly very potentially problematic things being suggested in a certain fandom suddenly appearing in the actual materials. From the official canon. And Star Wars is one possible -

Jeannette: Yes, but —

Shaun: Sorry, go ahead Jeannette

Jeannette: So I was on a "Women of Star Wars" panel... before the third film came out, it was after Last Jedi, I was in Rey cosplay, it was great. It was a great panel but right at the end, during questions, a white women in the audience basically got up and said "please condemn Reylo shipping. This is a bad ship and I want you to condemn it, it's very bad." And I was startled, because, dark secret, I do ship that ship, I'm not [air quotes] "active in the community" or anything but that is a ship I like, I like dark princes, I like bullshit. No secret I am trash for this kind of thing but the thing is - and I was really taken aback, it was very intimidating to be just put in the spot, and go "Oh, okay, is that where we're at now?" It felt very confrontational. And I don't want to make it out that Reylo shippers are the most beleaguered people on the internet, because they're they're not, and they kind of, [air quotes] "kind of" got what they wanted in the last film so whatever, but the point is it's still kind of weird to have had that - I'm not over that moment, it was not pleasant.

Russell: It's almost like you were put in a position whereby you were given authority as a gatekeeper.

Jeannette: I'm not a -

Russell: But in a really sort of loaded way, it's just -

Jeannette: Yeah, and you know one of the other panelists was like "Why would you ship this, it's stupid, there's these other attractive men on the cast," and it's like "Well, I appreciate that, but I thought we having a nice positive like - don't kinkshame me for having very basic tastes!"

All: [laughs]

Foz: It's like the pumpkin-spice latte of ships, let me have it.

Russell: We are here to -

Jeannette: I have I have other ships that are perhaps that are less mainstream, but not the point.

Russell: Yeah -

Jeannette: My point it was just a really... and I think that was the kind of interaction I would like fandom to not have?

Russell: We are here to discuss why our fave is problematic, but at the same time we must allow people to enjoy things. Especially with ALL OF THIS. [gestures]

Foz: Before this there was a period where the word problematic first started being used in fan discourse and everyone kinda ran away with it for a while to mean-

Jeannette: [indistinct]

Foz: It's a good word! It's a good word! But it's like, everybody was using it to mean "Oh this is problematic therefore you shouldn't like it," or whatever and I feel like we've graduated to the point now of saying "well everything is kind of a little bit, or potentially problematic", there's a question of degree. But you can't get away from the problematic. At a certain point your only alternative, because the ultimate problematic thing being society, the only alternative is to go and live in a cabin in the woods, but not in the Thoreau way where your mum still does your laundry for you. You can't perfectly extract yourself from everything you don't agree with from media and society, so while there's examples where you can say this thing really upset me for these reasons and I'm just going to stop, you can't expect everybody to share that.

Jeannette: I mean, so, when I saw this panel title, the two fandoms I really wanted to talk about was old Norse, because I am an old Norse scholar back in the day, I have a stupid degree in this, and for the last decade, every time it's come up, I have to say "I'm into old Norse but not like that." I remember googling for essays, I was like "Oh no, like I don't have a copy of the Poetic Edda, better check on the internet," and it's like, three sites down or three pages into google you're like "Wait, isn't this a neo-Nazi website? Hosting the Poetic Edda for some reason?" And yeah, in case you're not aware, that's a thing that certain types of neo-Nazis are really into. And in fact so were actual Nazis quite into it. And they are responsible for quite a bit of early research and it's very bound into the field, and it's like well I am into this but also these other things, and that's - you know, the Vikings themselves and old Norse people were not an idealised society either, they were also very sexist, queer but also kinda homophobic at the same time, they had a different set of -

Foz: Like hockey.

Jeannette: It was it was not the same as -

Foz: Sorry!

Jeannette: - As we would have here now in this moment which kind of makes them interesting. Not the point. One of my gay professors would not shut up about the way that they were pro gay sex but only very specific sorts of gay sex.

[Pop-up from alliecat1019: Can you like without condoning? I don't know the answer to this but I am searching for the answer.]

