very low gravitas warning

it is also widely accepted that women get raises less often because they don't ask as much as men. this is objectively not true.

it is also widely accepted that women are more talkative than men. this is objectively not true.

it is also widely accepted that women are taken less seriously when speaking because their speech patterns are associated with a "lack of confidence". this is objectively not true. [1][2][3]

every time we talk about gender discrimination, people look for an explanation that starts with women's behavior.

and every fucking time, actual research shows that across the board, women actually don't behave that differently from men.

Rules: make a poll with your ten favourite movies. They can be just ten movies you enjoyed seeing, or your ten favourite movies of all time, and tag some people.

WebCrawler, back before Y2K.

fiction is not reality is a thing we're all used to hearing by now. it is usually said with the general intention of conveying that because fiction is not real the events conveyed in fiction should not have to conform to our standards for judging behavior in reality

but we can also switch it around and say: reality is not (most genre) fiction

which i think is useful, in the context of the red flag/green flag being used as labels for characters instead of labels for behaviors

because see the thing is, in reality, you don't get to know

you don't get to know why people are really doing things. you don't get to know what people are really thinking. you don't get to know how it ends

that's why flagging behavior is useful. because it correlates with things that are important to know. treats a waiter like shit? red flag! spends every weekend at the casino? red flag! chokes you while having sex without asking? red flag! almost murders a person right in front of you? RED FLAG!

but in (most genre) fiction*, you, the reader/watcher, do get to know. you get to know how it ends (the completed quest, the solved mystery, the happily ever after**), and you get to know things even before you reach the end. the knowing is alive from the moment your engagement with that piece of media begins. the knowing shapes interpretation

the knowing shapes interpretation. take, for example, a long, long look between enemies who are the biggest two characters. is it enmity or is it attraction? well, action flick? probably only enmity (setting aside exciting erotic subtext). romance? it can and should read as both, in an open textual way

for another example, closer to red flag discourse: a hothead gets into a fist fight to defend their love interest's honor. is it a bildungsroman ft the hothead? could be a growing moment about managing emotions, especially anger. is it a romance? most reader/viewers know to view it within genre and not decide that this is a guy who has anger issues which need to be addressed in-text truly, i want to say, no shade on using the terminology red flag/green flag. like, yes, it's an evolution of when it was more accurately used it to describe behaviors, not people. but also: i openly say i love red flag MLs, so like, i'd be the pot calling the kettle black here if i disapproved of using the terms at all. i wrote this not because i hate the terminology but because i think this is one of the pain points inside the discourse

because romance is genre fiction, a character who displays any number of red flag behaviors can still be known with absolute certainty to be completely safe for their love interest. the reader gets to know for sure the interiority of the character because they get to view and observe and root for that character in the context of a fictional romance which has implicit rules of acceptable behavior***. the readerly certainty, due to genre, of the genuine love they bear their lover and the likelihood that all suspicion/aggression will be transformed into gentle love means the trust comes for free

i think xie zheng in pursuit of jade is basically a perfect example of a character well-designed to exploit the readerly knowledge and thus confuse the discourse. in the text, he almost murders a man out of rage, which anyone sane would be very afraid of, but the viewer is confident in the knowledge that that violent capacity will never be turned on fan changyu herself. so: red flag behavior, 'red flag' as a person if you're inside the text itself without viewer knowledge, and... kinda a 'green flag' character if the viewer's (completely genre-correct) confidence and trust in him is measured. cue massive rhetorical disconnect there's actually, by the way, a genre i love which is all about not knowing for sure. your classic midcentury gothic romance, where the heroine is stuck in a giant creepy house with two handsome guys, but one's a murderer. this is a genre that is 100% about reading red flags - but genre-adjusted red flags, of course. often the heroine has some nice foreshadowing dreams and creepy shivers when they talk to people, which should be read very much in earnest as flags. i'm also certain that very few people who commonly use 'green flag' would ever use 'green flag' to describe love interests in these novels, because the genre depending on not knowing voids the general readerly advantage honestly, after writing all this i'm a little sad. because there's obviously a difference between a xie zheng and a qi min on screen as a viewer, and i think that that's often what people sort of mean by calling xie zheng a green flag. he's not a qi min. genre and reader knowledge of qi min has determined that he will not be a good partner to his true love (despite being very in love). but i think it's all unsolvable because language is unsolvable anyway soo yeah i guess the good part of language being unsolvable, though, is that i can say, "fiction is not reality" and "reality is not fiction" and have those two phrases mean different things fiction is not reality because fiction, by not being real, can explore things that in reality we wouldn't want explored and reality is not fiction because in reality, you don't get to know ----------- caveats/notes

*of course there is a huge caveat here for literature which is told entirely externally via action (older works of fiction esp pre-modernity can be this way) or literature which explores opacity of intent and unreliable narrators. but neither are common in standard genre fiction **since i'm currently a cdrama blog i will say, in romance cdramas you don't always get to know whether it ends happily loool

Also see:

Commentary & full zine transcript

My previous writing about RSS & feed readers

Even more RSS:

Another excellent RSS zine by Aud McNamee & A. Service

RSS explainer by Nicky Case