to be taken seriously, not literally

interpretation, good faith critique, and in-expertise

I recently ran across one of my articles on Reddit. This isn’t unusual for random news hits, but the opinion articles I write for io9 are usually so defanged that they rarely make waves. But this article: “Magic: The Gathering Is Making Racists Mad, and That's Good” struck a nerve. On this Reddit thread (which I won’t link to, but you can probably find it on a certain well-known rage-driven anti-page) were hundreds of comments about this article, tearing apart my opinion and questioning my logic, all ultimately in service of defending their fury that Wizards of the Coast had dared to publish a Magic: the Gathering set that depicted some Lord of the Rings characters with Black and African features.

Funny how it’s usually the work that focuses on race, gender, or sexuality that elicits these kinds of deeply impassioned critiques. Well. Not that funny. Not really funny at all.

One of the big sticking points for these folks is that I said ‘canon doesn’t matter’. I tried to make the point that it’s the ‘why’ behind creative decisions that matter, but frankly “canon is a fool’s stricture” is a banger of a line and I stand by it. The larger context is that Tolkien wrote the way he did because he was creating an alternativee European Mythology, a reaction against war, and an ode to English Christianity. Which is all great for him, but none of that matters to Wizards of the Coast, because Wizards didn’t partner with the Middle Earth Estate to increase public appreciation for Tolkien’s writing, and it does not, in fact, have any stake in the preservation of that canon whatsoever and nor should we expect it to.

(Wizards of the Coast partnered with Lord of the Rings to make money. That’s it. Everything else is simply a meander in the river. That is not the point of this blog, that’s just a fact.)

But nestled in this deluge about preserving the sanctity of whatever Tolkien’s intention with his original work might have been, was literally no talk whatsoever about whether or not Tolkien would have approved of any of this at all. I certainly don’t think he’d been keen to have his work on trading cards of any kind, especially not Magic: The Gathering. This argument would have rendered the rest of the fury moot—if the author would have hated all this on principle (something we really can’t know for sure) then how it was adapted doesn’t matter. It would just all be bad, and whether it was canon-compliant or not would be a matter of annoying side debate on forums.

Postulating on what Tolkien would have wanted out of a contemporary cash grab using his intellectual property wasn’t really up for debate; the points were that the author’s canon was sacrosanct and that MTG (and me, by extension) was clearly, obviously, disrespectful of the legacy. The book canon was being destroyed by alternative depictions of fictional characters regardless of the fact that these pieces of cardboard had been removed from all canon context. As folks debated the strictures of fools, it struck me that many people on this thread were really, deeply, almost existentially concerned with what the author wanted to convey with their storytelling… As long as that author wasn’t me.

The irony of reading these dozens, if not hundreds of comments, many of which said something along the lines of how “death of the author” is the best thing that ever happened to liberal critics, while also seeing my own words and ideas misrepresented and misidentified and mistaken definitely took a lot of the heat out of the vitriol these folks were slinging. ‘Intention matters’, is what they said over and over, ‘But only if that intention lines up with what I want to say, what I want to prove, what I’m trying to carve into stone’. Intention is, at best, an interpretative thing and at worst it’s a cudgel to shut down dissenting opinion.

There is simply no way to write legibly. It is all interpretive.

This is something I know intimately. I have often failed at making clear points. I have mixed up words, written metaphors when I should have been direct, made use of rhetorical devices that have absolutely been read as earnest, and just generally abused language to suit my own means. I try not to do it, I swear. I try to write in a way that is not only effective but affective, but sometimes I accidentally sacrifice one on the altar of the other.

We are learning new language constantly. Words, meanings, definitions, it all becomes mutable when viewed through our own individual interpretations. It’s up to folks like me, sad little writers with big ideas and too many words to choose from, to try to find ways to limit interpretation, to create a framework around the ideas that I want to convey, and hope that people find a meaning that aligns with mine.

In all of this, there is the assumption of Good Faith Readings. There are many people who will go into an article and, because of the nature of the headline, already knowing they will disagree with me, and will find something to get mad about. Or, they’ll see an editing error—most recently Gray Hawk instead of Greyhawk—and accuse me of rage baiting “on purpose,” which is not only very weird but speaks to the kind of strange relationship readers have with traditional media.

I try not to write with these people in mind—the aperture of my language will never give them a clear picture.

I am not so self-obsessed to think that I am writing in a way that everyone understands, and I’m not saying this as a kind of white flag against even attempting. But I often think about this kind of mis-firing of language, the scattershot ways that intention finds its mark, the way that meaning is a bullet that might not always make itself known until it is felt, a kind of instinctual understanding that’s hard to define.

Recently, I navigated back to Facebook (I tried to delete this last year but clearly did something wrong) and I had a personal message from someone I’ve never met. He insulted me (in that kind of odd, unserious way of anonymous commenters online) because of an article I wrote about Secret Invasion. Annoyingly, he didn’t even specify which article upset him. I wrote quite a few about that show, which was mediocre in a dozen different ways. But this offhanded comment, read in the middle of writing this newsletter, drove these points home—some people don’t care what you mean. They just care about telling you what they mean.

So I write for people who want to listen. Maybe they want to have a conversation with me, and maybe they’ll disagree with me at the end of it, but hopefully, these readers—the ones I really want to talk to—can understand, and respect, what I meant. I have ideas—so many ideas, but they are just ideas, and just mine. They don’t mean much without context, community, or understanding. I just want to be taken seriously, even if there is literally nobody out there who can understand me—or really any other person—literally.

Oh well. There’s always another word to try.