(1) MORE ABOUT WISCON’S KILLABLE BODIES PANEL. One of the program participants, Nicasio Reed, put up “a quick mid-WisCon post”. This excerpt is about half of it.
So this morning I was on a 10AM panel at WisCon 42, and it was called The Desire for Killable Bodies in SFF. I’d been very much looking forward to the discussion, even though we’d had little pre-panel discussion about it. It’s a topic that deeply interests me, and that I strive to think deeply about while consuming and creating narratives and characters. The panel was staffed by myself, one other panelist, and a moderator. I was familiar with Molly Aplet, our moderator, who very appropriately made the call to act also a third panelist, because there were just the three of us. Lisa Freitag, my fellow panelist, I knew from one email before the start of the convention, and from a brief conversation in the Dealer’s Room on the Saturday before the panel, when we chatted about texts to bring up. My biggest fear before the panel started was not getting to bring up all the things I wanted to talk about, or not having intelligent responses to the inevitably brilliant audience questions.
Turns out I should be more creative with my fears! As was reported live via Twitter, and then on the WisCon blog, Lisa repeatedly made statements that expressed a desire to sympathize with both individual Nazis (in this context we would be talking about, I believe, Third Reich-era Nazis), and later also individual Confederate soldiers. That this happened once was confusing, surprising, and alarming. That this happened multiple times as the panel went on was flabbergasting, frightening, and finally just damaging.
A lot of people have checked in on me since the panel, making sure I was doing okay, and I appreciate all of you so much. However, I was absolutely not the most affected by what she said, and what she brought into that room. Most saliently, I’m not Jewish. I want to apologize to everyone who was there who was justly rattled, afraid, saddened, or made to feel unsafe. While I gathered myself enough to push back ideologically while on the panel, I didn’t take the step of directly turning to Lisa and saying, in however many words, “That was a fucked up thing to say, and it’s not okay.” The person who did eventually do that was an audience member, who I won’t name here without their permission. (Panelist and moderator names are, of course, public knowledge.) The onus for directly confronting those statements should absolutely not have fallen on the audience, particularly on those most directly and historically affected by the views expressed. That was my failure, and I am extremely sorry for it. So, again, to everyone in the audience who helped to push back, I’m sorry, and thank you….
The blogger Coffeeandink attended the panel and wrote a post detailing some of the discussion.
I don’t feel comfortable naming the panelist, though I wouldn’t say it was wrong to do so, either, and I do link to a post that names them. For this post, though, I’m just going to call them X.
I’m willing to answer questions about what happened. I am not willing to discuss the punishment or the con’s reaction with people who are not targeted by Nazis. If you are not Jewish, Roma, queer, disabled, or nonwhite/a person of color, please have that discussion elsewhere.
- The discussion was focused on Nazis in Third Reich.
- X did not express support for Nazi or Confederate ideology. What they did, repeatedly, was express sympathy for Nazi individuals and stress the need to “humanize” Nazis. They mentioned Confederates in support of this, appearing to think that saying that every soldier on both sides was “some mother’s son” was a convincing argument for extending compassion to Nazis. They argued that some Nazis were “good people”.
- According to Wiscon’s post, X “appeared to posit that disabled or injured people sometimes ‘have to be sacrificed'”, but I was pretty distracted at the point when that came up and can’t confirm it.
- The panel description focused on SFF “killable bodies” that are stand-ins for marginalized people, so I was not expecting the subject of Nazis as killable bodies rather than as killers to come up. It’s not innately problematic for a panel discussion to have a larger scope than its description, but I think a lot of people had this expectation and that it made the approach X took especially unexpected.
- Multiple audience members, multiple times, objected to what X was saying. At the end of the panel, one audience member said bluntly, “There’s a difference between understanding Nazis and sympathizing with them.”
- I remember the audience as being the ones who pushed back most assertively, but the moderator and panelist Nicasio Reed also argued with X after the audience broke the ice. I do not blame anyone for being too startled to respond firmly while in the room. I myself did not speak up.
