I’m just going to apologize right here, right now for being one person who cannot afford or complete a graduate-level degree in the history of colonialism, racism, and the other forces that shape far too much of our world.
And if you’re reading this, you’re probably like, “What? You’re not serious.” Whether it seems like I’m doing a lot, or not enough. Or both at once. I am trying, lord knows I’m trying, to offer a more honest perspective than other authors who create a new universe with fundamental changes and then don’t follow up on those changes or report honestly on what remains the same. But this play I’m producing takes place in a very small set on a very large stage. The Gazetteer — which seemed like an unnecessarily large undertaking for a story that begins with a man, a boy and a house — is really oversimplified and offensively lite in many places. If I come back for Year 13, my little world is going to get a lot bigger, and I need to be able to approximate global politics to produce a magic-enabled world war. What I’m able to hold in my brain in order to do this looks depressingly like Hetalia.
(Let’s not get into whether or not Axis Powers Hetalia is evil. The fact of the matter is I can’t give you global politics without reducing every country to a ‘Nation-tan,’ like Li’l Marsellia, and getting rid of many countries entirely. I admit this sounds a little like I’m such a small brewery I can’t produce your craft beer without spitting in it, but I still think it tastes better than Bud Lime-a-Rita, so I will soldier on.)
In the interest of finishing strong, although I will mainly be patching the website and writing some pornography, I’m also going to pen this apology/explanation that I’ve been putting off since I got the Gazetteer up. I am pretty apologetic in the Gazetteer itself, mind you, but then I continue to elide history and erase entire cultures anyway. If I don’t do that, you’re not going to get any story at all, but that doesn’t mean this is okay.
I mean, it’s okay. As in ‘meh, that’s not great but whatever.’ I am vaulting over that extremely low bar set by blockbuster intellectual properties like the MCU (wow, two whole gay people) and Harry Potter (your representation is an evil snake, this argument is invaild). I acknowledge the existence of colonialism and admit it was not a good thing, instead of creating a literal slave race *cough* house elves *cough* and never unpacking how fucked up that is. I don’t want to sprain anything patting myself on the back here, but I’m trying to touch on matters of identity, acceptance, discrimination of all kinds and what we owe each other as human beings. And in ways that are generally positive. I guess nothing more than Mr. Rogers was trying to teach us half a century ago, but hopefully with some forward momentum. Time passes and we’re all learning and growing (whether we want to or not), so we have to adjust to new ways of treating each other with respect. There will always be new boundaries and compromises, but there will still be boundaries and compromises of some kind. You know, the lines may be sketchy, but they must be drawn. And we’re gonna screw up and have to do ‘em over, again and again.
Unfortunately, even at the level of one house in one neighborhood in one country on one continent, there are a kerjillion little micro-issues that my extremely fallible characters (and their extremely fallible creator) are going to have to navigate and comment on. Beyond those, there are some big plot points that need to stay as they are or I won’t get to an ending that will be years in the future. The real-life future — and I am not Barnaby, nobody tells me nothin’ about where we’re headed. Once I write something down, I have a limited amount of leeway to change it. It’s electronic ink, it’s not sitting on your bookshelf, so I can fix it a little. And I’m always worried about how much. Someone who starts reading in 2022 will not do so with the same eyes as someone who started reading in 2017… If anyone did.
The obvious example is Mordecai’s revolution. The part where they broke into the Capitol reads vastly differently since January 2021. That’s one of the big things I can’t change. But if you read that and don’t notice it’s from 2019, you can’t help but go “Waaaait. Are you saying the January 6th rioters were in any way morally ambiguous, redeemable or justified?” No. I am not. (Well, not more so than any human life is redeemable, I don’t throw people away.) There are some pretty big narrative differences, but they look small next to the obvious similarity: They were mad at the government and they broke into the Capitol. It just didn’t look like a direct analogy when I wrote it. Y’know, revolutions be like that. And throwing papers around and pretending to pass laws in an empty building is kinda tame, much less violent than the actual fighting.
