Don't Feed the Trolls by Erica Kudisch
Apr. 12th, 2017 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroDaphne has just won a major award for her performance in her MMORPG of choice, Eternal Reign. Unfortunately, in doing so, she committed the crime of appearing female on the internet and the wolves descended. It’s “love in a time of GamerGate.” Fortunately, this is a romance novel, so it’s a reasonable assumption that by the end our hero will manage to find love, if nothing else. And that they won’t be arrested for forcibly removing chunks of sensitive bodily tissue from the fedora warriors.
Notes on content: This is hella queer, with pretty much the entire core cast being some flavor of LGBTQ. And as you might guess from the blurb above it includes (in a manner that makes it clear to the reader that they’re terrible) sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, death threats and stalking.
Disclaimer: The author is one of my best friends. I’m thanked in the acknowledgements. I suspect I won’t be able to be unbiased.
Starting from there, it’s always amusing reading something by someone whose verbal ticks you know, and who has a strong writing “voice.” This is clearly a very personal work—Daphne is heavily based on Kudisch and Laura (the love interest) on her wife, and several other characters have their basis (if not the specifics) in people from real life. The characterization is vivid. And that personal experience makes for a very engaging story about fighting with the internet (which also has roots in real life) that, because I knew the people involved, made me just want to punch a lot of neckbeards on their behalf.
Which is why I had issues with the novel’s treatment of Orin. The thing is, in a lot of ways this felt like a novel that was “for” me, as it’s positively dripping with geeky references and I’m a queer-friendly, socially-conscious kind of guy. But it’s not, not really. This is a story for women and queer folks who have intersected the geek space, and it has no patience for the Orin the white knight; Orin who pines for a version of Daphne who only exists in his head; Orin who thinks he’s helping but, until he’s “redeemed” by acknowledging a queer identity and then standing back and letting the women speak, is functionally an antagonist. And the thing is, the narrative does need that—this isn’t Orin’s story, and he doesn’t actually have the role he thinks he does in Daphne’s. There are several other male characters who get redeemed by the end, and all of them share the same flaw of myopia—they genuinely mean well, but don’t actually see enough of the situation to realize that they aren’t helping.
And my reaction of wanting to punch the entire internet on Daphne’s behalf didn’t help where I was identifying. But hearing female friends talk about the book—and they know an Orin, they all know an Orin—made it clear that they saw they character very differently than I did.
Because really, this is a book about Daphne/Daphnis’ journey of self-discovery, coming through an emotional gauntlet changed for the better. And part of that is learning which relationships are healthy and helpful and which are not. Orin learning to actually be helpful is a separate book.
Overall: Buy and read this book--unless you actually believe that anyone ever cared about ethics in games journalism, in which case feel free to buy forty copies (preferably direct from the publisher at full retail price) and set them on fire.
Notes on content: This is hella queer, with pretty much the entire core cast being some flavor of LGBTQ. And as you might guess from the blurb above it includes (in a manner that makes it clear to the reader that they’re terrible) sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, death threats and stalking.
Disclaimer: The author is one of my best friends. I’m thanked in the acknowledgements. I suspect I won’t be able to be unbiased.
Starting from there, it’s always amusing reading something by someone whose verbal ticks you know, and who has a strong writing “voice.” This is clearly a very personal work—Daphne is heavily based on Kudisch and Laura (the love interest) on her wife, and several other characters have their basis (if not the specifics) in people from real life. The characterization is vivid. And that personal experience makes for a very engaging story about fighting with the internet (which also has roots in real life) that, because I knew the people involved, made me just want to punch a lot of neckbeards on their behalf.
Which is why I had issues with the novel’s treatment of Orin. The thing is, in a lot of ways this felt like a novel that was “for” me, as it’s positively dripping with geeky references and I’m a queer-friendly, socially-conscious kind of guy. But it’s not, not really. This is a story for women and queer folks who have intersected the geek space, and it has no patience for the Orin the white knight; Orin who pines for a version of Daphne who only exists in his head; Orin who thinks he’s helping but, until he’s “redeemed” by acknowledging a queer identity and then standing back and letting the women speak, is functionally an antagonist. And the thing is, the narrative does need that—this isn’t Orin’s story, and he doesn’t actually have the role he thinks he does in Daphne’s. There are several other male characters who get redeemed by the end, and all of them share the same flaw of myopia—they genuinely mean well, but don’t actually see enough of the situation to realize that they aren’t helping.
And my reaction of wanting to punch the entire internet on Daphne’s behalf didn’t help where I was identifying. But hearing female friends talk about the book—and they know an Orin, they all know an Orin—made it clear that they saw they character very differently than I did.
Because really, this is a book about Daphne/Daphnis’ journey of self-discovery, coming through an emotional gauntlet changed for the better. And part of that is learning which relationships are healthy and helpful and which are not. Orin learning to actually be helpful is a separate book.
Overall: Buy and read this book--unless you actually believe that anyone ever cared about ethics in games journalism, in which case feel free to buy forty copies (preferably direct from the publisher at full retail price) and set them on fire.
