Twelve-Mile Limit

April Daniels6 Comments

Note: this is my entry for this week’s flash fiction challenge put up by Chuck Wendig.

“We’re not getting too close, are we?”

She smirks. “Scared, Dave?”

“Yes. Yes I’m fucking scared.” You’d have to be an idiot not to be scared. They’ve just come over a hill and caught sight of the thing’s distant glow for the first time. Blue, watery light spilling up into the night sky. There, just over the horizon, something lurks in the ruins of Seattle.

“Don’t worry,” says Laura. “I’ve done this a hundred times. Treat the Exclusion Zone with respect, but don’t let fear control you. They say you need to stay fifteen miles away, but it’s really more like tweleve. As long as we don’t for a swim in the sound we should be fine.”

“Right. Right,” says Dave. This is his first run. The barbed wire and machine gun nests were easier to get through than he’d expected. Laura knows all the blind spots to skirt through, all the right officers to bribe.

Zone running is a cottage industry now. Uncle Sam says “keep out” but market forces say “come on in” and so there’s almost always a few people hunting and pecking through the ruins. There’s a huge market for salvaging from the Exclusion Zone. People will pay to get old family photos back, or a rifle in good working order recovered from one of the places where National Guard units made their final stands. And of course, there are the artifacts. The strange bits of dross fell off the thing as careened through the sky on its way down. Find a nice piece of that, and you can retire.

Dave and Laura skitter down the side of a collapse building, wary of broken glass and rusty metal. Tonight’s run is a quick one, just in and out with nothing more than a little food, a little water, an emergency beacon, and of course their rifles.

People have gone unarmed into the EZ before, but that was mostly in the desperate early days. Before everyone learned better.

“Where are we?” asks Dave as they reach street level. The road here is relatively clear, and so they walk down its center, weaving between collapsed buildings and abandoned cars. Weeds punch up through the asphalt, and crows watch them from a distance.

“We’re about to cross 180th,” says Laura. She’s got her hair cut close, almost a buzz cut. There’s a fun scar that traces the bottom of her jaw, and her eyes are on the horizon. “Shouldn’t be too much further.”

Dave is here to get some files. When the doom fell on Seattle, the survivors were evacuated. Among them, a very large, very wealthy software development firm. You have probably heard of them. There had been a project underway, millions of dollars already committed. It was so top secret that the only backups were kept in another building on the same campus. They didn’t trust the files to be saved anywhere else, and as long as the buildings weren’t close enough to be caught by the same fire, what’s the harm, right? Risk management by committee at its finest. In the headlong rush to get the hell away from that thing which landed in the Sound, everything at corporate headquarters was abandoned. Mostly, what was lost could be reconstructed or replaced. But not those files, and those files are the future of the company. And so after years of boardroom debate and backroom maneuvering and lawyers smelling blood in the water, they decided to send someone in to go get the files.

Dave is a member of the development team that was working on the project. It has to be him. He’s one of the few survivors who actually knows which physical disk it is that they need to unscrew from the racks and place carefully in the custom-fitted crash pack they’ve designed to carry it in. He was also in the Army once upon a time, and to the rest of the team that makes him a badass but the truth is that in three tours he never left the Green Zone and he barely remembers how to use a rifle.

A thumping helicopter passes them in the distance. It turns. Laura takes a knee, gestures for Dave to do the same. They huddle behind an abandoned car. Cars made of fiberglass and plastic don’t rot and rust the way older cars do. At first blush, they look like they’ve only been here for months, not years. Except there are plants sprouting from the seats.

“Think that spotted us?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s wait.”

And so they do. The helicopter passes them again, and then moves away. The Army still patrols the EZ. They’ve been known to drop troops on zone runners from time to time, but that’s not really what they’re watching for.

The wind shifts, and with it comes a new sound. Chanting in the distance.

“Shit!” hisses Dave.

Laura listens intently for a long moment. “I don’t think they’re coming closer. Let’s finish this and get the hell out of here.”

“Yeah, no kidding.”

Bent low and moving fast, they double time it down the road. There’s the street sign they are looking for, rusted out and leaning over. Dave knows where he is now, and with a surge of confidence he whispers at Laura to follow him and they head directly into the old campus.

As they reach the perimeter fence, Laura grabs his arm and they take a knee to watch and listen.

“These buildings look like they’re in good shape,” she says. “Could be a real attractive squat for a cult.”

“Oh.”

So they wait for a solid twenty minutes, and don’t see anything. Dave isn’t sure, but he thinks the chanting may have gotten louder.

“Okay, let’s go,” says Laura. They move into the campus at a light jog. Dave wishes the company had sprang for some night vision, because right now every shadow seems like an ambush in waiting.

Everything looks smaller than he remembers. Lesser. The memories come thick and fast. The screaming the sky, the thunderous detonations of sonic booms. The low rumble that went on and on after impact. And then the strange noises coming from the radio. The sudden outbreak of murder and madness. The way his team leader looked at him with eyes of burning blue fire and screamed with all the hate in the world. The sudden, sick realization that fell on the escaping survivors like a sandbag that they can never come back.

They find the building they need, but the keycard locks don’t have power so they hunt around for a few minutes until Laura finds a fire escape ladder on the side of the building.

“Boost me up,” she says, and he holds her up on his shoulders while she flips the catch that holds the ladder up. It comes crashing down with a terrifying bang.

“Shit, do you think they heard that?” asks Dave.

“Possibly,” says Laura. Her face is grave. “Let’s do this quick and vanish.”

They scurry up the ladder and pause for a moment while Laura booby traps it with a claymore mine.

The hallways are thick with dust and scattered paper. Their flashlights play over frozen chaos. It’s amazing how big a mess a hundred and fifty people can make when they’re fleeing a building on zero notice. They move down through the fire stairs until they get to the floor Dave’s team was secreted away on, way in the back. Another keycard lock, so Laura smashes the window with the butt of her rifle and reaches through to crank the door open.

Dave goes directly to the backup servers and unscrewing disk drives from the server racks. Tense moments later, they’re packed up and ready to go.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” says Laura with no trace of her earlier swagger.

“Right,” says Dave tightly. The drive is strapped to his back. The bonus they’re giving him for this is going to pay off his house, his car, his college debt, his credit cards, and stock him up to send all three of his kids to Stanford, and right now he’s pretty sure that he got lowballed.

They head back to the fire stairs to get up to the roof. The sound of chanting drifts down the stairs towards them.

Dave feels like he’s going to puke. His skin feels cold and clammy. “Uh, so, uh. Let’s go out the back way, okay?” he says in a shaking voice. He backs away from the fire stairs.

“Dave, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” says Laura. Her eyes are glowing. A pale, watery blue. “The first time I did this, my GPS was broken. I got a little closer than twelve miles.”

Dave turns to swing his rifle up, but by then it is far too late.

TW: Trigger Warnings

April Daniels

Trigger warnings have gained enough cultural currency that they’ve started to pop up into really whiny think pieces. Sigh.

Okay. Let’s get this out of the way.

Let’s start with the basics. What is a trigger warning? Trigger warnings are an emergent behavior of online communities which strive to ensure that all participants in a conversation are participating voluntarily and with informed consent about the topic under discussion. That’s it. They’re an effort to make sure that people who believe that they would suffer psychiatric harm from encountering a certain topic without warning have enough advance notice to either bow out of the conversation, or emotionally steel themselves to withstand it. They usually take the form of a short note at the beginning of an essay, or a video, or so on. They are more common in text works than video or audio works, but not unheard of in all mediums. The term has its origin in the concept of triggers in PTSD; a trigger is a stimulus that can cause an episode of symptoms in people with post traumatic stress disorder.