I’ll give you a more subtle one that is bugging me now. Ann is a very sweet person, but she is still catching up to her physical age. You know she means well, I hope. I was thinking that when I wrote one of her lines which I did end up changing. She is explaining to Hyacinth that Cerise is a lesbian — unbeknownst to her, Hyacinth is also a lesbian. She offers to explain what a lesbian is and the original line is “Oh, you do know what sort of a thing that is, don’t you, Cin?” Ha-ha, like it’s a job description! Hyacinth is stepping on Ann and Cerise’s identities, and Ann is stepping on Hyacinth’s identity. They handle it gracefully and Ann apologizes later when she finds out about Hyacinth. Except you can also read it that Ann thinks a lesbian is a creature, something inhuman, a ‘thing’ like John Carpenter’s Thing. You should know her well enough to know that’s not what she means, but it’s ambiguous and not much of a laugh, so I changed ‘thing’ to ‘person.’ Similarly, I changed “boys down at the Black Orchid” to “friends down at the Black Orchid” when Ann expresses interest in a gender reassignment for some people she knows. Ann may be a little murky on her understanding of assigned-sex versus gender, but it’s rude, it’s just one word, and you don’t know her very well yet. Also, Pierre was a late add and for continuity purposes, Ann would have had trans friends of both genders/sexes.
Fast-forward to where Ann finds out she was accidentally being a bit patronizing to Hyacinth and there is narration around her words — so from her POV — about Cerise’s identity: ‘Cerise was not, technically, a woman.’ Now, transwomen are women, get it tattooed on the back of your hand if you have a hard time remembering it. But where Ann is, they haven’t even defined ‘trans’ yet. She’s been at the Black Orchid and aware of other mollies for only four years and Cerise thinks Ann is a lesbian transwoman like her at this point in the story. Ann identifies as male and if Cerise is making we/us statements that include her, there is going to be more of that hilarious confusion. Realistically, Ann can’t understand the distinction at that point of the story. If she does sense some difference, Cerise keeps ignoring it because she wants Ann on her ‘team’ (as she does later during the second magic storm). The very next line is, ‘But she was in every other way, and Ann and Milo did not experience any difficulty assigning people whatever gender or pronouns they wanted, regardless of the reasons.’ And then some of Ann’s assessment of how Cerise feels about her body and why, because Ann doesn’t feel that way about her own. Ann and Milo may not get it, but they give Cerise her correct pronouns and treat her as a woman as a matter of respect. As one should. But, out of context, here’s something for an awful person to point at and go “Ha! Even the libby-libby-lib SJW admits transwomen are men!” Or it’s a place I could lose a new reader who started at some random point and isn’t willing to give Ann, Cerise or me the benefit of the doubt.
That thing where Cerise opens up during the storm and accepts Milo (and Ann finds out she and him are the same age as Cerise’s lost little brother) is kind of a big deal for all of them. And it sets up the thing later where Ann needs to be more open about Milo, and to put herself out there. And Calliope learns more about why people hide things and Cerise and Pierre come to a grudging understanding that they both have valid experiences/identities. Warm fuzzies for all, but it takes… God, let me do the math… 187 minus 72… 115 installments to get there from the line I’m concerned about. Shit fire and save matches! Nobody is going to give me that much time if they’re hurt, or if they want to hurt someone else with what I wrote. So do I go back and stretch Ann’s understanding a little, or soften the impact right away by adding something like ‘You know, on paper.’? I don’t know yet what I’ll do, but I’ve put a lot of thought into one sentence that seemed like an obvious choice when I wrote it. And you can’t know that from reading it.
This is the internet and there are people out there who either mean harm or don’t care if they do harm. If you are marginalized in any way, you have dealt with these people already. Due to structural issues and unfettered capitalism, you will continue to deal with them — at least it looks this way at the beginning of 2022 — forever. Where I have set up my tent and made my home, I will have to deal with these awful people, and people who mistake me for one of those awful people.
The awful person’s answer to this dilemma is to screw the marginalized. (Wow. Shocker. Never could’ve seen that coming.) I will never be ‘woke’ enough, so there is no point in bending over backwards to please an audience that will never be satisfied. Ha-ha, lefties eat their own. Cancel culture! Perhaps if us sensible folks ignore the inevitable passage of time, we can stagnate comfortably and never have to learn anything new or adjust our behavior ever. Fun times if you’re on top socially, not so much for anyone else. Well, maybe if we stick our fingers in our ears and scream BOOTSTRAPS as loud as we can, we won’t have to hear them complaining.
I would do anything for clicks, but I won’t do that. The ‘woke’ train may crush my feeble old enby brain, but I will stay on as long as I can. Because the alternative is an unending sleep which we might as well call death. Ah! The complexity lets me know I’m still breathing! So I can’t be done growing and changing and wondering about what’s hurtful, what needs an edit, and what needs to stay in. I created an imperfect world to comment on the imperfect world I live in. Both of these will evolve or die.
There is a lot I worry about. I’ll list only a few…
- The nature of Incision (the Invisible) was meant to be a total horror show and the blackest of black comedy, but maybe the joke is too dark and weird for general consumption.