Noria: Allie is wondering, and I think this is a very interesting question to consider because can you like without condoning? Because I think that's a question that a lot of people have in hand. And just like you Jeannette I do have a couple of ships that people have been proud to tell me "Yo, your ship is abusive!" and I'm like "I know that. Your point being?"

Jeannette: But that's why it's hot! I'm sorry!

Noria: But you know [laughs]

Jeannette: I think I'm okay!

Noria: Yeah. But like, how do you cross that divide? How do you say that yes, because my personal answer is just because I like something doesn't mean that I condone that behaviour. But a lot of people in fandom just can't wrap their head around that. They can't see liking something without wanting it and I'm what I'm wondering is, "Yo, all the movies you watch? You know, the revenge fantasy movies? Some of you might not want to admit, but a lot of us really do love because there's just something very satisfying about watching a character being like "I am going to get my revenge in the most bloody way possible". Equaliser, we bow at the magnificence that is Denzel Washington, and what I'm wondering is I can enjoy a good revenge fantasy, but it doesn't mean I'm going to go buy a gun and say "yo I'm going to start shooting everybody". It doesn't work like that. So how do you navigate these conversations, explaining to people that you can like something without necessarily wanting to condone or promote that behaviour.

Russell: Yeah, it doesn't work like that for most of us. Obviously we've had some really tragic high-profile examples of when that has not been the case, but well, The Equalisers a great one, because would that have been as awesome without Denzel? But yeah, sorry, going back a little to the previous point whilst answering this, skating a little further in history, hang on I was leading onto two points here. Let me cancel that one and start again. I don't remember but someone made a brilliant - there was a brilliant discussion I was on with some friends of mine, not a month or two ago about – about that old Michael Douglas film, Falling Down. Now I remember being introduced to this by my dad, because he was laughing so hard at some of the, certainly the scene where he goes into McDonalds and y'know Michael Douglas plays this angry white guy who just completely loses his shit one day, and goes into McDonalds and threatens to shoot it up because it's like a minute or two past them serving breakfast. Sorry. Where it comes obviously not condoning it, the more you watch, I think it's one of those films that weirdly holds up but has a different - but gets a different feeling for it next time. He is presented clearly as an anti-hero, but the more it goes on, the more it tips into "this is harder and harder to excuse". It's a really cleverly done film, because it's also the bit that we don't see so much, is the completely understated performance Robert Duvall puts in as the cop trying to deal with him. He's just the opposite. In the same way the guy's been through some stuff and seen some stuff, but he's also kinda "I see how you get there, I'm one or two bad days from this happening to me, but we can't be you mate", and yeah, it's that came across a lot, I dunno, I could hear Duvall's part a lot louder.

Jeannette: I feel like complexity and nuance aren't necessarily the answers to having problematic themes in your content, in some ways because... So Hunters, Amazon, it's the one on Amazon, it's the one about Nazi hunters set in the seventies, it's really good, but it kind of starts off being basically "Let's kill Nazis as revenge for the holocaust" and its kind of tagline is "revenge is the best revenge" and it promises you a revenge fantasy, and the revenge fantasy bits are great! And then later on it kinda tries to introduce more more complexity into the story, it's basically about is revenge really the thing you want? Is revenge too much? And in some ways it got in the way? I kinda just wanted it to be a simple exuberant violence, that it becomes this thesis on the morality of vengeance and the complexity of that makes it a less good revenge fantasy. And it's like, well, if you're trying to say revenge is bad, you've still spent so much time enjoying revenge that now you're trying to guilt me for it? I'm a bit like

Foz: Yes, because I'm not here for the philosophy of revenge, I'm here for the revenge.

Noria: [laughs]

Russell: Are you saying go watch John Wick instead?

Jeannette: I know when to [indistinct] out.

