- Liquid Communism
- Mar 9, 2004
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Out here, everything hurts.
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Yeah, it's a tendency I've been spending a lot of time trying to iron out of myself in my interactions in the queer community. If you look at some of my earlier posts in the trans threads you can see how intensely I was cleaving to respectability politics. I am, in general, tired of punching. And I have to stop myself from starting stupid arguments online often in order to get that fun rush.
I saw cultures with beliefs like that brought up a lot, but specific examples always slip my mind, could you provide some? I never really took the time to investigate the salient differences between those beliefs and the way they function in their respective cultures, and otherkin beliefs. I am sure it would be really cool and interesting!
The variety of justifications people have is fascinating. Although seeing the discussion of otherkin identity as a coping mechanism is interesting, it's a little disconcerting that they can't bridge that gap and understand that coping mechanisms can be and more often than not are maladaptive.
There definitely tends to be a different type of person whose attracted to the idea of being fiction-kin to the other more typical otherkin claims. And they more often than not are much more likely to employ the "psychological" understanding of their beliefs. This helps conveniently circumvent a lot of the thornier questions that naturally arise in such situations. The others are, as Terrorforge said people that claim that the works were "channeled" by the author, and evoke elaborate multiverse theories. What's especially unusual to me is that there's another version of this that happened/is still happening right now among pagans/new-agers/occultists. I am referring here to the rise/continued popularity of occult/ritual practices informed and inspired by the writings of HP Lovecraft. Although they tend to employ a bit more intellectual sophistication in their rationale, tending to be older, I can't help but notice the similarities between the two.
On the other end of things, I had, in that community, profound experiences that I will spend the rest of my life grappling with the consequences of. Not all negative, some very positive in fact. But I'm still convinced it's a pretty unhealthy environment and belief system. The impact of the otherkin community is a bit of a chicken-egg problem too, cause it tends to not attract the healthiest most well-adjusted individuals around. It's fascinating to me how you get these miniature cults of outcast high schoolers that seem to emerge independently of otherkin, but profess similar beliefs.
In these threads there always seems to be a large number of goons with stories about these groups that pop-up and narrow escapes and I often wonder "how many of these groups have I had brushes with?" "how many of their members have I had to kick/ban from IRCs and other chat rooms for misconduct?" The community was TINY after all.
DeLint and the early Urban Fantasy were absolutely ADORED by the older members of the community when I was around.
Mercedes Lackey has talked about this too, she wrote urban fantasy (her Diana Tregarde series) in the late 80's/early 90's and shelved the universe for decades due to poor sales and because it got her death threats from creepy stalkers who went full fictionkin on it and showed up at her publicity appearances and cons. She eventually moved it into another universe she wrote with her husband and several other authors specifically to make it harder for people trying to delude themselves to justify more and more openly fantastic elements. Led to a really fun bit of angry writing, too:
quote:
THE LAST STRAW
Mercedes Lackey
This is going to offend some people. These are the people who most
need to read this. This definitely has needed to be said for a long
time. We're writers. We write fiction, which is, by definition, NOT
FACT. Creative and entertaining lies, if you will, but still not
truth by any kind of stretch of the imagination. So, we've written
over 40 books, of which a grand total of three are dark fantasy that
involve the occult, "real" psychic powers, and nonstandard religions.
So what attracts so much trouble and so many lunatics you'd think it
was a "Free beer and come as your favorite psychosis party" in
downtown L.A.? You've got it. The "Diana Tregarde Investigations."
Take, for instance, the undeniable fact that I haven't written (and
at this point, don't intend to write) any more of them. Why? THEY
DON'T SELL. The numbers are there in black and white. DT books are
consistently and vastly outsold by every other type of fantasy we
write. Now some people would decide that there was an Evil Force out
there preventing the sale of their glorious books and determine to
thwart that force and PROVE how wonderful the "unpopular" books are,
but hey, call me nutty, but I believe that people are trying to tell
you something when they don't buy a book, and that is, THEY DON'T
WANT THEM! Why should we write something people don't want? If every
hardcore Diana Tregarde fan bought fifty copies of each book, I could
afford to maybe buy a new VCR with the royalties. There are plenty of
other people who are already writing books people don't want, and
doing it in bigger numbers than we can! Just take a look at the
remainder- racks!
