After #FireRickRemender, Can We Have a Real Conversation?

[emac1790]

This is another thing going around these days, mocking outrage. If people respond to things passionately, emotionally, they get breezed aside as irrational rants.

David Brothers had a really article about this.

What I’m talking about is how we—the comics community—describe, talk about, and address the concerns of people who are upset about one thing or another. The way we talk about outrage fatigue, outrage-of-the-week, faux outrage, outrage-o-matic, misplaced outrage, another outrage, this outrage, that outrage, and why it’s gross and short-sighted. How we use “tumblr” as a pejorative but ignore the poison in our own forums and followers.

The way we use the word outrage suggests that the outrage in question is fake and irrational, on account of being poorly thought-out and overly emotional. It happens every time someone brings up a point to do with equality, sexism, racism, or justice. It’s the same tactic the music media uses to devalue Kanye’s rants. They’re invalid, an inconvenience, annoying, or fake because you can see the emotions driving it, and emotional reactions aren’t valid.

We use the presence of passion to first diminish and then dismiss arguments. The offended must play by the rules of the unoffended, or even worse, the offenders, in order to be heard. You have to tamp down that pain if you want to get help or fix it. You can see it when people say things like “Thank you for being civil” when arguing something heated with someone they disagree with. Civility is great, sure, but we’re forcing people who feel like they’re under attack to meet us on our own terms. In reality, passion shouldn’t be dismissed. Passion has a purpose.

Nah, I'm mocking fake outrage. Being passionate is one thing. Calling someone to be fired because said person has an ax to grind or because said person didn't read the page is another thing. A thing that deserves to be mocked.

In any case, in my post I was joking with Moriarty.

[ViewtifulJC]

Nah, I'm mocking fake outrage. Being passionate is one thing. Calling someone to be fired because said person has an ax to grind or because said person didn't read the page is another thing. A thing that deserves to be mocked.

Who decides what outrage is "fake" outrage? "Faux" outrage? What if people are legitimately, passionately upset about something?

[The World]

In the case of UA, Remender probably overreacted. But in the case of the Falcon thing, no he and Marvel are under absolutely no obligation to be respectful. Their "critics" in that case were blatantly ignoring what was on the page and making crap up just to turn people against Remender. That's not respectful criticism or a valid critique, that's lying to people to make them hate someone. So Marvel has no obligation to be respectful to those people because those people showed no respect to their target, who they basically accused of being a racist, misogynist, and condoning statutory rape. I'd be even less kind to people who accused me of that than Marvel/Remender have been. I have issues with Remender's writing as well, I don't hate his work but he's not one of my favorites either, but if I'm going to criticize him then I'm going to make sure that the criticism is actually over a valid issue.

Yeah this is more or less where I stand. The whole Captain America nonsense was ludicrous, but the refusal to admit when they were wrong and the backtracking was the saddest part.

[emac1790]

Who decides what outrage is "fake" outrage? "Faux" outrage? What if people are legitimately, passionately upset about something?

The outrage is fake when when people are calling for a guy to get fired over something that didn't happen. Passionate is not an excuse for being an ass.

Also I edited my post before I saw this. Again I say I was joking with Moriarty.

[Zero Hunter]

I think one of the big problems is if you say anything about not liking a certain direction, be it Thor being a women or Falcon becoming Captain America or many others, you are suddenly a racist, sexist, unenlightened man child that has no place in society who should just shut up and never say a word ever again and are attacked by other posters for not whole heartedly being on board. It does not matter what reason you have for not liking a change that is how many people on message boards treat you and things turn hostile fast in that kind of atmosphere.

[emac1790]

I think one of the big problems is if you say anything about not liking a certain direction, be it Thor being a women or Falcon becoming Captain America or many others, you are suddenly a racist, sexist, unenlightened man child that has no place in society who should just shut up and never say a word ever again and are attacked by other posters for not whole heartedly being on board. It does not matter what reason you have for not liking a change that is how many people on message boards treat you and things turn hostile fast in that kind of atmosphere.

The unfortunate effect of social media and the internet in general. Everyone must have some kind of motive or agenda. Perhaps a person just doesn't care for the story. No "isms" there.

Both sides have to realize that other people enjoy different thing than they do. That's just life.

[Zero Hunter]

The unfortunate effect of social media and the internet in general. Everyone must have some kind of motive or agenda. Perhaps a person just doesn't care for the story. No "isms" there.

Exactly. Some people just will never accept that and want to label anything and anyone that does not fall in line 100% behind their opinion, and that is when the insults start coming out.

[Fringe Division]

Oh, good, another thread filled with total misinformation.

I can't believe people are still hammering on this issue. A "real conversation" couldn't be had because the statutory rape never happened. It was made up and then spread by well articulated blogs and hashtags so that people who didn't read Captain America might have thought it actually happened or that the situation was ambiguous enough to cause a rational reader to think statutory rape happened (as a reader, it was not. Jet was clearly an adult and was established as such many issues ago). One need in no way be a "rape apologist" to acknowledge that.

