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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Thanks to @TheBookOfAllan, I decided maybe Twitter slapfights about fantasy authors might not be Too Online to talk about here. I mean, let's face it, the nerd quotient here is pretty damn high. On the rare occasions I write a top-level post, it's usually about the intersection of Culture War squabbles and hobby drama. So -

First They Came for the Fantasy Authors

Brandon Sanderson, in case you don't recognize the name, is a best-selling fantasy author. In impact on the genre today, he's probably second only to George R. R. Martin. He famously finished Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, and he churns out new books at a rate that makes Stephen King look lazy.

(I have read quite a few of his books, and find them reliably entertaining, but Sanderson is a mediocre writer whose schtick is rigorously-defined magic systems and world-building, to the point that his books sometimes read like LitRPGs, and a big overarching cosmology called the "Cosmere" that unites every one of his series into his own personal MCU.)

Sanderson is also a Mormon. If you've noticed we're in the Culture War thread, you might have an inkling where this is going.

From time to time over the years, some LGBT folks have taken a run at Sanderson over his religion. In 2007 or so, he wrote a blog post offering a sort of milquetoast apologetic, basically saying he was totally cool with The Gays but he also believed in the divine revelations of his church so gay marriage is still a no-go, mmkay? He's been under continual pressure by fans to "update" his views, and he kind of has, saying he continues to "learn and grow." He's tossed a few gay and trans characters into his stories, and he's even written a FAQ: How Do You Feel About Gay Characters?. However, he remains a practicing Mormon, continues to tithe to the LDS, and has very carefully never actually walked back the belief that homosexuality is a sin.

So how has he avoided getting the Orson Scott Card/JK Rowling treatment? Well, for one thing, Sanderson is a genuinely nice guy who is affable with everyone, loves his fans, is very encouraging of new authors, and most importantly, generally avoids any kind of culture war and does not get into Twitter fights. He's got legions of defenders, and most of them accept his bland statements of tolerance and acceptance. It's pretty obvious that he does not personally dislike gay people, and I'm sure he would be thrilled if the LDS elders announced tomorrow that they just received a new revelation from God that He's totally cool with The Gays.

For most people, this is sufficient. There are people who are zealous and dogmatic about everything their church teaches, and there are those who clearly struggle sometimes with a religious doctrine that conflicts with their personal feelings. Most people recognize that everyone wrestles with cognitive dissonance, think "live and let live" is good enough, and if they like Brandon Sanderson despite disagreeing with his religious beliefs, they'll recite "no ethical consumption under capitalism" or "how to be a fan of problematic things."

Most people, but not Gretchen Felker-Martin.

Gretchen Felker-Martin is a transwoman with a single published book: Manhunt. If you wanted to create a hostile caricature of an unpleasant leftist conflict theorist who checks every stereotype, you'd have a hard time finding a better archetype. Think trans Arthur Chu with a foothold in SFF.

Manhunt is about (caveat - I haven't read it, this is what I gathered from reviews) a plague that turns all cis men into feral zombies, and in the post-apocalypse, brave stunning transfolx battle for survival against cismen and TERF hordes. (Yes, seriously.) They also harvest testicles for hormones or something, there's a ton of graphic rape and murder, and also apparently there's a throw-away line about JK Rowling being burned alive in her mansion.

Manhunt was published by Tor, which also, incidentally, publishes Brandon Sanderson.

So, a few days ago, Felker-Martin posted this tweet. (ETA: Hilariously, Twitter's new "added context by readers" feature is now defending Sanderson. I wonder how enraging that is to Felker-Martin?)

In itself, this would be hardly a skirmish in the Culture War. Trans woman doesn't like a Mormon author, wants to cancel him, writes stupid Tweet. It looks an obvious move to try to kneecap a rival, but Felker-Martin probably bit off too much to chew this time and has mostly been mocked for presuming to have some sort of gatekeeping role in deciding who SFF will "tolerate."

