Official Orson Scott Card Community Hatethread

I figured we could all do with some feel-good piling on.

So he's getting to write some Superman comics (digital ones so they don't really count of course)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/11/dc-comics-orson-scott-card_n_2663591.html

He should give him blue skin.

I guess DC decided they wanted to cover all the Superman bases in the new universe so Apollo is now to be mirrored by a homophobic, authoritarian white power superman.

Either that or they are trying to cash in on the Ender's Game film.

I'm really confused as to why DC would shit where they eat at this point, especially since pretty much everything Card does these days is met with protest and most of DC's audience has already been receptive to their inclusion of LGBT-friendly themes. Lame attempt at equilibrium? I don't follow sci-fi lit, does Card even still have much stock in that community?

DC Comics has LGBT-friendly themes? I BEG TO DIFFER.

People will claim "Batwoman" - a title that gets zero advertising space, isn't distributed to newsstand outlets, and is treated like a separate ghetto niche comic despite ostensibly being part of DC's biggest money franchise.

Making an "established character" gay in the New 52 reboot? Good idea. Making it the Earth-2 version of Alan Scott, and immediately killing off his gay fiance so that they don't actually have to write a major gay relationship? Cop-out at best, and offensive "bury your gays!" at worst.

Vertigo titles such as Swamp Thing and Hellblazer which often addressed themes of sexuality and challenging societal norms - cancelled and relaunched in the "mainstream New 52" as sanitized non-controversial versions.

But then again, DC Comics still employs Gail Simone, who after starting the whine-a-thon Women In Refrigerators internet gripe site, proceeded to write a mature, non-exploitative gay relationship in Birds of Prey and then ignominiously kill off those characters just to motivate the protagonist to action. Hey Gail? What did you used to call that when it happened to straight cisgendered women? Uh-huh.

Orson Scott Card's politics are almost perfectly representative of the DC Comics unstated ethos.

That's the DC Editorial Bullpen battle cry used whenever people point out how few women they have working there. You know, how few women they have working there after they fired most of them. "We still have Gail Simone! She still has a job! GETTING US COFFEE ;D lol "

(But really, Gail Simone is heeeeeeeecks of overrated. But that just makes her fit right in at DC, I guess. Bru is over at Marvel, right? They should trade Brian Bendis for someone good, then DC can have Winnick,Johns, Simone and Bendis and then someone can sink the ship. Ann Nocenti, she's underrated. Also, true story, twenty years ago DC had three times as many women writing monthlies as now. wtf?)

Not sure how I missed this. Nute, this is veering toward Getting Over Breakups Using Helium territory. Slow turn.

Regardless of the criticism you're making here, "whine-a-thon . . . internet gripe site?"

The Women In Refrigerators site insulted me as a writer. Supporting characters exist solely to support the protagonists of a story. Therefore whatever happens to them is justified - not only because it's entirely fictional, but because that is their entire point. You might as well get offended at math. Trying to claim writers are misogynist (which was the intent of the site) because the victims of violence were usually women was attacking a symptom - it would have been much more effective to get people to buy more of the books that featured strong female characters and good gender-balanced writing instead of trying to tear down an invulnerable strawman.

Granted, "fridging" is the sign of a lazy writer in most cases, but when the death or imperilment of a supporting character moves the story along, that is the only relevant factor in storytelling, not gender politics or someone's cry for attention on the internet. If Women In Refrigerators was genuinely about feminism, they would have done something positive instead of concentrating solely on negative and destructive screeds. Repeating "THIS IS A PROBLEM!" ad nauseam accomplishes nothing, never has, never will. Actually doing something about it in the manner of writers like Brian Wood, Grant Morrison, Brian K Vaughan, who have no trouble writing good female characters without resorting to cliche or exploitation - that does more for feminism than pointing out the obvious: 80+ years of an industry run solely by men, ostensibly for a male audience, is going to have a lot of repetition.

If you think Banksy is an eyesore, putting up a hate website isn't going to change anything. Becoming a more popular artist who'll make his vandalism irrelevant and obsolete? That will.

Women In Refrigerators - like most of Gail Simone's work, is a trite example of lazy writing and pandering to the lowest common denominator for a cheap pop.

I have no issues with your dislike of a particular comics person but it's clear enough to me that the fridge-stuffing problem - not exclusively, but disproportionately vis a vis women characters in comics and similar media - is real. It's not "math," it's an exploitative cultural cliche.

Actually, it is math. Or rather, a simple set of facts that follow from each other.

1) One of the most common devices for motivating any character is to put a loved one in danger. This is true for every form of media, not just comics.
2) By and large, the vast majority of protagonists in comics and similar media are male.
3) The majority of those male protagonists will have female love interests, family members, etc.
4) Therefore: putting the female love interest in peril serves to motivate the protagonist.

What Women In Refrigerators did was focus exclusively on point 4 without pointing out the root causes or doing a single thing to actually remedy them. You can work backwards to find a number of obvious solutions which would not only lessen the incidents that the site complains about, but would engender better storytelling as a whole:

3) Develop more non-romantic relationships that are equally as important and motivating to the character as a stereotypical romantic partner. Featuring more relationships in comics that aren't just heterosexual romances is a good thing.
2) Write better female characters. And, conversely, write female characters better. I thought, for instance, that Greg Rucka's run on Wonder Woman was the best that's ever been done with the title (setting aside that Rucka can only write one female character archetype. It's a good one, but man he gets repetitive.) I read the title and loved it not because "Hey, it's a woman kicking ass" but "Hey, there's a lot of kicking ass here and it's awesome!"
1) USE BETTER TROPES. WiR sort of focused on this at the beginning, but it ended up devolving into just digging up more logs to throw on an already-burning fire.


