Also, re: Wendig’s firing. Can the social justice crowd in the SW fandom stop fighting about shipping and character stanning and in-universe morality questions and all that other self-indulgent diegetic crap and focus on this? I personally love Wendig’s work but it’s also just completely fucked up that he got fired for, primarily, defending queer representation and standing up to– I didn’t actually know the level of harassment, this is a quote from his blog:
“I also started receiving TONS of harassment – harassment that has gone on for years, harassment that has required me to contact local police and warn them of SWATting attempts, harassment across all corners of the Internet, here, FB, Reddit, YouTube. Some of it was bot stuff, obviously, or sock puppets, but some of it was pretty creepy, and very personal. I didn’t call a lot of it out or even highlight, but it was there, a sort of… constant background noise. (Christ, for an extra special treat go search for my name and check out the YouTube videos if you want an eye-opening glimpse.)“ (x)
Like. Holy shit. This was over gay characters in a series of Star Wars novels.
I was so disappointed in the SW fandom for immediately factionalizing when the matter of Tran Loan’s harassment came up. But in some ways this is even more disturbing, because it’s not just harassment, it’s a creative being fired for having progressive politics and for refusing to take harassment lying down.
If you care about representation in Star Wars, this is where you take your fight. When writers explicitly are thrown under the bus for writing rep and voicing progressive politics. Because honestly, if people let this slide – and I truly expect that, I am being extremely optimistic to even ask anything of this rotten fandom – how can people expect to get any representation, ever? How can you expect you’ll be able to pressure the writers (that’s who the sj crowd is always trying to pressure!) when they might lose their jobs and be targeted by terrifying threats over giving you what you want?
Honestly stop blaming the creative team, in light of all this I think Wendig is a man of exceptional conviction and courage. He faced a gauntlet of shit and no support from his bosses for putting what a lot of people on this site consider a bare minimum of progressive politics in his work. For all we know, a lot of people would love to do more but they’re scared.
It’s tone policing.
- He was harassed.
- He became negative and uncivil as a result of being harassed.
- He was fired for being negative and uncivil.
Honestly I don’t even want to use that language.
He’s actually a super positive and upbeat guy. He didn’t become negative and uncivil, it’s not like he was this fountain of invective and rage. People have literally mocked his tweets for being too energetically, goofily supportive. So much of what he posts is this over the top sincere encouragement.
He responded to individual cases of harassment by not taking shit, and he posted political opinions.
People have ALREADY started pretending he was this awful raging angry guy, and have already made bullshit attacks about him being a fake ally, so I don’t want to play into that.
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