podcast friday
May. 6th, 2022 07:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabby Today's Podcast Friday is about the podcast Rite Gud.
Goddamn I love this podcast. I'm still catching up on back episodes but every one I've listened to is hilarious, insightful, and genuinely useful as both a sci-fi/fantasy reader and as a writer. You can probably click on any of them and if you like the title, you'll probably get a lot out of it. But of course the episode that you should listen to, if you choose one, is Squeecore, which launched them into The Discourse.
(If you're not a podcast person, you can read a transcript.)
"Squeecore" features host Raquel S. Benedict and JR from the Podhand, discussing what they argue is the predominant literary movement in speculative fiction. It's the thing I've been dubbing the YA-ification of genre fiction, though I will admit that Squeecore is much more catchy. The thesis is that a lot of SFF these days...kind of sucks? Even as it's theoretically more diverse, it's become more limited in terms of tonal and emotional range and particularly in terms of the class composition of writers. There's an unwillingness to deal with messy emotions and characters, a safety, and a liberalism (or, as the podcast asserts, a neoliberalism even while the authors are overwhelmingly left-wing). Particularly in short stories, there's an overriding moralism, as if readers can't be trusted to pick out nuance, and a narrowing of allowable outcomes and experiences.
This episode is a live hand grenade dropped into the conversation. It caused. So. Much. Drama. on Twitter, with a load of authors I really enjoy weighing in. Raquel got all kinds of hate (JR less so, because he's not a woman on the internet). They did a followup episode, "The Squee-quel", which talks about the backlash and expands on some of the ideas in the first one.
Now, while there are positions on both sides of the debate that I respect, I do come down on the side of "this is a thing and I don't like it"—I've had this itch with so much of genre fiction that touches dark issues but doesn't really come to grips with the darkness. "Squeecore" is a Rorschach test in many ways—Raquel and JR don't name a lot of authors, but Scalzi and Wendig are in there, Joss Whedon carries a lot of the blame, and they assert that the problem is more prevalent in short fiction than in novels. Personally I was thinking of books like A Memory Called Empire and Victories Greater than Death where the central conceit in both cases involves a young lesbian who is happy to her memories overwritten by a different personality and is cool with it and we're supposed to be happy for her if it works. And everyone loses their mind over these books because yay representation uwu smol bean, etc. I also think that a lot of the prose is flat. Which is not a new problem in SFF—the Golden Age that everyone on the right of these debates romanticizes is practically unreadable—but it's a particular type of flatness that I associate with YA and it speaks to a failure of imagination and innovation in the genre. It's why when I read someone like Silvia Moreno-Garcia (who also weighed in on the debate, on the side that I agree with), I absolutely lose my shit because she clearly rejects a sharp division between literary fiction and genre fiction and proves that you can absolutely write a book about vampires or magic and not have it be a quippy, dialogue-heavy, barren story that seems written purely to be adapted for screen.
It's been a long time since the Sad Puppies (whose spectre is, of course, raised by this discourse) and I think SFF ought to be mature enough to have these debates.
Anyway, as a proponent of dense, messy fiction I really enjoyed this challenge and I just want to talk about it forever.
Goddamn I love this podcast. I'm still catching up on back episodes but every one I've listened to is hilarious, insightful, and genuinely useful as both a sci-fi/fantasy reader and as a writer. You can probably click on any of them and if you like the title, you'll probably get a lot out of it. But of course the episode that you should listen to, if you choose one, is Squeecore, which launched them into The Discourse.
(If you're not a podcast person, you can read a transcript.)
"Squeecore" features host Raquel S. Benedict and JR from the Podhand, discussing what they argue is the predominant literary movement in speculative fiction. It's the thing I've been dubbing the YA-ification of genre fiction, though I will admit that Squeecore is much more catchy. The thesis is that a lot of SFF these days...kind of sucks? Even as it's theoretically more diverse, it's become more limited in terms of tonal and emotional range and particularly in terms of the class composition of writers. There's an unwillingness to deal with messy emotions and characters, a safety, and a liberalism (or, as the podcast asserts, a neoliberalism even while the authors are overwhelmingly left-wing). Particularly in short stories, there's an overriding moralism, as if readers can't be trusted to pick out nuance, and a narrowing of allowable outcomes and experiences.
This episode is a live hand grenade dropped into the conversation. It caused. So. Much. Drama. on Twitter, with a load of authors I really enjoy weighing in. Raquel got all kinds of hate (JR less so, because he's not a woman on the internet). They did a followup episode, "The Squee-quel", which talks about the backlash and expands on some of the ideas in the first one.