Back to the original point - I have no intention of buying Card's comics because he isn't a good comics writer - his abhorrent religious politics aside.

If you want to close the tangent I'm fine with that. I think that while your 1-4 list there is workable there's also a tendency - wider than just comics - to use women in peril (including sexual peril) as disposable plot/character props because it's a simple frisson-generator for male audiences. Putting a pithy label on stuff like that and calling it out is worthwhile.

I'm way out of my depth here anyway because I think 90% of comics writing and storytelling is atrocious, so I've only loosely followed the industry since I stopped actively reading them twenty years ago.

But I'm gonna have to fall on the side that "fridging" is not an animal that is unique to comics; it's a device as old as literature and may not be as much a symptom of misogyny (although it certainly can be and often is) as it is just writing to your characters and audience. See also: every James Bond plot ever. Yeah, it's sloppy and usually trite, but it greases the gears if that's the kind of story you're making -- and let's face it, superhero comics are exactly that kind of story.

Is it, though? It hasn't improved the situation, and it's arguably distracted from the real problems. I think Nute is right: when that plot device is problematic it's because it's bad writing and/or lazy plotting, and that it happens more frequently with female characters isn't a problem unto itself so much as a symptom of the problematic relationship between women and mainstream comics. If you're noticing a tendency in comics to share note-for-note the plot and characterization of every NES game ever made, that kind of points to a lot of deeper problems than "too many damsels in distress."

It's pretty hard to argue about consequences; I don't think something getting a website or a TVTropes entry has a clearly measurable impact outside of, I dunno, ephemeral internet discourse or whatever. It concentrated my attention on a pattern.

My back-of-envelope view is that cheap instrumental women-in-peril-as-plot-prop stuff happens to a considerable degree in pop culture storytelling and to a somewhat higher degree in nerd-culture storytelling with its slightly more acute women problems as discussed in various threads here. Women in disposably instrumental sexual peril/distress is that more obviously tawdry and is even easier to point out as a non-reversable problem that isn't just a facet of "supporting characters existing to have misfortunes."

For a last-few-weeks example see this thread about a espionage/thriller show on cable. Outside of this forum - which is pretty alive to gender/sexuality issues - I didn't see all that much of this criticism among my other TV-watching friends. Because that sort of thing is routine? I dunno. But it's on my radar, and one of the reasons was because of reading about that website.

Let me be more clear: it's worthwhile to call out problems. But what's really worthwhile is thinking a problem through, figuring out what's causing it and what can be done to address it, not assigning it a pithy slogan and moving on. If you don't care enough about something that bothers you in pop culture to really think it through and identify the root problem, why do you care enough to complain about it at all?

And that's not to say that "women in refrigerators" is necessarily a problem at all. Maybe that's just superhero comics serving their audience. But what is for sure is that those comics tend to have very poorly developed female characters and very male-centric stories, and that's both a function of the genre being disproportionately consumed by males and a propagator of that state. If comics never used a damsel in distress plot again they'd still be awful with regard to female characters and people who complain about "fridging" now would complain about other aspects of the larger problem then. So I submit that if you have a problem with that kind of thing, what you should be calling for isn't fewer "women in refrigerators," but rather more... well, as Nute put it:

I'm not sure what the difference between "call out" and "fix" is unless we're working in content creation or really vocally engaged in an influential critical discourse or something; I feel like a consumer who discusses his consumption with like-minded consumers, with correspondingly limited agency.

I see things as I framed them in my last post, more than I see things as being a product of Nute's framework. It strikes me as a gendered thing and not just as the gender-unequal playing out of a supporting-characters-and-crummy-stories thing, partly because it happens in, say, the pretty well executed TV show I just linked.

To be fair, DC also had Karen Berger who, as executive editor of the Vertigo imprint for as long as it's been a thing, probably did more to shape the non-superhero American comics landscape than anybody else alive. (And in my experience at least, was hugely responsible for getting women readers interested in comics. There's a definite thread I've noticed among women of my generation who are into comics: almost all of them got into the medium via a Vertigo title like Sandman or Hellblazer or Preacher. I suspect for younger women, manga was probably the gateway.)

I'm talking about identifying the real problem. To me, complaining about all the women in refrigerators in mainstream superhero comics is worrying about the symptom. Put another way: have you ever read the parts of those comics where the women aren't in refrigerators?

I would just as soon not stray even further from the ostensible subject of this thread. Suffice it to say that everything I've said on this subject is meant to apply to comics specifically, since they're the source of the trope as named and defined in a limited sense.

I think, post-tangent, we can frame it how we prefer to - we're pretty distant from OSC, who we probably all have the same turn-head-and-spit opinion about - but I agree we're framing it differently and that's fine.

From http://www.the-gutters.com/comic/378-ben-bates:

Is The Gutters a decent site?

It's... variable. The writer and artist changes from page to page, and along with it the quality.

OSC definitely hates himself some gays, but if he were to retell the story of Superman's origin, I have to imagine it would be yet another thinly disguised Mormon history.

On the plus side, Supes already sorta has the magic underwear.