Clock strikes Midnight

The Ingredients of Shakespeare 

This comic appears in the latest issue of The Southampton Review.

Looking for inspiration? I have a new book on ideas and creativity: abramsbooks.com/shapeofideas

Previously, I’d only seen the first two panels and assumed it was the complete comic.

Yes, this stuff is still going on. I was hoping it would have ended after this, but it hasn’t, and being called a bitch whore murderer gets wearing fast when it’s based on nothing.

Look, frank talk about this stuff on Tumblr is often discouraged — when you have a small but pretty active group of “haters,” as happens nowadays to most successful creators, especially women, the general rule of thumb is not to talk to or about them. Blocking them on twitter excites them: it’s attention. Replying is pointless, explaining is deliberately misinterpreted, the truth is a lie, lies are truth, up is down, winning is losing. You can’t win in this situation, anyway: nobody can or does, everyone loses. The creators, the fandom, those caught in the middle (actors, etc.) Everyone.

This business about me killing Alec isn’t a rumor. It’s a lie. A purposeful lie told to make a point: that I am a bad person unworthy of my creations and that if I am a bad enough person, it’s okay to say they don’t belong to me, that I didn’t create them, that there is essentially no value in the act of creation, especially when it is done by a woman.

As we all know but mostly don’t talk about because If You Speak It They Will Come, there is a small group of anti-TMI-book fans who believe the books and the show are at war.  (They are not the show’s fans. They are something else entirely. I talk to perfectly nice show fans all the time: these are less people who love Shadowhunters than people dedicated to the idea that if they scream about it long enough, the show will cease being based on this particular book series: an ultimately doomed goal that nevertheless leaves them plenty of opportunities to annoy the rest of us.) Instead of being able to accept that art is partly subjective, they are in a constant battle for an imaginary moral high ground in which they are the keepers of a version of the Mortal Instruments that has been objectively purified of all problematic elements. 

The problem there being, of course, that there is no such thing as perfect, unproblematic media. Art comes from humans and humans are flawed. If you expect perfection you will be bitterly disappointed every single time: I’ve watched it happen over and over, as the this showrunner is a gift tag turns into the This showrunner is not a gift tag,  and many of those who last year spoke glowingly of wrapping Ed Decter, their unproblematic hero (who once said to me in wonder, “You really worked a miracle with Malec, you know, people care about them as if they were a normal couple”), in cotton wool and fuzzy socks, now refer to Todd Slavkin as “Toad.”* Plenty of articles about the problematic elements of Shadowhunters have now been written and plenty of posts posted. (If Ed hadn’t been fired, he might have stuck around long enough to get called Ediot; these things are, after all, just a matter of time. (i get called “Casserole”, seriously, I am not kidding you, you cannot make this shit up.) ) 

To clarify: I am definitely NOT saying that a (potentially problematic) work should remain uncriticized to spare the feelings of the creators because they are flawed humans like everyone else. Criticism is valid; criticism is useful; criticism is important. What I am talking about in this post is not criticism. Telling a creator that her creations should be taken away from her because she “doesn’t deserve them”: not criticism. Making up funny names and mean hashtags for creators you don’t like: obviously hilarious for some, but definitely not criticism. And to some extent everyone knows this – so if it’s important to you that a creator be denied the right to claim ownership of, and pride in, her own work, it has to be because she is not just problematic but corrupt, evil, and cruel. She has to be morally bankrupt such that removing her from the narrative of her own creation is a moral good.

And so the lie that I’m planning to kill Alec (framed within the true narrative that killing off LGBT+ characters is a serious fucking problem in media) is a natural development: because wouldn’t that be awful and mean the books were morally very bad and wrong and shouldn’t creators who create bad wrong things have their creations taken away from them? Which would be just another Misogyny Tuesday on the internet except for the fact that it’s exploiting the fears of a vulnerable group of people (LGBT+ fans for whom Alec means a lot, in whatever format – fans who have seen over and over LGBT characters die for nothing, for shitty reasons, for straight people, on TV and in movies and in comics and in books and are therefore in a place to be incredibly hurt by it happening again), to score a point in what is basically a ship war. And that is really shitty.

And yes, it’s a ship war.

There was really a “salty casserole” joke in there begging to be made. Missed opportunity!

So, why am I salty, you might ask? There is this belief that I must be Upset With The Show because people care about Malec on it more than Clace: my friends, the field where I grow my fucks is barren on this topic. I made up both couples. I don’t care which one you ship more, especially in a format where their story is not being told by me and for all I know, the showrunners don’t even want you shipping Clace at the moment. They seem into Climon and oh God, I have bored myself with this tangent.