But - the reason I wrote this is because I've seen the Sanderson criticism take off a little bit, more than in previous attempts. His haters are really trying to give it legs. The Midnight Society, for example, is a woke satirist who is actually, pretty funny most of the time with really on-point skewerings of SFF and horror authors (except when taking obligatory swipes at JK Rowling by portraying her as a slithering snake hissing about Jewssss and transsss), and this tweet started out great (a completely deserved send-up of Sanderson's tropes) before shifting to an unsubtle signal-boost of the discourse started by Felker-Martin.

Twitter and Reddit seem to have an awful lot of "Hey, did you know Brandon Sanderson is a Mormon?" threads. (It is amazing to me that there are people who've been reading his books for years and had no idea - he does not make it a secret, and also I guessed by the end of the first Mistborn trilogy that the author was a Mormon without knowing anything about him.)

You can see all the usual arguments being recycled: "Should we cancel all Mormon/Catholic/Christian authors then?" (Felker-Martin: "Unironically, yes.") "It's just his personal belief, has nothing to do with how he treats gay people." ("But he TITHES and that means he is funding the LDS's Anti-Gay Death Camps!")

So woke fandom tried to take a scalp and overreached (this time), because while Tor is pretty darn woke, they're still not going to drop one of their biggest cash cows. Yet.

Can You Cancel a Bestseller?

Not literally, no. But can you hurt even a big name? Yes.

JK Rowling is still mega-rich, still a best-selling author, still beloved in most of the world. Yet I'm sure it does sting, even if she never says so publicly, that she and her books will never be celebrated again without an asterisk, that Harry Potter fandom tries to put her name in small print if at all, that she will never be reunited with the stars who she saw grow up and considered friends, until they were forced to denounce her. (Though in Emma Watson's case, it doesn't seem like much forcing was needed.)

They might not be able to Voldemort Brandon Sanderson, but being turned into a homophobic villain who is reviled by fandom and no longer invited to conventions would definitely hurt him. More cynically, Felker-Martin might know that Sanderson was too big a target, but that much smaller Mormon (and Catholic and Baptist, etc.) authors might be intimidated.

(Which makes me tempted to say, "Okay, now do Muslims," but there are only a handful of Muslim SFF authors I know of. The most famous is probably Gwendolyn Willow Wilson, an American Karen who converted to Islam and writes the Ms. Marvel comic book series. Saladin Ahmed wrote a few fantasy novels and also the Miles Morales Spider Man. Amal El-Mohtar is very in with the woke Hugos crowd. All of them apparently believe that Mohammad was totally cool with The Gays. It will be interesting to see if an actual tradcon Muslim ever tries to break into the industry.)

The Midnight Society

Sanderson: haha no no you got it all wrong

Sanderson: I don’t personally hate gay people

Sanderson: I simply support an institution that wants to kill them

Sanderson: I think they’re neat

Sanderson: if it were up to me, they wouldn’t be exterminated at all

Sanderson: but jeez, guys, who am I to tell the Mormon church it’s wrong?

Sanderson: I really don’t have any choice here other than to keep tithing them millions of dollars

Sanderson: my hands are tied

Orson Scott Card: oh yeah totally very relatable

Barker: haha that sucks, man

Sanderson: look, I know you all think I’m some sort of bogeyman for giving millions of dollars to a church that wants to kill queer people

It's pretty sad that wokes are just about the only people who take religious commitments on their face (though I'm not sure if LDS doctrine specifically can be interpreted as demanding to kill all gays and queers, over basic Christianity, so it seems that what earns Mormons extra ire is having a functional Church this late into the game). Of course online wokes do it in bad faith (pun not intended), knowing well they won't ever be touched and just holding theists to task for their professed beliefs. And they succeed in wringing out apologies and clear signs of internal conflict and guilty conscience. This doesn't satisfy them, but this gives the lie to the notion that any theist beliefs which are seriously, consequentially divergent from the mainstream morality can be sustained. As a contemporary Christian, you cannot be in the world but not of it: your peers will recognize your seriousness as edgelord behavior, your children (if you find a partner) will cringe and apologize for their backward parent, and your faith will be reduced to a notional identity marker in a generation.

