sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: fandom

An f/f romance novella featuring two young women who are both active in the online fandom for the same tv show, but with widely different interpretations and preferences in their fanfic.

And oh my god it's so funny while also being so charming and fun! The two main characters are so petty and yet so into each other. And I recognize both kinds of fan, though I'm not either of them, lol. A fun quick read.

This is a graphic novel memoir written by a person of my generation about eir relationship with gender over the course of eir life. Kobabe is genderqueer and seems to be somewhere on the ace spectrum and grew up in fandom, just like me, and grew up with similar cultural references and touchpoints. I've spent so much of my life reading books written in bygone eras (whether a decade or two centuries out of date!) that seeing a book where the author's life seems familiar is honestly odd, lol! But eir relationship with eir body and gender and sexuality is all ultimately very different than mine, as is eir family and the context in which e grew up. And e mostly hung out in different fandoms than me, too!

Anyway Kobabe is clearly skilled at comics and I enjoyed reading this journey through eir experiences, and it's clearly brave of em to put this out into the world, and it's just nice to have more narratives of the ways that queer experiences can look!

The book does feel like it ends a little abruptly, but the author was 30 or so at the time of publishing and that's still honestly early in one's journey through life, so it's perhaps not surprising that there isn't a satisfying conclusion to wrap it all up with, and it's still a good ending.

To anyone who doesn't already care deeply about the workings of the Hugo award and sff fandom history, this would be an enormously tedious book and also probably a bit baffling. But that's not the audience it's aimed at. It wants to meticulously document the whole situation around the Sad/Rabid Puppies' involvement in the Hugo Awards, including what led up to it and what happened after, to allow the people who already care to fully understand the scope and details. It is the most insider of insider baseball.

And you know what, I am that audience, and I did read all 269,000 or so words of the Complete Debarkle with rapt attention, though also more than one twitter complaint about just how endless the dang thing is.

It's not perfect (as an example, it trends too much in the direction of wanting to present both sides equally when it comes to discussing the Mixon report and the harassment perpetrated by Winterfox/Requires Hate/Benjanun Sriduangkaew), but by gum it achieves what it set out to do and it is a truly impressive achievement.

And despite my previous familiarity, I learned things. There were entire swathes of involved parties I never even heard of previous to this! I do feel like I have a much better grasp on exactly what happened, now, despite having fascinatedly read plenty of blog posts on the topic back in the mid-twenty-teens as it went down.

I also learned some things about older fandom history, and was fascinated to learn more, for example, about Baen Books, which I remember having a vague understanding of as a teen as being the only publisher of REAL science fiction, and now that I have the further context I am SO CURIOUS where I picked up that idea!

(I also learned that sff authors Elizabeth Moon and Elizabeth Bear are not in fact the same person. In my defence, Elizabeth Single-Syllable-Nature-Related-Noun feels like the kind of name that there would unlikely be more than one of within a small category of people! But this does explain why I could never quite remember what that Elizabeth's name was, lol.)

But overall the Complete Debarkle reads like a blog round-up post (well, because it is one, or an extensive series of ones), which is a very specific genre and style of writing. It's collecting information and putting it in front of you to observe the facts of what was said, making use of extensive quotes, rather than synthesising research to present in a more traditional nonfiction book style. There is some commentary, but the point of this kind of writing is less trying to explicitly construct an argument, and more trying to pile together vast quantities of primary source information to allow the readers to draw specific conclusions from the information presented.

I do wish that this book had been a lot shorter, but given that the approach the book was taking was "here's a whole lot of direct quotes from involved participants so you can see exactly what was said," I can see why it couldn't be any shorter within the framework of its intentions.

So the book is very successful, I think, at being exactly the thing it is trying to be, and I can appreciate it and what it's doing. And also dear god I'm grateful I am DONE it now and can STOP READING IT, it was starting to feel like I could literally never reach the end because it would go on forever.

