Doctor Who Is The Most Diabolical Villain on Television

April Daniels2 Comments

The whole “Doctor’s Companion” thing kind of horrifies me. Let’s really sit down and examine what it implies.

You’re an ordinary person. Probably British. You’ve got a life worth living. You’ve got hopes and ambitions and dreams and talents, all of which only make sense in the context of the time and place in which you were born.

Then one day an old police box sets down in your vicinity, and a thing that looks like a man (also British) walks up and gives you the sales pitch. The sales pitch boils down to this:

“Hello! I’m a monstrously powerful alien, here to whisk you off on an adventure (That you cannot POSSIBLY understand well enough to provide informed consent for) to see all of time and space (until I get bored of you, or you die horribly)!”

And you, like a damn fool, say yes.

Even if you don’t die, and even if you return home to your family, you will be irrevocably traumatized by all the terrifying experiences you’ve been exposed to.

For the Doctor’s amusement.

And yet fans wish that the TARDIS would set down in their own back yards.

The Doctor has seduced an entire fandom into Stockholm Syndrome. The Doctor is pure evil. Hell, sometimes he even looks like Kilgrave! If you see a blue police box chilling out in your back yard, run the fuck away.

*Yes, I know he’s not called Doctor Who. I need those sweet, sweet SEO clicks.

Milestone!

April Daniels

Hey guys, awesome news! Yesterday I signed a two book deal with Diversion Books to publish Dreadnought and its sequel, tentatively titled Legion. Dreadnought is scheduled for publication in 2016.This is a huge step for me, the culmination of more than a decade of work, or about a third of my life to put that in perspective. I am excited and eager to see what comes next. I hope you’ll all pick up a copy of Dreadnought when it is available.

Cannibalism

April Daniels3 Comments

Lateral violence is when people within a marginal community take out their rage on each other. If you’ve witnessed an activist circle meltdown, you’ve probably seen it. The egos, the pain, the venom, the hurt. It boils down to a radioactive sludge that poisons everything it touches, until once vibrant communities become digital ghost towns, low-rez tumbleweeds blowing through ancient and abandoned threads.

(My blender has a metaphor mixing setting, and damn if I don’t enjoy it.)

At the beginning of 2014, there was a real sense of hope in the online feminist communities that I hang out in that we’d make real progress in confronting lateral violence. That didn’t happen, or if it did, it only seemed to be the results of an effort to circle the wagons against the screaming hate machine that erupted later that year. The root of the problem wasn’t pulled up; if anything, we’ve only become more insidious with each other.

But let’s get specific. What do I mean by lateral violence within marginalized communities? I mean points-scoring. I mean witch hunts. I mean the way the word “problematic” has been weaponized into a scarlet letter. I mean the way our social justice discourse has necrotized into a filthy ethos that encourages us to point the finger early, point the finger first, lest the finger be pointed at us.

I mean the way it’s strangling us.

Over and over we demand more representation, more marginalized creators, more voices from the edges. And these are good demands. We need more movies by women, and people of color, and queer folk. We need more books by women of color and trans folks. We need music by gay dudes and paintings by lesbians. We need more art from the edges, so that the kids at the edges growing up today will know they’re not alone. To see themselves embodied in all aspects of life, to help them find the strength to thrive in a world that too often wishes they weren’t around.

I cannot overemphasize how important this is to me. I wrote Dreadnought specifically so a scared trans girl could stumble across it on a library bookshelf and have something that, at least for a few hours, would help her feel powerful and important and worthwhile. To help her imagine a world in which she’d decide to stick around long enough to see what her twenties would be like. The money is secondary for me, as it is for many marginalized artists. We do this because we can’t not do it. Because we know what it was like to grow up with only a few scraps of culture that even acknowledged we existed, and because we want to ease that pain for the kids who come after us.

That’s why it breaks my heart that I can’t think of a single marginalized artist, writer, or creator that I am familiar with on a personal level who hasn’t expressed fear that someday they’re going to put a foot wrong and then—

–and then the mob will come for them.