Foz: I think that's, just going to the question of one of the things - because we were saying earlier that people having different needs and getting different things from fandom or whatever, I feel when it comes to this, the question of how do you enjoy something problematic without endorsing it or how do you like something by a problematic person without endorsing them, I think the uncomfortable answer a lot of the time is that everybody has to draw their own lines and we're not always going to draw them in the same place, and a lot of the anxiety in fandom around this is that - and I understand this fear in the age of internet dogpiling, that a lot of people don't want to be seen to have the wrong opinion and to potentially get dogpiled for it. Or people are just terrified of being disagreed with to a certain extent, or being told that they're morally in the wrong. And the difficulty, I think the fear of that a lot of what the anti rhetoric, that "We're promising you that as long as you agree with us about everything you'll always be right and anybody who disagrees with you will be the bad guy" and there's a simplistic moral safety to that. But it's -

Jeannette: The problem with the anti-ship is like you can always say I am better than those guys

Foz: Yeah

Jeannette: I ship this thing which is bad, but as long as I dogpile onto this ship, I'm still pure.

Foz: Yes, yeah, it's exactly like that, and I think people, we don't like to admit that there's always going to be a potential disagreement over something that we care about, that there might be someone who for perfectly legitimate reasons says "Hey, I really dislike this, or hey, I like this thing that you hate," or, there's no one perfect position to take, that you have to potentially - you don't have to be willing to argue every single point, because you don't owe people that engagement even if they want it from you, I think as long as you can just sort of back up your own position, but also not even necessarily back it up, but just to be able to say "Yeah, you're right, I know this this I like is trash, I'm not morally defending it," because that's the thing, I think we often conflate watching a thing or liking a thing with morally endorsing it, and it's not always the case, and that's why in the fandom we talk a lot about "I am in the dumpster. This is my trash, I am a racoon person, shower me with garbage." We admit that. And at the same time of that, we still try to hold some kind of moral point around it.

Russell: Y'know - Sorry Jeannette, go on.

Jeannette: I was going to bring up The Untamed as quite an interesting example, especially of people wanting different things from their media. One of the things I find quite interesting in art more in general is that people who want to do - art from different cultures reflects unsurprisingly their own prejudices and there is no, to my knowledge, completely unprejudiced creator or culture, but however because people do have subtly different prejudices, that thing from another culture can scratch your itch in a way that nothing from your own culture can.

Foz: The thing with - something with The Untamed, the two things that I hold in my head constantly and for anyone who hasn't just seen it, it's on Netflix, it's a live drama adaptation of what started out as a queer web novel -

Jeannette: [indistinct] is better by the way

Foz: Oh yeah, I've heard that, I need to watch the Viki translation. But basically it's everybody involved in creating this tv show, the producers - I've got very far down the rabbit hole of looking at the behind the scenes stuff for this by the way, it's a little tragic

Jeannette: For the record it's about a gay necromancer who's in love with this ritualist -

Foz: Handsome sword boy.

Jeannette: - handsome sword boy and they're -

Noria: They're trying to make their love work.

Jeannette: - a lot in the TV show.

Foz: Yes. But the thing is that everybody involved in creating in the tv show, has gone "Okay, because of chinese censorship, we can't openly depict this as a queer relationship, but my god we're going to put as much sub in that text as possible, and we're basically going to play chicken with the censors and get as close to doing this as we can."

Jeannette: Unlike some, what was it, Goblin? There was another tv series -

Foz: Guardian, Guardian.

Jeannette: Because webnovels are very popular in China, slash webnovels -

Foz: Yes.

Jeannette; - "boys love", the genre.

Foz: Guardian.

Jeannette: But much like slash in fanfic it's primarily written and consumed by cis straight women. About queer love. Or some of them may well be less straight than they think.