This is, basically, a good idea. If you’ve never been triggered, and don’t understand what the big deal is, that’s great. Really. Please understand that other people do get triggered. And for them, it’s not the same as being uncomfortable, so much as it’s a real health hazard. And really, trigger warnings are no more intrusive than many other content notes we already smear all over our communications. Video games, movies, and TV all have content ratings and sometimes even audible warnings. This has been happening for years, and hasn’t caused the death of culture yet. (Books, essays, and such are traditionally exempt from that kind of rating, except of course when they’re comic books because new media is evil and must be punished.)

I don’t really see a problem with the idea of trigger warnings, and I think that if you do, you might really want to consider why you oppose them. Does it actually hurt you to see a warning? Probably not. But it may save someone else from getting hurt. So step outside yourself and consider which is more important to you: the safety of others, or your right not to be reminded that other people have problems you don’t.

Okay? Okay.

So that’s my headline, above the fold stance on trigger warnings.

But I also happen to have this handy can of worms right here and it doesn’t look like it’s going to open itself, so lets get down and dirty with some caveats and criticisms. There are a few arguments against trigger warnings that I think are worth taking seriously and discussing on their merits.

 THEORY

One argument against trigger warnings that I can see and even sort of agree with in a very limited, contextual sense, is that it’s a way to force people to speak about certain topics only in certain, community-approved ways. “You can talk about rape, but only if you include the magic trigger warning at the top,” says the scold. (And yes, online social justice communities have a real problem with scolds in their ranks, but that’s a conversation for another day, and a braver blog.)  That kind of power play can seem really intrusive and, if not censorious, then certainly in the same ideological realm. “Communication must be contained, controlled, and classified according to the Greater Good, comrade!” This is why I am adamantly opposed against making them mandatory, or even setting the expectation that they should be included by default in all arenas. And I think this is the main source of most objections to trigger warnings.

People do not like being told how to speak, and if they feel like a trigger warning has become some kind of community-mandated certificate they must apply to everything they say, then they may rebel against the notion. If we want them to work, they’ve got to remain voluntary. The moment they become mandated, they stop being a bottom up emergent behavior, and start being a top down rating system. Rating systems never work. This kind of thing can’t be imposed upon a community, particularly not a community which inhabits a mostly online space, where top down directives inherently operate at a deficit of efficiency. Additionally, there is no single online community, and many different communities have different standards. I’m part of a mailing list where the group ethos is to be caustic bastards, and I have found a lot of value and strength in being part of such a community. Such a group is not for everyone, but for those of us whom it fits, it is a wonderful thing. Trigger warnings would ruin the whole ethos of the place.

Additionally, a trigger warning puts a lot more responsibility on the author of a communication for how the communication is received and interpreted. This is, to put it mildly, a problematic notion. Trigger warnings can seem to be implicitly shifting a lot of the responsibilities readers have for interpreting text* onto the shoulders of the people who authored that text. There’s a quite reasonable fear here: what if I write something that hurts someone because they had some baggage I had no way of knowing about or accounting for, and I’m held to be culpable? Is it fair to hold authors** wholly accountable for every possible reaction to their work? I don’t think so. Authors certainly have a responsibility to write with care, and empathy, and concern for their audience. But that responsibility can only go so far. Meaning is created when a reader interacts with a text, not when that text is laid down. Meaning is a negotiation between reader and text.  The author has responsibility for her words, but not your reading of them. An obvious consequence of this is that different people will negotiate different meanings from the text. You can see this principle at work in any OTP flame war. (“Harry/Hermionie will never die! The text supports it! JK Rowling was wrong!“) A trigger warning can be seen to undermine this principle; it can seem to implicitly support the notion that an objectivist reading of the text is the “correct” one, that texts have a single meaning, and that the meaning a reader will take from a text and consequences of that meaning upon the reader can be reliably predicted a priori.

To be blunt, this is a terrifying notion, and while I do not agree that trigger warnings work in this manner, I do not dismiss the concerns of those who do. I personally consider trigger warnings to fall into the field of things that you can do to show your concern and empathy for your reader, because while you cannot be assured ahead of time how people will read your work, you can be reasonably confident that discussing certain topics will elicit painful reactions for certain people. You can’t predict everyone’s trigger, but that doesn’t mean that no effort should be made to provide warnings for the very common ones. (Although please remember I do not think they should be mandatory.)

Then there is the school of thought that says that trigger warnings are just another part of the continuing effort of some people to carpet the world in eggshells and call that safety. I have mixed feelings about this objection. On the one hand, I see where it is coming from. Some people–not many, but a few–seem to only be able to operate inside a carefully maintained safety bubble, and instead of using that bubble as a refuge to grow stronger so that they may engage with the world as an independent adult, they seem more intent on annexing more and more of the world to sit within their little bubble. This is a tremendously entitled attitude, because it presumes that their needs are (or should be) preeminent over all other concerns. It presumes that if the rest of the world finds something to be innocuous, but they find it to be poisonously objectionable, that their objection should have priority. Worse, this attitude is self-defeating. The thing about comfort zones is that they are constantly shrinking unless you make a point to step outside them every now and again. Comfort zones are, as the name implies, comfortable. But you don’t want to let them become a prison.

On the other hand, we’ve had warnings and labels on media for decades now, and while I would argue that ratings systems are generally bad and impinge upon art and expression, they haven’t destroyed our culture yet. If you oppose trigger warnings out of some principled opposition to labeling any media, then that’s at least consistent, but I’ve never actually seen anyone advance that position. What I have seen is an extraordinary level of fury directed at an emergent behavior that first showed up in spaces primarily controlled and mediated by women, and I don’t think that is a coincidence. So is this really an effort to sand all the rough edges off of life? Or is it a movement to get people to voluntarily provide information to the other members of their community so that they may make informed decisions on if they wish to consent to a particular conversation? Remember that trigger warnings do not necessary imply the attitude I described in the paragraph above; there are plenty of people who use them just to be neighborly. If someone wants to step outside their comfort zone, that’s great, but they should have the opportunity to give informed consent before doing so!

Like I said, I’ve got mixed feelings on this point.

So that’s the three main theoretical objections to trigger warnings that I am aware of and consider worth engaging. There may be some other theoretical objection I’m forgetting at the moment, and if it is brought to my attention, I’ll take a look at it as well.

From this point on we move out of objections to theory and into objections to practice. It might be tempting to say that these objections are less important because they are not objections to the very concept of trigger warnings, but I don’t think that is fair or accurate. A lot of the most passionate arguments against trigger warnings have been objections to how they manifest and are applied to texts, and so it is worth taking a look at these arguments and seeing if there is any merit to them. (Spoiler: I tend to agree with these a lot more than the theoretical objections.)

PRACTICE

The first and most important objection to how trigger warnings actually manifest in the real world is that they can be used to bully and control people. This can take two forms.

The first is the one that people tend to think of when you talk about bullying via trigger warnings: an angry hothouse flower demanding that trigger warnings be included on everything, and if you don’t include them you’re a Bad Person and Bad People deserve all the abuse that can be shoveled onto them. I have not seen this behavior in the wild very often, but it does happen. Usually, people who behave this way are so obnoxious to be around that they get sidelined pretty quick by anyone who doesn’t already think exactly like them, and so are not a very large concern. Remember there are assholes everywhere, and in every movement. You don’t have to take everyone seriously, and don’t let the most embarrassing members of a movement define the entirety of that movement for you.