We’re not talking about Gators when we have these hushed conversations. We talk about Gators and their ilk loudly, and in public. The conversations I’m talking about are hushed, as often as not. DMs, face-to-face, Gchat. Sometimes Twitter. Sometimes blogs with all the names stripped off. But very, very frequently with one eye over our shoulder, we speak about how our allies and compatriots sometimes scare us to death. Sometimes it feels like any friend can become an accuser. Any finger can be pointed right at our hearts, right through our chests, right down to our soul to damn us eternally in the eyes of our community. You know what I mean. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen it happen before. I say lateral violence because it’s precise, but what I really mean are social hit jobs, and they are especially devastating to members of marginalized communities who, once ejected from their support network, may have nowhere else to go.

Not only are the consequences more severe for marginalized people, but the chances of this happening seem to be higher, as well. The moment you stake your claim out as a queer writer (or a writer of color or a feminist writer or any other marginalized voice) you are stating your intention to become part of a tradition. It’s a proud tradition, and a vital one. It’s a statement that yes, there will be politics in your work, and you won’t shrink from that. It doesn’t demand that you write nothing but polemics or didactic just-so parables, but it does demand an awareness of who you are and where you’re writing from, and to my mind it can create some of the most beautiful art we have available to us.

But the blade has two sides. Because now, as a queer writer, you’re also expected to be better—for some value of better­ that varies from reader to reader, community to community, sometimes self-contradictory and always in flux—than those other writers, those plain old writer-writers. It’s okay for a writer-writer to fuck up, or if it’s not okay, there are allowances to be made. Sure Popular CisHet White Dude Author X makes all his female fans cringe when he writes chapters from a woman’s point of view, but hey, his plots are zippy and the dialog is fun, so we’ll ignore that. But should a self-identifying lesbian writer screw up a chapter from a gay man’s point of view, she cannot expect the same mercy. She should have known better. And the more marginalized groups a writer belongs to, the higher the standards she’s held to. We love to eat our own.

So not only are the consequences of lateral violence—both emotional and professional—more devastating, the very same forces that make marginalized writers and artists marginal in the first place make this lateral violence far, far more commonplace for us.

I do not know of a single writer who I know in a personal context who hasn’t expressed, at least privately, some doubt and fear that someday they will say something careless and be ruined for it. Or that something they write will be taken out of context, and they’ll be called to be “accountable” for it, whatever the hell accountability is supposed to mean in this context. Or even, yes, that someone who is an oversensitive ninny could decide to take out their insecurities on them. It’s happened. Don’t think it hasn’t. And the more marginal you are, the greater this fear tends to be. I know that it’s my biggest fear as a writer.

I’m not worried about never getting a fat contract. I don’t spend a lot of time twisting my apron over the fear that I’ll never leave a WorldCon with a rocket in my luggage. Sure I think about these things, but they don’t scare me. What scares me is the thought that one of my human flaws will be excavated from the deep sedimentary layers of the Internet, ripped from context and history, and spun out into a reputation-destroying dagger planted right in my back by someone I thought valued me as a member of their community. I think we can all think of an instance where we saw something like this happened. And if you can’t—well, have I got some bad fucking news for you!

This kind of thing is horrible enough when it isolates people from their social groups. People have been traumatized, ruined over this kind of thing. But when it destroys writers and artists personally and professionally, it contributes to the impoverishment of our culture. It pays the bullshit forward to the next generation by strangling our clearest marginalized voices before they can do their best work. It contributes to that blasted cultural wasteland that so many of us struggled to survive in when we were younger and still looking for our people.

For a long time, I resisted using the word violence to describe actions that don’t involve inflicting physical harm on people. In some ways, I still wish we had a better term for this, one that distinguished this kind of harm from bloodshed. But the anxiety I feel over this—that all my writer friends who aren’t straight, cisgender white dudes feel over this—doesn’t seem like it would come from something as innocuous as a few dirty words, a few unpleasant conversations. This is a poison right at the heart of our communities, and it makes me sick to think how many voices—perceptive, beautiful, lively voices—we’ve lost before we even got to hear them simply because some people decided it wasn’t worth the risk of seeing if anyone wanted to hear what they had to say.