A fun and charming romance novel that I mostly really liked. BUT. Okay this is a non-fanfiction novel about people who are intimately involved in fandom, putting them through a set of tropes common in fic. And this felt to me like it was....drawing too much attention to the tropiness of the tropes and the way that it would actually be an uncomfortable set of circumstances to happen in real life, and it only works in fanfic because we all agree it's not real. But when fandom exists in the narrative to contrast with the "real" life of the main characters, it makes it feel too real and then I was uncomfortable with the power dynamics inherent in the relationship, between the identity secret being kept AND the social power of a famous actor dating a fan. Sigh.

It's too bad because if this was fanfic I would have loved it, I think! I was very charmed by the two leads, and enjoyed how invested they were in the characters they loved, and liked the deliberate anti-fatphobia stance too. And a few of the excerpts of fanfic included in the novel, I felt invested enough that I was disappointed I couldn't read the rest of the fic! So I did really enjoy reading this book, despite my discomfort.

One other point though. Although the book was careful to include a couple of background queer characters, it felt very glaring to me that literally the entire ao3 fandom for their show shipped only het ships as far as we were shown. And yes the lead characters are specifically fans of one het ship, but other ships in the fandom are also mentioned and they're all het too. I genuinely do not believe that the show as described does not have any slash or femslash fandom, but the book stayed totally heterosexual in this regard and it just felt wrong to me, like it was straightwashing the way ao3 fandom is for the benefit of the assumed-straight readers of this straight romance novel. Sigh.

Wooo it's the latest Susan Palwick! Last time I reviewed a Susan Palwick novel I accidentally talked for like 1500 words whiiiich is possibly overkill? I don't have 1500 words in me this time, in part because this one is a less ambitious novel than the last. But this one was overall more successful than Shelter, I think.

It's...a literary fiction novel, I suppose you could say. It takes place entirely in our current real world and is about the reactions of various people to a terrible personal tragedy (tw for rape and murder and suicide in the book) that occurs. Except that I genuinely like the characters, and they feel like real people, and I care about them. And yes I cried.

It's a very Susan Palwick book, being about grief and loss and hard things and about how family (by blood or by choice) is important. And all that is great!

But what's really special about it is the other part - the stuff about the Comrade Cosmos comic book series and the Comrade Cosmos fandom. A number of the main characters are into CCverse, and the novel spends a fair amount of time talking about CCverse and oh dear god I love everything about this. It reads like Palwick GENUINELY GETS IT about fandom and it makes me SO HAPPY. And the book acknowledges that slash exists without getting weird or judgy about it! (and is also one hundred percent correct about what slash fans would ship because wow yes CC/EE practically writes itself)

(Also I have to say that I dearly want there to be fanart of the Emperor of Entropy at a birthday party. Lots of it. All the fanart. Also all the other CCverse fanworks.) (HELL YEAH I am requesting CCverse for yuletide this year!) (yes I already checked tumblr and AO3 and there's absolutely nothing about Comrade Cosmos and I am sad)

But the way that a fandom is a) fun for the people involved and b) also can be helpful and meaningful to people going through hard times is just... yeah.

And I love CCverse and its fandom as described in the book. I got genuinely squeeful reading each section about CCverse. And I love that the CCverse canon is explicitly imperfect - so Palwick didn't intend CCverse to be a shining paragon of a canon that does everything right. Which makes me feel better about things like the way that CC's backstory involves a fridged woman whose continued disabled existence is only to cause CC angst instead of her getting to be a person in her own right. And the only major female characters are the love interest(s) and the fridged/tragically-disabled family member. It's like...yeah. That's too often what comic books DO, unfortunately. CCverse is interesting and groundbreaking in other ways, but it also retreads some very familiar ground.

At any rate, I don't have any grand sweeping statements to end my thoughts with. But I really liked this book and I'm glad I read it. AWW YEAH SUSAN PALWICK.