- It’s important to recognize and acknowledge the humanity of people who do terrible things. However, when doing so, it is a moral imperative to center the victims of those terrible things. X centered the emotions and conflicts of the perpetrators–directly in the face of survivors or people who would have been targeted, who repeatedly pointed out that this is what X was doing. I do not believe X did spoke out of malice, but this is a topic that requires great care. If X has considered the topic with that care, it was not apparent during the panel….
(2) THE LAST OF LE GUIN. David Naimon on working with a legend at Literary Hub: “Ursula K. Le Guin, Editing to the End”.
Ursula’s final words to me, her final edits on the manuscript of our collected conversations, were in pencil. We had talked in one of these conversations about technology, about how, in her mind, she was unfairly labeled a Luddite. That some of the most perfect tools—a pestle, a kitchen knife—were in fact perfected technologies. I had just received the manuscript from her days before, and the pencil on it reminded me of the aura of in-the-world magic this whole endeavor, bringing a book into the world together, had assumed.
The manuscript had traveled in the world as an object, one carried by foot and passed hand to hand. Our publisher, Tin House, located literally in a house of tin on the corner of a leafy boulevard in Northwest Portland, was just down the hill from Ursula’s home. And by a remarkable twist of fate, as if sharing the same street were not enough, Ursula’s own granddaughter worked as an intern there. It was often her or the book’s editor Tony who would walk up the hill to deliver the pages, or walk up the hill to walk them back down again. …
She could have published most if not all of her books at one of the big five publishers in New York. She could’ve economized and maximized her time by only granting interviews to the likes of Terry Gross, Bill Moyers, and Charlie Rose. And yet she continued to choose small presses, and often ones distant from the hierarchy of the publishing powers in NYC, whether an anarchist press from San Francisco or a feminist science fiction press from Seattle. Similarly, she never said no to her hometown community radio, KBOO, a station that is not Portland’s NPR affiliate, but whose mission statement is to give voice to the voiceless, with shows like Rose City Native Radio, Transpositive PDX, and Black Book Talk. By conventional metrics, KBOO is a small station, both in reach and listenership, and yet you wouldn’t get that impression when Ursula speaks of it…
(3) CALLING ALL HOLLYWOOD ACCOUNTANTS. We Got This Covered puts its flopologist to work: “Disney Responds To Solo: A Star Wars Story Flopping At The Box Office”.
Although the full four-day estimate won’t be released until later today, it’s probably safe to say that the Anthology pic won’t be gunning for the Memorial Day holiday weekend record anymore. As you’ve surely heard, the Ron Howard-directed space western hauled in $83.3 million in its opening weekend and will finish off Monday with about $110 million, nowhere even remotely near the current record holder, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End ($140M).
In a year that’s seen three releases enter the domestic top thirty for all-time opening weekends, Deadpool 2 ($125M), Black Panther ($202M) and Avengers: Infinity War ($257M), the box office failure of Solo: A Stars Wars Story is only amplified that much more.
(4) DANCING IN AND AROUND THE MAY POOL: At Featured Futures, Jason has compiled another month of choice reading to dip into with “Summation: May 2018”.
This month’s baker’s dozen of noted stories (four recommended) comes from the pool of ninety (of 440 Kwds) published between April 30 and May 28. The print zines were individually strongest with Analog and F&SF each contributing multiple tales but the web combined to contribute seven.
While not applicable to the monthly recommendations, I did review a collection this month which had eight reprints (three recommended) that I especially liked.
(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY REDWOMBAT
- Born May 28, 1977 – Ursula Vernon
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY SPOOK
- Born May 28, 1908 – Ian Fleming. Happy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!
(7) COMICS SECTION.
- Mike Kennedy says Over the Hedge explains Westworld.
(8) WORD TO THE WIS(E)CON. I wish I could transplant this axiom to the comment section here. Beware the free-floating harshers of squee.
God. I can’t believe it has to be said, but don’t pop into threads where someone is obviously happy to make them feel like garbage because you have a bone to pick with an organization. Read the damn room.
