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So, mods. Now that you can speak freely, can you spill the beans on what was going on with the reddit admins/AOE? You made some allusions previously but I'd really like to understand what's going on. I have been led to believe that reddit is run by a cabal of terminally online tumblrinas. Surely that can't be right?
@ZorbaTHut explained it (which is to say, there really isn't much more explanation than what we've said before).
My personal opinion is that we probably weren't in as much imminent danger of being banned as many people (including Zorba) believe, but it was inevitable that we would be banned someday. I always watched /r/CultureWarRoundup as a kind of canary, because despite their much smaller footprint, I honestly thought they'd get banned before we would. Their witches are pretty open, and SneerClub definitely knows about them, which means presumably they must get reported fairly frequently.
But I do have two things to contribute which I never would have posted on reddit. First of all, I will confirm that it was indeed Chtorrr who visited us and dropped the "friendly notice" in our mod channel.
And that being said, a few months back there was a "Mod Summit" (via Zoom) to which all subreddit mods were invited. I was the only motte mod who I guess was bored enough to zoom in (I even sent them questions! None of which made it to the queue that got answered, naturally). As you might expect, almost all the talks were about things like "How to build safe communities" and "How to self-care and preserve your mental health while having to deal with all these terrible people," etc.
The most valuable thing I got out of it were screenshots.
Without further comment: https://imgur.com/a/4oIS59D
So here's a thing that I've been sitting on for months.
Chtorrr.
I've never seen this mentioned anywhere, which surprises me, but "Chtorrr" is a pretty obvious reference to a scifi novel series named The War Against the Chtorr. "boy it's funny she named herself after the bad guys" no no, that's not where I'm going with this. Hold your butts.
The War Against The Chtorr is a post-apocalyptic alien invasion novel by David Gerrold, best known for his Star Trek episode The Trouble With Tribbles. I haven't read his stuff in over a decade but I know I loved it as a kid, and I've still got the books in a box somewhere - someday I'll dig that out. The Chtorr series was meant to be the longest thing he'd written, originally a trilogy, then six books; the fifth book has been delayed for literally twenty years, jesus christ get that thing finished already.
The overall plotline . . .
. . . okay I'm going to take a brief diversion. The overall plotline has some cool worldbuilding. One of the past events was the USA went totally world-conquering imperialistic and was defeated soundly, a la Nazi Germany but with less genocide. The USA was put under severe economic sanctions but this turned out to be an even bigger problem for the rest of the world, as the USA was producing pretty much all the world's high-tech equipment. The world grudgingly allowed the USA to continue selling tech, which they did.
Later the aliens arrive and large parts of humanity join the aliens and use human military equipment against the remaining US countries . . . and it turns out that the USA has remote killswitches in literally every chip they'd sold post-sanctions. Which they originally put it in stop anyone deciding to crush the USA, and which is technically now being used for that exact purpose, just nobody expected that "anyone" was going to be aliens.
Anyway. Diversion over.
The overall plotline is that an alien invasion shows up from outer space. This isn't the normal "spaceships and greys with guns" invasion. The Chtorr are some kind of symbiotic hive-mind species, including fungal and worm creatures. There's no particular unified military action taken by them, they just kinda . . . colonize . . . and spread . . . and it's hinted that there's some kind of induct-humans-into-the-hivemind thing going on, and large sections of humanity start giving themselves freely over to the Chtorr menace and it's all very bad.
A big recurring theme here is the collapse of civilization and the dehumanization caused thereby. This series does not pull punches; it is not a stars-and-stripes patriotic fight against the aliens (check out Doc Smith's Lensman series if you're into that, it's gloriously ridiculous), it's a bunch of disorganized guerillas who are trying to stop a force that cannot be stopped while under siege from opportunists and warlords and everything else that you would expect from the fall of humanity.
There's murder. There's rape. There's torture. And there's pedophilia.
One of the plotlines is the main character visits . . . god, I don't remember the details. An orphanage? It turns out that the leader has been raping the kids, and they're like, "aw hell nah" and kill the guy and save the kids to bring back to their town. That night, one of the kids crawls into the main character's sleeping bag and asks to have sex, and the main character is all like "aw hell nah" but the kid is insistent and so the main character basically flees the tent and goes to talk to the group leader.
The group leader says, paraphased,
And the main character goes back and has sex with the kid.
(Fade to black, obviously, it doesn't go into detail.)
I just want to reiterate that I'm not making this up.
I actually think this is a really good series overall. It's uncomfortable to read - excruciatingly so - but that's kind of the point, yeah? It's asking what atrocities humans do in a situation like this, it's asking what atrocities are justifiable in this situation. Do I think the main character made the right choice? Fuck, I don't know! But that's great. Seriously, I read this book twenty years ago, it's stuck with me the entire time, I still don't know what the right solution is!
But this is the book that Chtorrr chose to name herself after.
And if David Gerrold was posting The War Against The Chtorr on Reddit, I guarantee that Chtorrr would be banning it.
I don't really have a conclusion here; this entire situation is just ridiculous.
I did allude to it once by linking to the cover of War Against the Chtorr. I have never read the books, though.
As for that scene: it strikes me as some really fucked up sublimation. Like, "Can I construct a scenario in which fucking a child is actually the right thing to do, and then write it convincingly into my sci fi novel?" is Piers Anthony territory.
That was my assessment as well, when I came across it. The actual alien ecology parts of the books were completely fascinating and deeply compelling, and a lot more of the books had to do with the psychological breakdown of the surviving human populations... but it was all shot through with the sleaziest, grimiest 70s sexual ethics, the sort of sex-positivity that comes with a metaphorical bad combover and a sweaty upper lip. That part in particular was a bridge too far for me, but quite a few of the other parts left me feeling vaguely ill. At maximum charity, some of that might have been the author's intention, but no thanks either way.
Gerrold did develop his writing chops in the seventies.
Maybe that's why he stopped - he knows his style isn't going to be accepted anymore?
Similarly with John Varley's Eight Worlds stories, which had a similar '70s libertarian field; the last one was decades ago.
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