Now, while there are positions on both sides of the debate that I respect, I do come down on the side of "this is a thing and I don't like it"—I've had this itch with so much of genre fiction that touches dark issues but doesn't really come to grips with the darkness. "Squeecore" is a Rorschach test in many ways—Raquel and JR don't name a lot of authors, but Scalzi and Wendig are in there, Joss Whedon carries a lot of the blame, and they assert that the problem is more prevalent in short fiction than in novels. Personally I was thinking of books like A Memory Called Empire and Victories Greater than Death where the central conceit in both cases involves a young lesbian who is happy to her memories overwritten by a different personality and is cool with it and we're supposed to be happy for her if it works. And everyone loses their mind over these books because yay representation uwu smol bean, etc. I also think that a lot of the prose is flat. Which is not a new problem in SFF—the Golden Age that everyone on the right of these debates romanticizes is practically unreadable—but it's a particular type of flatness that I associate with YA and it speaks to a failure of imagination and innovation in the genre. It's why when I read someone like Silvia Moreno-Garcia (who also weighed in on the debate, on the side that I agree with), I absolutely lose my shit because she clearly rejects a sharp division between literary fiction and genre fiction and proves that you can absolutely write a book about vampires or magic and not have it be a quippy, dialogue-heavy, barren story that seems written purely to be adapted for screen.
It's been a long time since the Sad Puppies (whose spectre is, of course, raised by this discourse) and I think SFF ought to be mature enough to have these debates.
Anyway, as a proponent of dense, messy fiction I really enjoyed this challenge and I just want to talk about it forever.
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Date: 2022-05-06 01:18 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2022-05-07 02:29 pm (UTC)It also spoke to me bc I find, when you complain about sex in film being bad, they think you're a prude who wants more censorship. Actually censorship is what makes sex in film bad. There are like 5 stock blockings that directors know they can use without pushback, and that's like all anyone uses. Yawn. And then there are people like, how dare you want a film? To be good? Most movies are bad with unimaginative action scenes! And it's like, yes & I complain about them, too?
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Date: 2022-05-07 08:44 pm (UTC)None of this shit is new, of course—there was the whole one foot on the floor rule, etc. But I am less forgiving of modern-day prudery.
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Date: 2022-05-07 09:55 pm (UTC)I always thought it was cool on Bound how the Wachowskis brought in a sex scene consultant, similar to what you would do for action scenes, in order to film the scenes respectfully & get another perspective on the erotic aspect (so, eg, the focus on hands as sexy was from the consultant's input).
Bc otherwise you get something like s1 of Black Sails, where there's a ton of sex but it's all kind of just. A thing that is happening?
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Date: 2022-05-07 10:30 pm (UTC)Honestly most sex looks absolutely ridiculous to me on screen, to the point where it doesn't register unless it's pointed out. Same with most modern action movies where you can tell they're leaning on cuts because the actors don't generally have skills. (I watched a lot of old martial arts movies at one point, and you can really tell the difference between an actor with training and one without.)
I'll swallow both of those if sex or action isn't the point of it, as I can accept visual shorthand, but the second you start thinking about it it's absolutely absurd.
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Date: 2022-05-07 10:40 pm (UTC)Actually though irt visual shorthand, I kinda feel like this is why film (& tv but especially film) tends to be a bit conservative artistically, even in arthouse stuff. Bc it's kind of all building on precedent and is suuuuuuuuuuper referential? so if you want to Change Film, you have to retrain the audience, too. :/
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Date: 2022-05-07 11:51 pm (UTC)I notice with my students, film doesn't really hold their interest anymore. To some degree I think it's that they're disengaged, but I remember showing a stronger group of kids films from the 70s and it wasn't just that they were bored, but that they literally couldn't parse what was happening on screen.
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Date: 2022-05-08 01:13 am (UTC)In a way it's like, the weird outlier between the studio system of the 50s and the modern one reasserting itself. Like obviously studios still mattered but they had no idea what would do well, so everyone gets to be a bit weirder (but also they lean into auteurism & the director is the brand, which sucks for diversity bc you kinda get hand-picked stars).
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Date: 2022-05-08 11:54 am (UTC)I find 70s cinema so fascinating because it's a weird period between the final death of the Hay's Code (except not because arguably the Hay's Code is still with us) and the modern blockbuster.
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Date: 2022-05-06 02:25 pm (UTC)*takes notes*
Re: *
Date: 2022-05-07 01:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-06 02:29 pm (UTC)NEVAAARRR
I don't really read genre fiction but I'll add these to the playlist. :P (I had brought it down to 425 episodes at the end of the Montréal trip but I'm back up to 472. Sigh.)
