Malazan Empire: amphibian - Viewing Profile - Malazan Empire

A rather fun and interesting list of recent-ish SFF to read: https://www.rd.com/l...y-books/#card-1

 the broken, on 17 January 2025 - 02:20 AM, said:

I do want to (gently) respond to this.

Good and ethical reporting of sexual assault takes a long time. There's a need to not re-traumatize the person or people telling the story by making them hurriedly relive, retell, and to some level, re-experience what happened. There's a need to fact check and verify and find substantial context beyond what is told on the page in order to fully understand what happened and to some degree, why it happened. There's a need for checking by legal counsel, editors, and the publisher's leadership team.

And often, there is a need for breaks in the process because covering sexual assault takes a toll on people's mental health. I know this particularly well because a friend was an Assistant District Attorney handling child abuse cases for 4 years. He did his best, yet the experience of that was arduous for everyone involved and there's a big list of reasons why most people rotate in and out of those kinds of assignments.

Doing all of these things right for the people harmed and for those handling the story, investigation, or the prosecution takes time. All too often, the police, attorneys and courts handling investigations/prosecution bungle this and hurt even more the people who've been hurt. There's a passel of bad reasons why some people forgot reporting sexual assault to the formal justice system and we as a society haven't done a great job of addressing those.

Getting a fast story out isn't worth the damage and hurt that usually causes.

His movies were much closer to like... alt reality in which aliens attempt to be people than they were people doing story things we're more used to.

Cool things, totally get how people bounce off them.

Vandermeer can get out of pocket sometimes. I think Scalzi's post is late in coming and uneven in what it says.

The parts that I object to are the specific enumerations of how Gaiman helped him personally and then focusing on the other "friends of Gaiman" going through the same thing much more than the people who Gaiman likely hurt directly.

Talking about the two things at the same time is not ideal without something that connects to the people who've been hurt - who are the epicenter of this much more than the fandom or friends.

Scalzi actually had some good points about how it's difficult to be someone who was a friend and now must change that because of the hurt that person did to others, but... did they have to be surrounded by the other things in that post?

Gaiman helped people and comforted many more. That part of him was real - and I just finished a book by Brust where Gaiman is specifically thanked in the post notes. It's just that the same guy doing that stuff also did these terrible things that are skeevy and dumb even in the best possible light, as Scalzi put it.

There's a lot of words being put out there about how people have to recalibrate friendships etc and I think most are going to be coupled with very little action - much like the Zimmer Bradley situation or the Alice Munroe situation etc. I'm particularly prizing those who are taking actions to support victims, to speak up about increased needs for rules at cons and tours etc. I think Vandermeer has done those things, so I don't look too harshly at his being out of pocket here.

I think my decision to remove Gaiman from my library has to do with how he made several noticeable elements of his abuse as a child into the Ocean book and abuse of others into elements of The Sandman. They are not super subtle and they are there alongside redemptive themes that now have an overtone of creepy rather than the uplifting tone they once had without this knowledge.

Palmer has something going on where she must be the sun around which others orbit in an unhealthy way and it fed into this - and likely her own poor treatment of people as well.

There's many spokes of this that go into how comic and fantasy fans need to have organizational structures that protect them as fans more than what currently exists (that's going to require reformation of conventions and book tours a bit), how easy it is for people to somewhat abet the horrible conduct, and how old this phenomenon is within the American/English fantasy field.

Similar things were happening with Marion Zimmer Bradley and her somehow even worse husband before they got married in Berkeley. I think there has been progress since the Bradley days or the Asimov days, but it's not enough and the people/authors who've been tolling the bell for further action on protecting fans, authors, and the staff even more are right. We need to do more and it may start with reforming cons, book tours, and so on with contracts/clauses/expectations of behavior that exclude relationships or hook-ups with fans.