So I linked it to another friend, one who plays video games and is not the same kind of social justice activist. I spend a lot of time with people who are, so the comments are alien to me. It felt a lot like the comments were coming from some strange ‘other’ that is aggressive and anonymous and hates women. I don’t have any kind of mental bridge between the kinds of people who make those comments and the kinds of people I actually have conversations with.

An interesting conversation ensued. I don’t play a lot of video games: I’ve played Trauma Center, and some Mario Party, and Wii Fit. I’ve played online MMOs like Rift and World of Warcraft. I’ve played flash games on the site Kongregate (mostly puzzle games and tower defenses). But he is coming from a world where he owns gaming consoles that are not the Wii, and actually plays games on them.

See, I have been reading a variety of articles about rape culture in video games. In Rift, despite being in a guild with people I quite liked, I knew a woman who never spoke in Ventrilo (a voice chat client), because she didn’t want people to know she was female. Another woman, though, used the fact that she had the kind of mezzo-soprano voice that can sound really cute to get first pick at loot. There were also the kind of casually sexist jokes that I don’t care about most of the time. I don’t care about those jokes because I’m pretty awesome, and people who don’t recognize that can’t keep up very long: they get burned up like so much ablative plating on my colonizing spaceship as it enters atmosphere on Planet Awesome.

But I’ve been doing that thing where I try to expand my horizons and better understand subtext in media, which means reading a lot of material about social justice and media. I’m more aware of what subtext connotes, and why it’s not something we should perpetuate. I have more of a vocabulary about the whole issue. I’m more aware of the taken-as-given connection between trailers like the one for Hitman and casually insulting conversation in Vent that suggests (jokingly, of course) that I should either go make someone a sandwich or post topless photos.

Still, the overuse of tropes about both sexes in video games and tits in place of storytelling are separate issues from the prevalence of rape culture in cooperative video games and multiplayer online games and internet culture. They are often conflated, to everyone’s detriment.

Rape culture is tautologically bad, and should be discouraged.

Lazy sexualized storytelling is bad in a completely different way. Some romance novels share the same attributes. Many romance novels that I happily read share the same attributes. If I can read about sexy immortal shape-changing warriors with guns, I am pretty much okay with a straight male friend admiring Bayonetta‘s attributes.

Wish-fulfillment media being conflated whole-hog with rape culture is not a positive thing for anyone. If the entirety of a genre you imbibe is supposed to be disempowering to women and misogynist and hateful, how are you supposed to be able to tell when something actually heinous pops up?

You’ll note that most of the linked articles are a bit out of date. This is because the issue is something that I’ve been mentally prodding with a stick for a while. I had a really hard time figuring out what I thought about it. Video games are not the media I consume the most of, so it was difficult to get a broad sense of context.

On one hand, I am all for napalming the bejeezus out of anything that supports rape culture.

But at the same time, specifics matter, and context matters.

The fanworks themselves can be utterly amazing, and I gushed at length about a couple in particular. She suggested that she might look some up herself, and, while I have full faith in her ability to find archives of fanfiction on the internet, I have full faith in her ability to find archives of fanfiction on the internet.

Fanfiction is like any other sort of self-published work. Some of the stories are absolute gems written by people who know their craft and get other people to read them over for errors. Some of them are adolescent wish-fulfillment posted before the pixels are dry. As everywhere else, the latter outnumber the former rather spectacularly.

So here is my short, incomplete list of recommendations. These are not necessarily those stories that I love best, but those that I feel both stand alone as literature and are stronger and more interesting because of their context as fanfiction.

First, Strider’s Edge, by tumblr user Paratactician

It is the combination of Homestuck by Andrew Hussie, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. It is set in Oxford, and we are informed that most places mentioned in the story map to real places, though names have been changed.

Strider’s Edge kicks off with an A. E. Housman poem, the whole of which foreshadows the entire story, and only part of which is included in the text itself. The story itself is difficult to summarize without giving away all the important bits, but the one at the top of the story is “It was a Tuesday late in September when I went up to Oxford University.” The story follows the adventures of John Egbert as he grows up, meets new friends, falls in love, and is peripheral witness to several murders. The solving of the murders is not central to the plot.

One of the central themes is that all things are repeated: this is addressed explicitly in one of the interesting conversations about literary constructs that occurs in John’s Tutorials sessions, as well as being a central facet of the way the story is presented and integral to the fact that this is fanfiction.

