#(they just activate my Narrative Hatred Reflex)

[musical-chick-13]

Very funny to me always when people say, "I'll bet you'd like this character if they were a woman," because no. I wouldn't. If a character is poorly-written, that poor writing stays regardless of the gender of the character involved. If a character does one of the Few Specific Things That Always Annoys Me, I will continue to be annoyed. I hate this character because they suck, not because he's a man.

[hms-no-fun]

I know that last response was a joke and no pressure to seriously answer, but how do you actually process there existing fictives of your work? I’m a writer and my headmate, who’s a fictive, absolutely despises the creator of her source, as well as, to some extent, the source itself, and I don’t want to end up being that to someone else. (No need to answer.)

so i think at first i found the concept of fictives a little alarming and maybe even unhealthy? like i didn't understand them and couldn't relate, but ultimately had a live-and-let-live attitude about it.

over time though as i've explored the contours of my own plurality, i've come to see it as a compliment that something i made carried within it enough of a spark that it spun up whole new entities in other people's heads. i don't have any fictives myself and i don't think i ever could, but it's just not my place to judge how other people's minds work.

it definitely puts a bit of pressure on me, though, because another person's conception of a character like june eg8ert isn't gonna be the same as mine. hell, my own conception of her has changed a lot since i first started writing her! and as a writer i want her to grow and change in new and interesting ways, rather than remaining this unchanging archetype. like i think everyone who knows about june eg8ert immediately pictures her how she looked in 2.2, with the vest and the shoes and the hybrid aspect shirt and the mohawk. but that's a very "early 20's gender rebel" mood and i actively want june to grow out of that. which isn't remotely an invalidation of that persona, nor a judgment of anyone who dresses that way and stays that way! just, you know... people change.

and i feel some responsibility to depict that change respectfully entirely because there are so many people who identify really strongly with june. and like i COULD get all in my head about it and feel like, oh no, i don't want anyone to get mad at me, i have to do this the exact right way OR ELSE... but that would be, in my opinion, a betrayal not just of the story but of the very fans i was ostensibly trying to protect.

rather my approach to it is the same as my approach to most narrative problematics. i've always said that the question for any artist wanting to depict or explore something potentially problematic is not "how do i make this text accessible to everyone" but rather "who am i excluding by making the choices i want to make, and are those choices really justified?" i think a lot of writers don't acknowledge how much their craft is reflex, how much we lean on existing narrative structures and character archetypes to do a lot of heavy lifting for us, and like, that's FINE, that's just the process of making art, but a lot of those structures have systemic inequities baked into them that can wind up making creative choices for you without you ever really realizing it. like fundamentally i think a lot of racism/sexism/bigotry etc in fiction has its roots mostly in laziness rather than any active hatred. and i think some writers, they get really defensive when people tell them their stuff has some problematic element because they're like "well, i didn't do that!" and it's a refusal to recognize that liberal ideology makes itself invisible and has a whole lot of really awful attitudes about minority populations built into it, and if you're not careful and actively mindful and about your work you just wind up recreating all those same problems in the subtext. and that takes work! and some writers balk at the idea that it's work that they should have to do in the first place, which to me is just abject cowardice. you're saying the structure made a choice for you that you weren't even aware of, and you're like... you're okay with that??? lmao maybe this sounds really galaxy brain but it's how i've looked at this kind of thing for a long time. ANYWAY THE POINT IS, with june, knowing that there are people with fictives of her is just another aspect of that knowledge of the ways my story might affect people.

the thing is, right, is that godfeels is inherently an emotional and traumatic narrative. it is a story about messy gay people fucking up, of traumatized folks desperately trying and often failing to not hurt each other, and i don't think anyone who made it through godfeels 2 is gonna have the attitude that june is like... their comfort character? or this is their comfort story? and if they expect that bad things are just not gonna happen to these people anymore then, idk, then their conception of this story is just wrong and it's not my job to write to their expectations. but i DO recognize that if i have bad things happen to june, or if i make june do bad things, that could be esoterically very upsetting for someone with a june fictive. the question to me is not "how do i avoid upsetting these people" but rather "am i upsetting these people for a good reason?"

and i think being really honest with myself and asking myself that question rather than pretending like it doesn't matter actually makes me a better writer. because instead of doing something shocking for the sake of being shocking, i know that if i'm going to go in a certain direction that i have to do so with incredible confidence and purpose. and i really feel like that is what i'm doing!

because ultimately i can't control how people see my work, or what they take from it, or WHO they take from it. all i can do is make it as good as it can possibly be, knowing the ways it could potentially harm someone. if i believe that i made that choice for a good reason, if i believe that the story i'm telling is worth that potential negative reaction, then i will be able to sleep at night because i'll know that i wasn't trying to be edgy for the sake of it, that it wasn't arbitrary, that people will be able to look at it and at the very least feel like this was not written with blatant disregard for the existence of the sensitive reader.

