Fallow Hearth

yeah I can't stop thinking about this either, ever since I first read it. There's so much going on. I read the first chapter of this book, and the tension that was so unbearable in it was "main character's uncle dies and main character's father talks about maybe keeping the inheritance from her" - that's the stressful plot point that couldn't be handled.

There's a version of this I see a lot in queer political arguments which I'm going to call Competing Ontological Needs. When two people need the same thing to be in two incompatible ontological categories. Or need the same thing to be logically impossible and not.

Now put like that obviously it's nonsense. Ontological categories are abstractions and where we draw their boundaries doesn't change the facts about the things in them. You can't *need* pluto to be a planet because no physical facts, either about pluto or about anything else, change depending on if pluto is "really" a planet or not.

But people sure do get really really scared and angry when they argue about what categories we should put different people and the things they do in! Obviously it makes sense to say "I categorize myself this way, and if you're not thinking about me with that same abstraction it means we don't understand eachother well which is sad". But the thing I see a lot is more concrete than that.

The common unspoken syllogism is "It is politically acceptable to do bad things to people if they are X, I don't want bad things to happen to me, so I need to not be an X". With variations like "if it was possible for Y to happen then it would be mandatory, Y is bad, thus I need to to not be possible for Y to happen". Or "Z is a good kind of thing to be, I dislike z, therefore z is not a kind of Z"

The fact it's unspoken sucks, because then you get into flaming rows where one party is making the totally pedestrian observation that someone has the characteristics of an X or that Y is totally possible, and the person they're talking to is reacting like this is a threat of immediate violence. Because if the unspoken syllogism were correct it totally would be! The prosecutor who argues that you're a murderer really is trying to commit literal violence against you by this argument! And in the ideal case is even morally correct to do so!

But often the unspoken syllogism doesn't work, or isn't universal, and so people get into arguments in which they need different things to be categorically true. And that sucks because settling arguments like that is even harder than settling ones about facts, and so often the apparent stakes are wildly different between participants.

It'd be really good if more of these could be defused by dismantling the syllogism. It doesn't need to be impossible for someone to change their sexuality, it just needs to not be mandatory. We don't need to argue about if this person is actually a woman, we can just stop doing bad things to her depending on which she is. We don't have to argue if AI can make "art" if we stop treating art as uniquely praiseworthy.

Especially when so many of the syllogisms are actually "in the 80s a political coalition made an argument that depends on X being Y, they won and did a really good thing, thus X must be Y". Which is extra insidious because if we take that as our argument then it's good to argue that X is Y *even if this is false and you know it's false*.

One of my app projects is for a wardrobe organiser, where I can catalogue all my clothes and save outfit combinations I've particularly liked. There are quite a few apps of this kind on the market, and I've even used a few, but none really had the feature I wanted which was to have the clothes represented by illustrations showing the structure of the garment (like the schematics on sewing patterns). Most of them are built around photographing your clothes then algorithmically removing the background. Which is fine... But not if you're curvy, like loose-fitting clothes, and wear mostly black. 90% of my favourite clothes look like amorphous black sacks on the hanger.

Tagging @mytly4 who also asked about this:

The problem comes from the fact that a lot of traditional SFF tropes—the invading orc hordes, the uninhabited exoplanet to settle, the adventurous archaeologist, the ancient aliens, the Lost World, the scary untamed wilderness—are rooted in colonialist adventure stories and attitudes from the 1800s and 1900s, and if you don’t really know what you’re doing with them it’s way too easy to accidentally just replicate their underlying colonialist and orientalist basis. Stargate is a famous example of this, but it’s missing the other half of the equation here: the desire to write something cozy, queer, uplifting, nice, and hopepunk.

When these two things crash together it can create some deeply unintended implications.

The problem with indie work in this space is that it has a tendency to be pretty conflict-averse, and it accomplishes this by presenting a protagonist or protag group who are nice as their primary defining characteristic. They’re nice, they’re good, they have correct and progressive beliefs, and narratively everything they do is framed as nice, good, and correct.

I wanted to contextualize what I’m talking about before I name specific works, to make it clear why I see this as a recurring issue. Links below go to more in-depth discussion of each example.