#(With a few notable exceptions from one author in particular but I've already talked about her)

[arizonaconservativegal]

The three people responsible at Disney for ruining Marvel, Starwars, and Indiana Jones with woke gay shit are Bob Iger, Kathleen Kennedy and Kevin Feige. They take no accountability except blame the majority of the population who are heterosexual like myself. They started to make content for a small portion of the population being the feminists, left side, homosexuals and forcing that shit on us. I did not ask for it and I did not watch any of that shit after endgame and I did not watch the last jedi or the rise of skywalker. The force awakens was awful. I could go on but what gets me is how they think I should accept the homosexual agenda and have them determine how I live my life because they are a small population with mental disorders and me being straight is wrong and not normal.

Every time you send an ask about the 'homosexual agenda,' I get more confused about what you think is happening here. I don't know shit about marvel so maybe that's what I'm missing but with Star Wars and Indy... well I only saw the new Indy movie the once but I don't remember any gay characters even being in it and as for Star Wars, yeah okay there's been quite a few lately but they live almost exclusively in publishing and if you didn't make it through the sequel movies, I highly doubt you're reading all the new books to even know that. So what exactly are you upset about? Yeah Disney Lucasfilm is a mess in a lot of ways - including a fair bit of pandering and human shield usage - but I think you've honed in on the one thing they really aren't doing.

[fishmech]

tbh i despise that vox article on the helicopter thing because the overall framing and argument it makes just really sucks.

like yeah twitter is an argument factory and all but that pattern of internet discourse is so fucking old it goes back to the early days of usenet, about 40 years ago. and the original author did deliberately choose a provocative story subject and even more provocative title for it. this was always going to lead to a big fucking arguments online and honestly twitter doesn't have much to do with it at all!

and i sincerely doubt that the author would have been able to handle the nominally less 'intense' reaction to their provocation that would have happened if published with a similarly provocative title and subject in 2010 or 2000 instead of 2020.

because its not really like maybe waiting a few extra days or at most weeks for the word to spread and people to get angry and suspicious would actually matter, and that's what we'd be having over the story. the level of it might even be somewhat increased in increasingly older eras because the relevant communities that would be talking about it would be smaller and relatively more tightknit, which would put an additional level of intimacy into the people saying "who the fuck is this person". and there would likely have been an even more untrusting reaction from the trans community because yknow there was already a lot more open transphobia in comparison.

and like i think its very weird the way the article tries to position things as like "well the first few days after it was published not much had been written about it except by the direct readership and the surviving tweets seem positive from then". that's not special? like most speculative fiction outlets these days, there isn't exactly a huge direct readerbase for clarkesworld - they get about 50,000 monthly users. in modern terms that's pretty decent for an outlet to manage and it's still a low amount of people, particularly as many of the readership isn't actually reading the new stories as they're published.

but its like yeah, the most dedicated and prompt readers of the outlet are most likely to have a higher level of trust in what's being put out, that's why they're in that group in the first place. and it only makes sense that as hearing about the story radiates out from that generally most trusting group, people might raise more questions about the general weirdness of premise and choices in bios.

i'm a fairly avid reader of and listener to short fiction. i've heard and read so many snippet bios that i don't really care about which tend to have similar generic statements about the author - this author lives in x region, likes y and z hobbies, thinks cats are cute etc etc - that honestly it was kind of weird that the bio snippet associated with this particular article didn't have those sorts of things that really sound like they're telling you more about an author than they really do. because that is a notable choice to drop it. for those who aren't familiar with those, here's one of the author bios attached to a recent clarkesworld story:

incidentally i did enjoy the story this bio is associated with! but as you can see, it's the sort of thing that just gives you a vibe about the author who chooses to go into very little detail about their life, and it happens to link to a rather barebones writing business-focused site. she's not a first time published author with this story, but you'll see a lot of similar vague, frankly privacy-protecting, bios associated with a lot of first time published authors.

but the helicopter story decided to go full force with provocation and not doing, well, basic satisfy the reader's curiosity bio stuff associated. so yeah of course it looked suspicious. personally i also felt, when i read it when it was new, that is wasn't even a particularly good handling of the concept they were trying to get at and that i've frankly read/heard better stories about military forces where people's genders or other parts of their mental identification were replaced with identification with combat roles or equipment (and don't ask me for the names of those, it's genuinely hard for me to keep track of all the stuff i've read! pretty sure at least one of them was on escape pod in the mid-2010s tho).

so take modern twitter out of the cycle entirely and we still would have had a story that would have kicked off a firestorm of controversy and dislike through other forms of web community as word of it diffused out from the core readership. like i guess some people just have feigned or real amnesia about the world before they decided twitter was the real world, but internet controversies are again not new, nor is having it over provocative fiction in particular. it's not like lack of twitter usage would mean, say, that you wouldn't be able to search for people talking about the story on google or whatever to see negative reactions, or to experience it in large communities. or to take it back to the 80s and 90s, to see it in large irc channels and usenet discussions or on newsletters. or to peel all the way back to a full analog era (where frankly the concept of this provocation would barely work considering its nature, but fuck it lets pretend an alternate 1970s where people were widely accepting of trans people) it would be showing in letters to the editor, at fan cons, and in fanzines, as was the style of the time!