— Renay? (@renay) May 28, 2018
(9) HARDLY A MARVEL. Nicholas Whyte chimes in with his preferences for “The 2018 Hugo finalists for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form”. Landing well below No Award is —
7) Thor: Ragnarok
This is the fourth Marvel Universe film I have seen, but only the third in chronological order – the others were the first Iron Man, which didn’t impress me much, and nor did Captain America: The First Avenger, which I also ranked below No Award. On the other hand there is also Black Panther, made after Thor: Ragnarok but which I saw earlier this year, and loved. I’m afraid Thor: Ragnarok is back to the usual form for me. Not being terribly invested in the characters of the Marvel Universe, let alone the Thor storyline, I could see that the whole thing was trying to be funny but it wasn’t really my fandom. At least Jeff Goldblum was treating it with the approriate level of seriousness. I am sure it will do better than seventh place in the overall vote.
(10) DINING (WAY) OUT. NPR reports “Great White Sharks Have A Secret ‘Cafe,’ And They Led Scientists Right To It”.
“We expected it to be the desert that the textbooks sort of advertised it would be,” said Bruce Robison, a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
But this was no desert.
A layer of nutrient-rich plant life exists deeper under the ocean than satellites could detect. Tiny creatures feed on it, and larger creatures feed on them. And up and up. It represents “a complete food chain, a ladder of consumption, that made us believe that there was an adequate food supply out here for big animals like tunas and the sharks,” Robison said.
(11) LET’S ALL TWEET LIKE THE ROBOTS DO. Too sensitive: “Bulgarians tweeting in Cyrillic confused for Russian bots”. Twitter has several criteria, ANY of which can cause a tweet or account to be suppressed; using Cyrillic is one of them, despite it being used in 11 countries beside Russia.
Speaking at a United States Senate Committee inquiry into extremist content and Russian disinformation online, Twitter’s acting general counsel Sean Edgett shed some light on why this might be happening.
He said in October 2017 that Twitter’s tools “do not attempt to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ automation,” when looking for Russian-linked accounts.
“They rely on objective, measurable signals, such as the timing of tweets and engagements to classify a given action as automated.”
What can qualify as a Russian-linked Twitter account?
- Created in Russia
- Registered with a Russian phone carrier or email address
- User’s display name contains Cyrillic characters
- Tweets are frequently in the Russian language
- Logged in to Twitter via a Russian IP address even once
“We considered an account to be Russian-linked if it had even one of the relevant criteria,” said Mr Edgett.
(12) DINO DANDER. Might be evidence of the first step towards birds: “Dinosaur dandruff reveals first evidence of skin shedding”
An analysis of fossilised dandruff fragments has given scientists their first evidence of how dinosaurs and early birds shed their skin.
Found among the plumage of these ancient creatures, the 125-million-year-old flakes are almost identical to those found in modern birds.
It shows that these dinosaurs shed their skins in small pieces, and not all at once like many modern reptiles.
It’s more evidence that early birds had limited flying skills, the authors say.
(13) FUN FOR ALL. Here’s video of the Anime North 2018 religious protesters. (There’s several posts about them in Reddit’s Anime North thread.)
These guys show up every year. The congoers also do this every year [play songs on a loudspeaker].
[Thanks to JJ, Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Brian Z., Chip Hitchcock, Carl Slaughter, Andrew Porter, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories, Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]
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3) Not sure what anyone expected when it was released while not one but two(!) juggernaut movies were still in their prime.
First?
First! Thanks for the link, and for the reminder about not harshing people’s squee.
Not quite first, then.
But well above “No Award,” at least.
Bloody Americans. (I am one.)
Thank you for the Wiscon links.
(11) Am I missing something, whether obvious or not, or is this just ridiculously overbroad?
Here in 679, we do not yet have good grasp of how the Twitter magic works, so “missing something” does seem likely.
(9) Gosh, I think Nicholas is being a bit harsh on Thor: Ragnarok but also I’m biased by my adoration of Waititi. Aside from that, I’m not putting Blade Runner 2049 below No Award but it’s close.
Deadpool 2 was funny, but more serious than I expected, not just a farce.