- Question, the nonbinary person we’ve barely met at the Black Orchid, was meant to evolve to Q and then Kes, but Q-Anon refuses to die and I’m left considering a name change.
- Thank god Milo Yiannopoulos finally cacked it socially, but I worried about Milo (as in Bloom County and the Phantom Tollbooth) and Ann (Raggedy, not Coulter) as a combo for a good while there.
- Sean casually calls Erik a slur in #54, and I’ve been over it and over it, but there is no way anyone hearing it knows it’s a slur, least of all the ditzy actor who hasn’t even noticed Ann’s not gay. It’s a character note I return to for him again and again, “It’s cute when I’m insensitive because you know I’m so dumb I don’t mean it!” But do we? I provided the only circumstances I could think of that would result in Sean learning the error of his ways, for funsies, but it happens so much later you may not even notice.
- Diane (and this is super relevant for the pornography!) is meant to be bi, and ace but not aro, and time will tell how well I’m able to handle that. Mordecai certainly had a hard time with it! I’m already having a heck of a time trying to indicate it in the main story, and as soon as you give her character information a view, you know her card is The Monster. Also, you know, her abilities are eventually revealed. I think, given a chance, you can see she’s just as human as any of ‘em, but there’s not much apparent incentive to give me a chance. Oh, another impossible creature with a weird gender/sexuality? Boo.
- Oh, god, and I made a “you no take candle” dialect joke involving a distant relative of Sanaam’s. That is gonna hafta die once I have the time for the edit and some idea of how to reword it. It’s just too offensive for an obscure laugh. I don’t always think about the implications and some stuff sneaks by that I really should’ve caught the first time, I admit it.
The best, the best case scenario for this mess made by an anxious, neurodivergent person, is that it shifts from the uncertain aether it currently occupies to the floor. That my level of sensitivity and representation becomes the new low bar for a future author to sail over. That, god willing, somebody has reason to say, “Shit. Remember when we all thought stuff like Tin Soldier was cool? Before Wyvr made an ass out of themself on Twitter and got lame?” Or some other word if we stop using ‘lame.’ (Here in 2022, I gotta pick my battles; if we try to fight hurtful people by removing every word with a hurtful etymology from our lexicon, we are not gonna win. It will be very hard to get me to redraw that line, but only time will tell.) In the future, maybe an understanding of how deep the evils of colonialism (and racism, classism, all the isms) go will be easier to come by. Because the new authors will grow up reading works from people who didn’t totally ignore it… Or in certain cases, (ha, ha, how are we still doing this?) softly excuse it.
If I’m really lucky, I’ll eventually end up in the basement, which is ‘a product of its time’ or ‘quaint.’ Like a racist grandma!
But never once assume that what I am doing right now is the ceiling. And don’t you assume I assume that either! This is just the best I can do right now. Tin Soldier is not enough and if you don’t demand more you won’t get it. There is no ‘enough.’ If we stop moving we die. Please don’t yell at me, personally, too loud, because I get scared and hide. I’m having enough trouble scraping together the confidence to keep doing this. If you want more, correct me gently. And remember that thing I said about picking your battles. If we attack on all fronts at once we will take each other out and we will… I don’t think lose, in the long run, but we will move backwards and need to work even harder to advance. And a lot of us won’t make it.
Respect to Moses and Dr. Martin Luther King, but if you suggest a promised land, a lot of people are going to sit down right here and declare that they are in it. I have seen these people, they get a lot of views. I have to skew more towards Hunter S. Thompson in one of his many drug-fueled freakouts: Don’t land. We can’t stop here. Or there. Or waaay over there. It’s bat country as far as the eye can see. Snort some courage and floor it.
Liner Notes…
More I’m not going to hold my breath It can’t stay this way Things change and so must we I shared a brief dream with you I can’t see you now All I have are these reflections Hear my voice But be patient with me There’s so much I can’t do If every star became a spotlight If I could write your truth across the whole sky It still won’t be enough Don’t let it be enough All my love is still too little These hands have built a world but it'll Never be enough Don’t let it be enough For you Never, never Never, never Never, for you For you Never enough Never enough Never enough For you For you For you If every star became a spotlight If I could write your truth across the whole sky It still won’t be enough Don’t let it be enough All my love is still too little These hands have built a world but it'll Never be enough Don’t let it be enough For you Never, never Never, never Never, for you For you Never enough Never, never Never enough Never, never Never enough For you For you For you For us [I will eventually get you an illustration for this, but the recent WordPress updates have kneecapped my editor and made everything way harder to do.]