Much, much more troubling are the people who try to weaponize trigger warnings as a means of marginalizing other people. A very dear friend of mine was once told point blank that the fact that she is fat and disabled was triggering to someone else, and so she should not participate in a public activity. Alternatively, they may have been satisfied by her walking down the streets while ringing a bell and shouting “UNCLEAN, UNCLEAN.” Let us be very clear on something: if another person’s mere existence is a trigger for you, then that is your problem to solve.*** They are under no obligation to curtail their life just so that you won’t have to deal with the horrible trauma of living in a world with people who aren’t like you.

In summation, if you have ever felt the need to write something along the lines of “trigger warning: black people” or “trigger warning: mental disabilities” then please go fuck yourself with a lit road flare.

Another practical objection is that trigger warnings, as they are currently used, seem to be devaluing the concept of triggering. A trigger, in PTSD terms, does not mean “that makes me uncomfortable.” It means “I am having a psychological episode and the thing you are doing is making it worse.” Being triggered into an episode of PTSD is dangerous. It can cause an episode of depression, it make someone temporarily unfit to do their job (with all the professional consequences that implies), and can seriously impinge upon a person’s quality of life, or even their basic self-sufficiency. At the extremes, it can set someone up for an episode of suicidal ideation. It is not simply being made uncomfortable until the uncomfortable stimulus leaves.

And yet we have people claiming to be “triggered” by various things when their behavior suggests they merely found it distasteful. This is one of those things that’s hard to give guidelines for spotting, because it’s so contextual, and because PTSD manifests in so many different ways. As a general rule of thumb, don’t just assume this is what is happening when someone says they are triggered by something that you find to be innocuous. But at the same time, if you spend enough time in certain corners of the Internet, you’ll find colonies of people who seem to be triggered by everything from paying their bills to tying their shoes. Who get “triggered” in one minute, and then enjoy a fascinating, not-at-all-troubled conversation in the next. Who use “you’re triggering me” when they really mean “shut up.”

This is sort of related to the first of the two bully/control objections, but I’m breaking it out as a separate point here because I think it is important to point out how this dilution of the concept of triggering can hurt people who actually have triggers. Because if the group ethos implicitly decides that a “trigger” is really just a matter of courtesy and decorum, and not, you know, a fucking medical issue, then that means the whole space becomes less safe for people who really do need the ability to identify various stimuli as being actively dangerous for them to be around.

This tendency towards dilution becomes especially dangerous in places where these communities abut the internet at large, because people who aren’t familiar with these conversations will observe trigger warnings being requested and given for all manner of exceedingly mild things (I have seen a trigger warning for profanity, for example ) and may eventually conclude that the whole idea is milquetoast bullshit and should be done away with. And so now, another potentially helpful tool has been squandered, and my friends who have PTSD are, for most intents and purposes, back at square one.

The last objection to how trigger warnings are used in practice is that sometimes people who advocate for them behave badly in ways that are unrelated to the actual substance of trigger warnings or their absence. This is a stupid fucking argument and should not be taken seriously.

IMPLEMENTATION

Now, with all that written above, you may have noticed something odd. It sure sounds like I like trigger warnings, and yet there are none on this blog. Here’s why: I don’t use them. I never have, really. There was a time when I found some of the arguments described above to be a little more convincing than I do now, but the root of my opposition to using them was always this:

Triggers can be anything, and everyone is equally valuable, so how can I warn everyone equally? Some people are triggered by seeing dogs; should all posts with pictures of dogs in them come with trigger warnings? Some people are triggered by some of the most random, otherwise innocuous stimuli. It’s impossible to effectively warn for everything, but to warn for some triggers and not others is implicit favoritism.

I’ve since abandoned this position because the perfect should not be the enemy of the good, and just because I can’t warn everyone for their trigger doesn’t mean I shouldn’t warn for really common triggers. Of course, I still don’t use trigger warnings per se.  What I use are content notes.

A content note works better than a trigger warning, I think, for a variety of reasons.

First, they don’t devalue triggers. You can include a content note for some content that may not be triggering to many people, but which will reliably make many of them uncomfortable without implying that triggers are merely a matter of comfort. Comfort matters! It really does. But it’s not as severe an overriding concern as triggering a medical episode is, and so we should not conflate the two. With a content note, you can be courteous to your readers without feeding the dangerous notion that triggers are just things some people don’t like. Meanwhile, those who really would get triggered by whatever it is the content note is signposting get all the warning they need to protect themselves. It works for everybody.

Second, they put the focus on the work, not on people’s reaction to the work. The first page of my first novel has only one sentence on it: “Content note: this book contains depictions of sexual assault.” The sentence is clear, concise, and focused on the contents of the text, not any person’s reaction. It’s not a promise I’m making to the reader, or the fulfillment of an obligation. It’s a note between the text and the reader about the text the reader is getting ready to engage with. The space between the text and the reader is where meaning is negotiated and created, and so that is the most appropriate place to situate such a note. It says to the reader how you take this text is up to you, but heads up, here’s something you might want to know before continuing.

Could a trigger warning carry the same meaning? Quite likely. But I think it also implicitly carries a lot of other baggage. A trigger warning is not a note about the text, it is a note about the presumed reaction to the text that some readers may have. And in that, it somehow seems to trespass upon a space that I hold sacred, the space between reader and text. I have my favorite authors, the ones who reliably create texts in which I find great meaning or even just a fun few hours, but that does not mean that I think they are wholly, or even mostly responsible for the experiences I have when reading. When the author steps in to warn me about an experience she thinks I may have, rather than simply providing me with a note to tell me about some of the text I am about to read, it is as if she is jiggling my elbow, and whispering in my ear. No, stop. Your part in this ended when you sent it out for publishing. Now it is the reader’s.

I am aware that this is really deep into lit nerd territory, and so others may not find this argument to be persuasive, but this alone is enough for me to favor an alternative to trigger warnings. For most people, the first point is probably the more important one.

Another facet of how I use content warnings is that I use them sparingly. I do this because I don’t believe in safe spaces, and I think attempting to create them is a bad idea. There are safer spaces, considered spaces, but no place is truly safe. However I do care for my readers, and so I want the warnings that I give them to be taken seriously. If a warning becomes routine, it loses its efficacy. Does that run the risk that someone could see something on this blog that unsettles them or makes them uncomfortable or even triggers them without being warned ahead of time? Well, yes, but that’s a risk that we all take getting out of bed in the morning. I can’t promise safety, only consideration and my best efforts.

I think that’s what most people who use trigger warnings think, too. We know we can’t promise safety, we can only do the best we can. They just reached a different conclusion than I did about what that means for them.

Which is fine.

 

 

*I’m using “text” here in the litary analysis sense; that is to say, the sum body of a peice of communication, even if it is not literally text.

**Have you ever written anything online, ever? Then you’re one of these authors I’m talking about. Don’t think this only applies to professional writers.

***An exception can be made here for, say, someone who tried to rape and murder you, but that’s an individual who has made themselves unwelcome in your life for what they did. That distinction is critical!

Do You Wanna Be a Lich Queen?

April Daniels

Anna:
Elsa?
(Knocking)
Do you wanna be a lich queen?
Come on let’s crush them all!
Immortality is here for you
all you have to do
is cut away your soul!
Being mortal is so foolish,
eternity waits,
I wish you could understand!–
Do you wanna be a lich queen?
It’s not so bad being a lich queen.

Elsa:
Go away, Anna

Anna:
But then you’ll die…

(Knocking)
Do you wanna be a lich queen?
You’d have power unparalleled!
I think some perspective is overdue
It’s not like I’m killing you
but by death we are compelled!
(Please! There’s not much time!)
It’ll get a little lonely
All those empty years,
Just watching your grave grow mold…

(Standing over a coffin)
Elsa?
This didn’t have to happen.
They say you were brave right to the end
The mortals don’t know death; not like I do
And I can’t lose you,
but death I can mend
I know you didn’t want this
But you’ll forgive me
What else can I do?