(3) There’s a good interview in Vanity Fair, posted just the other day, with GoT star Emilia Clarke, who’s in SOLO.
(1) My sympathies/commiseration to the WisCon panelist and blogger who’s now reflecting on what he wishes he’d said at the time. I’ve been doing that all evening after a conversation in which I felt belittled and disrespected, and now wish I had said so.
(1) Eeesh. Am so glad that the con I went to this weekend was very… erm… the opposite of this? There were lovely panels all in favor of supporting everyone. A mundane in the bar even thought it was a con for disabled people b/c there were so many there. Of course, a wide majority of people were able-bodied, but it’s like how men think there are a majority of women in a room when it’s above 17% or something.
(3) Maybe people were like me and decided to wait for reviews and such? It looked very meh to me.
(5) Felicitations to our favorite marsupial!
Happy birthday, Red Wombat!
(2) I don’t think we’ll ever get to the last of Le Guin. I hope not, anyway.
When I get the the last of Le Guin, I go back to the beginning and start over again,
@Lurkertype Agree, Baycon was way more civilized (despite being sadly lacking in bacon and jacuzzi bubbles due to all that remodeling). Normally I’d be all grumpy about my disrupted amenities but I was having too much fun.
Happy Birthday, Red Wombat!
Do religious nutters come to all events, or have they a particular interest in animé? We don’t get them en masse in the UK (I once saw one protesting the stegosaurus outside the Natural History Museum in London).
3) Saw it yesterday and enjoyed it a lot. Also, seems somewhat hyperbolic to describe it as a box-office flop just because it didn’t reach a previous record.
I’d say its lower box office compared to the other Disney Star Wars (particularly Rogue One, the most comparable of them) is more cause for concern there. It was also a heavily reshot movie, which likely runs up the budget and makes it easier for a film to be a financial flop.
(I enjoyed it, though the L3 plot had some sour notes in it.)
If all goes as planned – which translates to “if I successfully drag myself outta the house in time” – I will see both Solo and Deadpool 2 this afternoon or evening. $5 Tuesdays are a wonderful thing, but I still have to look at the showtimes and pick two with a minimal gap between them… so I’m not sure which I’ll see first.
Lemme tellya, it’s been absolute hell avoiding spoilers for them here in 3868. (They’ve just been rereleased in ultraplexes to commemorate their 1850th anniversaries. I really shouldn’t be surprised that the Deadpool franchise is as immortal as its focal character, but you do not want to know about the Dark Years of Star Wars. Things really went downhill when I Was a Middle-Aged Jawa hit the screens. Drier than Tatooine sand, that one was…)
Re: Scroll title. I hope it doesn’t, won’t fail
3) So it didn’t set a record…so it is a failure? Hollywood accounting indeed.
Re: Wiscon, thanks for the additional information
Happy (now belated) birthday, Ursula!
Happy Birthday, RedWombat! Thank you for your gift of hopeful stories featuring protagonists who are decent beings facing dark challenges. Also, for chicken stories and garden photos and snark.
I hope that you’ve had a wonderful day, and that you and Seanan haven’t set anything on fire or blown anything up yet. 😀
@James Moar. Good point about the re-shooting – I’d forgotten about that. I wonder what the balance was between CGI costs and real shooting costs. The former comes much later in production, so I’d assume less wastage there. (I was also surprised to see Ubisoft credited with some vfx work.)
Happy belated birthday, @RedWombat! 🙂
11) I’m confused, shouldn’t they be blocking all bots, not just Russian ones? While allowing individual Russian posts?
Happy Birthday Red Wombat!
@NickPheas the stegosaurus in specific? Why? I am used to protests against dinosaurs and even fossils in general but why a stegosaurus in specific???
I once protested a specific dinosaur at the ROM in Toronto but that was because they had installed it with the pelvic girdle inverted. They fixed it and I stopped complaining.
Elisa: I once protested a specific dinosaur at the ROM in Toronto but that was because they had installed it with the pelvic girdle inverted. They fixed it and I stopped complaining.
