Ah, wank. Perhaps, gentle reader, you have missed the last week of ire over the use of the term "Krystallnacht" to title a Harry Potter role playing game. If so, you may catch up here. (Go ahead, we'll wait.) While the crux of the complaints was the insensitivity on the part of the RPGers to a horrific event that is still very present in the minds of many fans, last week's debacle leads us today to a discussion of appropriating things (terms, ideas, etc.) from other cultures for fun and profit.

Short answer: don't. Really.

Longer answer: the entire world would be a better place if only people would research properly. As the past week has demonstrated, research of terms with cultural significance cannot simply be conducted by a dry study of history textbooks and a reliance on one's (perhaps faulty) memories from school. History is a living, breathing thing which has shaped and is shaping the world around us. In the case of the Krystallnacht RPG, those involved erroneously assumed they were taking the name of a "dead" piece of history, rather than invoking an event that sparked years of attempted genocide that is still carried by those who lived through it. (One is reminded of Bill O'Reilly's use of the term "lynch mob" to describe the group he said ought not to be raised against Michelle Obama as long as she knew her place. That the man still has his job only signifies that the mass media is not nearly as ready to rise up against ignorance among their own as fandom is. Good for us, bad for the national discourse in the U.S..)

Research is our friend. Lots of research. Metric assloads of research, if necessary. When we are creating fanworks, be they literary, artistic or "just a game," we need to be familiar enough with our topic to give it proper coverage and due, not just gloss over with a quick stereotype. Saying something is just being done for fun does not stop it from upsetting people anymore than when you were teased in middle school and the bullies said they were just having fun when someone called them on it. Feel free to insert your own tale of woe here. (You almost certainly have one; Snacky's Law exists for a reason.) However, also keep in mind that your own tale of woe does not make you an expert on anyone else's tale, it simply means that you should have some basis for understanding when someone else tells you that you've upset them and that you know how you hoped people would act when it was your turn. Shorter: don't be a jerk.

How can you not be a jerk? More, how can you not be a jerk when you're honestly intending not to be a jerk? Well, to start with, it's not solved by pretending that people who aren't you don't exist. Every six months or so, fandom returns to the subject of racism in the canon, in the fandom, in the fanfic and in the society that formed them all. It's a good conversation, though one that invariably leads more than one person to comment they avoid writing characters of color because they're afraid of doing it wrong. (This also leads to comments about writing characters one is interested in, thus following one's squee, and that since the juiciest character parts seem to be handed out disproportionately to the white male characters on a series, those are the "most interesting" characters. Sometimes it even leads to exploring the cultural assumptions on the part of the writing staff about who should get the most screentime and best plots in order to maximize the audience, and audience focus on those characters reinforces their choice. Sometimes Dr. Merlin drinks heavily when she reads Metafandom.)

Research. Ask. Read. Read more.

If you're branching out in your fanfic and writing a character from a background you've never written before, learn. Start with canon, because no matter how much we deviate from canon, it is the touchstone from which all things start. How does the character speak? How does she move? What does he dwell on when he's not being moved around by the plot? If you can capture those, you're already most of the way home. Familiarize yourself with that individual person, because s/he is going to be unique, and unique is fun. Also take some time to learn about what it's like to come from that background in general, not so you can turn your character into a caricature of something s/he's not, but so you can get an idea of what it's like to be him/her. Find things that overlaps with your own experience. Dr. Merlin's last fandom included a character who, as a child, wore glasses, read comic books, and lived with his grandmother, all just like Dr. Merlin did; Dr. Merlin wrote from his point of view a lot.

If you're setting a story in the past, learn about that time. Don't stick with the history books, and certainly don't just rely on Wikipedia. Geeky people get PhD's studying various time periods, and then they publish books about it. Read the books. If people are still around from the time, talk to them. Ask them what it was like to live through, frex, the Challenger disaster. If they're not, try to dig up contemporary documents from the time (and remember as you do that humans have always been blind to their own assumptions). The Hornblower fans are well-known for the research involved to bring their stories to life, and you can do it too. Find out what happened to the survivors, on both sides if applicable -- who still marks the events with yearly remembrances, who has rewritten or forgotten major details in order to live with their own pasts -- and see if you can find the echoes in events happening today.