Foz: Yeah. There was guardian that was the one that came first, and that was based on a queer webnovel, and that success of Guardian and The Untamed so now there's like a subgenre of cdramas based on queer content, but what I'm sort of getting at is, you're watching this as Western person, well I'm watching it as a western person, going the fact that I know it's subtextually supposed to be a queer romance and knowing that everyone involved in making it were making as a queer romance -

Jeannette: But -

Foz: - Is really meaningful to me. The fact that on-screen the straight relationships that are there aren't like kissing and swooning and everything, there's exactly the same amount of romantic tension between the straight characters as the queer characters, but I can also understand how someone would look at that and go "That's actually worse in a way that the queerness has been erased, that they're not able to show that" and getting really frustrated by it, but I'm looking at going OK, but the thing that I crave, my personal catnip is something like a fantasy story that just happens to have a queer romance in it where that's the main emotional throughline, and the west isn't producing that in tv long-game form. If they do, it's like a side couple or something, it's not the main emotional throughline and so I'm looking at The Untamed going "Okay I know that this is meant to be gay, I know that everybody making it wanted it to be gay and I know why it's not so even though I can politically object to the censorship -

Jeannette: and I think they're [indistinct]

Foz: Sorry?

Jeannette: Unlike in Guardian where they wrote in extra love interests. I believe it's Guardian they wrote in female love interests so it's more obviously censored.

Noria: And in fact there was a whole - because I was also following the untamed when they were shooting in regards to them actually making it, and there was a lot of uproar that started because initially it seemed like Wei Wuxian was going to end up with MianMian

Jeannette: MianMian? Really?

Noria: And everyone was all like "Yo, these characters are gay!" I'm saying it was a big deal, people singed petitions! Fandom was like "nope, this boy is gay" actually he's bi but he's not meant to be, he only has one person he's ending up with so yeah, so I can't get that.

Jeannette: But because The Untamed is also really interesting because one of its actors was personally involved in getting Archive Of Our Own banned in China.

Foz: Okay, yes and no though, because it was like... Basically there was an RPF fic with the two main actors from The Untamed, which is Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo, and this particular fic was written in Chinese, it got circulated on Weibo, and it was this huge backlash of Xiao Zhan fans who objected to his depiction in this fic.

Jeannette: Sure.

Foz: Because it was sort of like sex work but -

Noria: no he was depicted as being a trans woman, so they - it was messy, yes.

[Crosstalk]

Foz: It's alright, sorry, the thing that I've heard subsequently is that the Archive was probably going to be banned anyway at some point, this became the pretext -

Jeannette: Sure -

Foz: But the actor copped a lot of backlash for something that was not his fault.

Jeannette: Sure, but -

Foz: But apparently there was a whole expectation that he managed the fans who objected to it who started harassing other people, and it was this whole thing -

Jeannette: I think that The Untamed isn't - it's that problem with The Untamed though I'm trying to get is the wider context of China and, y'know, China: not the good guys right now. I watched Eternal Love and it's like oh, oh it's cool, it's that Uyghur actress that I like and oh yeah Uyghurs, they're still being imprisoned and culturally genocided.

Russell: To be fair we have a worryingly short list of good guys right now.

Jeannette: That is also true, and The Untamed hits that weird spot where has this - its also mentioned in quite a few fascinating conversations, such as people trying to argue that chaste queer romance is superior to not-chaste romance, because it's kinda fed into that argument of [air quotes] "clean" and the kink at pride conversations, where a certain subsection of people, queer people who are not comfortable with overt, depictions of kink, sexuality, kind of look at the Untamed and say "This is how it should be," and it's sort of like the "I'm glad you're getting the content you want, but also, where that comes from is is an uncomfortable place for a lot of other people, because it is born from censorship, not a desire to depict a squeamishness about sexuality in general.

Foz: Yes.

Jeannette: So yeah. It's -

Foz: Shaun, you had a -

Shaun: I wanted to jump in because I think it's really interesting, because we've been talking about works and problematic content that's in in works, and there's only been a couple of mentions of works created by problematic people. A little bit in this latest example

Jeannette: The entirety of china got brought up, Shaun!

Shaun: Yeah, but before, I got it, but what I'm saying that the question that led us to this point about "can you like something without condoning it", and it seems like that the answer we've come to with the works themselves: yes. You can enjoy something that is problematic without condoning what makes it problematic, but for me I wonder, the other side of this, which is about the people who may be behind it -and it was in the comments, the reference of JK Rowling, because she's one of the latest of the high profile examples of someone who's become extremely problematic, or as some people would say outright a bigot and a TERF.