So there was no statutory rape, and I don't think there needs to be any conversation about the interracial nature of the encounter. This isn't 1965. Miscegenation shouldn't be controversial, and hopefully most people don't even know what the word means anymore.

Are you aware that the original issue was not about statutory rape?

So I missed all this controversy, but reading the link, and the links in the linked article, it seems to be pretty much:

Some readers mistakenly thought that Remender had written Falcon sleeping with an underage girl. Some tumblr social justice warriors picked up on this and, as usual, wrote angry tumblr blogs about the racist, sexist, ablist, cis-privileged, heteronormative, misogyny of it all and demanded Remender be fired. Remender got pissed off with people trying to get him fired due to their inability to read some text in a comic and told them to drown themselves.

Is that about right?

No, it goes like this: Jet is depicted to be a very young child in the first issue (as small as her brother is in the next issue when he is supposed to be one year old) and is later referred to in the recap published by Marvel as an infant. A total of twelve years pass, which would put her in her mid-teens at the latest. Her age is not specified again until this issue, where she is now supposed to be 23. People believed her age had been retconned so that she would be old enough to have sex with Falcon, and they took issue with that. This being hardly the first time they took issue with Remender's work, they started the #FireRickRemender tag.

Later, a few people who had not read the issue or even the posts complaining about the issue picked up on Sam having sex with a girl that was previously believed to be a teenager and started bringing statutory rape into it, and a couple of others seemed to think Jet was lying about her age, but they weren't the ones who started the movement and they were always a very, very small percentage of those participating.

As it turns out, apparently JRJR drew what was supposed to be a 10-year-old girl in the first issue in a misleading way, so misleading that whoever writes the recaps thought she was supposed to be an infant, and Marvel published that recap when they shouldn't have. So while Remender might not have retconned Jet's age, it's Marvel's fault for publishing material to give people the impression that she was supposed to be a teenager prior to this. No one from Marvel nor anyone calling the entire thing stupid seems to want to admit that Marvel's failure to do its primary job -- storytelling -- is to blame for the misunderstanding. And instead of anyone trying to politely explain that it was a misunderstanding to anyone who was upset (again, upset by something they believed to be true only because Marvel published material that misled them), they jumped on these people in really vicious ways, sometimes to the point of outright lying about their actions and motivations. The original poster ended up receiving death and rape threats partly because certain individuals are hellbent on misrepresenting what she said and why.

Remender, however, didn't participate in any of this, probably because he had made a real mess of things the last time there was a big controversy surrounding his work by telling critics to kill themselves and kiss a fictional character's "shiny red dick."

In the case of UA, Remender probably overreacted.

"Probably"? When is it not overreacting to tell people who had a problem with your work, however politely worded, to kill themselves or kiss someone's dick?

But in the case of the Falcon thing, no he and Marvel are under absolutely no obligation to be respectful. Their "critics" in that case were blatantly ignoring what was on the page and making crap up just to turn people against Remender.

Marvel probably should have been since it was their choice to publish misleading artwork and a recap that identified a ten-year-old as an infant that caused the problem in the first place.

That's not respectful criticism or a valid critique, that's lying to people to make them hate someone.

No one using the #FireRickRemender tagged lied. Marvel editors and writers have said that they were lying, but that didn't happen. A small few were mistaken. Most never even made a claim of statutory rape happening in the book.

[Double 0]

I think one of the big problems is if you say anything about not liking a certain direction, be it Thor being a women or Falcon becoming Captain America or many others, you are suddenly a racist, sexist, unenlightened man child that has no place in society who should just shut up and never say a word ever again and are attacked by other posters for not whole heartedly being on board. It does not matter what reason you have for not liking a change that is how many people on message boards treat you and things turn hostile fast in that kind of atmosphere.

That's not what I've witness. What I've seen is someone will say they don't like that particular change. Then when asked why, the reasoning tends to contain some unfortunate implications that go beyond just having an opinion. Hence why they get called out, hence why there tends to be a mess.

I'm not happy about the recent changes for Cap and Thor, but I definitely understand why they are happening. I like Falcon as Falcon, but if Falcon can get more of a following while being Cap and after being Cap, like Bucky, then I'm fine with that. So far, I haven't gotten any flack for saying that.

[emac1790]

Oh, good, another thread filled with total misinformation.



Are you aware that the original issue was not about statutory rape?

The issue was someone didn't like Remender's work. Here is a link to the original post...

http://weinersoldier.tumblr.com/post...r-do-this-time

I suggest that everybody on this thread reads that and then make up their own minds.

Edit; this is the lines about the Sam and Jet issue,

And today - included an unsafe, nonconsensual (intoxicated) sexual encounter between Sam Wilson and a female OC who previously had been written as underage but has been since “aged up” in order to make her legal for sex, apparently (she’s meant to the same age as Ian Zola, Steve’s adoptive son who was twelve when Steve left Dimension Z, but is now apparently 23 even though no time has passed in-narrative). She’s also often depicted wearing essential Lelo’s suit from The Fifth Element, albeit with 1000% more tits and fanservice

[Tiamatty]

This is another thing going around these days, mocking outrage. If people respond to things passionately, emotionally, they get breezed aside as irrational rants.

