Good evening one and all!
Just a wee thread here so we can put up centralised links in many ongoing, flowing discussions about various topics spanning fiction (and, SPOILER, non-fiction - but I'm ever the rebel) in various guises. We've all seen oodles of interesting links and topics, many of which we think others hereabouts would love to read (or simply should read, if we're being tyrannical about things, which I certainly am) and possibly discuss. Things that mightn't really go a whole way to prompting you to write a nice, wholesome post, but which you really would like to see shared.
Well? Here's the place!
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To start us off, here's a thing I read on Facebook thanks to some cherished old friends. (Well, more gossipily, a barely-known friend and an ex-girlfriend, but the difference is only in the narrative and labelling.)
Foremost, this piece: We Have Always Fought, by Kameron Hurley - talking evocatively about the ongoing narratives surrounding the roles of women, in fiction and in fact.
Broadly speaking, it chimes with my yearning for scepticism: people's narratives are very often entirely independent of a solid basis. "So there's still an imbalance in numbers!" might be one thing to show why it's fine to assume male fighters? The solution to that little boggle is left for the reader.
It's something that bugs me unduly, I think, and leaves me fundamentally distanced from a lot of people: I seem to see narrative as distinct from truth, not informed by it. This makes for an awfully cold and flippant approach, but also an excruciatingly (for others, I assume) awful lack of self-awareness. I'm no accomplished truth-seeker, but I inadvertently (yet resolutely) think other people who don't worry about truth are absolutely a danger to everything that ever will be.
It's a little foible, if you will. I digress, however. Unwitting narratives, perhaps more obvious to the male reader in the form of the narrative (TV Tropes on) white man's burden, not really the same thing, but it's curious in its infiltration and in its persistence as an oft-unquestioned narrative thought.
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Further to the original article, following some of the link chains is fascinating, the recommended one (here) is particularly intriguing.
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As an extra thought: I disagree a bit with the 'someone has to be first' thing. My disagreement isn't profound, so much as I suspect that's a narrative that doesn't quite get to the heart of the matter of how change proliferates. The story of the 'first pebble to fall' in the narrative isn't, I think, actually as a good representation of the truth as, say, a sprawling exploration of what the actual state of affairs of all the pebbles on the mountainside were. Awful analogy? Sue me!