Russell: And not even that recent, but yes.

Shaun: Fair point, I would say, for a lot of people it suddenly became very public, but it certainly wasn't recent, you're right Russell. And I think that the answer for the people who are problematic who create the things that we enjoy, the answer to this question is a lot harder -

Foz: I think -

Shaun: Can you enjoy Rowling without condoning Rowling?

Foz: I think this is a specific example where the medium matters a lot, because when you're looking at say an author, the author is the single person who creates the book, or sometimes it's two people writing together. But it's a much more one-to-one relationship between consuming the thing and supporting that person, depending on how you buy. If I go out today for whatever reason and decide to buy a second-hand copy of Rowling, she wouldn't get any money from it, because it's already been purchased

Shaun: Right.

Foz: So there are ways to engage where you can financially disengage from it, you can buy something secondhand. But when you're looking at something like a TV show, there are so many people involved so you say OK, do we go by the prominence of the person involved? Do we really care if an Assistant Director gets brought up on criminal charges because - or like are we concerned if it's the director, are we concerned if it's the producer, are we concerned if it's one of the actors, if it's a minor actor,

Jeannette: [indistinct]

Russell: I mean there's a big difference in positioning between Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, for example, so -

Foz: Yeah, and I mean, they're both atrocious, but the thing is, if you say "I'm going to stop watching", for instance, this tv show, because of one person involved in it, you're also disconnecting from everyone else involved in it who you might want to support whose fault this isn't. So I think it's kind of like a false - in a lot of contexts it can be like a false dichotomy to set up where you're saying watching the thing or not watching the thing is the way to express your disapproval of that person -

Russell: Sure -

Foz: - I feel like the more effective mechanism, because let's be honest, the big societal failing, the reason this is a conversation a lot of the time is that people with social power, people who are celebrities, people who are prominent within their industry, they don't suffer any consequences, so it feels like it's put on you as a fan and a consumer to try and demonstrate the consequences, but that's not how it should be. We're not the ones who should be holding for instance Warren Ellis accountable, or Harvey Weinstein accountable, that should be a legal thing, and there's a whole other conversation about the failings of the police and the law department everywhere. But what I'm getting at is that it's a fundamentally - I feel like fandom has taken this burden on itself, especially when it comes to stuff that's actually literally criminal, and not just "oh that person is a bit toxic or a bit dicey". Fandom has had this burden put on it to try and morally - to be responsible in some sense, emotionally for whether or not bad people make a living from the stuff that they do, particularly in context where they're not the only ones creating it, and where cancelling that entire show or thing would have an impact on the livelihood of other innocent people, and that shouldn't be on us

Russell: No -

Jeannette: Can I just -

Foz: - we should have a better -

Jeannette: - bring up an example, of something that came up very recently, because a new season is about to drop -

Foz: Of what sorry?

Jeannette: The Dragon Prince?

Russell: Oh yeah.

Jeannette: It's a TV show

Shaun: I was thinking Sleepy Hollow would be another good example.

Jeannette: Where the people who are saying the allegations are saying "we want change, we don't want fans to boycott the show, we want the company to be less sexist. We want to have our jobs -"

Russell: I need to mention Brooklyn 99 as well at this point because obviously it's a show babout cops, at the centre of it all, and for all of the goodwill it's had from - and quite a massive fanbase, one thing I would note recently that they've done, apparently they had the entire of the next season ready to go, more or less, or at least a large chunk of it, but because of recent events, they've basically canned the entire thing and said "Right, look, we're going to have to take a whole new approach on this." And that was not, I don't think that was anything the fans specifically asked for, I think that was possibly an expectation that the people on the show had on themselves, to give to the fans as to what they thought would be the right thing to do.

Jeannette: Yeah.

