#missing step
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months ago
Text
Mirion Malle’s “So Long Sad Love”
Tumblr media
On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.
Tumblr media
In Mirion Malle's So Long Sad Love, a graphic novel from Drawn and Quarterly, we get an all-too-real mystery story: when do you trust the whisper network that carries the fragmentary, elliptical word of shitty men?
https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/so-long-sad-love/
Cleo is a French comics creator who's moved to Montreal, in part to be with Charles, a Quebecois creator who helps her find a place in the city's tight-knit artistic scene. The relationship feels like a good one, with the normal ups and downs, but then Cleo travels to a festival, where she meets Farah, a vivacious and talented fellow artist. They're getting along great…until Farah discovers who Cleo's boyfriend is. Though Farah doesn't say anything, she is visibly flustered and makes her excuses before hurriedly departing.
This kicks off Cleo's hunt for the truth about her boyfriend, a hunt that is complicated by the fact that she's so far from home, that her friends are largely his friends, that he flies off the handle every time she raises the matter, and by her love for him.
There's a term for men like Charles: a "missing stair." "Missing stair" is a metaphor for someone in a social circle who presents some kind of persistent risk to the people around them, who is accommodated rather than confronted:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair
The metaphor goes like this: you're at a party and every time someone asks where the bathroom is, another partygoer directs them to the upper floor and warns them that one of the stairs is missing, and if they don't avoid that tread, they will fall through and be gravely injured. In this metaphor, a whole community of people have tacitly decided to simply accept the risk that someone who is forgetful or new to the scene will fall through the stair – no one has come forward to just fix that stair.
The origins of this term are in BDSM circles, and the canonical "missing stair" is a sexual predator, but from the outset, it's referred to all kinds of people with failings that present some source of frustration or unhappiness to those around them, from shouters to bigots to just someone who won't help do the dishes after a dinner party:
https://pervocracy.blogspot.com/2012/06/missing-stair.html
We all know a few missing stairs, and anyone who's got even a little self-reflexivity must wonder from time to time if they're not also a missing stair, at least to some people in their lives. After all, friendship always entails some accommodation, and doubly so love – as Dan Savage is fond of saying, "There is no person who is 'The One' for you – the best you can hope for is the '0.6' that you can round up to 'The One,' with a lot of work."
And at least some missing stairs aren't born – they're made. Everyone screws up, everyone's got some bad habits, everyone's got some blind spots about what others expect of them and how others perceive us. When the people around us make bad calls about whether to let us skate on our faults and when to confront us, those faults fester and multiply and calcify. This is compounded in long-tenured relationships that begin in our youth, when we are still figuring out our boundaries – the people who we give a pass to when we're young and naive can become a fixture in our lives despite characteristics that, as adults, we wouldn't tolerate in someone who is new to our social scene.
To make all this even more complicated, there's the role that power plays in all this. Many missing stairs are keenly attuned to power dynamics and present a different face to people who have some authority – whether formal or tacit – to sanction them. This is why so many of the outings of #MeToo predators provoked mystified men to say, "Gosh, they never acted that way around me – I had no idea."
These men aren't necessarily clueless. There's a predator who once traveled in my circles, and when he was outed, it wasn't just men who were shocked. My professional and personal life includes a large cohort of socially and professionally powerful women to whom this "missing stair" presented an impeccable face on every occasion. None of the people this guy looked up to ever witnessed his behavior firsthand, and for complicated reasons, none of the lower status (younger, less experienced, and not exclusively female) people whom he preyed upon came to us.
Which brings me back to Cleo and Charles, and the mystery of what Charles did to Farah in art school, many years before. The people in Charles's circle have an explanation: Farah was Charles's first heavy crush, and he courted her in ways that crossed the line into harassment. But – according to Charles's friends – this was a temporary condition that Charles outgrew, and it was only later, when Charles was in a healthier relationship with someone who reciprocated his affections, that Farah retaliated by attacking him to their small art-school circle.
This is just plausible enough – Charles was young, still figuring stuff out, he made a misstep – that Cleo is able to console herself with it. But as Charles grows more irritable and belittling of her, and as Cleo's friends gently encourage her to dig further rather than burying her lingering doubts, a much uglier truth comes into view.
Malle handles this all so deftly, showing how Cleo and her friends all play archetypal roles in the recurrent missing stair dynamic. It's a beautifully told story, full of charm and character, but it's also a kind of forensic re-enactment of a disaster, told from an intermediate distance that's close enough to the action that we can see the looming crisis, but also understand why the people in its midst are steering straight into it.
This transitions into a third act where Cleo leaves Montreal and finds herself in the midst a very different social dynamic of people who have figured out a far healthier way to manage their interpersonal problems. This short conclusion is powerfully satisfying, showing how it's possible to live without missing stairs and without the immediate expulsion of anyone who has a "problematic" moment.