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Date: 2022-05-07 01:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-06 10:26 pm (UTC)I mean, also because she was actively harassing people, but go off, I guess.
(My actual feeling on RSB is that she had the "every single work of fan fiction ever written is stealing from the finite pool of Proper Queer Fiction" take a couple of years back, still one of the worst takes I've ever seen, but I think of her fondly when I look over my vast array of het fic. She has some good ideas but wow, she's bad at expressing them and seems like an asshole.)
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Date: 2022-05-07 01:20 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2022-05-07 02:00 am (UTC)As for the broader conversation, at a certain point isn't this just an argument that, like, mass market fiction is written for the mass market? I also think this has to do with publicity/optimizing vs diversity of writers/characters. It reminds me of the conversation my friends and I have about wrestling & like, who is it for? The live audience? The people watching the stream at home? The people seeing gifs on Twitter? David Meltzer specifically? Anyway I think some blandness has to do with optimizing around shareability + is a reflection of that. The music industry has similar issues. Plus everyone creating now is kinda crushed under the weight of the past, which is all super accessible immediately.
Also, I am admittedly a bit of a crank about this, but the discussion of néolibéralisme feels a bit shallow. Like, I feel like they didn't make the whole argument here for how it connects specifically to the YA-like quality of the writing? Like is néolibéralisme ok if the books are better? (Plus like... I think then the history of néolibéral economics & the history of the YA genre kinda don't have perfectly aligned timelines. Idk I'm not saying there's nothing there but... I don't think this was super convincing?)
But see this is what I struggle with podcasts, I feel like everything jumped around a lot and I got a bit confused where they were going... This is probably my editor brain but like. I think they could have cut this down to like, 10-15 mins... But I know that's a non-optimal podcast length.
Anyway ultimately I hit a similar place here that I do with film. Creating and publishing is easier now than ever before. So there are plenty of good works out there - to me the question is more about, how do we find ways of supporting & funding the art we want to see.
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Date: 2022-05-07 11:08 am (UTC)YA is relatively new as a marketing category, so I think its influence merits a lot of analysis. The generation writing SF/F now might be among the first to not have gone from reading children's books to adult books without a large body of literature in between.
I've been advised that if you want to get signed to a major press for genre writing, you have to be pitching it as something that could be adapted for a screen, and I think that's really new and has to do with thinner budgets and consolidation of the Big Four publishers. Which, of course, drastically limits the type of stories that can be told.
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Date: 2022-05-07 12:48 pm (UTC)Oh, crap.
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Date: 2022-05-07 12:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-07 02:18 pm (UTC)And ah yes how could I forget 'future rights holders' in my who's-this-for list? Yet again a big discussion in wrestling (and sports) bc as you shift from making money off the gate to making money off broadcast/library rights, it becomes more about, what kind of program do high-paying advertisers want (one that appeals to white college-educated men under 40, a demo that is obsessively tracked). I think film & books are a bit less depressing here bc the ad situation isn't the same as tv.
But yeah, seems like books aren't quite as bad as film, tv, music, video games. Yet. So this really is the time to get to work. One thing I do (in addition to just buying from small presses) is request my library buy books. I've had pretty good success there & all the ones they bought also had at least a 2-month wait-list on publication. I think we also need to figure out the ebook problem. Bc I think that kindle is a big driver toward consolidation. But obviously this is a hard one. I know medium presses have some success with drm-free or watermarked but I assume it's not viable at smaller levels or everyone would do it.
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Date: 2022-05-07 08:47 pm (UTC)Amazon has been absolute shit for publishing. It just decimated all independent booksellers and publishers. When I worked in publishing, Chapters-Indigo was in the process of massacring all mid-level publishing in Canada and then Amazon came along and shot the survivors in the head.
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Date: 2022-05-23 07:41 am (UTC)So. Many. Thoughts! The reason why I'm commenting late is that I really wanted to go through and say this and that and the other to you about it. Maybe I still will. Anyway this is a place marker to say thanks for highlighting it, I feel like back in the days of Metafandom there would have been someone highlighting all the reaction posts and subsequent discussion.
...I might just have to listen to the follow-up.