I don’t yet know how we fix this.

But we need to admit that it’s a problem.

Peeple

April Daniels
There’s a new app coming out that is basically Yelp, but for individual humans who are just living their daily lives, not, you know, companies engaged in public-facing financial transactions. It will let you give people a 1 to 5 star review, as well as leave comments about them. It will let *anyone* who knows you do this.

The article I’ve linked above doesn’t quite do the situation justice, so I’ve included some line edits here for clarification (helpful additions in bold):

“We’re creating a platform that allows users to provide a rating and commentary on the people they come in contact with everyday, on a level that we haven’t seen before,” said Julia Cordray, ominously. The self-described “female, emphatic” CEO then paused for a high pitched and somehow disturbing giggle fit before continuing, “We feel this is the ultimate social experiment. Let’s look at everyone in the three ways you could possibly know someone — personally, professionally and romantically — and let the world rate them, while allowing yourself to be rated.”

She said the app will help people to better choose who they hire, do business with, date, let babysit their kids, become roommates with or teach their children, among other uses. When pressed on what those other uses could be, she only replied, “You know. OTHER uses.”

Users will log in through Facebook and provide a cellphone number to verify their identity. Co-founder Nicole McCullough was more or less able to suppress a fit of laughter while she explained the service’s security measures.

“The aim of our platform is to showcase a person’s true character,” said McCullough, with deadpan sincerity. At press time, the company’s twitter account remains locked to the public.

They Rid Themselves Of The Man Who’s Name Looks Like An Erection

April Daniels

John Boehner forced the largest government spending cuts in United States history, and he’s still treated like a wimp and a sell-out by conservatives. Why? Because it was never about the money.

It was about forcing Obama to lose, about making the black man capitulate, about shoving him into calamitous ruin, and damn the consequences. They presumed that a black man in the White House would mean Armageddon, and when Boehner failed to deliver their apocalypse on time, they got upset.

Clearly the black man couldn’t be keeping his house in order without Boehner laying down for him again and again. Clearly it couldn’t be that Obama’s an effective and skilled administrator. They had been denied satisfaction, they had been denied their schadenfreude, they had been denied the spectacular demise of a republic they felt had betrayed them.

This is what happens when thwarted privilege and inflamed id are given the run of one of the two major parties. The Republican Party doesn’t have principles anymore, it has targets. It has grudges. It has an insatiable bloodlust–yours, theirs, anybody’s. Anything at all, any level of suffering at all, so long as it puts Obama back in his place.

But it won’t end with Obama’s departure from the White House. It’s gone too far. The next Speaker will likely suffer the same fate–surely HILLARY couldn’t avoid an immediate default without Speaker McCarthy’s constant capitulations!

Just you fuckin’ watch.

You’re Probably Wrong About A Lot of Important Things

April Daniels2 Comments

I am sick of this notion on the left, never spoken but often implied, that whomever is most offended is most correct. No. Go fuck yourself. You might be full of shit, and I’m not going to assume you’re right and I’m wrong just because you’re squawking at me. I would hope that you would hold me to the same standard, and dismiss my own bullshit when it shows itself.

Everyone is a messy, complicated person, trying to live in a messy, complicated world, operating on imperfect information and making decisions with a brain that mostly runs on hormones and emotions. We are all–all of us–flawed, limited creatures. We do the best we can, and that’s all we can do, and sometimes we make mistakes, but sometimes that mistake is assuming that we can see other people’s failures perfectly when really we’re only seeing the distorted reflection of our own.