Do you want to be a lich queen?

Gettin’ My Pagan On (Part 2)

April Daniels1 Comment

[Continued from earlier]

So I got through the hardest year of my life as an atheist. I have no doubt that it is possible to live without prayer or faith, even through quite trying times, because I did it. This is also how I know that my later embrace of my Goddess wasn’t an act of weakness, but simply a choice to accept that I had an experience which didn’t fit neatly into a materialist metaphysics, and to allow that to have an effect on me.

Towards the end of 2011 I stopped being homeless. A huge lucky break in July resulted in me getting a job, and by November I’d saved up enough money to get my own place. For the next two years, I was essentially in recovery. Several months after starting work, my writing came back to me, after a years-long absence. It was a glorious night when I realized I could compose fiction again. Like getting a superpower back, really. In something like four months, I wrote the first draft of what would become Necessary Cruelty. My semi-regular bouts of suicidal ideation stopped happening. My panic attacks stopped being so frequent. My emotional fragility healed, more or less. When I first moved back up to the Portland area, I was always on the lip of fury or terror.

The job was hard, though. Very stressful. I can’t imagine how I didn’t get fired in the first six months. Every few weeks, after leaving work I’d have to bellow black rage up at the sky just to get it out of me. I was healing, yes, but that’s only because what I’d come out of recently was so much worse. It wasn’t a very emotionally healthy place to work. And so, soon my depression and despair about life came back to me. I was scared that this was it, this is what my life was going to be like forever: homelessness or working at a call center.

Years prior, when I was first trying to figure out what it meant to me to be an atheist, I’d said that if I ever did turn to religion, it wouldn’t be Christianity. Too patriarchal. Too stifling. Paganism, that was the ticket. Because paganism implies a worship of nature, which is powerful and glorious and terrible and actually makes sense to worship.

The first time I really seriously considered it, I was in a grocery store on the edge of tears because I was just so miserable about life. I asked the Goddess if She would mind if I prayed to her, and maybe She could just nudge things my way for once. It wasn’t a very sincere prayer. It wasn’t a very sincere prayer. I didn’t feel any connection. I was lonely, though. I wanted somebody to care. (Lots of people cared, but that’s the nature of depression; you don’t see what you have going for you.) But nothing came of it, so I forgot about it, and tried to pretend that I hadn’t done it. Apparently, I was not as firm in my atheism as I had thought.

In December of 2012, while waiting for the paramedics, I started to pray in earnest. I thought I was having a stroke. I thought I was going to die, or become a vegetable. I was terrified, and so I asked Her to keep me safe. I pledged that I would pray to Her on a regular basis if I survived, and when it turned out it was just a pinched nerve it seemed like poor form to forget about my promise. Even if the promise was just to, what I conceived of at the time, as an imaginary friend.

And as I write this, I am of mixed feelings about how it’s coming across. It sounds like paganism was something I resorted to after a series of failures in life, like it’s a crutch, like it’s weakness. It isn’t. I could blot out my experiences and pretend I haven’t felt the things that I have, or discredit them as brain chemistry being strange. I could turn away from this, and go it alone again. But there was no need to, and I found utility in this practice. Before a few months ago, I would have called it a coping mechanism. I would have tried to minimize it, to say it came from a feeling of obligation, like if I made the promise and then broke it that it would somehow be disrespectful. To Her, to myself, or maybe to something else entirely.  It was rote, and not very sincere, but it was comforting.

Another legacy of my period of homelessness is that I have an acute anxiety disorder. When any of my life plans get interrupted or stalled, I have a panic attack. Setbacks are terrifying for me. I get scared that it’s happening again. I can see the chain reaction coming, the cascade of failures that inevitably lead to my death in a gutter. In March of this year, I had one of these attacks. My plan to return to school was scuttled by an error on my part. The class I needed to take was unavailable to me, so I became convinced that I was about to die.

In desperation, I reached out and grabbed hold of a tree and asked Her to help me. She did. It was like all the fear and the pain got sucked out of me into the tree, and what replaced it was calm, and comfort, and the knowledge that I was loved. That’s when it stopped being an invisible friend thing. That’s when I stopped thinking of it as a coping mechanism. I truly, sincerely believe in my Goddess now. I don’t know much about Her. I wouldn’t pretend to have gained any special insight to the structure of the Universe. Maybe there are many gods. Maybe there are many faces to only one. Maybe they predate us or maybe they’re an emergent property of our own consciousness. And maybe I’ve snapped, maybe I’m believing in things that don’t exist outside of chemical imbalances in my brain. But I don’t think so.

I think that She is real, and I think that She knows about me, and that She cares. It’s been building for almost two years now, but it feels so sudden. In middle school, I had a teacher who had recently become a born again Christian. He described the experience as filling a hole in him that he hadn’t known was there until it was filled. The description is uncomfortably close to my own experiences. So maybe that’s it: this is just my way of manifesting the common heuristic failure mode that afflicts all humans. Or maybe we really are coming into tune with something beyond ourselves. Maybe that heuristic accounts for the numinous and the ephemeral because those things do exist. Maybe we all find the god or Goddess that is right for us, and if none of them are, we find nothing and are content with it. Maybe it’s just different ways of interpreting the same phenomena. I don’t have any answers, only my Goddess.

An acquaintance of mine killed herself recently. When I heard the news, I felt gutted. I didn’t know her well, but she was also trans and suicide is the way for trans women to die. Every time one of us kills herself, the rest of us remember that it could happen to us. We’re all survivors of suicidal ideation. I don’t know a single trans women who hasn’t considered ending it all. I work in customer support and I found out while I was in the middle of my shift. I put myself into break so I wouldn’t get a call and went outside to grab onto a tree and pray for her. The misery and grief were making it hard to focus, and the moment I touched the tree it was all sucked away from me. For a moment, I was disturbed. I didn’t want Her to just take it from me. I didn’t want to not feel these things. But then I realized that in taking them, She had given me enough tranquility to go back to my job and finish my shift. And then later, after work, another trans woman and I met up at a bar and mourned our dead sister properly. It’s things like that which make me believe. She knows what I need, and if it is within Her power She grants them.

And so now I am quite religious.

I’m getting ready for my first big formal ritual soon. I’m very excited.

Gettin’ My Pagan On (Part 1)

April Daniels

I’m Pagan. Like, full on Goddess-worshiping, makes-own-candles-for-midnight-rituals Pagan. If you’d told me even two years ago that this is where I would be, spiritually, I would have been surprised. If you’d told me a year before that, I might have taken offense. It’s been a long, windy road to get here.

Let’s briefly skip over the beginning: as a young child I went to a very liberal church on weekends, and Catholic school during the week. Maybe that fucked up my notions of the divine and maybe it didn’t, but either way I left childhood without a real strong attachment to religion. In adolescence, my mother got involved in a Quaker meeting house in Pasadena, and I hung out with Quakers enough to at one point identify as one, but I didn’t really believe any of it. It’s not that I thought of myself as an atheist, or that my disbelief was an active thing. It was just that… I wasn’t getting whatever the other people associated with that church were.

A few weeks before the end of high school, I had a realization that was so terrifying I nearly fell off my bike. I remember it distinctly. It was a sunny day, and I was near the front of school, heading to ride my bike up the wheelchair ramp, and it suddenly occurred to me that we are alone on a tiny grain of rock orbiting a star that is only one of hundreds of billions of stars in this galaxy alone, which itself is only one of hundreds of billions of galaxies…and that’s just the observable Universe. Worse, that’s all there was. Us, and our rock, and the infinite uncaring night. I’d never been very religious, but this was the first time the full weight of a Universe without a god dropped on me, and it was horrifying. The radiation from a supernova could snuff us out tomorrow, and nobody would ever know or care.