But, oh, the rumors! Conspiracy theories that would make Oliver Stone
burst into tears of envy! Someone periodically starts a rumor that
the publisher is "suppressing" the books---the fact is, that like me,
they want to publish books that are going to compete with our more
popular series. Another is that they have been published, but a
fundamentalist group bought them all so no one else could read them,
ignoring the fact that if anyone bought an entire print-run of
anything, it would be on the New York Times bestseller list! Or my
favorite two rumors, that appeared IN THE SAME WEEK, one that Larry
was a fundamentalist who was preventing me from writing them, and a
rumor that Larry was an evil pagan who was preventing me from writing
them! Then there are the letters taking me to task for not following
the letter-writer's own particular brand of politically correct
neopaganism. THESE BOOKS ARE ENTERTAINMENT ONLY, PEOPLE! I'M NOT
RUNNING A RECRUITMENT BUREAU, HERE! And if YOU want a book featuring
YOUR favorite brand of religion, YOU go out and write and try to sell
one, and good luck and don't let the door hit you on the way out!
They were written at the time when horror was outselling everything
else, and hey, I wrote them to make money. We've got a mortgage to
pay. I suppose by some people's standards that is a heinous crime,
but I'm sorry for offending your delicate little sensibilities.
Actually, no I'm not. Get a life, get a grip, and grow a spine; you
all ought to know by now that we don't do PC. Then there are the
people who insist that the Guardians are real. Hey, if there really
were Guardians, you'd see panicky skinheads buying up the Rogaine
supply like the KKK at a white sale. There'd be no such thing as a
crooked televangelist, when they'd have real demons popping in on
their shows to tell them where they were REALLY going.
"But Guardians must be real," comes the cry, "How could you make
something like that up?" Oh for crying out loud, an "occult police
force" is one of the oldest gizmos in horror fiction! The Nine
Unknown Men, the Hunting Lodges, the White Lodges, Dr. Orient, Agatha
Christie's Harley Quinn, to name a few; there's been more good and bad
books involving occult "police" than there have been books about
vampires! That's FICTION, people! Do you really, truly, think that
if there WERE an "occult police force" they'd have let those kids in
Florida kill their mother and drink her blood, that they'd let kiddie-
porn and snuff-film makers continue to operate, or that they WOULDN'T
make it their business to track down and dispose of serial killers?
What're these guys supposedly doing, punishing junk-bond dealers?
The thing is, on one level I can sympathize with people who would
really like to believe that Guardians are real. The world is a scary
place, and more and more scary things are happening in it, things that
really look as if there was a single evil hand behind it all. Hey, I
wish there were Guardians! I also wish for peace, prosperity and an
end to war. There's about an equal chance for either.
But now we get a little more into the shallow end of the reality pool,
because some of these people claim that the Guardians are this big,
cohesive group watching over everything. As far as that goes, in MY
books, the Guardians aren't even organized! They're about as cohesive
a group as a herd of grasshoppers! The closest thing to
"organization" they have is when two of them run into each other at
the Karaoke Club and find out they both want to sing "Poisoning
Pigeons in the Park." There's NO group meetings, NO politics, no
nothing---yet these same people have invented an entire complex
hierarchy for them, complete with lodge meetings, secret handshakes,
and decoder rings! Cripes! They aren't even reading the books,
they're just reading what THEY want to see into the books!
It gets stranger. A whole lot stranger. We aren't even in the
reality pool, anymore, we're out in the crabgrass around it. There
are people claiming to BE Guardians---and people who claim they would
be Guardians if only some Evil Force wasn't keeping them from finding
their own little Yoda and having their occult powers activated. Okay,
I can even sympathize with this one, because I've been there too.
When your life is in the crapper, you can't get a job that doesn't
involve a paper hat and a nametag, and you think that if you dropped
off the planet no one would miss you for weeks, it's comforting to
believe that all your misfortunes can be blamed on an Evil Occult
Force.
I had myself talked into that one for a while, but at one critical
point I had what the Twelve Step groups call "a moment of clarity,"
when someone else who had bought into the delusion began coming up
with things I knew just weren't true and I realized that the world is
what it is, and it doesn't take an evil force to make it that way---
and that I was doing a better job of keeping myself unemployed than
any Evil Occult Force could. That's when I forced myself to admit
that I had the best chance of making my life better if I just got a
good suit from Goodwill instead of wearing costumes, pounded the
pavement looking for work instead of waiting for a Dream Job to be
given to me, and put more and smarter effort into realistic goals,
like learning computer programming instead of spending all my time
staring at a candle and trying to contact my Personal Psychic Trainer.
That's when I also realized that I really liked making up the stories,
so I didn't give them up, I just stopped telling myself they were
real. And I started writing them down, which was a lot more fun when
other people started to read them and told me how good they were.