Foz: I hadn't heard that, I'm impressed to hear that, but I feel like it's a thing where ideally in a perfect world we would have better mechanisms for when stuff is criminal conduct as opposed to just skeevy grossness as opposed to something you can argue about or disagree, we would have better mechanisms at least for fandom not having to be the arbiters and be the ones advocating and saying "Hey, maybe the serial rapist should not have a TV show anymore and should maybe go to jail a little?" We shouldn't have to be the ones doing that. And yet the world is imperfect and that often falls to -

Jeannette: But I do think on that level, for some of us at least, it becomes a matter of, you can't see that person's face without thinking about it. If that person's behind the camera or in the writer's room or a producer you're like "Okay, I don't have to look at their face."

[General Agreement]

Noria: Was that not the reason why they replaced Kevin Spacey and had the entire last season centre Claire?

Foz: Yeah, but that's a fairly clear-cut example, because it's like, hey, dude's a rapist.

Shaun: It's an individual. It's an individual too, yeah.

Russell: Yeah.

Foz: And it's not just, oh, dude had some shady comments on the internet where people can argue "free speech ra ra ra," whatever, it's like legitimately -

Russell: A whole thing, yeah

Foz: - a go directly to jail, do not stop, do not pass go moment. But it's more or less -

Jeannette: An interesting comment from the - like about separating the artist from the art I think is quite interesting -

[Pop-up from Nikolas Fox: I personally don't think you can separate the art from the artist when it comes to authors because they inherently write it into their books. They are writing from their experience.]

Jeannette: Because in some ways it's very hard to separate the two, there's also a level to me where you could be getting something from the art that they didn't put there intentionally.

Foz: Yeah, there is -

Jeannette: So there is something there that that is actually an accident, is a happy coincidence because you come from different, a slightly different cultural background cultures or you have different set of life experiences, and you see yourself echoed there in a way that you don't see yourself echoed elsewhere and that's that can be very frustrating and you can be like

Foz: And sometimes when we talk about writing from experience, I think at a certain point - and again this is a your mileage may vary thing - when people are, I think it makes a difference to me personally when people are writing from a blind spot they might not have considered as opposed to deliberately, purposefully putting forward a view I find objectionable. So if I'm looking at somebody who has a story and there's no queer characters in it for instance, and I'm like "Oh, this is super straight and heterosexual," that's disappointing to me, particularly if I'm looking at the narrative and going "Oh I can see so many opportunities for queerness in this world" if it's a fantasy setting and I want to know how that works. And it might just be that the author, being straight, hasn't considered that. But if then I'm looking at somebody and they are actively bigoted and it's not in their work, that makes a difference to me. But again, its like a your mileage may vary thing, because - talking about trash piles and rolling around therein: I've watched most of supernatural and often that's garbage. And often it's complete garbage in ways that personally irritate me, but the bits that I like are what keep me coming back and the reason that I yell about the bad bits at all is because I care about the good bits, and I feel like that's the quintessential fandom experience often gets lost in it. Yes I'm yelling about this thing and the ways that it sucks, because I love it, or I love parts of it. And I wouldn't care, I wouldn't be invested in fixing the shitty aspects of it if it didn't have something that I thought worth engaging with.

Shaun: Yeah I think that part of what you're saying is that there's sort of like a difference between something that's irredeemably harmful, and something that has harmful elements but at its core maybe has something that's worth redeeming. So I can't speak for all of Supernatural because I'm about twelve seasons behind but - but right

Foz: There are so many seasons!

Shaun: There are so many seasons but there are so many aspects -

Jeannette: You're at least half-way through then.

Shaun: I'm getting there, I'm closing in, but there's aspects of the show that are certainly problematic, but you also have these really fascinating brother to brother love, these two brothers, not that kind of brother love, just to be clear, I know I know about some of the community, so I mean in terms of this family dynamic and these things and there those things I think are largely very positive about the show, and then you have the other problems that sometimes crop up, sexism and other things that Dean is a bit of a playboy and other kinds of stuff, but there is something at the core that I would argue -

Foz: Compelling

Shaun: Compelling, yeah. Whereas if you look at some other works and you might end up with a work that, like for example the Gor novels, which is, there's really nothing redeemable about the Gor novels. They're explicitly sexist, they sort of imagine a horrifying future in which women are essentially subservient and slaves and all these kinds of things, and those are largely irredeemable and they're obviously directly tied to the author in a way that -

Jeannette: But if for some reason you really want to wank to them, I'm not going to stop you, is what I'm trying to say.

