So I recently posted this on my personal Facebook account:
Me: I wish I could just do my shit in peace. Like or don't like just leave me alone to do it.
Also me: If nobody wants to burn your book, did you even make a real book?
And the first comment was:
So, you want to offend but don't want the backlash ?
And it’s like… yeah, that’s the joke.
But also yes, seriously, sort of no.
The response I gave to the comment:
There's something very wrong with the offence/backlash dynamic to begin with. To not challenge it is to accept an ever-narrowing range of allowed expression and/or just sit passively by while other people define allowed expression for you, and either way that is unacceptable. To challenge it is to attract the direct attention of the Eye of Sauron, and that is unbearable.
This is true, but doesn’t get at the heart of the matter.
I get being mad at fictional media. Some political point you don’t want rears its head in some thing, or a franchise you’ve loved has a new installment that completely misses the point or shits the bed, it attacks a belief you hold very dear, whatever it is, I get being pissed. When I was a kid, I tried to tell people I changed my name to Luke Skywalker, but I thought the Phantom Menace was so awful I just dropped all things Star Wars forevermore, I was so disappointed and pissed.
OK.
But being so pissed at a thing you want to remove it from being and punish its creators for it and try to prevent anyone else from experiencing the creation?
I don’t understand it. At all. Whether it was the internal concern over Eldritch Wizardry, the destruction of the first version of Palace of the Silver Princess, the Wings of the Valkyrie affair (to name some RPG example)… I don’t get it.
A hundred million times I’ll say before my life is done, I don’t get it.
So to say “you want to offend” can’t exactly be right, because if I had what I actually want, it couldn’t even be possible to offend in this way.
But the world is strange and so it is possible. And it’s nothing but trouble when it happens.
So what does one do in the face of this situation? Accept that other people can simply dictate what can or can not be imagined? Just accept that these absurd limitations exist without protest?
Well, no. Of course not.
Because what I want is not to offend… but to be unbounded. And not just me. I want to see what other people do when they too are unbounded. What could people do if they truly felt free to just go for it without any fear at all1?
So no, I don’t want to offend people.
What I actually want is for people to not be offended.
But… that’s not how things are.
So I want to be unbounded, but the offense people take is basically a bound. A barrier made of hurt feelings.
But the barrier itself is so damned fascinating! Why does it exist? What causes the barrier to appear? What doesn’t? When it appears, how does one deal with it?
These are the questions I become obsessed with. That damn barrier. So I end up teasing it, poking it, dancing with it. All sorts of experiements. And sometimes I get burned.
It isn’t just me being a troublemaker, it’s me following in the footsteps of all those difficult things that ran into this same barrier, that were challenged, hidden, suppressed to one degree or another, whether by active campaigns or simply lack of any exposure because such things get buried beneath corporate product. And yet all these things, despite these obstacles, found their way to me, and showed me there are so many more things that can be done, if you can manage to shut the world out for a bit.
These things are so much more special than anything served up through the mass market.
And with all this swimming in my head, it would be a complete waste of my time to take any other path than the one I’m on. I want to be the person that delivers that special thing to the sort of person looking for something out of step with the world.
And I acknowledge all the problems that will come with that, and of course I am volunteering to experience this burden… while at the same time believing that this burden is so pointless, unnecessary, and just plain fucking dumb.
What could I be doing if this barrier wasn’t there? Or if I had been born with a brain that fit in better, and I didn’t have to worry about the barrier because I truly had no interest in anything near it?
Would it have been possible, if I knew what I know now, to have arranged things a bit differently so I could do what I do without plowing flush into the barrier? Hmm…
Looking back at all the troubles and mistakes and missed opportunities over the years… if I could change just one thing… that would be within my power, not anything outside my own actions, and thinking about my realistic limitations… the one thing to change would be to start the loan process to get books reprinted at the start of Q4 2018, and not wait until the start of 2019.
oops, I did it again… I didn’t have to say that. And I know there are a good number of people out there who will think poorly of me for having said that.
But “I need to be careful what thought experiments I come up with, even ones that could never ever result in the thing happening, because people will frown,” is a contemptable state of mind to be in. How guarded do we really have to be in our own spaces? Am I reading the world correctly (with the built-in assumption that the world will at some point be peeking over this way, of course) or just getting my brain in a knot imagining how people might interpret this impossible premise I chose to present with the assumption that people wouldn’t like that I did it?
How healthy is any of this? Not at all, I’d guess.
Maybe someday I’ll see a path forward that allows me to do what feels natural to do, without running into the barrier.
In the meantime, I’m going right at it, even though I realize there’s probably nothing but a real big cliff on the other side.
I don’t think a whole lot would change in the big picture, actually. I think “mainstream” stuff would still dominate as it does now (in that certain qualities will still lend themselves to mass popularity, and certain other things will limit mass appeal, not because anything is restricted but simply by the nature of mass appeal). The difference, and what a difference it would make, is that people not doing that wouldn’t have to eat shit for the privilege of only being able to afford to eat ramen noodles for the sake of pursuing their art.