I invented Clace and Malec. I’m writing a trilogy about Malec because I love Malec and have a story in my head about them, despite being offered three times the money to write one about Clace, as they’re “more marketable.” I do not have a favorite. Maybe writing works that way for some people but I doubt it. I’ve always said I don’t ship in my own books, and that is precisely what I meant. 

Moving on: Are there things that have upset me about the show and the way it was developed? Yes — being told my mostly-female audience wasn’t a desirable one because they’re female; the fact that the female artist of color who created the runes has never been paid or credited for their use; being told Isabelle was “tits and ass”, being told Alec being gay was “a strike against his likeability”, contractual shit you will never know about because that stuff isn’t public — but for some reason I’m supposed to give a flying fuck about who ships what canon couple on the show? For viewers, as it should be, this is a TV show: for me this is part of my brand and has real-world consequences for my life. Unsurprisingly I care about those, not some imaginary ship war.

I was thrilled Shadowhunters won a GLAAD award for Magnus and Alec.  (I was thrilled when the movie of Mortal Instruments got a GLAAD award nomination for Magnus and Alec though there was so little of them in the movie, it served to really underline the paucity of LGBT+ storylines in major film and tv.) I congratulated Matt and Harry on twitter; the comments below mine are something of a primer in why female creators are fleeing the internet in greater and greater numbers.

https://twitter.com/cassieclare/status/848497330999369729

The message is overwhelmingly: “Shut up, bitch, how dare you open your mouth and remind us that this show exists because your books do, even though you didn’t actually say that but you see, we like to pretend you’re dead and it’s inconvenient when you speak.” I’d imagine every one of those commenters would tell you they were a feminist, too. The idea that nothing is gained by shutting up women or denying that their intellectual property has worth or value is apparently one that seems good in the abstract, but falls at the first hurdle of but I don’t like her.

The abstract often does fail when it comes into conflict with the concrete. Being a feminist ally means being an ally even to women you don’t like, because being an ally only to people you like requires no effort and less thought. That doesn’t mean never criticizing women or their work. But it does require interrogating what’s going on in your own head. One of the most unpleasant haters I see on twitter, who viciously loathes me though we have never met, has read all my books; she has Malec in her username, and a quote from the books in her bio. She has Cassandra Jean’s art on her twitter page, and Valerie Freire’s rune designs in her text and background. That’s a lot of mental and artistic real estate devoted to the work of three women she refers to as 
“garbage trash.” (Though I think Cassandra Jean and Val are mostly garbage trash because they associate with me and should instead have waited ten years for the TV show to come along so they could draw pictures of it or something. I don’t really understand it: the cognitive dissonance that allows to you dedicate your life to “Malec” while crapping on the person who created both characters and their relationship is so enormous that I can only follow it so far and no farther. I understand thinking that the show version is better, but not whatever warped fantasy tells you that if the books had never been written the show (now called “Evilchasers” perhaps) would have heroically found a way to invent the  story of a gay demon-fighting warrior and his biracial warlock boyfriend anyway because that very specific story was floating around the ethereal planes waiting to be discovered by the psychic powers of Disney and it is only by great misfortune that I got to it first.) Point being: if your username is “Bubbles loves Malec” yet your twitter is dedicated to spewing venom at the person without whom the thing you love would not exist, it might be time to ask yourself some questions about cause and effect, and also, what that hate of yours is doing for you, psychologically speaking.

Look, I am going to get a lot of shit for this post, but whatever — the upside of being constantly screamed at for things you have not done (slut-shamed Isabelle, planned to murder Alec, thus contributing to the fucking awful homophobic trope of killing off gay characters, “stabbed the actors in the back”, promoted incest, poisoned the earth’s water supply) is that you no longer bother worrying about being screamed at for things you did do. I won’t do set visits or conventions since coming back from NY Comicon to stuff like this:  

I’m not going to comment on the specifics, save to say they represent a massive and almost hilarious (though probably deliberate) misinterpretation of literally everything that happened on that panel. (If the network didn’t want book fans there, asking me questions, they wouldn’t have brought me there. I was there to do promotion for the show by talking about the show and the books — I am the author, and what the literal fuck else do you think they brought me there to talk about? The history of Belgian cabinet-making? They don’t think attention paid to the books takes away from the show: only a small group of asshats think that, and it’s weird that the OP never paused to think that if they didn’t want me there talking about the books, they could simply NOT HAVE INVITED ME. Also did it seriously never occur to them that panelists are asked to speak at certain junctures or in reference to certain questions, or gestured at to do so, we don’t just randomly interject? Lord.

