Harlock Sholmes

One of the reasons I don't interact as much with comics fandom is that there's this real undercurrent of resentment toward not being in control of the stories and characters that matter to them, which can spill out in some very nasty ways. Like the recent thing where some comics stan twitter guy made a fake account to accuse a writer they didn't like of sexual harassment. And there are a lot of real problems with how superhero comics are now and how many characters are handled, but the way this plays out a lot of the time is like people yelling at servers instead of dealing with systems of capitalist exploitation. I can't say I've never felt that kind of frustration, but I'm happy in the end to be working on the margins in my own space.

AND FURTHERMORE, a thing I really hate about comics stan culture is that people want their faves to be perfect and never flawed or wrong about anything. Like that's why I love Arthurian literature so much, you can be the world's greatest hero and still mess up or hurt people or be made a complete fool of, that's just life.

One of the reasons I don't interact as much with comics fandom is that there's this real undercurrent of resentment toward not being in control of the stories and characters that matter to them, which can spill out in some very nasty ways. Like the recent thing where some comics stan twitter guy made a fake account to accuse a writer they didn't like of sexual harassment. And there are a lot of real problems with how superhero comics are now and how many characters are handled, but the way this plays out a lot of the time is like people yelling at servers instead of dealing with systems of capitalist exploitation. I can't say I've never felt that kind of frustration, but I'm happy in the end to be working on the margins in my own space.

Thing about SFF is. People will act like it's an uniquely current problem that fandom at large is assigning awards to mediocre work, but that's kind of how it's always been. Like the first Hugo Award winner for best novel is The Demolished Man, which still whips, but the second is They'd Rather Be Right, a book most people don't even remember anymore, which won because it was playing to John W. Campbell's pet obsessions about psi powers and contrarian rationalism. Mediocre forgettable work has always won awards, fandom/publishing has always been full of cliques and there's always been resistance to approaches to writing SFF that don't fit people's predetermined boxes for what SFF is supposed to be. All these problems will endure as long as we're stuck in the capitalist mode of art production.

Want to gently take some people by the shoulders and tell them they do not have to get involved in every online culture war