So I told myself I believed in God. Because I was scared. Because I didn’t want to deal with being stranded on a wet pebble, locked in the orbit of a 4 billion year old thermonuclear explosion.

But I didn’t. I didn’t really. I didn’t pray and I didn’t have any experiences that told me this was anything but a fairy tale I was telling myself. The thing about lying to yourself is that sooner or later, you’re going to call yourself on your own bullshit. For me, that happened about 3 years later, in college. For weeks I’d been coming back to a certain question, worrying away at it. Worrying in both senses, of being anxious, and of gnawing. The question was: is it possible for aesthetics and morality to have any value in a purely materialist metaphysics? In other words, if all we are is meat in motion, how does anything even matter?

I was worrying away at this question because I had started to stop believing the little lie I was telling myself about my “faith”. And if a belief in God goes out the window, then a whole lot of other things seemed to necessarily go with it. Not because I thought you couldn’t be moral without God telling you what to do, or anything silly like that. Just that, if there was no second layer to the Universe, somewhere from which meaning could spring and give value to the world around, if we were just atoms held together by covalent bonds, then why does (for example) art matter? Why does anything matter?

Anyhow, I ended up doing what a lot of college students did before me, and embraced existentialism. I didn’t want to live in a world where art and beauty have no meaning, and where morality is reduced to a sterile ledger. Existentialism provides a very robust framework to have that meaning without resorting to supernatural, spiritual, or other non-material sources. Short version: things matter because we decide that they do. Meaning is an emergent property of consciousness.

This freed me from “needing” a view of the Universe that included space for God or a realm of ideas beyond the metaphorical, and I became a fairly militant atheist. (Then I realized how much of an asshole Richard Dawkins is, and I became a really easy going atheist instead.) And there I thought I would stay, more or less in perpetuity.

I didn’t need God, I didn’t need spirituality. And I lived that. I was fully committed. I survived homelessness as an atheist. I came out and began transition as an atheist. There was comfort in the absence of a God, I found, because without a God pulling the strings that meant all the shitty things happening to me weren’t personal. Nobody was doing this to me, it was just something that happened. And that was comforting, in a way.

So yeah, I was an atheist and pretty firm in that, and if you’d told me just three years later that I’d be gearing up for a midnight ritual to consecrate a silver amulet, I’d say that you didn’t know me at all.

 

[Continued]

The Worm Has Turned, Gentlemen!

April Daniels

I’ve been struggling through the early segments of Dreadnought 2*. When I was about eight thousand words in, and I realized that nothing had really happened in the story yet, and worse, I was writing a description of a glorified committee meeting. I got very sad. My outline, which had seemed such genius when I first knocked it together, now seemed like a horrible slumping mess.

But I keep going. It’s the beginning. I’m always horrid at beginnings. I always come back to change them. As long as I got the pieces I need established all in a row, I could come back and mix and match. If it was still a hopeless slog by word 20k, I’d step back and re-evaluate, but I didn’t think that was necessary. Even if it’s not fun, I just had to get it out there, get it down. You wanna be a writer, April? Stop whining and write. Take your medicine. Eat your vegetables.

And then, in the space of two or three sentences, everything changed. I can’t say what, since I’m still in drafting, but it’s one of those things that happens on the page that, in retrospect, I should have seen coming. It blew up what I had planned for the rest of the chapter, but in the best way. Immediately I could see a new path to the end of this segment of the story, and even better, this early bit stopped seeming like a chore I needed to get through and come back and rewrite later, and started looking an interesting scene all on its own. It’s dramatic, mysterious, it draws the reader in and immediately establishes the tone, stakes, and themes of the book.

In other words, I’m feeling like a fucking genius right now, and dashing out these quick words to brag about it before I turn and get back to drafting before the high is gone and I feel like an incompetent dilettante again.

*Working title, obviously.

MichFest Fail, Vol. MMCMLXXXI

April Daniels2 Comments

MichFest published this statement on Facebook a few days ago, their latest response to the perennial criticisms of their “Womyn born womyn” policy. Let’s fisk it, shall we?

The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was created in 1976 as a space to gather in celebration and exploration of the experiences of females.

Right off the bat, they start seeding the ground for a disingenuous denial of trans women’s identities. Here they are implicitly conflating being female with being cis. They state their goal is “the celebration and exploration of the experiences of females” and then spend the rest of the statement arguing, essentially, that some females are more female than others.

For almost 40 years, it has been a welcoming space for revolutionary womyn and girls who personify a broad spectrum of gender.

If by “broad spectrum” they mean “lots of different kinds of cis people.”

Anyone who has been to the Festival knows firsthand the truly radical and diverse nature of our community. There is no greater variety of embodied womyn’s gender expression anywhere else in the world.

This statement only begins to hold water if one considers that the subset of “womyn” doesn’t include trans women. Otherwise, any average trans girl twitter circle is probably just as if not more diverse.

However we express our individual gender identity, for this one week, we recreate ourselves outside the margins of female socialization, and use this sanctuary to examine and unpack the very real oppression of being born and raised as females in our male-defined culture. We carve out this space to turn our attention toward ourselves and toward one another in a culture created and defined by us.

Here we get to the real meat of their argument, the “born woymn” clause. It’s fatuous for two reasons. First, it presumes that trans women are never born female, which is wrong on its face. Many of us assert our gender identity as soon as we are old enough to be able to make such assertions. The trans experience is vast and multifaceted, so I won’t go so far as to say we’re all aware of our gender that early, but clearly some of us are “born female” as much as any cis woman.

Second, it presumes that there is no real oppression faced by young trans girls as they grow up in that very same male-defined culture that MichFest decries. I promise you, there is. I was emotionally abused for years as a child, in large part, I believe, because I did not really fit into the gender role that I had been assigned. Even though I only became aware of being trans in my early 20s, I was never “one of the boys.”  I was very bad at being male, and I paid a severe penalty for that. Trans girls are ground up and spit out by the patriarchy at a horrifying rate. We know gender based oppression as well as any other group on the planet. 

We have said that this space, for this week, is intended to be for womyn who were born female, raised as girls and who continue to identify as womyn. This is an intention for the spirit of our gathering, rather than the focus of the festival. It is not a policy, or a ban on anyone.

You know what it’s called when you do something abusive, and then deny that you’re doing it? It’s called gaslighting. MichFest is trying to gaslight the entire trans community.

We do not “restrict festival attendance to cisgendered womyn, prohibiting trans women” as was recently claimed in several Advocate articles. We do not and will not question anyone’s gender.

Oh really? Nancy Burkholder will be shocked to hear that. MichFest chased her out of the festival all the way back in 1991, and hasn’t apologized or changed its stance since then.

Rather, we trust the greater queer community to respect this intention, leaving the onus on each individual to choose whether or how to respect it.

This is one of the most noxiously passive aggressive sentences I have ever read. Basically, they refuse to call their policy a policy, refuse to provide any specifics or details on it, and then try to push off responsibility for it onto the heads of the people it is discriminating against. Their whole womyn-born-womyn stance is clearly meant to be inhospitable towards trans women, and it is disingenuous in the extreme to pretend otherwise. To then act as if it is the responsibility of trans women to sort through all the doubletalk and innuendo and police themselves on top of this is a really gross kind of cognitive judo throw.

