I mostly read (hard) sci-fi written by straight white dudes, so the tweet on the screenshot made me feel a bit defensive. In the replies and qrts people are patting themselves on the back for reading marginalized fantasy writers exclusively and this "consumption as activism" seems rad-libby to me, but maybe I'm wrong.

  • Coca_Cola_but_Commie [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Goddamn though, Twitter is absolute brain poison. One of the things I always think about with Jemisin is how she got caught up in the "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" scandal. Write up about that here, if you're not familiar, though content warning for transphobia and suicidal thoughts. And, whatever, it was just one moment of thoughtlessness from Jemisin, what happened to Fall wasn't her fault, and she had a pretty minor role in the whole thing anyway. She took a lot of shit for it all. But it's just such a clear example of how fucked the performative outrage machine that is twitter really is. Here you've got an author, a noted progressive, has positive trans rep. in her novels, and she still stumbles ass-backward into this kind of fuck up because she had to go and have a hot take about some story she hadn't even read. Twitter, it's bad.