You are so totally my kind of anal-retentive. If you’re coming to Worldcon 76, we could hang out and be pedantic together. 😀
Beware the free-floating harshers of squee
The free-floating harshers of squee
Share their gloomy vibrations for free
When there’s joy in the air
Then you know to beware
The free-floating harshers of squee
The more I read about the WisCon kerfullfle, the more I don’t have sympathy or respect for the complainers. It still looks to me like someone said “maybe you could look at individual German or Confederate soldiers as real people with complex lives and varied motives” and the audience was so incensed about it that therapy had to be offered and the person who said it was banned. It is like the people deliberately set out to conform themselves to the worst alt-right parodies of “special snowflake” SJWs. They come off as sad and pathetic hothouse flowers.
I saw a spoiler for something from the closing minutes of Solo on the Google News headlines on the opening day of the movie! I liked it. It wasn’t without rough edges, but so far I’ve liked both “side” movies better than the two newest “saga” movies.
@Darren Garrison The more I read… It still looks to me like… It is like… They come off as…
It’s worth taking a moment to reflect that you weren’t actually there and that some people have more reason than others to feel expressed sympathy for nazis as a threat.
[click]
[Happy birthday, RedWombat!]
/Godstalk
@JJ. I would love that. Unfortunately I don’t think I will be able to go thid year. I really hope to make it to one at some point in the future.
Happy (belated) Birthday, RedWombat! Yay, for another year of avoiding ditches by Walmart!
“maybe you could look at individual German or Confederate soldiers as real people with complex lives and varied motives”—wow, sounds like a lot of the books Harry Turtledove has produced during his long and illustrious career. WisCon, as usual, believes in “humanizing” only certain humans, and has trashed yet another kind and useful individual with a decades-long history of stellar service to and presence at WisCon. Lisa Freitag as a Nazi supporter? Are you fucking insane? Humanizing our enemies—our actual enemies—is desperately needed. Divisiveness will get us nowhere. I believe it’s more important than ever to engage with individual members of hate groups from a premise of “You probably think of yourself as a decent human being. How did you get to where you are, and how can we reach understanding?” See https://forward.com/opinion/380510/we-need-to-start-befriending-neo-nazis/ . Those who boast of blocking, banning and shaming core members of their own communities on fabricated and distorted evidence of not toeing an ideological line in the sand are doing more harm to their ostensible causes than the ideologies they claim to despise ever could.
Without being there, one could be forgiven for coming away with the impression that Orc’s as “killing bodies”/Cannon Fodder in fiction are problematic and worth discussing, but NAZI’s and Confederates aren’t. Seems off to me.
I am not being cute here. I genuinely do not understand how posters can be confident that they know what was said better than the people who were actually witnesses. There are multiple witnesses, and they agree. Some of these witnesses are verifiably independent of each other, because they were livetweeting.
Here’s amckiereads’s take, which hasn’t been previously linked here. Check out the full thread.
“to be honest I’m still stuck on a comment Ine panelist said about how we othered Nazis but then realized that the average one wasn’t so bad, so we’ve moved on to othering other groups. Which STOP NO. I have many opinions on this.”
How can you be sure that all these witnesses are exaggerating or deliberately misreading?
Also, for the Nick Lowe/Johnny Cash fans among us:
The beast of squees
Obsessed with old, forgotten Bonds
And whichever one you like
Is one of which he isn’t fond
God help the beast of squees
The beast of squees
Knows more than you on Doctor Who
Which host was better on Blue’s Clues
And in the twinkling of an eye
Might declare a Mary Sue
God help the beast of squees
Sometimes he tries to kid me
That he’s just a normal fan
Or even that he’s run right out of things to pan
I feel pity when I can
For the beast of squees
That everybody knows
They’ve seen him out in fannish clothes
Patently unclear
If it’s A New Hope or New Year
God help
The beast of squees
@Darren:
Yeah, I have to say that I do see a certain contradiction between the panel’s purpose (examine the problematic concept of the Universally Evil Group) and the idea of an uproar over applying the same methodology to examine one of today’s Universally Evil Groups.