Although this sentence is notable for how blunt and forward it is about its greasy manipulation, this tactic is not unknown to us: this is exactly how patriarchy operates. By attempting to create cognitive dissonance (you’re not banned, you’re just unwelcome!) to define the boundries, and then acting as if the oppressed have some kind of moral obligation to respect those boundaries is the foundational tactic of patriarchy, and it is deeply ironic that MichFest embraces it to such an enthusiastic degree.

Ours is a fundamental and respectful feminist statement about who this gathering is intended for, and if some cannot hear this without translating that into a “policy”, “ban” or a “prohibition”, this speaks to a deep-seated failure to think outside of structures of control that inform and guide the patriarchal world.

Or, you know, an ability to understand your words as you have said them.

Trans womyn and transmen have always attended this gathering.

Except for all the times they were kicked out, of course. And the times when they are not kicked out, what is their experience like? The authors do not say. Are they welcomed? Are they scorned? This is kind of an important point to clarify if they wish to claim trans women are granted full participation in the festival.

Some attend wanting to change the intention, while others feel the intention includes them. Deciding how the festival’s intention applies to each person is not what we’re about. 

Again, this is clearly disingenuous. MichFest has repeatedly stated that womyn-born-woymn refers to women who were “born and raised as girls” and has a history of asking trans women to leave the festival. They very much are in the business of deciding how the festivals “intention” (read: policy) applies to the attendees, even if they have moved on from expulsion to passive aggressive shaming. That lovely healing energy they’re so hot to talk up sure does clash with the scowls and intimations they send our way, doesn’t it?

Defining the intention of the gathering for ourselves is vital. Being born female in this culture has meaning, it is an authentic experience…

Okay, first of all, “authenticity” is a chimera that white liberals came up with. Beyond being snooty about what kind of salsa you’re willing to eat, it doesn’t really exist.

…one that has actual lived consequences.

Oh fuck you. Last year, I was fired for being a woman. Trans women endure all the consequences of being our gender that cis women do, only more severely and more frequently. We are one of the most at risk groups in the United States for rape, murder, and discrimination. Don’t fucking talk to us about consequences. We know consequences. Our attempted suicide rate is higher than any other demographic in the country. I do not know a single trans woman, not a single fucking one of us, who hasn’t been suicidal. Being suicidal is a rite of passage for us.

These experiences provide important context to the fabric of our lives, context that is chronically missing from the conversation about the very few autonomous spaces created for females.

Again, the conflation of being female with being cis. Here “autonomous spaces created for females” is implicitly cast as a trans-exclusionary concept. This right here is the nub of the trans community’s objection to MichFest. You cannot claim to be “for females” if you arbitrarily exclude a category of women. You cannot claim to be sympathetic to us while simultaneously denying our womanhood, our very identities.

This erasure is particularly mindboggling in a week when 276 girls were kidnapped and sold into sex slavery solely because they were female. This is the world females live in.

Can we pause and marvel for a moment at the chutzpah it takes for an organization made up of predominantly middle and upper class white American women to appropriate the pain and horror of an atrocity that happened to a poor black community halfway around the world?

There are many who are trying to forge a conversation that is based on open dialogue – both as a political value, and as the best tool to reduce divisions and build strong empathetic understanding and alliance.

Again, you cannot claim to be interested in anything even resembling empathy if your baseline position is that we are not female, that we don’t belong in female spaces, that we should not have access to the same celebration and healing as cis women.

We cannot allow the tactics of fear, bullying and harassment to control our community. We cannot stand by as people are harassed on Facebook and Twitter, as feminist artists and events are boycotted, communities are censured, and threats of violence are bandied around as acceptable speech.

Threats of violence are never acceptable, full stop. That there have been such incidents is despicable and destructive and I condemn them in the strongest possible terms. That being said, it is dishonest and unfair to speak of these incidents as if they are endorsed by the wider trans community. We do not accept this. We categorically reject it.

As is true in all of our home communities, the Michigan community is of many hearts and minds in this conversation, and we are committed to shifting our focus towards building alliances across our multi-faceted identities and beliefs.

How, exactly, does this concern us? Our objection is not that MichFest doesn’t do enough community; it’s that we are implicitly barred from entry. And further, I sincerely doubt the organizers of MichFest do care about building alliances, at least not with trans women, as they have again and again given us the cold shoulder.

We organized a series of workshops last year on the land that were a beautiful living model for how to forge dialogue, to speak to and hear one another through difference, to practice radical listening and to aid community building.

Sounds wonderful. What a shame trans women were shunned out of attending.

Hundreds of womyn participated, including trans womyn, and some of the most radical and healing work was created by womyn representing the full spectrum of perspectives on this and other complex gender identity issues.

Okay, when MichFest say trans women here, do they mean trans men? FAAB Genderqueers? What? Because given their emphasis on what people were “born as” (that is to say, assigned as upon birth) it sort of sounds like they mean “trans people who we think are women” but are actually men/something else. They throw this out here at the very end as if it means something, but they are so vague on the specifics, and so fanatically dedicated to avoiding making a clarifying statement about how trans women are to be treated while in attendance, or even if attendance is in fact allowed, that it really can’t be taken to mean anything.

Again and again we hear about their intention, but their commitment to avoid making specific policy declarations and calling them that means that the de facto policy cannot be criticized head on. Any time somebody tries, MichFest can just slip aside from the point by shrugging and saying “Policy? What policy?” It’s a dodge to avoid getting nailed down to a position that they might have to change. Instead they hare content to muddy the waters and rely on cognitive dissonance and a general sense of being unwelcome to keep the tranny population down. It’s a remarkably similar tactic to the ones used in male dominated spaces to marginalize women. Think of all the times you’ve heard about tech spaces saying they want to be “informal” and maintain “community standards” that don’t rely on codes of conduct. It’s the exact same thing.

We will continue this work at the 2014 Festival as we carry on our longstanding tradition of positive and radical discussions.

Yes, there will be endless conversations, endless dialog. Of course there will, because that is one of the best stalling tactics of a status quo.

We will continue to have these conversations face-to-face, heart-to-heart, not walled off from this difficult conversation or standing behind anonymous computer screens and keyboards.

My name is April Marlin Daniels and my email is on the contact page. There is no anonymity here.

We remain committed to always approaching at times complex and even divisive issues with compassion, love and respect.

Are you fucking kidding me?

Crystallized Fear

April Daniels

December 15th, 2010. In the space of four hours, every facet of my life comes flying apart in a brilliant spray of shrapnel. My life is divided into two parts: before that day, and after. It precipitated a full scale meltdown which, in some ways, I have yet to recover from. There were a lot of firsts that came out of this. The first time I had a panic attack. The first time I skipped town with less than 72 hours notice. And so on. For most of the following year,  I was homeless. Not living under a bridge, no, but you have to understand that homelessness is a complicated phenomenon, with a lot more gradation and nuance than people who haven’t personally encountered it tend to understand.

Homelessness is a traumatic experience, but also an enlightening one. Before 2011, I had vague, fuzzy fears. What if I never make it? What if I don’t succeed? What will life look like if I fail to actualize myself up Mazlow’s pyramid? Existential fears, without much in the way of concrete details and consequences. Just a formless anxiety about the trajectory of my life. But now, now I know exactly what I’m scared of. The most terrifying words in the English language are it’s happening again. When I got fired last year, I walked home in a foggy daze, absolutely convinced I would be dead by the end of the month. My biggest fear in life is going back to the way I lived in 2011.

In 2011 I encountered real violence for the first time in my life. I encountered food scarcity for the first time in my life. I lived among a culture that totally abdicates any sense of risk management or preparatory foresight. It was an absolutely terrifying way to live. And it could happen again. It could always happen again. When my apartment lease ended before I was able to find a new apartment, and I was forced to put my stuff in storage and couch surf for most of April, I still had not gotten another steady job. The combination of being on a temp contract and sleeping in a borrowed bed started pushing my buttons hard, very hard.