Shaun: Sure, yeah, absolutely, there's a difference between you personally saying these are my lines and I don't cross them, and so like my rule is basically if somebody is very bigoted in public, I just wait till they're dead and then I can read their work. But that's my personal rule.

All: [laugh]

Shaun: Now I made that rule -

Noria: I like that rule!

Foz: Sorry Shaun, I just have this image of you like looking at a watch waiting - with JK Rowling like tick-tock!

Russell: That's a very special watch you have there.

Shaun: There's nothing Rowling's released that I need to wait on, there are other authors that are still alive that I - that might die soon. But part of it is also like the scale of publishing, right? So, any given year there's thousands and thousands and thousands of just science fiction and fantasy books, and I don't have the time to read all of them, I'm gonna die before I read the ones that come out this year alone, that's just impossible, so I have to make decisions about what I cut out, and if you've made the conscious decision as an author or whatever to go around saying horrifying things and whatever, for me it's an easy decision. I can't read read all these things anyway, so [chopping gesture], gone. And maybe if the work's really important one day and I need to write like a fricking dissertation on it, maybe I'll wait till you're dead and I'm 95, and then I'll write about it. But otherwise there's tons of other stuff that's worth my time.

Foz: I think that's the thing. You have reasons for picking and choosing. You only have a finite amount of energy, you have a finite amount of time, and if you want to say say "Hey I don't want to read or watch or support this thing because of x character or x arc,"... sure! Nobody is standing over you saying "I'm sorry, you haven't fulfilled your quota of bullshit trash misogynist fantasy for the month."

Jeannette: Wait -

Foz: Nobody's doing that.

Shaun: Right.

Jeannette: - But that comes with the problem that in certain circumstances you're told where in order to participate in this community you have to read the greats of SFF -

Foz: Ugggggggggggggggh MEN

Jeannette: - You know, you show up and then they're like "oh yes, you should totally have to read Asimov", and I'm like "Well no you don't?"

Foz: Kiss my Asimov.

Jeannette: Read literally anything else? You could find some of your A level maths problems and read those, that would simulate reading Asimov! There I said it.

Noria: [laughs]

Russell: Yeah, I had some friends at school who absolutely loved - good friends as well – loved Asimov.

[Crosstalk]

Jeannette: - maths problems! For longer!

Russell: I was listening to them trying to pitch it and not quite my tempo, but as long as you're enjoying it that's cool but not, yeah.

Jeannette: But I think there's this unfortunate gatekeeping element to, these are the works that you should read to engage with this community. And I think that that can get very uncomfortable picking on the example there with the Gor novel, apparently endorsed by someone in both the SF and BDSM community in the comments. I stress this is not an endorsement, it's just that if for some reason you find it sexy I'm not gonna stop you, but be aware of why it's problematic! But those people most people here are aware of it already so I'm not gonna lecture you. I want

Noria: I think -

Jeannette: I -

Noria: No sorry Jeannette, please go on.

Jeannette: One of the things I find really fascinating I suppose is the idea of cultures having this slightly different set of things that they are bigoted about, and how that can create things, accidentally create things you find enlightening or illuminating. To get really pretentious, Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, when he travelled to the UK to Ireland, he was like "Huh, I previously thought that segregation was very normal, that white people, even "anti-racist" white people don't want to be in the same space as black people that's just how people work", and he went to the UK, to Ireland and he was like "Oh, people people are still very racist here", but segregation wasn't normal. People would assume they're gonna share a cab, because rich people are cheap like that, and it was suddenly a moment of like "Oh. Maybe that's something to this, it's not a thing, the idea that white people just cannot exist in the same space as, and it would be better to be in a separate place, maybe that's not a natural one" and it's not like he saw a completely not-racist world, he saw a slightly different racist world.

