Well, it’s as good a guess at a collective noun for “kerfuffle” as any other…<\/p>\n
There have been three moderately heated bloggy controversies that I’ve been following over the past week, that I haven’t commented on. Mostly because I don’t really have that much to add to any of the arguments, or at least, not enough to merit a blog post.<\/p>\n
I do want to note their existence, though, and maybe by combining them together, it won’t feel so much like a pointless fluff post. So if you’re dying to know my opinions on the crimes of fanfic, Oliver Stone’s casting decisions, or Hooters, click on through to the rest of this post. Otherwise, scroll down the front page, and look at the flowers and dog pictures.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
First up: Scalzi has a pair of posts (the original<\/a> and a follow-up<\/a>) about the raging controversy in the Harry Potter fanfic community over a popular author’s past plagiarism. The original situation is a “pox on both your houses” sort of situation, as far as I can tell– the plagiarism is pretty blatant, but the behavior of some of the people involved in publicizing it is pretty deplorable.<\/p>\n John uses the whole thing as a springboard to discuss the legal issues surrounding fan fiction, which is kind of interesting. There’s a spirited and wide-ranging debate in his comments, the most surprising moment of which was:<\/p>\n And questions of intended audience aside, it simply always has and always will get my hackles up to see the largely male SF\/F community (previous link notwithstanding) dismissing\/deriding\/mocking the quality\/purpose\/value of an overwhelmingly female endeavor and community. Full stop.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Never in a million years would sexism have occurred to me as an explanation for dismissing fanfic. I mean, I’m sort of vaguely aware that it’s mostly a female community (and why is<\/strong> that, anyway?), but it never sturck me as an essentially gender-linked activity.<\/p>\n (Personally, I tend to dismiss fanfic becuase the most ardent fandoms around seem to be centered around Harry Potter and Star Trek, neither of which strike me as having enough solidity that I’d want to read non-canon stories in those worlds. But that’s a separate flamewar.)<\/p>\n (This has also prompted a discussion of feral fandom<\/a>, which was sort of interesting, and worth a link, albeit a parenthetical one.)<\/p>\n Speaking of sexism, the second kerfuffle of interest was sparked by ScienceBlogs’ own Abel PharmBoy<\/a>, who asked:<\/p>\n Could the San Antonio Riverwalk Hooters restaurant run some sort of promotion during [the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium] for breast cancer awareness, fundraising, acknowledgment of S.A. as an international center for breast cancer research, etc. that would not be perceived as capitalistic, misogynistic or otherwise contributing to the demeaning of women?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I was sort of surprised at the magnitude of the shitstorm this kicked up, particularly after Bora took the question over to Echidne of the Snakes<\/a>. Abel has a follow-up<\/a> expressing much the same thing, and re-phrasing the question.<\/p>\n I’m weirdly conflicted about this, entirely for personal reasons. I think Hooters is tacky at best, and exploitive at worst, but I also have fond memories of going to the one in Rockville, MD when I was in grad school, with an uncle who would come to town occasionally for meetings with DoD. He really liked the place, and would flirt outlandishly with the waitresses, and we always had a good time. And the wings weren’t bad.<\/p>\n The second-to-last time I saw him was a trip to Hooters. The last time was at my sister’s wedding, where he was waving around a napkin from that trip, on which he’d gotten one of the waitresses to write some ridiculously improbable note about our visit, which he was using to try to embarrass my mother (this was a recurring game he played). He died later that summer of a massive brain tumor.<\/p>\n Which is a very wordy and downbeat way of explaining why I have a hard time seeing them as a bastion of evil. Sorry about that.<\/p>\n And speaking of downbeat, Kate has spent much of the last few days typing angrily about the casting of Oliver Stone’s 9\/11 movie<\/a>, which does a bleach job on the cast. At least a couple of the real people in the story are African-American, but are played by white actors in the movie.<\/p>\n Kate is quite irate about this, and she probably has a point. I’m not getting worked up about it, because that would require me to expend mental energy on a movie that is a) about September 11, and b) by Oliver Stone. All things considered, I prefer to just pretend that the movie doesn’t exist, because I’m happier that way.<\/p>\n In fact, what was I talking about?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, it’s as good a guess at a collective noun for “kerfuffle” as any other… There have been three moderately heated bloggy controversies that I’ve been following over the past week, that I haven’t commented on. Mostly because I don’t really have that much to add to any of the arguments, or at least, not… Continue reading A Squabble of Kerfuffles<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,18,35,2,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","category-books","category-movies","category-personal","category-pop_culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n