Kit Walker

A few days ago, a mutual of mine on Tumblr asked a pretty interesting question: “why do people get uncomfortable with political fanfic?” She went on to point out that “A lot of you love to boast that you love the dirtiest, nastiest smut ever, why can’t you handle someone writing ‘fascism is bad’?”

It reminded me of the time a book marketer told me The Casefile of Jay Moriarty was too political for queer romance readers, and too gay for political thriller readers. As if those two categories were completely mutually exclusive.

Fanfiction and romance fiction have a lot in common, and not just because fanfic tends to have a lot of sex and romance in it. Both are capable of being really really good — like, “permanently alters your brain chemistry, haunts you for the rest of your life” good — but are largely viewed as inherently frivolous. Both mediums are often read, written, and published by people who don’t particularly give a shit (much to the frustration of readers, writers, and publishers who do).

And so, very often, a reader going into a fanfic or romance novel will be doing so with the expectation that these works are low-effort; that the experience they’re about to have won’t make them think or feel anything complicated. When that assumption turns out to be untrue — when the work demands effort on the part of the reader — they respond negatively. It’s the literary equivalent of a pillow princess suddenly being asked to top.

However, just because I understand this viewpoint doesn’t mean I have to respect it. Fuck your comfort, I’m trying to do something interesting out here. To quote Bruce Sterling, “You can get a hell of a lot done in a popular medium just by knocking it off with the bullshit.”

( Read more... )

-K

For what may be obvious reasons, I recently read every story in the original Sherlock Holmes canon — all four novels and 56 short stories.

(This is not bragging. 56 is not that many. Harlan Ellison, one of my favourite writers, is said to have written over 1 000 short stories in his lifetime. You’re welcome to try and verify that claim, but you’ll probably get distracted by the “Controversies and disputes” section of his Wikipedia page.)

The Holmes stories were written before we as a culture fell from god’s grace and invented sequel hooks. As a result, I was struck by the fact that some of the canon’s most famous characters appear quite suddenly and don’t stick around for very long.

An example: if you asked the average person to name three Sherlock Holmes characters, they’d probably say “Holmes, Watson, and Moriarty.” But Professor Moriarty only factors into two stories, and personally appears in just one: "The Final Problem," in which he pops up out of nowhere to kill Holmes. The second story, The Valley of Fear, takes place before "The Final Problem" but was published 21 years later, establishing Moriarty as a recurring threat well after the fact.

Another example: if you asked the average person to name three Sherlock Holmes characters, but stipulated at least one of them had to be a woman, they might say "Holmes, Watson, and Irene Adler." Because Adler is the Woman — the woman who bested Sherlock Holmes.

( spoilers for basically any Sherlock Holmes adaptation that has Irene Adler in it )

So it turns out one of the producers from the upcoming Wheel of Time television series (are we still calling these things "television" when they aren't airing on actual broadcast television?) is also working on an adaptation of The Last Herald-Mage.

First off, while I was previously not at all interested in the Wheel of Time adaptation, I am now very invested in whether it turns out to be any good.

Second, I know Vanyel is Mercedes Lackey's special boy, but I'm not actually sure The Last Herald-Mage is a good place to start with a Valdemar adaptation.

( spoilers for the Arrows and Last Herald-Mage trilogies )

So. Klingons.

In the original Star Trek series, Klingons were dudes in brownface makeup with a penchant for snakeskin pants and Fu Manchu moustaches. Starting in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and throughout the Star Trek series of the 80s and 90s, the Klingons suddenly had dramatic forehead ridges and dressed like they were headed to a Slipknot concert. In the early 00s, Star Trek: Enterprise started out with the forehead-ridge metalhead Klingons, then had an entire arc that transformed them into the original series’ brownface snakeskin-panted Klingons. Star Trek Into Darkness, which takes place in an alternate-reality version of the original series, kicked that whole thing in the shins with their slightly pointier take on the metalhead Klingons. And then Star Trek: Discovery, which takes place a few years earlier than the original series, slam-dunked Enterprise’s explanation into the trash with its incredibly dramatic take on the Klingons.


There are other, smaller incongruities throughout the timeline of the various Star Trek series; for example, Discovery’s holographic communication system is, by official canon, contemporaneous with the original series’ space fax.

The non-diegetic explanation for these things is obvious: Star Trek is a show about the future, and nothing dates faster than the future. On top of that, each successive production had a higher budget, access to improved effects tech, and artists who leveraged both to try out some Stuff.

There have been attempts to explain these incongruities diegetically; for example, Enterprise’s arc devoted to a gene-altering virus that made the Klingons look the way they did in the original series. Discovery also had some throwaway lines to explain why the holographic communication system disappeared in later shows. But Star Trek didn’t need that and I don’t care.

There are people who will tell you these explanations are vitally important, and every little timeline discrepancy needs to be explained. These people are annoying and you don’t have to listen to them.

Anyway, let’s talk about theater. In live theater, there’s a distinction between the reality the audience observes and the reality the characters experience.

Sometimes this distinction is slight. Julius Caesar probably didn’t speak in iambic pentameter and almost certainly didn’t speak English. Shakespeare doesn’t bother to explain why Caesar does both in the eponymous play; it’s implicitly understood that the characters of Julius Caesar are actually speaking Latin, and the use of English is an interpretive device.

Sometimes the distinction is more blatant. The Broadway production of Hamilton is performed on a bare-bones set featuring a walkway, a couple of staircases, an occasional table, and nothing else. The characters fight on battlefields and walk the streets of 18th century New York, but it’s all implied by their performances; what they see isn’t what we see.


This is how I watch Star Trek: with a wall of interpretation between me and the characters. To me, the technological standards and alien makeup change constantly; to the characters, it’s all perfectly consistent. The reality they experience is different than the one I observe. I don’t need anything explained, and whenever Star Trek tries to explain it anyway, all that does is raise even more questions.

The bit from “Trials and Tribble-ations” where Worf gets embarrassed about original series Klingons is good, though. That can stay.

Now that I’ve quit Twitter, I no longer have something to mindlessly scroll through whenever I need to kill time. Advice columns have come to fill that void for me, especially Slate’s Dear Prudence column. This eventually led me to an essay by Emily Yoffe, a former Prudence, called “My Husband’s Other Wife.” ( Content warning for discussion regarding the death of a spouse. )