But guys, people who tell you that they are Guardians never made that
jette back to coolsville (To quote Dennis Miller). They're still in a
wobbling pirouette that's taking them straight into the orchestra pit.
And here we go right off the end of the bell curve, because the same
lunatics who say that they are Guardians are bound and determined that
I am a Guardian! Jeez Louise, if I had occult powers, would I be
sitting here writing my rear end off for a living? Heck no, I'd be out in
Vegas in the VIP suite with half a dozen semi-naked chorus boys
feeding me caviar, that's where I'd be! I'd be cruising the Bahamas
on the way to my own tropical island. I'd have a mansion and fifty
servants, and the biggest aviary outside of a zoo, that's what I'd
have, and I'd have more semi-naked chorus boys to do all the cage-
cleaning and feeding for me! Meanwhile Larry would be winning Le Mans
and Sebring in his unbreakable Lotus (a real occult miracle), and on
the side he'd be having one-man shows at the Guggenheim and his
personal Ford Indygo would be winning the Pebble Beach Concours
d'Elegance. Oh, and he'd also take a few hours off to do some hawking
with his Ornate Hawk-Eagle, taking the prizes for high- catch of the
day, of course. I'd write for fun, when I felt like it, and not every
day, eight hours a day, seven days a week.
Have we got that straight, all you cosmic cupcakes? Do you think if I
had occult powers I wouldn't have KNOWN those freaks in Oklahoma City
were going to blow up a building with a day-care center full of kids
in it practically in my own back yard and have DONE something before
it happened? Do you think if I had occult powers I wouldn't have
warned my friends in Los Angeles to be somewhere else when the
Northridge Quake busted loose? Or warned my parrot-breeder friends in
Florida to get their setups into concrete blockhouses long before
Hurricane Andrew came through? For crying out loud, wouldn't I have
KNOWN Larry's studio was going to have a fire, that our rearmost room
was going to flood, that his car was going to have a wreck, and that
our garage was going to get hit with a tornado???? Wouldn't I have
DONE something to avoid these things? And just because those things
all happened, that DOESN'T mean that I have these cosmic powers and I
either LET them happen or MADE them happen because I am evil! Shoot,
if you're looking for someone with Major Occult Powers, try someone
like Dick Clark---filthy rich, no scandals, and he looks HOW old? Or
Paul McCartney, who hasn't aged a day since 1972. The guy that
invented Pet Rocks---geez, how many of us did he sucker into buying a
road-rock in a cardboard box? Had to have been occult powers. Or---
it has to be the way the world works.
Reality check time, people, here's a whole ROLL of quarters, there's
the clue machine, GO BUY SOME. And people, why would someone who
belonged to a super-secret high-risk occult-society with amazing
powers at her beck and call be stupid enough to draw the attention of
all the Bad Guys by WRITING ABOUT IT? "Hello? Is anyone paying
attention? Oh, no---well, let me just run up a GREAT BIG SIGN that
says 'Guardian here! Come and get me!'" Just what was that supposed
to accomplish? Was I supposed to be looking for other Guardians? But
if I BELONGED ALREADY to this so-called "Inner Circle" why would I be
looking for them? Was I supposed to be recruiting new Guardians?
Guys, that gag is straight out of THE LAST STARFIGHTER. Yeah, that's
a good idea, Gunga Din; let's just raise our profile a lot higher for
the Bad Guys to shoot at, and meanwhile, we'll sort through all the
mail from every guy who ever wanted to levitate and shoot lightning
bolts "Just like in the comic books." Hey, we'll find a LOT of
potential Guardians that way!
Now at this point, if you've somehow been sucked into a group like
I've described, and you've raised these objections, your Fearless
Leader the Great Cranko is saying, "Well of course she'd say THAT, she
wouldn't want to blow her cover"---like it wouldn't already have been
blown higher than a palm tree at Bikini Atoll---but just how many of
those "of course she'd say that"s are you going to accept before your
logic circuit kicks in?
Oh, it gets better! Not only am I a Guardian, but I'm supposedly the
source of (or involved in) political corruption among the Guardians.
The Old Order has gone bad and is trying to suppress the Young Turks
(you know, if I tried to write that plot, my editors would reject it
as being too trite). I helped organize some whoop-de-ding spell-
casting session to "burn out" all of those who wouldn't follow and
obey us. And it's time to destroy the Old Order to make way for the
New, Pure of Heart, Full of---well, it rhymes with "hit." Follow and
obey ME? I can't even get plumbers to finish fixing my pipes on time!
