![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jlhTwo big links that lead me to two big thoughts on two big issues, but really really, if you care about either issue please follow the links.
First, my pal![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kalichan wrote an amazing post about a week ago: What's Love Got To Do With It: My Thoughts on *fail that everyone who's interested in such matters, especially in the way social justice is interacting with fandom, should read right now.
For me, as I said in my comment to Kali, I've been feeling more and more uncertain about the direction of the conversation as more and more of it has been about shaming. I think it's important to point out fail, and it's best when the person who's written a fic that has problems is open to listening and understanding the problem that people have. After that, though, I'm really unsure. It seems that there's this wish that if we shame folks into not loving things with fail and only love things without fail we'll get more products without fail. But I don't think that's how it works at all--and more importantly, I can't promise to be that pure a consumer of cultural products, and I'm not sure I even want to achieve that kind of purity. Mostly because it doesn't sound particularly enjoyable.
Instead, I'd want us to continue to point out the fail when it happens and talk about it while still understanding that many of us will maintain our love for that cultural product. One of my favorite holiday films is "Holiday Inn" from 1942, and it contains a key musical number done in blackface. There are plot reasons for this I won't go into, but it is remarked on in the film that blackface is old-fashioned. And yet, in the middle of the blackface number, the movie cuts to the mamie-like cook in the kitchen, her pickaninny children on her knee, as she sings a verse of the song. It's a deeply strange moment, listening to these white people singing a faux-blues song written by Irving Berlin, and then suddenly hearing a black woman singing the same song in a much more authentic, and distinctly different, performance style. And for that, I never skip the number when I watch; I just warn my friends that it's coming up. And I still love the movie.
The Pop Culture Happy Hour Podcast this week was at least partially about comics, specifically super hero comics, where the three folks on the podcast who aren't comic readers were given two recent Batman comics by their fourth podcaster, who's the comics editor at NPR, and came back with their reactions. Lots of great conversation about barriers to entry, and within that one of the readers noted that if one wants to get the entire projected 5-year story in these monthly single-issue installments it becomes incredibly expensive, not just as money spent but also in cost for the entertainment gained (at least, in terms of time) when compared to buying movies/music/tv shows/books.
In terms of that, I'll say that I look at the $250 I spent on 23 volumes of Fruits Basket and yeah, I'm not sure I really got my money's worth. I mean, I can't even take those books on the train with me (where I do a lot of my reading) because I can get through a volume in about 20 minutes. I have a whole entry in me about how much culture used to be free or pretty low-cost versus how much we're expected to spend nowadays, but I'm having difficulty framing that conversation in a way that doesn't sound like I'm advocating theft; I'm more saying that the model we are moving toward at the moment where people pay directly (rather than advertiser support) is probably untenable in large ways.
First, my pal
kalichan wrote an amazing post about a week ago: What's Love Got To Do With It: My Thoughts on *fail that everyone who's interested in such matters, especially in the way social justice is interacting with fandom, should read right now.For me, as I said in my comment to Kali, I've been feeling more and more uncertain about the direction of the conversation as more and more of it has been about shaming. I think it's important to point out fail, and it's best when the person who's written a fic that has problems is open to listening and understanding the problem that people have. After that, though, I'm really unsure. It seems that there's this wish that if we shame folks into not loving things with fail and only love things without fail we'll get more products without fail. But I don't think that's how it works at all--and more importantly, I can't promise to be that pure a consumer of cultural products, and I'm not sure I even want to achieve that kind of purity. Mostly because it doesn't sound particularly enjoyable.
Instead, I'd want us to continue to point out the fail when it happens and talk about it while still understanding that many of us will maintain our love for that cultural product. One of my favorite holiday films is "Holiday Inn" from 1942, and it contains a key musical number done in blackface. There are plot reasons for this I won't go into, but it is remarked on in the film that blackface is old-fashioned. And yet, in the middle of the blackface number, the movie cuts to the mamie-like cook in the kitchen, her pickaninny children on her knee, as she sings a verse of the song. It's a deeply strange moment, listening to these white people singing a faux-blues song written by Irving Berlin, and then suddenly hearing a black woman singing the same song in a much more authentic, and distinctly different, performance style. And for that, I never skip the number when I watch; I just warn my friends that it's coming up. And I still love the movie.
The Pop Culture Happy Hour Podcast this week was at least partially about comics, specifically super hero comics, where the three folks on the podcast who aren't comic readers were given two recent Batman comics by their fourth podcaster, who's the comics editor at NPR, and came back with their reactions. Lots of great conversation about barriers to entry, and within that one of the readers noted that if one wants to get the entire projected 5-year story in these monthly single-issue installments it becomes incredibly expensive, not just as money spent but also in cost for the entertainment gained (at least, in terms of time) when compared to buying movies/music/tv shows/books.
In terms of that, I'll say that I look at the $250 I spent on 23 volumes of Fruits Basket and yeah, I'm not sure I really got my money's worth. I mean, I can't even take those books on the train with me (where I do a lot of my reading) because I can get through a volume in about 20 minutes. I have a whole entry in me about how much culture used to be free or pretty low-cost versus how much we're expected to spend nowadays, but I'm having difficulty framing that conversation in a way that doesn't sound like I'm advocating theft; I'm more saying that the model we are moving toward at the moment where people pay directly (rather than advertiser support) is probably untenable in large ways.