Second, One of Our Submarines, by Luka Grindstaff

It should be no surprise to anyone that one of Luka’s stories ended up on this list: I adore Luka’s comic Kagerou so much that I am writing fanfiction of it myself.

One of Our Submarines is summarized as “Sollux Captor, recently drafted into the Service of Her Imperious Condescension, discovers a secret community of Helmsmen hidden inside the Imperial communications network. Meanwhile on Alternia, Karkat Vantas is up to his goddamn nook in revolution.”


Yes, it makes more sense initially if you have already read Homestuck, which it is a fanfiction of. It is also not complete yet.


One of Our Submarines explores what it would be like to be a sentient and formerly autonomous computer system, the horrors inherent in that transition, and storytelling entirely via chatlog.


Third, General Vantas Gets Hitched, by Jesse Hajicek

I probably link Luka and Jesse entirely more than I should, but I deeply admire both of them as writers.

Just go read the articles so I can blither about implications without explaining the basic concepts, okay?

I find it really fascinating how kishotenketsu contrasts with the convention of three acts. The role of plot without conflict in Western culture can be found somewhat in how we treat vignettes and one-act plays, but our approach to it is much different. When I think of vignettes, I think of Slums of Beverly Hills, where there’s some conflict within the family and internal conflict over growing up, but no over-arching conflict. I still remember it years after seeing it, because it had a tone all its own and I think it was also the first time I’d seen breasts in a movie, but it didn’t leave me inspired or emotionally satisfied the way The Hunger Games did.

Part of this is probably my predilection for adventure stories and grand fantasy and science fiction adventures where the world is changed forever. I like conflict. I like it when characters triumph. I like it when there’s something to fight.

I am not overly fond of vignettes. But kishotenketsu is something distinct from that, despite a vignette being the closest Western approximation I can think of, and it seems to me contains different opportunities. Kishotenketsu is less about personal agency than adaptability, and so requires a different mindset, which is always interesting to explore.

The principle behind it is to write those things you are familiar with.

This can be interpreted a number of different ways.

It can be interpreted as writing only those things you have direct experience of, as in travel and memoir pieces, or only writing about places you’ve actually been. This is probably the narrowest definition, and limits us most.

It can be interpreted as only writing about those experiences you can directly relate to, as in fiction set in the present day, about circumstances with which you are at least tangentially familiar. This is the mid-range definition, and one of the more commonly used ones. It is the basis upon which I’m going to take the pain radiating up from my jaw like being repeatedly sucker-punched by my own teeth and go write alien body-horror dentistry (I went to the dentist today. It is good for me, and my general health, and makes me feel like a Responsible Adult. I don’t care: it hurts now that the anesthetic has worn off, and I’m unhappy about it).

It can also be taken as an exhortation to go forth and do the fucking research. This is probably the best way to interpret it, as we should all do more research.

I had more plans for this post, talking about research resources and reading memoirs and not just statistics when researching groups, but all of you know how to use Google, and my face hurts.

Last Wednesday was the launch of my last issue as Editor In Chief of Island Writer magazine. It was a good run: I started as Editorial Assistant on Issue 8.1, was Managing Editor for 8.2, and Editor In Chief for 9.1, 9.2 and 10.1. I learned a lot over that period, and contributed to the magazine, I think. Island Writer is now available online: you can download it here. It wasn’t, before. Island Writer has six staff now, instead of three as when I initially started on it. I am not the person who instigated that change, but I campaigned for it and helped find some of the wonderful staff we have now, including Simeon Goa, our Art Director, who also did the cover you can see at right, and Kim Nayyer, the very steady Creative Non-Fiction and Writer’s Life editor, whose support has been invaluable. Lana Betts, our efficient Editorial Assistant, does not have a personal website. Nor does Lynnette Kissoon, our fearless fiction editor whose daughters I accidentally traumatized by inviting to a launch at which there were readings not suitable for young ears (sorry). Sheila Martindale is the poetry editor, and a venerable poet in her own right.

I started everyone using Google Docs for those things edited by multiple people online, and worked with Simeon to try to streamline a lot of that process as much as possible. We started having editing parties, which got us through copy-editing and proofreading in record time, without anyone feeling too much of a stress-crunch.

In addition to any contributions I may have made, I learned a lot while working on Island Writer: I learned the mad giddy rush of making changes to ones house style-sheet, I learned about formulaic rejection letters, I learned about being very polite under all circumstances (which, if you read last week’s post, you’ll note is not a skill I choose to exercise at all times). I learned about organizing book launches, and the fact that there is such a thing as too much cheese, but not such a thing as too many post-it notes.