You may think someone did something wrong. And in thinking this, you may yourself be mistaken. That horribly oppressive thing you just saw someone doing might actually be a completely innocuous or even healthy behavior, mediated by a context you were too busy huffing outrage to notice. Have some humility, and be willing to accept that your deeply held moral convictions do not give you magic powers of perception. Before you fire off on someone, consider that you may not have all the information. Consider that their concerns, while not your concerns, might be as valid and important as your own. Consider that nobody has a monopoly on truth. Consider that anger can be righteous, but very often it is not. Consider that love and compassion are almost never a bad choice.

There is a sense in progressive spaces–and this may be true of conservative spaces, I don’t know because I don’t hang out there–that we must all agree on every moral question. Of course nobody raises their hands and says “Yes, I’m the unreasonable asshole who destroys friends and slanders loved ones because we disagree on the appropriateness of using a particular word,” but let’s be honest, we’ve all seen it happen.

And it just so happens that the step which we’re expected to be locked to tends to be the one that promotes a maximal restriction on what is considered acceptable conduct, while somehow simultaneously promoting minimal standards of personal responsibility. If someone throws an absolute tantrum over nothing, we can’t tell people to suck it up and be adults because society is unfair or whatever. We’re not able to ask people to keep some perspective and exercise discretion and emotional self-control because personal responsibility is a neoliberal plot or something.

It simultaneously privileges the individual subjective experience above all else, while demanding a collective effort to curate that experience. This is a contradiction. It cannot function over the long term. And hey, check out what’s happening on social media these days: it’s not functioning!

More and more people are cutting off, backing out. Because it is literally impossible to function in a society where we are all responsible for the emotional experiences of everyone but ourselves.

I’m sick of the self-flagellating notion that if someone asserts that you’ve made some kind of moral error, that you must immediately back off of whatever you were doing, ask for forgiveness, and then adapt your conduct to whatever the accuser demanded of you. And if you don’t, then you are ::crash of thunder:: PROBLEMATIC. This ethos has no room to admit that maybe the person who is claiming offense is doing so for disingenuous reasons. Nor can it admit that maybe someone who is being sincere is nonetheless being unreasonable.

And then the weird, nasty wrinkle that makes all of this even worse is that somehow, once someone is being PROBLEMATIC, you can do whatever you want to them to vent your rage, and it’s perfectly acceptable. You want to violate someone’s privacy? Go ahead, they earned it. You want to spread rumors around that they’re a pedophile? Go ahead, that’s totally cool. I mean, it doesn’t really matter if they actually did something wrong. It only matters that you think that they did! Isn’t that great? I mean, horrifying?

I used to be as earnest a go-getter about this stuff as you can imagine. But now, at the ripe old age of 29, I feel like I’ve been fighting for a thousand years, and losing every step of the way. This corrosive, bitter way of thinking and behaving is killing us. We’ve made so much progress, and we’re in danger of losing it all because of a backlash that we on the social left will trigger with our own strident intransigence. Empathy for the people we disagree with is important. Cutting yourself off from anyone you ever have an unpleasant dealing with isn’t the answer. By all means, curate your online experience however you like, but this unending holy war mentality has got to stop.

If anything gives me me hope, it’s Stein’s Law: ”Things that can’t go on forever, don’t.”

A Theory About Gordon Freeman

April Daniels1 Comment

Gordon Freeman is not a scientist, but rather a US Government black ops clone. He’s a genetically engineered super soldier who has mimetic imprints for memories that give him an almost unnatural skill for violence and mayhem in a carefully controlled package.

He appears on the Black Mesa train, as if out of nowhere. (Because he was inserted out of nowhere.) He arrives at Black Mesa, and everyone recognizes him–either they were briefed that he would be coming through and they should pretend to know him, or other “versions” of Gordon have been a fixture at this site before. Either way, the player’s initial unfamiliarity with the opening level might be a subtle hint that Gordon, despite allegedly being an employee, doesn’t actually know his way around. He even has to be reminded to put on his hazard suit before entering the test chamber. This is not the behavior of someone who regularly works in that facility.