I will admit it was extreme of Harry not to leave me lying there on the floor or maybe drop a chair on my head while no one was looking. He should reconsider his choices.)

But that’s the thing: posts like this one are the reason I haven’t gone back to set, or gone to another convention, or promoted the show. Would you go to a convention if you knew people like this were going to be feet away from you in the audience? I’m a grown-up, I can take being called Crummy Crabapple (did the whole kindergarten class vote on that one or was it a decision by fiat…?) but the sheer hate that underpins the silliness of the post makes the idea of being near people who think like that fairly shuddery. 

I gathered a few such posts together to show to FF, and the network’s never blamed me for not wanting to go out and physically promote again. The sad part of all this is that mostly I pretend the show doesn’t exist because the downside of mentioning it is being screamed at for days by asshats (Let me be very specific what I mean by “asshats” = people who send threats, who use insulting gendered language, make anti-Semitic slurs, and repeatedly tell me I should not be allowed to own my own work — if this is not stuff you do, I’m not talking about you. Criticism of the books is fine and irrelevant.) 

We all know these asshats exist — and we are all sad about it: me, the network, the actors, the showrunners, because the net result of them existing is that I don’t talk about or promote the show, and that’s a loss for a show that could really use that outreach. Losing me, my online audience, my worldwide publishers, as potential promotional partners is bad, not good, for a show that these people theoretically love. Losing the book fans the show depended on as viewers, but who can’t stand the toxic atmosphere, is bad, not good, for the actors and writers they claim to support. Screaming “INCEST FREAK!” at every twelve year old who comes online and timidly asks when they will see Chairman Meow is not going to raise the show’s ratings. If someone is more interested in driving away the show’s potential audience because they regard them as moral degenerates than they are in getting it renewed, that’s their bliss to follow, but the reason I’m mentioning these people at all is 1) I’m disturbed by the narrative women shouldn’t be allowed to own their own work and 2) many many posts have now been made about what an awful place the Shadowhunters/TMI fandom is, and that sucks for everyone. Sadly, it doesn’t take that many people to ruin an online space.

The idea that the books and the show are at war for kibbles is a fannish one (most people, including my publisher, regard TV shows based on books as advertising for those books because from a book perspective that’s what they are) seems to come out of the fact that fans argue about which they like better, something that has happened since the dawn of adaptations. I remember it from when I was in the Harry Potter fandom: Alan Rickman understood Snape better than JKR, the movies gave Draco more depth, etc and so on. Looking back now I can see the irony of people with usernames like Lupinfan talking about how Lupin was sidelined in the books but not the movies, but distance gives infinite perspective, I suppose. If you like Malec better on the show: awesome. They still exist on the show because they were invented in the books. That statement will be interpreted as the height of arrogance, but it’s just flat fact. They matter in both formats to a lot of people. There will never be a hand of God that reaches down from the sky and declares either one better. It will always be a matter of taste and opinion. The fact that art is subjective is something we all have to live with.

This is what I mean about the “killing Alec” lie: it has become part of the justification for my unworthiness to claim to have anything to do with my own characters. Killing Alec would be a bad thing to do to Alec (and Magnus); thus I would be terribly maltreating Alec (and Magnus); thus I don’t deserve to have anything to do with Alec (or Magnus). Thus it is okay to tell me to get the fuck out – how dare I even open my bitch mouth to congratulate the actors playing my characters if I would do something so terrible to them, after all? And who cares if it’s a lie and no one can source it? (Come on now, be real — no one tried.)

Whether I deserve Alec and Magnus is somewhat beside the point: I invented them regardless, and there was a large and profoundly intense Malec fandom before the show ever aired, whose existence is in fact directly responsible for the fact that Malec are a thing on the show at all. (Initially, neither of them appeared or were even referred to in the pilot.) Reality doesn’t really intrude into the fantasy that Magnus and Alec and Isabelle and Jace descended, pre-created, from a sky cloud, though: the fan/creator ownership dichotomy has existed since before Arthur Conan Doyle was bullied into bringing Sherlock back from the dead. Fans and creators don’t always agree and creators aren’t always right. What they are, however, always, is creators.