It reminds me of the time I took a “Christ and the Cults”* class where the normal routine was to examine a specific “new religion”** each week, show where it deviated from some point of Christian dogma, and conclude that they were therefore wrong. One unforgettable week, Christianity got the same treatment – and my, was that ever an eye-opener! (Over thirty years later, the parallels between cult brainwashing techniques and Christian summer camps still chill me… particularly because I’ve attended the latter and recognize the similarities from experience.) I respected the teacher immensely for being intellectually honest enough to do that.
I’ve seen Nazis used as “mooks”*** in plenty of games, practically the definition of Killable Bodies, and so I’m not surprised that someone else considered them an example of it. They work as Killable Bodies today because they are so widely loathed as a group, and there is merit in considering – even and perhaps especially in private – whether we should exempt that specific group-loathing from the group-loathings that we label as bigoted. I find the notion of beliefs which cannot be questioned to be deeply disturbing.
My answer, FWIW: I have no problem using Actual Nazis as Killable Bodies in games or fiction. Their ideology is noxious enough to merit an exception to my general rule against group-hate. I despise Nazis not because “Nazis are bad,” but because I abhor the way they advocate treating other people – making mine a reasoned opposition, not a bigoted one.
tl;dr – Saying that a belief should be examined is not the same as saying that it should be discarded. Examination of even our deepest convictions keeps us honest and helps us learn. I remain suspicious of those who would tell me that some things must not be questioned, even when we share the same belief in the specific case. Don’t tell me something “is just true” – be able to articulate a justification. Yes, I get frustrated with the flat-earthers and moon-hoaxers – but because they refuse to examine the evidence and counterarguments, not because they ask the question.
* I attended a private, religious high school. That was the actual name of a permitted elective in a required field.
** The teacher preferred to use this more neutral term in class. I agree.
*** One of the RPGs I’ve played uses the term “mook” to mean what WisCon calls “killable bodies.” They’re the bad guy’s faceless minions, the ones who don’t get full character sheets because they exist only as a fighting force to be slain or evaded. Same idea, shorter term.
Meredith Moment: China Mieville’s Embassytown is currently $1.99.
Yay, Title credit!
Re Solo (3): Not surprising. First: Fatigue, 2nd: Against Deadpool 2
But main reason (I think): A good fleshed out character is a character, where you just know his backstory when he is introduced. You may not know the specifics, but you have a pretty good grasps, of what kind of guy Solo is, when he is introduced and during the various films, there are additional layers. A fleshed-out backstory does not make the character deeper or more interesting, it just adds trivia. I dont need to see a movie, to know, where Han Solo comes from. This has been established already.
That will be the same problem with other prequels as well. Rogue One worked because you didnt know the characters and the story was not very fleshed out. In fact, I would argue that the first part of the movie (which outcome was not yet known) worked much better than the second half.
Set stories in the Star Warts universe, if you must, but dont try to give us backstories, we dont need!
I’m finding it impressive that so many commentors appear to have missed that the panelist said we should SYMPATHISE with Nazis. Literally used the word sympathise, according to multiple reports.
Sympathising with them isn’t just “accepting their humanity”. It’s not just empathising with them, though I question the value of doing even that. Y’all are defending sympathising with Nazis as a position that we should be taking? Really? I guess that’s… a choice you can make, but be damn sure it’s the choice you want to make.
Because it sounds like y’all just wanted the excuse to defend Nazis, and defend sympathising with them, as “not bad people”. And I’ve got questions about that.
(8) You can tell the harshers easily, much of the time. The first (not always conclusive) warning is that their first words are “I hate to…”
Sometimes, these words are uttered by someone who really hates to, but most often, they are followed by “…rain on your parade,” or “…burst your bubble,” or some other set of words that indicate that they are about to (in their mind, at least) joyfully tromp on your cherished beliefs and drag you, much against your will, to the TRVTH AND LIGHT.
