the rule of fives

[melannen]

1. I spent yesterday morning at work planning out a honeytrap involving scantily-clad dudes with really cut abs, and yesterday evening getting ridiculously annoyed about the way Cap II fandom will critique anything involving fan portrayals of Winter Soldier's past until nothing is left but tiny crumbs of spite, while collectively ignoring the fact that Captain America tortured a prisoner onscreen and this was presented as a-ok;

2. I got into the Master Naturalist class! Unfortunately they don't have enough other applicants so now I get to wait and see if the class is cancelled for lack of interest...

3. So RE: my question about archiving ficlets and notfic on AO3, grey_bard pointed out that if my main concern is cluttering up my profile/dash, I can set up a separate pseud for that stuff, and it'll still be connected to my account but won't get mixed in with my main account.

WHICH IS BRILLIANT. And actually I'd already set up a pseud account to go with the LJ name I used to use for that stuff, so hey. So I'm going to start posting old scrap fic to AO3 today, starting with the Tumblr stuff, and we'll see how far back it gets before I run out of steam. I am probably going to combine posting stuff to my main account as individual works if it's good enough, posting to the scrap pseud account as individual works, and posting to the scrap pseud account as not-fully-tagged chaptered works.

4. Also re: that entry, here is the list of fiction sources people rec'd. I haven't read any of them yet (I am still putting off finishing starting A Companion to Wolves) but it makes an excellent list so I share:

Lightspeed (which merged with Fantasy magazine in 2012)
Strange Horizons
Clarkesworld
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Expanded Horizons
Crossed Genres
Daily Science Fiction
Tor.com

If anybody has more suggestions I am still open! Doesn't have to be SFF either.

5. Oh speaking of wolves! So I did not get around to any of the stories in my poll but hey I posted that Doctor Who one so it counts as doing the fest this year. :P But there are seven other stories added to the collection this year and they all look good, with the usual assortment of mostly smallish fandoms!

(I decided that doing the Carol one would require more knowledge of Carol's canon than I have any plans to acquire, boo. I still kinda want to do a Frontier Wolf one, though, if I can get through canon review by the end of the month...)

Comments

[sophia_sol]

Frankly I hadn't even noticed the lack of conversation about Steve torturing a dude - but you're right. I recall that back when the movie first came out I saw multiple people's movie reactions mentioning their displeasure with that scene, but I haven't seen any discussion of it since. But it doesn't surprise me that I haven't noticed - I am used to fandom condoning behaviours that I disagree with. Popular culture in general is a lot more on board with violence than I am (...not that this is hard, me being pacifist and all), so to me this is just an extension of that.

I have - more or less - made my peace with being fannish over characters whose canons present them both as good people and as people who do things I classify as NOT good. Because that's LOTS of characters. I guess I kind of pretend that most media takes place in an alternate world where violence works differently than in our world, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to handle watching/enjoying/reading fic about these characters. And yes, torture is worse than much of the sort of violence that's more usually present in military/cop/superhero/action fandoms, but it doesn't seem to me to be a separate issue.

Do I wish that criticism of Cap 2's ethics (like the Hawaii 5-0 vid Shock the Monkey) existed? For sure. But it doesn't surprise me that I haven't seen it. I'm frankly more surprised that Shock the Monkey exists.

[melannen]

Yeah, I think it bothers me especially because a lot of fanwriters themselves (and a lot of my relatives ): still seem to buy into the idea that it's maybe ok to torture someone if you really need information really quick (protip: no, because TORTURE DOESN'T WORK for that). I've been complaining about that since long before Cap II came out. :/ Part of what brought this on is that I spent part of the weekend reading Tony/Loki fic, and I should have known better - it's a pairing I want to like but the longfic seems to almost always require a scene where Loki gets tortured for information in order to set up a moral dilemma, and aUFGH NO, there is no moral dilemma there, because TORTURE DOESN'T WORK.

And the way it's portrayed unquestioningly in the media as something that works is almost certainly a factor in why the US Military decided it was something that works - I've seen quotes from some of the people involved that makes it really obvious this was a factor. So this isn't some nebulous 'I don't like your fic,' this is the fact that the climate around portrayal of torture in mass media entertainment has IN FACT led to A TON OF REAL-WORLD BAD STUFF because of LARGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE ignoring actual proven best practices in favor of wanting the US to look badass like an action hero.

What set me off yesterday was seeing yet another conversation about how certain kinds of fanfic are unacceptable because of how they deal with torture in light of RL politics, when I've seen that kind of conversation targeting other fans at least once a month since the movie, and nobody's pointing fingers at the canon itself. I'm happy to accept that it's a hard line for some people, but seeing people continually jumping on other fans for choosing to portray torture (to explicitly portray it as a bad thing!) in a fandom where, other than a few lines in reviews right after it came out, NOBODY is critiquing the much, much worse thing canon did - well, I should have known better than to say anything but I was already annoyed from all the Loki fic that didn't even seem to realize it was an issue in the first place. :/

[ambyr]

Is the Master Naturalist class the one that meets in Howard County on Wednesdays? If so, another friend of mine is also enrolled...

[melannen]

Alas, no, it meets on an alternating friday/saturday schedule that just happens to line up perfectly with my alternating fridays/saturdays for work. If this one doesn't work I'll have to go to one that I'd have take time off work for, but I'll probably do a Coastal Plain one in that case.

[sineala]

I was going to say that I feel like people critique Cap's ethics a lot, but then I remembered I was thinking of the comics. For which there is definitely a lot to say about Cap's ethics.

Aww, but if you don't write the Carol one no one will know about Deadpool's wolfsister Anne McCaffrey!

[melannen]

Yeah, there's a lot of that in comics fandom, partly because whenever they want an "event" they had Steve and Tony break up over ethical issues so it's hard to aviod. But most of what I see about MCU Cap is "poor perfect sad bisexual unicorn". Not that they're wrong there, but... Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places.

If I wanted to write the Carol one I would have to get into what was going on around the time of Chewie's origin story and gashdarnit I don't want to think about what the Avengers wolfpack was doing during Civil War.

[copracat]

That pseud account idea is very clever.

[melannen]

Isn't it? I am delighted by it.