What goes around comes around. When, as a minority, you cast off the protective membrane of contempt for infidels, they dissolve you. The Haredim will prosper – in their unashamedly bigoted communities, under the umbrella of people bound to them by ethnic obligation. The Amish will survive as well, conditional on their continued legal recognition in the US. Everyone else...

In 1930, before marrying Marietta, von Neumann was baptized into the Catholic Church.[69] Von Neumann's father, Max, had died in 1929. None of the family had converted to Christianity while Max was alive, but all did afterward.[70]

I wouldn't read too much into this example. "[outgroup] literally wants to kill all [ingroup]" is a very common culture war hyperbole. Even if it's not literally true, no-one on your own team is going to question it, and it's a good way to rally the troops.

Just try searching Reddit comments for the string "literally want us dead" and you'll see plenty of examples:

And lest you think it's exclusively a blue tribe thing, here are a few examples of "liberals literally want conservatives dead" from right wing subreddits: 1, 2, 3. These are somewhat rarer, but Reddit has considerably more left-wing users and communities, so we can't necessarily draw a conclusion about which side uses this rhetorical tactic more.

Whether someone "literally wants us dead" is a fact-specific question. Even if not many people on a side literally literally want you dead, there's the question of how often and how directly a side says they want you dead, whether they encourage or discourage this rhetoric, and how much bad faith that rhetoric indicates.

It's not a foregone conclusion that, by this standard, the right and left equally want each other dead. If you ask a conservative why he thinks liberals want him dead, he's probably going to point to statements that are fairly close to "all conservatives should die". If you ask a trans activist and the trans activist points to suicide rates, that's not the same kind of thing. Even if neither side is likely to go on a shooting spree, so neither side literally wants the other dead, this isn't the same kind of "wants us dead" and is not symmetrical.

The left saying that conservatives "want us dead" is related to the strategy of demanding that victims must be listened to and their wishes must be obeyed. So you get things like "the right doesn't want us to do X, and that may result in people dying, so they want us dead". You don't see this much on the right.

statements that are fairly close to "all conservatives should die".

Any examples?

What? The previous post has three links to conservatives saying that liberals want them dead. I'm not sure about the first, but the second is "They call everyone who disagrees with them "Nazis" so that they can dehumanize them and justify literally any action against them." and the third is in response to a SWATting, which literally literally tries to get someone killed, as in actually pushing up daisies in a coffin buried in the ground. These are fundamentally different from "the right promotes policies that increase suicide rates so they want us killed".

If left wing people referring to conservatives as Nazis is 'fairly close to "all conservatives should die"', then surely the same could be said of conservatives referring to liberals as groomers.

He's saying that because the context is that if someone is a Nazi, you are permitted to do anything to them you want, including things that are normally not okay to do to people. Even if the liberal wouldn't actually shoot someone for being a Nazi, he's saying that it's okay to hurt them; this is in a different ballpark than "they are increasing the risk of suicide".

I don't get the impression that conservatives, by calling people groomers, are saying "so it's okay to do anything you want to hurt them". If you think they are, fair point.

I think people who sexually abuse children are at least as hated by the general public as Nazis. Read an article on Reddit about pedophilia/child molestation and it's not uncommon to see upvoted comments wishing for pedophiles to be tortured or executed in a gruesome fashion - "punch a Nazi" is tame by comparison.

If the argument is about the mental state of the sides using these epithets being different - i.e. both sides label their opponents as members of a group which is universally reviled and seen as deserving of violence, but the left does it with the goal of opening the door to violence and the right does it with some other goal - then I'm curious what leads you to this conclusion.

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Ah, I may have misread your comment. When you said 'point to statements' I thought you meant they'd point to specific statements that liberals or whoever actually had made, and that you were implying that that did actually happen.

If someone tries to literally literally kill you, surely it counts as a statement that they want you dead?