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Date: 2022-05-23 01:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-25 03:32 pm (UTC)https://www.metafilter.com/194137/Is-there-an-aesthetic-dominating-todays-English-language-written-SF-F
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Date: 2022-05-25 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-23 04:42 pm (UTC)This is a fascinating phenomenon but hard to disentangle because it seems to be influenced by lots of things. The fact that the world is burning down both metaphorically and literally, and lots of people are looking for comfort reading. The increased influence that fanfiction tropes and expectations have on pro SFF - from 'fanservice' elements to stories that started as fanfic (like Winter's Orbit) or just take their cues from the fannish zeitgeist. That whole movement that started on fan Tumblr (I think) that comes across as sex-ambivalent if not actually sex negative, where 'wholesome' is the highest praise you can give to a character. All of those streams seem to be part of this.
Though I would argue I guess that the "the tingle of relatability as a beloved character does something cool, or says something “epic” and snarky" is not as new as a phenomenon. It seems to me that Joss Whedon for one has always traded in that aspect of squeecore. And indeed they do mention Buffy later on.
Part of squeecore is maybe what post-modernism boils down to: it's always painfully conscious of itself as a narrative construction, and of how its readers will view it, and that the fourth wall has really gone for good. It's painfully self-conscious and maybe that's where so much of the earnestness comes in. (Though I cringe a little reading the comments about the callbacks to narratology and deconstruction because I do think I do this a little in my novel. It's so... pervasive.)
The diversity in many of these novels does seem very flat and (if you'll pardon a very old meme) PASTEDE ON YAY. I started noticing this in fan reviews maybe a decade or more ago now, in the wake of Racefail, that someone would be writing about a novel and saying "it has a bi POC protagonist!!11!1!" and I would want to be there in comments going, "fab, but is it any good?" And on the one hand you can't blame writers for wanting to pick up on that trend, but on the other hand... it's diversity as extruded entertainment/industrial complex, something that reassures rather than challenges the reader.
I was baffled by how many people loved "Ancillary Sword" when it was literally this outsider showing up on a colony world and giving a few lectures saying "exploitation is bad, guys," and everyone goes "oh thanks for letting us know!" (Very much caricaturing here... I haven't read it in a while.)
I did really like this comment: "So if you’re actually interested in the true spectrum of experience of marginalized people’s lives, yeah, it’s gonna – there’s gonna be parts of it that make you very uncomfortable, and there’s going to be parts of it that have sad endings or are weird or too raw… or too horny. And if you chase that away, you don’t have real diversity in your art."
Finally there have always been cliques in SFF but I do wonder how much of this is down to the increasing credentialism here (as everywhere else), where you don't just send a novel to a publisher anymore but you have to get an agent, and do the workshops, and get a developmental editor and all this other stuff. Funny because you would think the rise of self-publishing would have thrown open the doors hugely, but instead maybe it just means that we've got more fanfic-styled SFF. And I love fanfic so I don't even know why I'm saying that so disapprovingly! Or I do know: once upon a time fanfic was about putting the subtext into published fiction but when the fanfic becomes the text, subtext often seems to get stripped out.
So there are some ramblings, not very organized. Feel free to ignore them!
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Date: 2022-05-23 05:14 pm (UTC)The more I listen to this podcast (this episode and others) the more I find minor points of disagreement even while I agree with the broader points. Like, for example, fanfiction, which I feel is too fundamentally ancient a concept to complain about it having an influence on literature, unless one wants to complain about Dante writing his self-insert palling around with Virgil or whatever. Many of the more classic sci-fi writers of previous generations got their start writing fanfiction, if we're going to limit it to modern definitions of the term. What they're complaining about is more social media-incentivized fanfiction in the post-Ao3 but more critically post-Tumblr era, which has less to do with fanfiction as a genre/set of genres/tropes and more to do with algorithms and SEO.
The diversity in many of these novels does seem very flat and (if you'll pardon a very old meme) PASTEDE ON YAY.
HAH.
I started noticing this in fan reviews maybe a decade or more ago now, in the wake of Racefail, that someone would be writing about a novel and saying "it has a bi POC protagonist!!11!1!" and I would want to be there in comments going, "fab, but is it any good?" And on the one hand you can't blame writers for wanting to pick up on that trend, but on the other hand... it's diversity as extruded entertainment/industrial complex, something that reassures rather than challenges the reader.
Yes, this.
It poses two different, shitty challenges, depending on your relationship to marginalization.
If you are coming from a place of privilege relative to your character, you are confined as follows: Any attempt to diversify your writing will be seen as suspect. You are not hashtag-Own-Voices. You should write what you know, from your own experience. However, if you write only characters exactly like you, your work will face criticism for not being diverse. The solution is often that the main character shares a privileged identity with the writer but the side characters are one of everyone else. These characters are not as fully developed or interesting and bear the burden of Good Representation, and as a result we get Magical Negroes and such.