WisCon: I wasn’t there and I’m having a hard time parsing everything that has been posted here. But on top of everything we know about Nazis and white nationalists, a friend of mine suffered permanent brain damage as a result of the Nazi march in Charlottesville, so I don’t feel particularly sympathetic to any of them.
In other news, here is a non-fiction article from the MIT Technology Review that will blow your mind: How the nature of cause and effect will determine the future of quantum technology.
Given that two blockbusters with the same target audience, Deadpool 2 and Avengers:Infinity War, finished right behind Solo, I would say that if it didn’t meet expectations, perhaps one should reevaluate the expectations.
Here in 3542, we live in nicer caves. Still no flying cars though.
I am going by what the witnesses said. For instance, the witness who said:
(bolding mine)
And the witness who said:
In saying that they were incensed because someone spoke of The Enemy as something other than a two-dimensional cardboard cutout villain isn’t mischaracterizing their posts, it is summarizing them. As Rev. Bob said, the people went to a panel about characters being treated as disposable bodies and freaked out when someone made the argument that some people might not actually be utterly evil disposable bodies. And the person who said it was banned, and the convention offered counseling for anyone so deeply traumatized by having to hear someone say that maybe–just maybe–not every single member of two armies made up of millions of people was an evil caricature. That saying that maybe somebody joined because they needed a job to feed their families or because they lost someone to the other side and wanted revenge or because they were pressured into it or because they wanted to defend their homes and not because they wanted to kill all Jews/enslave all blacks is “confusing, surprising, alarming, flabbergasting, frightening, and damaging.” These are people demanding dehumanization.
So was I the only one who had to read Bette Greene’s “Summer of My German Soldier” as a kid in school? It’s been a while since I reread it, but I seem to recall it holding up moderately well as an adult. And it did stick in my brain.
THAT is how you write a sympathetic individual WWII German soldier without excusing Naziism in general, or worse, trying to *sympathize* with Nazis. Anton was a very sympathetic character, but not an excuse for then saying “Naziism is not a terrible ideology just because some people who lived with it were human beings.”
@Lenora I remember reading that too as a kid although I never have re-read it.
No, you don’t. You have a friend with permanent brain damage as a result of one person deciding to drive a car into a crowd. There is no collective guilt for the actions of one person.
1 – The cannon fodder problem is more of a problem in video games than in books because many action video games aren’t more nuanced than point and shoot. It’s getting better but a lot of game mechanics revolve around engaging an enemy so having an enemy you can kill hundreds or thousands of without feeling like a sociopath is what many studios try to do. This means demons, Nazis, zombies, robots, mutants and monsters. If humans ten usually they throw in some messed up kick the dog moment so we’re never unclear that the bad guys are bad guys.
SFF in books has had some more time and perspective to deal with this and there are a lot of great modern examples where the enemy isn’t just cannon fodder (though there’s still lots of that with zombies and white walkers and so on).
One of the things I enjoyed about the more recent Stormlight Archive book was a character’s realization that the but unstoppable force they’re fighting are also a people that have been wronged and feels a deep conflict about how to face an enemy he has empathy for.
There’s a lot of great discussion about the topic, however those who picked up a gun and fought for or protected genocide or slavery I may try and understand their circumstances they lived in but I sure don’t have any sympathy to spare for them. Since those that did are in fact used as killable bodies in media I can see how it was brought up in the discussion however it feels like there’s a lot of ground to cover for if/when the trope is appropriate or not and the whole ‘there are good people on both sides’ nonsense.
This weekend, yes, but there’s a tendency for the box office to be very front-loaded. Infinity War made three times as much as Solo in its opening weekend, and Deadpool 2 made fifty per cent more.
@ Darren Garrison
No, you don’t. You have a friend with permanent brain damage as a result of one person deciding to drive a car into a crowd. There is no collective guilt for the actions of one person.
First of all, my friend’s injury had nothing to do with the car incident. I suggest that you not jump to conclusions. Second, the Charlottesville Nazis were there to cause damage. Many of them were armed for hand-to-hand fighting (some of them had guns). There was at least one arrest involving the Charlotteville mob which were not as high profile as Heather’s death, so the other cases went under the radar.