SGTCharlynne

This is my favorite pic I've made this year :) its a homage to Downtown 81! A slam poetic feverdream film where we follow Jean-Michel Basquiat through the hustle and bustle of 1980s New York.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ6qzDnQzGI

Illustration by Hitomi Terasawa (寺澤 一美), from Kowloon City: An Illustrated Guide (大図解九龍城) (1997), by the Kowloon City Exploration Team, supervised by Hiroaki Kani (可児 弘明).

Learning about the strange and extraordinary story of Kowloon Walled City feels like it was a rite of passage for my particular flavor of Internet nerd during the late oughts. It lurks in various footnotes as a trivia item, but these fail to convey its truly staggering scope. At its height, its roughly 35,000 inhabitants lived in what is almost certainly the most densely populated living arrangement that human beings have ever experienced in all our history, with about 1.3 human beings per square meter of a surveyor's map. That's over 115 times as dense as habitation in present-day New York City. That's about 29 times as dense as Manila, the world's most densely populated city at the time of this writing.

(Continued below)

As Pride comes to a close, I want to celebrate Lunar Boy and talk about what including explicit queer terms in a middle grade graphic novel means.

This was really difficult to summarize in comic essay form haha. I had done extensive research while I was in school over how middle grade comics often avoid saying words like "gay" "lesbian" or "trans" and its connection with bans and censorship. While I was at school, it felt like Raina Telgemeier's "Drama" was the last time I saw a character say "bi" in a middle grade graphic novel, and that was published in 2012! Why haven't we built more from that bravery since then? So I vowed to make sure Lunar Boy wasn't going to be a kids book that talked around queerness,

As I continued to develop Lunar Boy, I realized how this would affect the larger intersectional context of honoring Indonesian history. And that led to another rabbit hole of pressures! Inter-cultural discourse, the way so many Indonesians don't have access to broader knowledge about our history, it's a lot!

Happy Pride, be nice to each other 🌈

I love this a lot.

I have a tendency to get heated about traditional writing advice for a lot of reasons, but one of the big reasons for me is that traditional writing rules don't account for queer experiences.

"Show don't tell" discourages talking about feelings--but in healthy real-life relationships, talking about your feelings is a good thing, because everyone experiences emotions differently and it's hard to know if someone actually feels the same way in response to something that you do unless they bluntly state the things they're feeling.

Stuff like "be concise" or "don't use filler" or "stay focused on the plot" ignores that a majority of life experiences, themselves, are unfocused or meandering, and that these feelings are as worth exploring as any other--but in particular, it limits the means with which one can explore queerness, because a big part of queerness is in exploring the in-betweens, the lack of conclusions, the lack of definitions.

These are just a couple examples that come to mind immediately. More generally, I always try to emphasize that a lot of writing advice comes from capitalistic interests, from the assumption that everyone's end goal is, or should be, to write to sell as many copies as possible. Or more specifically, to catch the interest of people who have the money to spend on it, i.e. the people in power, i.e. mostly white cishet people. (At least, this is what I've seen in English-speaking communities, but I always have to wonder how much pressure the English-speaking colonial powers have put on the cultural priorities of other regions, as well.)

This is unfortunate, not only because it's appeasing the powers that be and reinforcing their beliefs ever further, but because I think it also creates the impression among a lot of writers that if someone writes in a way that's more honest to their own personal identity, it's not recognized as writing to their identity, it's looked at as "bad writing" because it doesn't fit conventional writing guidelines that were always formed with an entirely different cultural identity in mind.

We all have to make money some way, but I ask writers to hold onto their sincerity in whatever ways they're able to. And I ask readers to please, please be open to anything unfamiliar to you. You don't have to like it, but at least try to think through the author's perspective of why they might be doing something a certain way, or try to think of the kind of person who would enjoy something for being written a certain way, and why.

Part of why I brought up "show not tell" being at odds with queer storytelling is because I wish there was more criticism over why we keep seeing stories in the mainstream where:

• cis character walks into a trans character changing clothes/ being naked so that the cis audience can be shown not told, that "a trans person is a person with body parts you weren't expecting them to have". Rather than having a trans character just tell their audience-surrogate-cis-friend what their deal is.
• I mention this in the comic but bi and pan characters being mandated to date characters of different genders, instead of just taking their words for it when they tell us who they are. But show not tell requires proof, so proof people make.
• literally the whole process of coming out is telling someone who they are. And some closeted people are really good at keeping to themselves, so you won't always see "foreshadowing" that they were gay the whole time.
• related to my last point, but I think this is the reason why so many queer characters in the mainstream are often robbed of their agency to come out on their own terms. We have to show that x character is gay, so have their audience-surrogate friend walk into him kissing another guy.
• I said it in the comic but it bears repeating, aro ace characters having to reject romantic advances. Please, I'd like any other story!!
• a general reliance on external signifiers of queerness. I talked about this previously but this leads to very limited notions about gender especially. X character knows she's trans because she likes pink and playing with barbies. Y character is non-binary because androgyny and they/them pronouns

Everything is aimed to coddle and teach the non-queer audience. Queer characters are subjects to be gawked at and studied, they're not people who can speak for themselves. Because that would be tell not show! It's that capitalist/ appealing to the privileged mindset you mentioned.

I recognize that having a platform in traditional publishing always means some kind of compromise is being made, but I wound up very lucky to have a team that backed me up and understood/respected the goals of Lunar Boy. I hope it encourages more books that pushes against the conventions of the medium's place in publishing. ❤️

i know everyone has been waiting for my opinion on the discourse so here it is: chill

i silenced various discourse-related tags long ago, both for my mental health and to remind myself not to get involved with it, but the most common pattern is: one person is annoyed or unhappy about something, posts about it in a way that gets seen and/or shared, then it instantly blows up into a firestorm lasting days, with both sides fighting a war that just makes everyone involved miserable, especially the people who accidentally started it

this can be avoided by: chilling out. X out the post. Close the tab. Go to wikipedia and read about pre-dreadnought battleships or extremophile bacteria or something. is your opinion worth feeding a fire? i figured out mine isn't and i'm happier for it