If you share a marginalized identity with your character, first off it is going to be much harder for you to get into publishing for all of the economic and social structural reasons that have kept marginalized people out of publishing forever. But you also have the added fun of being expected to represent your own community in one of two ways: write misery porn, or gloss over all the bad stuff. Both will get you dragged on Twitter much more than a privileged author would get. God forbid you write about a different set of marginalizations from your own (I just saw a trans man on Reddit questioning whether he could make his lead a trans woman. Like. WTF? that makes me sad.). The result tends to just be less diversity in genre fiction.
I was baffled by how many people loved "Ancillary Sword" when it was literally this outsider showing up on a colony world and giving a few lectures saying "exploitation is bad, guys," and everyone goes "oh thanks for letting us know!" (Very much caricaturing here... I haven't read it in a while.)
Hah. I failed to bond with those books and Murderbot, which everyone else loved. I figured it was just me being cis and allosexual.
Or I do know: once upon a time fanfic was about putting the subtext into published fiction but when the fanfic becomes the text, subtext often seems to get stripped out.
So
It's TV but a good example is Stamets/Hugh on Star Trek Discovery. Yay, we have a queer couple and it's even an interracial couple. Cool cool cool. Okay, they're married, and they are treated just like any other couple. That's the goal, right? We don't see their courtship at all, and the writers are pressured to show very little conflict between them, because that would be Bad Representation, so they are nothing else but perfect and supportive. And then they want to throw in some plot so they kill off Hugh. But! No one wants to be listed in the Bury Your Gays entry on TVTropes, so before the body has even cooled, we get assurances from the writers that this is only a temporary death, as the audience cannot be trusted not to initiate a boycott campaign over Twitter. And we get assurances that this is a long, complex story where the two find their way back to each other. Instead, Hugh is just magically revived, there are a few episodes of angst, and everything is normal until the next season when they repeat the same fucking thing but this time with the first trans characters in Trek. /rant even though I love Discovery
The problem, like with most things, is market forces and capitalism.
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Date: 2022-06-07 06:36 am (UTC)Like, for example, fanfiction, which I feel is too fundamentally ancient a concept to complain about it having an influence on literature, unless one wants to complain about Dante writing his self-insert palling around with Virgil or whatever... What they're complaining about is more social media-incentivized fanfiction in the post-Ao3 but more critically post-Tumblr era, which has less to do with fanfiction as a genre/set of genres/tropes and more to do with algorithms and SEO.
Oh indeed. I think I was shorthanding a bit there. "Recent currents in media fandom," let's say, although I think we saw some of these trends before algorithms were so much of a dominant thing. Definitely during the DW/Tumblr era, anyway.
If you share a marginalized identity with your character...
You're also expected to wave your credentials around at the appropriate points. There are all these interesting initiatives for marginalized people in publishing at the moment, which is great, and some of them I'm planning to apply for, but it does feel very much like credentialism for identity. I don't like the idea of... "exploiting" is the wrong word, really... but let's say "making my identity do work for me." It's not the worst problem to have, though.
Hah. I failed to bond with those books and Murderbot, which everyone else loved. I figured it was just me being cis and allosexual.
Hmm, well, I'm cis and allosexual too, so maybe it's just that I didn't find enough things in it to counterbalance what I didn't like. I did enjoy the first Ancillary book, but not enough to think about it much after I finished reading it.
So radiantfracture and some of his friends and I have a thing going where there is a distinction between queer fiction and fiction about gays.
I think I've had that discussion with you as well, and I agree. I don't know if you've come across the whole 'sweetweird' thing yet – I think I'm going to do a linkspam – but the thing that got me there was "a lot of queer stories naturally seem to trend towards sweetweird." Friend, I boggled. I guess sweetweird at its best can be subversive in its own way – much more than Stamets/Hugh, certainly – but still...
no subject
Date: 2022-06-07 11:28 am (UTC)God, yes. As a [insert identities here]. I've known a bunch of BIPOC who feel like it's the most awkward thing to put their identities on display in query letters.
I think I've had that discussion with you as well, and I agree. I don't know if you've come across the whole 'sweetweird' thing yet – I think I'm going to do a linkspam – but the thing that got me there was "a lot of queer stories naturally seem to trend towards sweetweird." Friend, I boggled. I guess sweetweird at its best can be subversive in its own way – much more than Stamets/Hugh, certainly – but still...
I guess sweetweird has the advantage of including some media I genuinely like. But it feels like a slightly different type of overcorrection.