And what’s he actually doing in Black Mesa on that fateful day? His part in the experiment turns out to be a very dangerous but not very complicated job, exactly the sort of thing you wouldn’t want to risk someone who had an MIT degree on. Now as it happens, it turns out that this particular sample was too pure, the resonance cascade hit, and now Gordon–who is essentially a living flight data recorder–is stranded down in the bowls of the facility. Good thing he’s got all that subconscious combat training to help him escape and make his report! Why would you need an autonomous data recorder that can defend itself? Well, because they expected that if anything went wrong, there would be hostile aliens to contend with, of course!

But there’s a glitch in the plan. Upon seeing the Marines, his programming to approach them and announce who he is so he can be taken safely into custody fails. He begins fighting them instead. The Marines, who had been briefed on who he was, what he looked like, and to expect him to peacefully surrender, are shocked and horrified to find themselves up against a super soldier. This is why the player sees graffiti on the walls like TRAITORS DIE! How could Gordon be a traitor against them if they didn’t expect him to be on their side? How would the Marines even know his name, as opposed to the hundreds, or even thousands of other anonymous civilians in the combat area? Marine chatter, radio traffic, and other bits of graffiti all clearly indicate the Marines know exactly who they are dealing with, and are infuriated that he has chosen to fight them rather than follow his “orders” and surrender.

The G-Man, who has an unusual and unnatural interest in Gordon from the very first moments of the game, shadows Gordon as he fights his way through the facility. Was he the one who flipped Gordon’s programming? Or is he only trying to make the best of a bad situation? Either way, at the end of the game he comes in to swoop Gordon up and place him in stasis until his hour comes again.

Freeze Peach

April Daniels1 Comment

There’s an idea that’s been percolating in the back of my head for a while. Or more precisely, a collision of two separate ideas, each coming from a place of good intention.

Government power is not the only power to be concerned about. There are other powers in society–social, economic, cultural–that can also unfairly impinge upon people’s liberties.

Only government suppression of speech is censorship. Private suppression of speech is a matter of individual rights. It’s no infringement upon a speaker’s liberty to refuse to lend your voice to their ideas, nor to attempt to persuade others take your view of the acceptability of a certain forms of speech.

 

These don’t really go well together, but I often see both ideas put forward (at different times) by a single group or individual. It kind of makes you wonder just what exactly they mean by “free speech” doesn’t it?

I don’t have any pithy answers here. Just a whole lot of questions.

Fuck Professor Snape

April Daniels1 Comment

Professor Snape was an abusive creeper who made life hell on an innocent child because he couldn’t get over the fact that the kid’s mother had decided she wanted to be with a man who showed he could exhibit personal growth–a trait Snape never got a handle on. Out of anger at being jilted, he joined a racist terrorist organization and participated in ghastly crimes against innocent, defenseless people.

Professor Snape is the kind of guy who gets turned down by a nice Jewish girl so he joins the Aryan Nations. Then he has second thoughts and starts wearing a wire for the Feds, but that doesn’t change the fact that HE JOINED THE WIZARDING WORLD’S VERSION OF THE ARYAN NATIONS.

Fuck Professor “I’m still mad at people from high school even twenty years later so I’m gonna take it out on someone who wasn’t even born then and whose parents were murdered by my good buddies” Snape. I spit on his corpse.

Shut up about the Duggars already.

April Daniels2 Comments

Okay, as horrible as the Duggars are, I really think people should ask themselves what they would do if one of their kids started raping his siblings. Can you be absolutely sure that you would instantly know the right thing to do, and would have the courage to do it without hesitation, even if it meant condemning one child to start life as a felon, and four others to community ostracization when word of what happened to them got out? (Hey, here’s a thought: maybe being reluctant to subject your daughters to what the criminal justice system does to rape survivors is actually a good call. Or maybe not. Maybe these things don’t have easy answers when they’re up close and happening to people you love.)