Where the hell did this paranoid delusion come from? If there are any
of you out there who have bought into THIS particular schizoid
fantasy, I have some real harsh words for you. PERSONAL
RESPONSIBILITY.
You are responsible for your OWN thoughts, actions, and attitudes,
dudes and dudettes. Somebody else may preach these things, but YOU
are the one responsible for hanging your logic out to dry, putting
your brain on "record" and forgetting that you're supposed to think as
well as believe. And if your "coven leader" is feeding you this line
of garbage---when you READ that this is the last thing we would
believe in, you SEE and HEAR that our books are preaching compassion
and not trashin', and you can find out with no trouble whatsoever the
amount of charity work we do---WHO DOES LOGIC SAY IS THE REAL BAD GUY?
Whose ACTIONS are consistent with someone who does the right thing as
well as talking about it? Who goes out and tries to help, instead of
blaming some poor fantasy writers for "oppressing him?" And kids, when
he tells you that you are all going to have to destroy the old order
to make way for the new---think REAL HARD for a minute. Those same
words have been spoken by other people who got their followers to go
out and do horrible things FOR them. People like Thomas Mitzger,
Charles Manson and Jim Jones---people who worked up hysteria and
paranoia among THEIR followers then sat back with folded hands while
real blood flowed, and said, "but I am innocent, I haven't done
anything!"
Okay, so maybe all these guys want to do is have you all hold hands
in a circle and try and give me a headache. Hey, knock yourselves
out, have a good time, and don't drive home intoxicated afterwards.
But maybe they want to manipulate you into doing something very bad
in the real world. I've got news for you, kids. IF THEY DO, YOU ARE
STILL RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN ACTIONS. YOU will go down; maybe
embarrassment, maybe to jail---maybe to Death Row. Why? Because YOU
handed over your brain and conscience to a would-be tin-pot dictator
who gets his jollies out of manipulating people he thinks are weak-
willed and suggestible suckers.
And right now some of you are saying "oh that couldn't possibly happen
among fans!" (or pagans, or whatevers). Guess again. It not only
can, it already has. Within my own very limited circle of
acquaintances, I PERSONALLY have VERIFIED with mundane sources---one
man ennobled in the SCA who took on a contract-killing and is
currently in prison for it, one man in fan circles who was convicted
of child molestation and went to jail for it and died there, one man
in RenFaire, sf-convention and pagan circles who was caught and
convicted of multiple torture-murders, one man in fan and SCA circles
who was caught and convicted of setting pipe-bombs in public
buildings. That's just among people I knew.
I'm not the only author who's had their fiction distorted like this,
and it makes all of us want to track the creeps responsible down and
pound them into the ground like tent pegs. But WE are adult,
compassionate, responsible (there's that word again) human beings, and
we know that would be wrong. So we sit in our offices and get death-
threats and wonder which one of these loons is going to be THE one---
and if this time someone is going to get hurt. It might be the psycho
himself, or it might be one of his followers who decides to show up.
Maybe Aleister Junior will egg one of his followers into buying a
Saturday Night Special and go blaze away at a book signing. Most of
us writers are only partly worried about ourselves---because maybe
what happens is an innocent fourteen-year-old flings herself into the
line of fire, or is just standing there getting a book signed, and
becomes a statistic. How the hell do you think we'd feel about THAT?
I can tell you that there are at least some writers---or the people
left behind (if it was the writer who got toasted)---who wouldn't sit
in their offices and wring their hands afterwards. They'd track down
the creep responsible, and for half an hour forget they were adult,
compassionate, responsible human beings and turn him into a thin layer
of red gel on the concrete. It would be wrong, but that's what they'd
do.
Want to make a judgement call on good and evil? Anyone who would be
the instigator of something like that is hardly on the side of the
angels. Anyone who causes that sort of disaster is propagating the
real evil in the world, not some poor hacks writing thrillers to pay
the mortgage.
So before your local wizard who claims to be a Guardian or one of the
Nine Unknown, or the leader of a Hunting Lodge gets you into anything
deeper than some joyful, joyfilled celebrations of life, compassion,
and all that is right and good in the world---maybe you'd better draw
his attention to that paragraph about the thin layer of red gel.
Because sometimes, boys and girls, what you think is a striped worm
turns out to be the tail of a tiger and no magic is required.
This was followed up by leaving the convention circuit in the late 90's after someone jumped one of their people at a con.
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May 20, 2018 13:28