The missing stair phenomenon would be so much easier to deal with if every missing stair started out as an irredeemable monster. We could fix all those stairs and declare ourselves done. But – as Malle illustrates – there's a reason it's so hard to fix those missing stairs. Every good friendship has some give and take – but every missing stair takes too much. Knowing the difference is a skill you learn through hard experience, not one you're born with. Learning when to call someone out, and when to call them in, is a hard curriculum – and it's even harder to know when to keep trying to help the people in your life be better selves, and when to protect the other people in your life from their worst selves.
Malle's book is packed with subtlety and depth, romance and heartbreak, subtext that carries through the dialog (in marvelous translation from the original French by Aleshia Jensen) and the body language in Malle's striking artwork.
Tumblr media
Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!
Tumblr media
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/25/missing-stair/#the-fog-of-love
68 notes · View notes
arethosefangs · 3 months ago
Text
I need some advice about what to do about a person who I believe to be a “missing stair” in my local community. are there any common practices with this type of situation? Idk how dangerous or not they are but it kills me to think that someone else could get hurt.
0 notes
moncuries · 3 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
firefighter show bisexual
2K notes · View notes
evyltalks · 2 months ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
marlene is either girlfriend material or miss break-your-heart, no in-between
2K notes · View notes
fraycreations · 2 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
uhh...he's right behind me, isn't he?
(tried to pull this joke in cosplay with @ingo-ingoing-ingone at ALA as they were handing out missing posters, but nobody really got it dfhsgdhs)
942 notes · View notes
floq · 1 year ago
Text
Tumblr media
It’s been a while since i stepped on this site 0_o
Anyway, here’s a drawing loosely based on A Glitch in Time I did a while back
3K notes · View notes
poorly-drawn-mdzs · 6 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
Good morning, Sleepyhead.
[First] Prev <–-> Next
#poorly drawn mdzs#mdzs#wei wuxian#lan wangji#'WWX was asleep for 4 days' is an incorrect factoid.#The average WWX sleeps for 8 hours. The PD-MDZS WWX who was asleep for 40 comics and 4 months is an outlier.#We are back to present day! I have missed drawing them!#Ah...the contrast between how the flashback ended (cold and distrustful) to how wwx wakes up (warm and watched over)...#The gap between the past and present is very important. Not just in this story but in our lives too.#The past can still hurt and it doesn't just go away with time as some say. It is the power of realizing that things have changed.#We can't get the good back. The bad memories have concluded. Those live somewhere else now.#It is hard to realize that you have to live for today and tomorrow. The past is so loud.#For WWX it is realizing that despite the mistrust in the past - He really does have faith that LWJ will be there for him.#It is the reflection of knowing that you changed and will keep changing and that change is good and kind sometimes.#But more importantly...and this I really do mean with all my heart:#It will all end up okay in the end. Even after the worst day. The most painful losses. You will get through it.#What feels like a breaking point is truthfully just another step you have to take. You'll get through it even though it feels like the end.#There are wonderful things you have yet to see. Friends you have yet to meet.#Even if it hurts so badly...one day it just aches. Someday you'll go a few weeks not remembering that it ever hurt.#Oh and because my izutsumi comic revealed many people were in need of hearing this:#You are loved. Right now. You are so loved right now. We just forget to tell each other that.#Go tell the people you love that they matter to you. I'm assigning you homework!!! You are graded on completion.
1K notes · View notes
ridivenire · 10 months ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Tav's POV: Embarrasing Rolan
I'm trying to draw again after 3 years of artblock. Not digging how the color version turned out so I posted black&white too
Rolan is verry bullyable
2K notes · View notes
corneredcopia · 22 days ago
Text
Get you someone who looks at you the way Nandor looks at Guillermo when he’s finally giving Nandor attention again who has missed him deeply
Tumblr media
741 notes · View notes
petricorah · 1 year ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
meeting on the fire nation stairs [ids in alt]
5K notes · View notes
akiacia · 3 months ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
multi-step shenanigans
1K notes · View notes
catgirljaneway · 10 months ago
Text
i'm sorry about this one guys
2K notes · View notes
kennico · 5 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
may I have this dance?
1K notes · View notes
upon-the-snow · 6 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
✨ thoughts and prayers ✨
1K notes · View notes
b0tster · 1 year ago
Note
Who is your favorite Zelda character?
who do u think lmao
Tumblr media
3K notes · View notes
pparuparfait · 7 months ago
Text
so like…this is 100% why ivy had That Reaction to fig disguised as lucy, right? it wasn’t that she saw through the disguise, she just saw her once dead friend now revived (like the rest of the party had already been) and thought lucy finally chose ankarna (chose them)
760 notes · View notes