Don't take "UR DOIN IT WRONG" as a value judgment on your worth as a human being. Humans screw up. Humans posting on the Internet flush with happiness at a new toy or in the heat of a discussion screw up even faster. (See "Someone is wrong on the Internet.") First, check yourself. Did you pull it out of your butt? Are you basing it on something you heard once from your online buddy / your father / your third grade teacher / someone you met on the bus? If you answered "Yes" to either of those questions, shut up and apologize and do more research next time. (There are exceptions. Heartbreaking, triggery stuff at that link, but worth the read to recall someone forgotten by historians.  Sometimes history is what you learned at your mother's knee.) If not, do more research anyway. Find out what you did that set one person (or many thousands of people) off about what you said or did. Something you think is harmless or unrelated may carry a lot of angry weight for someone else, and yes, the burden is on you to figure out why, not on them to explain in minute detail. Many people on "UR DOIN IT WRONG" duty are coming from a place of already having had to explain it time and again to people who still didn't get it, or didn't care, or didn't think it was that important because it was in the past and we're living in a bright shiny happy future now where everyone is treated equally, at least until they point out that's not the case and then they had it coming for whining anyway. Your education is your own responsibility.

The flip side is of course that one should not abide trolls. Someone who says "UR DOIN IT WRONG" for the sake of stirring the excrement -- whether for the lulz, the attention, or for the sake of an ill-conceived social experiment -- needs to be thwacked with a goat.  Determining the difference between someone with an honest complaint and a troll is what is known as "using your best judgment."  It's occasionally also known as double-checking your own judgment with someone else's.  Troll is best served flamed to a crisp, with asparagus as a nice stuffing.  Dismiss someone with a valid complaint as a troll, and you'd best hope they're kind with where they stuff the asparagus.

Learn. Learn about the things you take for granted as a daily given, and learn where those things came from, how they got to you. Look at your own language, not just with the eye of a writer who loves lyrical prose but also with a critical eye towards the shambling stumps of words we've acquired from other places and were too lazy or uncaring to check the connotations at the door. Use this in your writing. We are forever writing aliens and demons and angels and vampires and elves; what do you take for granted that your character cannot even imagine being "normal"? Take the opportunity that fandom affords you to see your own daily life as something immensely fascinating and new, or something barbaric and strange. Farscape fans may remember the Dentiks; brushing teeth in space got weird fast. In Stargate fanfic, how would Teal'c and Jonas and Vala have different experiences dealing with Earth culture, based on their individual backgrounds and also on how the world perceives them? Think about it, and learn, and research and figure it out.

Accept your own mistakes, and apologize if you've hurt someone when you made them.  Please remember to apologize for what you did, not for how it made him/her feel. Make new mistakes next time. (You're bound to. We all do.) If you didn't screw up this time, but someone else clearly did, learn from those mistakes instead of / in addition to your own. Learning from someone else's blunder is like getting a free class in What Not To Do. If you, like many of us, have trouble sometimes figuring out the proper social thing to do, this is especially helpful. Do better next time.

It's not cool to take something you don't fully understand and use it in an attempt to make yourself look deep. It doesn't work with using poetry you've never read for story titles, it doesn't work with writing emo or mature subjects (and I'm not just talking pR0n, but whatever the Big Kid toy is this week in the never ending "we're more avant-garde than you" quest), and it doesn't work calling yourself something you don't know the full context of. Do your homework, put out the very best product you can, and people will come, accolades will be given, lights will flash, bells will ring, and so on. Plus, when arguments come up online, you'll be able to tell less-informed people that, no, actually this is what happened and who doesn't love being the person on the Internet who's right?