(In case I had forgotten that I am not, in fact, a hot dude actor. ASTONISHING INFORMATION.) It is mysterious to interpret congratulating actors as taking “credit for Matt and Harry’s hard work”;  I neither need or want that anyway because I am not an actor; I am already credited on the show as the author of the source material, which is what I am. (I’ve won plenty of book awards but would be very puzzled to win, say, a Nobel prize for chemistry.) I congratulated the actors knowing I’d get a raft of shit for either doing so or not doing so: I chose to do so despite the inevitable annoyance factor because I like Matt and Harry; I wanted them hired; I like how much they love the characters, and I’ve always found them to be kind people who would loathe and despise the kind of tweets these folks are sending on their behalf.

Ironic, that.

But yeah, I also sent it because I’m proud of Malec. Deal with that. Women need to be allowed to be proud of their work sometimes without that being considered a deep evil. I don’t think the Magnus and Alec I created are perfect (by which I mean my writing of them, not their endearing flaws ;) but they represent years of work and love, and like any author would be, I’m thrilled to see the screen version of them acknowledged twice as something special. That’s very normal: for the GLAAD win, I got flowers from my publisher, congrats from the network and from my agents at CAA, because why wouldn’t you congratulate an author on something good happening to an adaptation of their books? The idea that when discussing an adaptation of their work, an author should reel back in terror screaming “I AM UNWORTHY TO BE MENTIONED IN THE SAME SENTENCES AS THE CHARACTERS I CREATED!” is so bizarre to most people that if you tried to explain to them that some women, not all women hahaha of course, but SOME WOMEN JUST DONT DESERVE TO BE ALLOWED TO TALK OR CLAIM THEY CAN “OWN” THINGS AMIRITE, they would back quietly away muttering that they had an important appointment to get their hedgehog dyed blue because they would literally think you were probably a serial killer.

This situation is not unique to these books, to me, or to this show: however, there is a special angle to this particular situation. Many commenters on all this have noted that the books are a female creation, the show a male one. Ed, Todd, Michael, Matt, McG, and Darren are all men, and in many ways, people find it much more comfortable, much easier, and much simpler to give uncritical admiration to men. They’re men, and therefore they have authority I don’t, and my continued existence as the author of the source material of Shadowhunters is seen as even more horrible because it makes it a girl thing, and “girl things” are less serious and less worthy. One of the things I often see the haters say is that the show is “older”; in fact the audience of the show is statistically younger than the book’s audience (I’ve seen the numbers) but I think it’s hard not to want to dismiss something so imbued with lady germs as being inherently inferior (and what’s more inferior than young women? It’s trendy to bash YA, which is seen as the province the young and the female – surely preferring men’s work makes you, you know, a more serious person? And surely if I had the sense God gave a weasel, I’d stop writing, give the book rights to some guy, and retire in shame? GO FORTH HARLOT AND WRITE YA NO MORE.)

Feminism does not mean you cannot criticize works by women. I’ve said that before, but I’m saying it again because it’s so easy to dismiss essays like this by saying “She’s hiding behind feminism and claiming we can’t criticize her because she’s a woman!” Nope. (Though it does mean you look for patterns. It’s kind of interesting there’s this small group of people who believe these characters/storylines really came alive when control of them was handed over to a series of ever-changing white middle-aged men. I mean, coincidence perhaps, but…?) I haven’t addressed criticism here really because it’s not the point: there is a huge gap between writing a bad review of a woman’s book and crusading for the idea that she shouldn’t be allowed to own her own intellectual property. Men taking away, literally taking away the money made from and authorship of women’s work is an ugly part of history (“Colette and [her husband] separated in 1906, although it was not until 1910 that the divorce became final. She had no access to the sizable earnings of the Claudine books [she had written]—the copyright belonged to him”) and it’s disturbing to see a group of primarily women argue that it should be repeated.

If the idea that a woman created Magnus and Alec, or any characters or world, is so horribly, terribly bothersome that you have to make up lies that, in your mind, render her unworthy of her own creation so that it’s all right to “take it from her” by discounting her role as a writer, her ownership of her own intellectual property, her right to exist as a person and to stand on the same stage at a convention as the “gem-like saint” male actors playing her characters —  maybe think about why?* What does screaming that I’d better not think Alec and Magnus have anything to do with me get you, really? Except the knowledge that if, one day, you write or create or draw something people love, you’ve helped create an environment in which it’s a veritable certainty you’ll get treated like you’re a piece of shit for doing it?

TomSka is Sad: The Cycle