David Brothers had a really article about this.

What I’m talking about is how we—the comics community—describe, talk about, and address the concerns of people who are upset about one thing or another. The way we talk about outrage fatigue, outrage-of-the-week, faux outrage, outrage-o-matic, misplaced outrage, another outrage, this outrage, that outrage, and why it’s gross and short-sighted. How we use “tumblr” as a pejorative but ignore the poison in our own forums and followers.

The way we use the word outrage suggests that the outrage in question is fake and irrational, on account of being poorly thought-out and overly emotional. It happens every time someone brings up a point to do with equality, sexism, racism, or justice. It’s the same tactic the music media uses to devalue Kanye’s rants. They’re invalid, an inconvenience, annoying, or fake because you can see the emotions driving it, and emotional reactions aren’t valid.

We use the presence of passion to first diminish and then dismiss arguments. The offended must play by the rules of the unoffended, or even worse, the offenders, in order to be heard. You have to tamp down that pain if you want to get help or fix it. You can see it when people say things like “Thank you for being civil” when arguing something heated with someone they disagree with. Civility is great, sure, but we’re forcing people who feel like they’re under attack to meet us on our own terms. In reality, passion shouldn’t be dismissed. Passion has a purpose.

I agree. But the insidious part is that it's so easy to fall into the same trap. I've defended the right of people to be outraged, but I've also mocked people who were outraged about other things.

But yeah, the attempts to dismiss the concerns of people who are deeply concerned about something is a serious problem. You see it all the time. And it's a tool to try to end a conversation. By making the person's passion seem trivial and petty, it's trying to embarrass the person into dropping the topic. It's a way to promote the status quo, and it's generally used by the people who benefit most from the status quo.

[Fringe Division]

The issue was someone didn't like Remender's work.

To be more precise, she's found it offensive on numerous occasions prior and, because of Marvel repeatedly publishing material that misled a large portion of its audience and at least one of its own employees as to a character's age, found it offensive again.

Edit; this is the lines about the Sam and Jet issue,

And today - included an unsafe, nonconsensual (intoxicated) sexual encounter between Sam Wilson and a female OC who previously had been written as underage but has been since “aged up” in order to make her legal for sex, apparently (she’s meant to the same age as Ian Zola, Steve’s adoptive son who was twelve when Steve left Dimension Z, but is now apparently 23 even though no time has passed in-narrative). She’s also often depicted wearing essential Lelo’s suit from The Fifth Element, albeit with 1000% more tits and fanservice

And? Keeping in mind what Marvel had published in the comic book and not what Remender said on Twitter one time or what Bleeding Cool said on the matter several days after this comment was made, what about that is an inaccurate reading of the situation other than the fact that Jet was not supposed to be the exact same age as Ian?

[emac1790]

To be more precise, she's found it offensive on numerous occasions prior and, because of Marvel repeatedly publishing material that misled a large portion of its audience and at least one of its own employees as to a character's age, found it offensive again.

If that's how she felt, that's her right. So we're both right in this case. She didn't like Remender's work and was offended by it.

Edit; As I stated before, I don't read his work. But I read her post and the Captain America page in question. I can't and won't comment on anything else.

[Fringe Division]

If that's how she felt, that's her right. So we're both right in this case. She didn't like Remender's work and was offended by it.

Edit; As I stated before, I don't read his work. But I read her post and the Captain America page in question. I can't and won't comment on anything else.

I guess I'm not understanding why you replied to me in particular.

[Tiamatty]

I think one of the big problems is if you say anything about not liking a certain direction, be it Thor being a women or Falcon becoming Captain America or many others, you are suddenly a racist, sexist, unenlightened man child that has no place in society who should just shut up and never say a word ever again and are attacked by other posters for not whole heartedly being on board. It does not matter what reason you have for not liking a change that is how many people on message boards treat you and things turn hostile fast in that kind of atmosphere.

False. This is a strawman. There are actually entirely legitimate criticisms of Lady Thor or Falcon as Captain America. The problem isn't the criticism of the ideas. The problem has been that many of the criticisms have had problematic undertones, while other arguments raised have been, to some of us, somewhat naive.

Complaining about "quotas" and "pandering" and "PC agendas" and all that - those arguments have uncomfortable undertones to a lot of people, for reasons talked a lot about in the diversity thread.

The argument that female and minority characters should be promoted in their own identities doesn't have the same undertones, but to me, and some others, it's a naive argument; again, it's been talked about plenty in the other thread.

I also haven't seen many accusations of racism or sexism in that thread, at least not from the defenders of the moves; I've seen more veiled accusations of racism and sexism from the people criticizing the moves. Those of us defending the moves haven't been saying anyone's racist or sexist, we're pointing out double standards when it comes to race and sex, and how certain arguments have harmful undertones.