The day I moved in to my new apartment, I was grinning ear to ear almost the entire afternoon. A few hours after we’d finished moving my stuff into the place, when I was alone under a roof I had a legal claim to again, I broke down sobbing. I gave prayers of thanks to my Goddess, and I hugged myself, and I sobbed because it hadn’t happened again. It looked like it was going to, but it didn’t.

In a weird way, it’s a relief to have my fears crystallized in such a specific form. I know exactly what the stakes are when things get rough for me. I know I have survived it before, but I also know it was a close run thing. I have a realistic assessment of my ability to endure and adapt, and that’s a good thing to have. There is no easy way to come by such knowledge. I hope that I will not have to re-up on the experience any time soon.

The Hardest Part of Drafting

April Daniels

I’m currently attempting to knock out the rough draft of the as-yet unnamed Dreadnought sequel. It’s much harder to get the words out this time than the first book was. This is not the first time I’ve faced this problem. When I attempted to write a sequel to Necessary Cruelty, I encountered a very similar issue. I’m trying to decide if it’s a common cause, or a symptom with more than one possible genesis. NC2’s outline is a structural mess, and that might have played a part in gumming up the works, but Dreadnought 2’s outline is much tighter, with a much stronger cause-and-effect through-line. Still, I find it difficult to make headway.

I’m beginning to suspect the problem is that I’ve not sold either manuscript yet. Writing a book takes a lot of effort. A lot of effort. It is basically a full time job on top of my other full time job. I was able to write Dreadnought in six weeks flat in large part because I was unemployed at the time, but it was still hundreds or thousands of hours bent at my keyboard in intense concentration. When I reach the end of a heavy day’s writing, my chest feels tight and anxious for a good hour afterwards. The kind of focus needed to draft fiction doesn’t come easily, and I don’t unclench from it without effort.

And that’s just the effort. It doesn’t even begin to describe the emotional obstacle course I have to run to get something that big produced and polished. Elation, fear, excitement, frustration, and despair are all crammed up right next to each other during a day of writing. On a good day, more positive emotions than bad during the writing process itself. But the other ones tend to pop up when things are going slowly, or when I read back on what I’ve written and decided I don’t like it.

Writing is strenuous. It leaves me physically weary. It’s not a small amount of effort we’re talking about here.

And sequels? Sequels are harder.

In the first book of a series, I’m blazing new ground. I can do almost anything I want. A sequel has to pick up from its predecessor in a logical place, and it can’t confuse the reader, either a new reader or someone who is continuing from the first book. This makes the beginning of a sequel difficult, because there are a lot of pacing problems that need to be overcome. That can be fixed with outlining though, and I am a fervent convert to the outlining camp. I write, and rewrite the skeleton of my book two or three times before I even start on page one. So I’m not convinced that the problems I have writing sequels comes from the narrative constraints of being a sequel.

I think it’s something that’s harder for me to fix. I think it’s because I’m not sure the effort is worth it. You see, when I’m writing a new book, it hasn’t failed yet. It hasn’t been considered by a dozen+ agents and rejected. But by the time I’ve got my ducks in a row well enough to start work on a sequel, its predecessor has (in both cases where I got far enough to try) failed to get any professional traction. That is perhaps not the best way to think of it, but I’ve never been a particularly sunny person so there you go. So by the time I’m drafting a sequel, there’s that voice in the back of my mind asking if this is just wasted effort. If maybe I should try drafting another Book 1 and see if that is finally able to sell.

So there it is. The hardest part of drafting a sequel is worrying about the first book’s lack of success.  I’m still not sure how to get around this problem, except to keep going and try to force my way through.

CLASSIC: Europa Universalis IV is The Best Genocide Simulator of The Year

April Daniels

This article was originally published at Gamemoir.com.

The first minutes I spent with Europa Universalis IV were a beautiful tragedy. I’d elected to start the game as Austria in 1492. Right away I was faced with a troubling situation. Some of my provinces in the western half of Europe were separated from me by the national borders of several other countries, and cut off from their motherland had forgotten the joys of living under my benevolent rule.

Nationalists had risen up and laid siege to several of my forts. They were in fact very close to forcing their demands for independence.

All that lay between My loyal subjects (For all of My subjects are loyal, even if they don’t always know it themselves. That’s why they need me, you see: because I know what’s best for them) and the purposeless ennui of independence were the sixty thousand men of the Austrian army.

But you can’t just march a doom stack of troops across five countries without permission, not unless you’re willing to fight your way through. My diplomats scurried along, carrying My will to the less enlightened segments of Europe that had not yet accepted Me into their hearts.

Now they may be backwards and ignorant foreigners, but they know a good idea when they hear it, and letting thousands and thousands of foreign soldiers tramp through their fields and clog up their roads is a marvelous idea. I felt so generous not even asking for anything in return.

Not all were so wise, but enough were that I could plot a twisty route across Europe for my soldiers to go liberate the shit out of my wayward provinces. I would save them from the rising doom of independence. I would save them from themselves. So off My soldiers marched, sixty thousand of the finest conscripts my commissars could drag from under their beds.

Five thousand made it back.

I couldn’t believe it. How had such a catastrophe happened? Venice took the opportunity to pounce and crossed my southern border, burning everything in their path. I couldn’t afford to replace my losses, and what replacements I could scrounge up wouldn’t be ready for months. I went back to an earlier save and tried again. Again, my army melted away like spring snow. This is how I learned about attrition.

You see every province can only support so many soldiers. If more soldiers are present in that province than can be supported, some of them start to die. The route I’d selected for My glorious march against freedom couldn’t support more than twenty thousand troops in any given province. So the army had simply died of starvation until it was down to a more manageable size.

With their morale low and their numbers depleted, they were cut to ribbons by the rebels, and only found victory by burying the enemy under mountains of corpses. Again, I reloaded an earlier save. Again I tried, but this time I broke the army into three parts, and plotted three separate routes across Europe and had them fall on three separate rebel-held provinces. Success.

From that moment on I was in love with this game. Europa Universalis IV is a pitiless tutor. There are dozens of systems to keep track of, many of which interact with each other and can create perverse cycles of dysfunction in an otherwise well-run empire. At the start of the game, troops can take months to recruit and even a small army can bankrupt a great power. Planning requires forethought measured in decades, if not centuries.

And all the while, the engines of history churn on, heedless of of the desires of rulers and peasants alike. Drifting cultural loyalties, religious insurrection, disputed lines of succession, and even simple bad luck can wreck a scheme decades in the making. Your challenge, as the kind of immortal, disembodied spirit of a country, is to withstand the onslaught of perils and misfortune and lead your country to greatness.

When any given week can bring an ill omen in the sky which leads to a drop in stability which leads to a rebellion breaking out in one corner of the empire which leads to three other rebellions in three other provinces, leading to the ruin of all you have striven for these past five decades and more, you must plan for catastrophe.

You must learn to prioritize, to put out fires quickly, and to keep your eyes on the goal. When you’re fighting three separate wars, putting down rebellions, managing a religious conversion, bringing insolent merchants to heel, and thinking “yes, it’s all going according to plan,” then you’ll have arrived. You won’t be a master, but you’ll have unlocked the secret to playing and enjoying such a gargantuan, sprawling, and fundamentally unforgiving game.

After getting Austria up to snuff as a central European powerhouse, I thought I’d try my hand at overrunning the New World as the British. As an American, I have a perverse fascination with playing as the British and trying to keep the Revolution from happening. Or, if that’s not possible, at least win it for King and Country.