Russell: This might -

Jeannette: And I think that's important, and that to me sometimes why experiencing anime even though it can be sexist punches different sexism buttons and it's like oh, how refreshing! A different set of ridiculous sexism.

Foz: And one I don't have to live with every day!

[laughter, crosstalk]

Noria: I honestly think that -

Jeannette: You need to be open to why those things are also bad.

Noria: Sorry Jeannette -

Jeannette: Whilst you're embracing like, like whilst I'm sitting here going "Oh anime has all these female characters" I kind of also have to say, yes, but they're also pandering to a certain demographic and that's why they exist."

Foz: Yeah.

Jeannette: But look! Different boob sizes!

Russell: You know how you say Frederick Douglass had that conversation when he went to Dublin, I had that conversation, I've had that people have had that conversation with me as recently as last year, so yes.

Foz: How are we for time?

Shaun: We're technically over.

[Pop-up from AllieCat1019: Being open to criticism is healthy. If something you love is problematic, take the criticism and think about your blindspots.]

Noria: I think we're over, I think we've actually technically we've overshot, but I don't think anybody was complaining especially in comments and I do think that having in-depth conversations about this is important.

Foz: Agreed

Noria: Because ultimately we're having this conversation on a booktube channel, and we're all involved in fandom, we've been involved in fandom for years, so I think that in itself, in its way this conversation has been essential and important in helping people understand just how to better navigate those spaces. I do know I have to do the update, but I'll definitely put the update links to all your twitter handles and ways people can still come reach you and continue that conversation, because I do think this was not a conversation that we can have in an hour. It's something that you know is continuous because fandom is ever changing, it's every growing! Authors keep doing stupid shit! Creators keep doing dumb-ass fuck shit! So this conversation -

Russell: And really smart stuff sometimes as well.

Noria: And sometimes really smart stuff, so smart that you're like "Yo, are you from another planet? Are you a different species? Have you not seen the stupidity that the rest of your kind have been doing?" Or, then we start giving them all the cards for doing the barest minimum, but I think it says a lot about us in fandom that we're so used to receiving garbage that you're like [gasp] "This person did something wonderful!" And I'm just shocked. So. [laughs]

Jeannette: I think -

Noria: I do love that.

Jeannette: I really want to talk about the different, the changing standard, the shifting standards of what is problematic and how that's both good and bad.

Noria: Yes, I think we can, you can have that conversation, I'll just wrap up this part of the liveshow with that

Jeannette: I'll take it to twitter.

[Laughs]

Russell: Yeah.

Noria: Okay, okay, but I told everybody in the chat, I will have the updated links in the description box, so go check everyone out, follow them, @ them and tell them "Yo! I was part of the Your Fave is Problematic panel, in the comments and I had this thought" I'm sure they will be willing to respond. Please do it. Don't be like all those fans that are like "I'm bugging you I'm bugging you, answer me now!" Take time, be cool about it, some of us can be cool in fandom, so.

Russell: I mean you can if you like. But I'm not gonna promise I'm gonna answer you in a hurry if you do that.

All: [laughs]

Noria: Okay, Russell is already given you the heads up about it [laughs]

Russell: I'm just kidding, I probably will, I don't get like bombed with thousands and thousands of tweets a day so don't worry about it. Come at me.

Noria: Okay. I'm certain that we'll take you up, I know that I'll take you up on that. You've been warned but I don't think you mind, so that works, But I want to say a huge thank you, thank you so much for coming on this panel, thank you for sharing your thoughts and opinions with us, I know I'm going to replay this panel over and over because there's so many nuggets that my mind is like "yo, everything, oversaturation" sometimes. It affects me like that. So thank you so much for coming, and thank you all for joining me in the audience and we're going to have still cool panels for the rest of today and tomorrow, so you can just please please follow and we'll see you soon, so bye everybody! Thank you!

Russell: Lovely to see you all, take care!

Jeannette: Oh god why are there so many people, are there even that -

Special thanks to Susan T for drafting the transcript of this panel! Responsibility for final text lies with Adri Joy - for any corrections or comments, please get in touch via Twitter.