It’s been a great run.

I dislike being white being made out to be the biggest part of privilege that we have to look at. Yes, I am a white, cisgendered, reasonably neurotypical (I’m smarter than you), middle-class, heterosexual female. But just because I have privilege does not mean I am part of the problem.

Probably one of the reasons so much of the social justice stuff I read rankles is that it focuses on race, and is written by Americans. Americans have a different experience of race than Canadians from small, northern, west coast cities.

To illustrate, let me tell you about the city I grew up in.

Quesnel when I was a child had one black family. They were the dark-dark skinned East Indian pharmacist couple and their two kids. Their girl was a couple years younger than me, but their boy was my age and in my class. He was all into sports and whatever, which was irrelevant to my reading-obsessed self, but he was also good at math. My biggest awareness of interaction with him was beating him in a national math competition that we both competed in, at a grade level above ours. I was smugly satisfied when I beat him, because everyone knew he was smart and I’m absurdly competitive. We had one openly lesbian family. They were friends with my mom, they had two adoptive kids. It apparently never occurred to my mom to explain what lesbians were, so I just found my sense of narrative incredibly confused by the fact that the one with cropped hair who always wore plaid lumberjack shirts was significantly shorter than the soft one with curls around her face. In the stories, the manly person is always taller than the womanly one, and so it was very weird. The population of the town was primarily Scottish-Canadian, Chinese-Canadian, Sikh Canadians, and First Nations. My family, good Catholic Scottish-Canadians who had been there for generations, was related to a lot of people, and had longstanding connections in the community. Like the Keens, a Chinese family who’d been there for ages. Harry Keen gave the eulogy for my great-uncle. The Hoys, another long-standing Chinese family, had at one point owned about a third of downtown, including taking family portraits of practically every family and miner passing through to Barkerville, the big Gold Rush town. Oh, and there were the Metis, who are the reason I was reasonably certain for most of my childhood that all French-Canadians were really tan. My mother’s graduate work in First Nations studies meant I spent a fair amount of time on the reservations, and we were invited to potlatches. I also went to the open community days at the Sikh temple, and looked forward every year to when my mom got huge batches of pakora from a woman who made them by the lot in her kitchen at home. I saw a lot of 30-something First Nations men with alcohol abuse problems, too, that awful stereotype and social justice hot topic. Including two of my cousins.

Oh, right, I should mention: I’m the only one of my first cousins on my mom’s side without First Nations status. I stand out at family reunions like undercooked fish.

On from race, as it is overstated: some of my closest friends are genderqueer and various shades of gay. Okay, yes, that covers most things I could say about that. I’m aware of issues around it, of the fact that a couple bi guys I know identify as straight on dating sites because they feel more secure in it.

When I was at my first high school, my first real friend was the apparently developmentally disabled girl in my theatre class: I only realized she was atypical when a teacher complimented me on my ‘outreach.’ The idea of it repulsed me: she was fun to hang around with because she was interesting and not obsessed with boys and drinking, not because it got me brownie points with authority figures. Awareness of neurodivergence is one of the reasons I contribute to the intermittent blog Speaking Human, which is partly dedicated at exploring and explaining why people act the way they do.

That covers everything at the top except class: I am intensely aware of class. I am aware that having an educated family has advantaged me (some people didn’t learn how to use semi-colons until university, and that’s just tragic), and that I will have a lot more opportunities if I complete a Bachelors degree at the very least. I connect class and education a great deal, because I value reading and erudition and good conversation and cannot comprehend that those might not be the essential elements of high society for everyone.

So now you know that I recognize privilege. But recognizing privilege isn’t enough: being a responsible member of society relies on doing something about it. I call people out on discriminatory language whenever possible, and explain why I am doing so. I have, in my cranky way, tried to educate people about various issues in the belief that most prejudice is xenophobia and knowledge will dispel it.

I have a whole other rant about ‘white culture’ being brought up as a primary privileged group and the fact that ‘white culture’ is a thing that does not exist, because one can hardly get two straight cis white Republican males from the same state to agree on anything, let alone all white people across three and-some-ish continents (I also have another about how awesome it is that someone I went to high school with is running for Governor and how it makes me feel unaccomplished, but this post is already possibly the longest I’ve ever posted).

So remember: I am not racist. I am not misandrist. I do not care whether you are gay or straight or bi or trans* or genderqueer or ace. I am a misanthrope: I hate all of you equally.