3.1 chapter 8 is gonna be ROUGH and i've made no secret of that fact, but i think when it's all said and done that everyone who is really a fan of this story will have found it to be a satisfying experience. that's the hope, anyway 😅

[barri-zonema]

Isaiah 52:5. Now therefore what have I here," declares the Lord , "seeing that my people are taken away for nothing? Their rulers wail," declares the Lord , "and continually all the day my name is despised.

James 1:27. “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.” ... Teamwork and friendship both work in very similar ways.

1 Peter 4:10 “As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.”

Ephesians 5:25: For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. ...

Genesis 2:24: Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

hold fast to your wife, and you shall become one flesh

The Lord has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.

-Isaiah 52 : 10

Freedoms, against extreme far-right ideas June 12 KEDISTAN

While these events are scheduled to take place in France, the climate they aim to denounce are far-reaching ones, not limited to this country. Others elsewhere may wish to consider similar actions on that day or on another, as an ongoing, international but locally-structured movement elsewhere.

Marching for our FREEDOMS

Against Extreme Far-Right Ideas

Saturday June 12 2021

Full Information on mobilizations

On www.marchedeslibertes.fr

Along with other media, Kedistan magazine has signed the appeal to demonstrations in France on June 12 2021 “For Freedoms, Against Extreme Far-Right Ideas”.

This support is in the very logic of our existence and validates all of our commitments concerning our privileged treatment of topics related to the Middle-East and beyond. The constant upsurges of excluding nationalisms, warlike identitarian indrawings,of sovereignties serving as disguises for Nation-States furbishing weapons for destructive national growths in competition instead of breaking with the capitalistic financiarization leading humanity to its ruin, all this is redolent of an ideology  of which the previous century experienced the consequences.

True, History does not repeat itself, but the accumulation of similar causes produces similar effects.

In this race at ideological one-upmanship with the far-right, France is speeding ahead in joining a number of European countries where notions of the need for “strong leadership” in times of “insecurity” and the “falling apart of values and of identity” supposedly resulting from an opening out on the world, are at the public forefront, or already exercising power.

This ideology which serves as the matrix for every form of fascism is presented as providing solutions to economic woes as well as resolving social crises, when all of these are generated by the successive global crises of capitalism. It treats the world ecological crisis due to climactic change as a simple “problem” technology can resolve, and considers it more as holding back growth as a simple consequence of “globalism”. Although it is nothing but the tail end of  the neo-liberal comet that provided the prosperous days of dictatorships on the South-American continent, this neo-fascism presents itself as the pseudo-renewal of the old world, requiring strong leadership and strong States, nations welded around a strong identity, while wishing to trust the economies to the “market” in a more “sovereign” framework than that provided by the financiarized capitalist globalization.

This manifests itself as a will to rein in a number of social issues. The proposed New Order is a carbon copy of the old in which patriarchy dominates, gender discriminations are everywhere , human rights are scorned by  a racism upheld as a duty of assimilation subjected to one and only national narrative, in an old colonialist reflex.

We are well aware of how these ideologies were recycled in the Middle-East, of the wars they generated and go on generating, of the syntheses being realized with radical religious ideologies in processes aimed at maintaining and perennizing power structures.

So when the media cup overflows and spills over into sickening, nauseating shows, when the countervailing forces supposed to take them to task collaborate in the process, when tired political institutions and systems spin in the void and produce “language elements” and “sound bites” instead of common sense, among other things, it is more than time to react and, mostly to demonstrate that, even if in the minority at the moment, humanist thought still exists in the face of the prevailing growth of rot.

All this may seem like grandiloquence in the face of an evolving reality. But words are often all that is left in a mouth before a brown and obscure power comes to apply the muzzle.

Here are more such words which constitute the terms of the unitarian appeal:

FOR OUR FREEDOMS AND AGAINST FAR-RIGHT IDEAS

For several months now, we have been aware of an alarming political and social climate.

Alliances with the far-right or the adoption of its ideas are no longer considered as forbidden. Racist and sexist discourses and actions proliferate at work and in daily settings. Attacks against freedoms and social rights are in serious increase. In this political, economic, social and sanitary context, injustices explode and generate strong social misery.

Several freedom-destroying laws are setting up an authoritarian society based on surveillance and control, one that would preclude informing on police violence, already much too prevalent. Moreover, if some of these laws stigmatize a part of the population based on its religion, others find themselves targeted because of their activism.

As signatories to the appeal for freedoms and against the deadly ideas of the far-right, we all feel the urgent need to build a strong and unitarian response in the form of an alliance for freedoms, for work and for  a sustainable future.

Facing this climate of hatred, racist and destructive of individual and collective freedoms, we have decided to collectively organize on Saturday June 12 a first great national day of demonstrations and mobilizations to take place at the local level.