Someone On The Internet Is Wrong (Pt 2)

Looking2daStars (aka, The Trilobite) has commented to me:

Hi. Trilobite in question here.

I enjoy the irony of this. I post a story to defend a comic series and a heroine - which and whom I enjoy most of the time - after someone else posts a commentary that painted a picture of every single Red Sonja comic being just like this.

I attempt to explain the story fully and lend some context that Red Sonja isn't just killing a baby for the hell of it - she is KILLING a demonic being that just tried to kill her.

Then again, I'm of the old CCA school where demon = monster = okay to kill. I score high on the Zombie Survival test too - the one where it asks how comfortable you'd be shooting loved ones who had fallen to the legions of the damned?

I admit: That Batman analogy was not the best. I tried to use irony to prove a point and the point got lost in the shock value.

Apparently I need to say this, so I'll say it: I am NOT in favor of rape. I realize that rape is a VERY BAD THING.

That said, I still do not understand why anyone who has a problem with rape and violent imagery would be reading a book like Red Sonja. If you don't like that kind of thing, fine. You don't have to read it. But by that token, you shouldn't go posting images from a book you don't like and then go treating it like those exact instances are commonplace within that title.

I do think you have a point on how cliche it is that when a female character goes evil, she becomes bloodthirsty and sleeps around. However, in this case, I think it works since Sonja is so well known for being chaste and using violence as a last resort. It's meant to show just how much she changed in the alternate reality. Cliche, yes... but sometimes cliches work.

Regardless, I can't help but think that you didn't read anything else I wrote before you concluded that I had my nutsack used to replace my brain. I'm actually a long-time WFA contributor and have had work published in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Feminist carnivals... including an article about Red Sonja's status as a feminist icon and the issues behind her origin.

I still laugh at the irony: that I try to encourage people to look at the whole of a story before judging it and I now find myself being judged as the next Mad Thinker or anon a mouse by people who won't read the whole of my body of work.

Ah well. Your choice.

My Response:

Dear Trilobite Of The Stars,

It's all well and good to pull out your feminist credentials at the right moment. This is not the right moment. You sound a lot like a white guy who goes 'But I've read Frederick Douglas and Malcom X and I got an essay published in an African American magazine. I can't be racist or full of privlege.'

ZMallet was pointing out a trope, one you just agreed with in your comments to me - Female heroine turns evil, wears black, sleeps around, kills indiscriminately.

His post points out that trope storyline is a WHATIF. His context makes it clear the storyline is not one he finds appealing as a story OR as a whatif.

He has comments to someone else who went 'eew, I so agree to the eeewh'wherein he points out this isn't standard for the comic or the regular writers. But oh yeah, this one shot is full of eewh.

And then you get up on your podium and begin to say that he manipulated things in order to point out the eewh, and the trope and you use words like 'motivation for the rape' and then wonder why the women you know, or who know about you are all cutting their eyes and telling you to crawl back into your cave and pick off your own fleas.

If you act like a Mad Thinker, even once, you get treated like a Mad Thinker. And you get thought about differently. Show your ass in public and people will label you a baboon and baffoon and other b words, like bastard.

But you had individuals willing to talk to you, to point things out. I'm not one of them, but they did exist. Yet you continued to defend said action and to treat the women who were trying to point out the fallacy of your argument as if they were hysterical, irrational or too traumatized and squeamish about rape to listen to any point. And so you ended up talking to an audience of one, yourself.

Now it's very egalitarian of you to treat Zmallet as you then treated those women, or perhaps it was you treated those women as you treated Zmallet; exactly even, precisely and with no difference. But I believe a jackass brays just as loudly to anybody.