So after a dicey few decades in which I cut the Hundred Year’s War short by about two thirds, I untangled myself from Continental politics and focused on rushing up the tech tree as fast as my country could go. The history of this alternate world is filled with the names of explorers I sent west, never to be heard from again. Finally, I managed to get a ship out to Labrador and back without losing it, and was able to plant the flag and start my first overseas colony.

And it’s here where things started to get a bit…fucked up. I was still having loads of fun, but suddenly I couldn’t get into playing a jovial dictator relentlessly pushing her borders back and using the bones of dead peasants as the mortar in her new palace. Somewhere, deep in my chest, a little voice was whispering this is really fucking sick.

Let’s be clear about one thing: in real life, the colonization of North America by European settlers was only possible because of the accompanying slow-motion genocide of the people who were already living here. The First Nations of the Americas did not have castles, or royal dynasties, or a continent-spanning church like the Europeans, but they did have a civilization. They had politics, trade, cultural exchange, territorial disputes, and wars. They built cities and temples, domesticated animals, and mastered their environment just as thoroughly as any other people on the planet.

I knew going in that I’d playing a game about a topic that, in real life, is horrifying to my (white, privileged) progressive sensibilities. I thought I was prepared for it.

Then I actually saw how they treat the Americas. For reference, here is what Europe looks like about a hundred and fifty years into the game, after several of the smaller states have been gobbled up by their larger neighbors.

Europe in Europa Universalis IV
Europe in Europa Universalis IV

And here is what North America looks like, about ninety years after English settlers first landed in Canada.

North America in Europa Universalis IV
North America in Europa Universalis IV

Something is off. It took me a while to figure out what it was, but something felt a little strange about colonizing the Americas. It couldn’t be that I was not comfortable with playing a ruthlessly expansionary state. I mean, have you read the first part of this article?

Perhaps it was my uneasiness with gamifying a genocide that I directly benefit from, even centuries after it started. That’s probably part of it, but a greater part of it, I think, is how the game portrays that atrocity.

When you finally get a ship over to North America, you’ll notice that things look a little different. Europe is crammed cheek to jowl with minor duchies and single-province powers, at least in the early game. There is no square inch of territory unaccounted for. But when you get to the Americas, you’ll see a lot of “empty” territory. The provinces and territories that are not claimed by any power or nation can be colonized.

You do this by sending a colonist to that province, and watch as its population grows. Once it hits a threshold, it becomes a productive city, and you can recall your colonist to do it again elsewhere.

Except that there wasn’t any “empty” territory in real life. There were people who already lived in the Americas, and in Africa, and in Asia. Entire cultures rose and fell, for thousands of years without European involvement. But when you get to where a lot of these people lived in Europa Universalis IV, you are presented with a blank spot on the map, and a suggestion that nobody who matters lives there. (Yes, a cataclysmic series of plagues crashed the native populations shortly after the first explorers arrived, but even still, those blank spots on the map had people in them.)

This is not to say that there is no thought given to the natives. Oh, they’re represented all right.

The colonization screen in Europa Universalis IV
The colonization screen in Europa Universalis IV

You can see a simplified take on their religion, a rough population estimate, and the only two stats that most indigenous peoples are allowed to have in this game: “aggressiveness” and “ferocity”. That’s right, your ancestors might have been a peaceful culture of fishermen, but in EUIV they were aggressive and ferocious. Like animals in need of taming, really.

And can you really call it aggression if they attack the colonists for taking their land? Since when does self defense, or the defense of one’s territory, become aggressive? Why, when brown people are doing it, of course!

(Speaking of which, look at how Native Americans are actually pictured here. That doesn’t strike anyone else as a bit…broad? A bit caricatured? A bit…say it with me now…racist?)

There are some indigenous cultures that are granted the dignity of being represented as actual political actors. The Creek, the Iroquois, and so on. The problem is that these countries are superficially defined, and intentionally limited. Cultures with the “new world” technology group accrue technology at a snail’s pace, and are much slower to gather resources.

This means that no matter what you do, by the time the Europeans show up, you’re facing an apocalyptic war for survival that you can’t hope to win.

While there is some effort to reflect a different culture, mainly in the names of your national leaders and the graphics used to represent the buildings in your provinces, this is clearly a halfhearted effort. For example, the advisers that you hire to gain extra administrative, diplomatic, or military resources for example are all Europeans, no matter what culture you are playing as.

Some limitations that make a bit of sense in the European setting, like the inability to explore uncharted territory without first developing your technology base, only serve to lock Native American factions into their starting area. While European cultures are allowed to expand or contract their borders in gleeful disregard of historical fact, Native American cultures are chained to a rough approximation of where they historically existed.

The national decisions and missions available for a player to select are greatly reduced as well, which means that most countries that don’t border the Mediterranean are going to be very stale and generic compared to, for example, the intrigues of the Holy Roman Empire.

And it’s hard to believe that this isn’t intentional. It’s hard to believe that the existence of the Huron and the Iroquois aren’t only there for the European player’s benefit. Having some cultures represented by countries with definable borders and a diplomacy screen allows players who are playing a European power to simulate the diplomatic relations that some colonial powers had with some of the Native Americans.

I’m pretty sure that’s the only reason why some Native Americans are given “European-style” countries in this game at all. The problem with this game is not that you can colonize the New World; the problem is that this game only includes the New World so that it can be colonized.

A pretty good piece of evidence for this theory is how trade is handled in EUIV. Trade, in Europa Universalis IV, is a one-way prospect. A province creates trade power, and that trade power is pushed up along a linear path, where it is eventually collected either at your capital or by a merchant you’ve sent to collect it.

There is no way for trade to flow “backwards,” which means it is impossible for cultures at the “upstream” end of a trade network to benefit from it. In this game, trade is only for extracting wealth from places that aren’t Europe. I haven’t played much with trying to colonize Africa. Not after I saw one of the provinces had as its trade good “slaves” with a picture of a big iron ball and chain.

For a game about creating alternate histories, Europa Universalis IV has some very firm opinions about what should happen to the peoples living in the parts of the world that aren’t Europe. None of them good. I don’t mean to say that it endorses genocide, merely that it doesn’t question it. The game accepts it as natural, inevitable, and unworthy of comment.

There’s plenty of winking humor in how it treats the various atrocities that happened in Europe during this time, so I know they are aware of how things were horrible for many Europeans during that era. But there’s no clues to indicate that they really understand the horrors of colonization, as well.

Everyone knows that religious wars and inquisitions and violently repressing your own people is wrong. But not everybody agrees that colonizing other nations is wrong, and that makes all the difference. It’s like how in Grand Theft Auto players can have a grand old time perpetrating mass murder on the streets of Liberty City, but many would have problems with a rape mini-game. We all agree murder is wrong, but rape is something people make excuses for.

We all agree that dictatorships are wrong, but colonization is something we make excuses for.

It’s an unsettled question. It’s a moral problem we have not yet agreed on an answer to. The distancing assumptions that allow us to vicariously enjoy the chaos of a 5-star rampage in downtown Los Santos are not available. Or, perhaps the assumptions are too available; perhaps the game relies on the assumption that moral question would never be asked.

And so for those of us who are aware of the question, and who care about it, it’s not a very exciting premise for a game.

It’s a fun game. A masterful game. A work of passion and talent. But I can’t enjoy it without reservations or recommend it without caveats. The moment you begin your colonization effort, the game takes a dark and troubling turn. It never really recovers from that. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll be over here, attempting to unify the Holy Roman Empire into the modern state of Germany. And not doing any colonization.