While you’re thinking over your answer, do you think we could we maybe stop using the story of four young girls getting raped by their older brother as a way to become ever more comfortable on our very tall horse? Can we maybe conceive of a universe in which we acknowledge that the Duggars’ lifestyle is patriarchal and retrograde, but stop short of declaring that their adherence to fundamentalist Christianity as the sole source of this tragedy? There are liberal families out there that have had incestuous rape problems, too. How about we decide to hold back from making this family tragedy into the next front in our revived culture war?

What happened in that family was an abomination and a tragedy, and yes patriarchal purity culture is creepy as hell, and yes there is a lot of really squicky shit that happens in right wing Christian cults. But I don’t see these conversations happening. Or at least not with the same verve and gusto that I see people writing about how horrible the individual players in this tragedy are.

Hate those Duggars, show how virtuous you are! Don’t worry, you can leave your own unconscious rape-culture apologia intact! There’s no need to reexamine your own complicity in a system that punishes rape survivors and exalts their predators over and over in all walks of life in every city in the whole country. Yes, you can totally snark at people being upset at Game of Thrones while rejecting their concerns out of hands, because at least you’re not a Duggar! Yes, you can still reflexively approve of Christianity being enshrined as special in the public sphere, because at least your Christianity isn’t Quiverfull!

Whatever you do, make sure your critique isn’t systemic, is instead squarely focused on the actions of individuals operating in a realm of stress and anxiety the likes of which few can imagine, confronting the kind of crisis that most families can’t even bring themselves to admit exists much less prepare for before it happens. Because if you did that, why you might have to start asking other questions.

Questions like:

  • Why do we allow “purity culture” adherents to have TV shows that aren’t hugely critical of them?
  • What does it say about us that this show ran for ten seasons on TLC?
  • Why is the use of fertilization technology to get a woman pregnant 20ish times uncontroversial, but her daughters’ access to contraception is worthy of a debate?
  • Why can Michelle Duggar have no problem finding doctors who are willing to help her push her body past the breaking point with more pregnancies, while her neighbors might have serious problems finding someplace to have a safe abortion?
  • Why is it that a woman can push her body to the absolute breaking point, past all medical advice, to pump out a frankly unhealthy number of children on national TV, and nobody demanded an investigation into the family’s life to ensure that nobody is being coerced into doing something dangerous or unhealthy?
  • What does it say about us that these four young girls are likely being re-traumatized in the name of gratifying the public apatite for outrage, and now have to carry a stigma–yes, there is a stigma about being a rape survivor–around for the rest of their life?
  • Why hasn’t the Federal government seriously started enforcing women’s rights to control their own bodies with things like criminal investigations and strong new legislation?
  • Why are rape convictions so rare?
  • Would we accept similar apathy towards a man’s right to control his own body? (Hint, we do, but mainly if they’re brown and in prison.)
  • Why do we allow huge swaths of the country to be run by people who think that the people writing abortion legislation should mostly be men?
  • How come membership in a creepy cult like the Quiverfull movement isn’t automatic grounds for an investigation by Child Protective Services?
  • Is it because we let “mainstream” Christians get away with only slightly less outlandish behavior?
  • Do the women who are forced to live in these communities, either by circumstance or by birth, have less of a right to cultural resources that affirm and support their independence and self-determination?
  • If not, how come we allow these cults to persist?
  • Would we let an extremist group of Dianic Wiccans to do this to men?
  • If not, why not?
  • How come Josh Duggar’s mea culpa sounds just like so many half-assed apologies that come out of so many cases of sexual assault? How come he had a script to read from? A template to work from?
  • And why are these kind of apologies considered even remotely acceptable as a pass back into acceptable society?
  • Might it be because this has happened before, will happen again, and these periodic displays of public humiliation are more about releasing pressure against the system than it is about spurring real change?
  • WHY DO WE ACCEPT A CULTURE IN WHICH GIRLS ARE TREATED AS ONLY HALF A PERSON?

Wait, don’t answer. The Duggars are about to release another public statement for us to ridicule. That’s way more fun to do than answer questions that might implicate ourselves along with them.

Shut the fuck up about the Duggars already.