(A/N: This essay was written some weeks ago, before the Cultural Appropriation discussion turned into RaceFail '09 and also into OutingFansFail '09.  Much more has been said at much greater length across the 'Net, and you can find most of it here thanks to rydra_wong's patient link-keeping.  There are even links to quick summaries for people who want the short version.)

If you've been in a hole for the last two months, you may have missed what's been going on.  While the most recent flux of conversation has been surrounding a certain famous author's mea culpa, followed by a lot of Fail on the part of her friends and colleagues, and finally by her admission that she was "humoring" the FoCs who'd critiqued her work, this latest iteration of AppropriationFail and RaceFail has been brewing at least since the announcement of the (all-White) casting for the Avatar: The Last Airbender movie a few months back.

Short form: cultural appropriation is STILL not cool.

What does that mean? Well, in its simplest form, cultural appropriation means looking at another culture (even one that's ostensibly a subculture of your own) as an uninvolved spectator, mining it for nifty and shiny things you particularly enjoy, then presenting these in your work as a way of being "deep," "relevant" and/or "meaningful" without taking the time to understand the nuances of the culture or the meanings these things already had within that culture. It's a teenaged Caucasian American girl wearing a red dot on her forehead as a fashion statement. It's casting David Carradine as a Shaolin monk. It's distilling thousands of years of history and culture and love and hate and humanity into a tiny Noble Savage mold and pouring out plastic NDNz for the White hero to learn from about living off the land before he Gets the Girl and Saves the Day.

It sucks, really.

And it doesn't mean that people from one culture (or gender, or lifestyle, or orientation, or anything else) can't or shouldn't write people from another. They should. We should. But it means extra work. It means learning those nuances, even the painful ones. It means having to look at the world around you without the comfortable glasses you get to wear when you're in the majority (or just in charge) that filter out the really crappy things about where we are.

We will start with the example of gender. Now, most creators and writers for our shows and books and movies are male. Note that I'm not saying that's a bad thing, simply a fact. We're science fiction and fantasy fans, and our media nowadays tends to be made by geeky guys who grew up watching Star Trek and Doctor Who, and all of whom secretly want their own lightsabers. Some of them are really, really good at creating, writing, and developing female characters. Some aren't. In general, when they write female characters as actual people, given actual development and interests and goals and opinions and lives, we say, "Frak, yeah, she's awesome!" And still, the writers are mostly guys, and while the guys are peripherally aware of rape and battery and pay disparity and the Mommy Wars and all the other things that inform the day-to-day lives of women, they don't have to live them and they don't have to think about them unless they want to. While they may even have been personally touched by sexual violence, they haven't, for example, spent years talking with friends about what happened when they were drunk or drugged or otherwise coerced into sex, and they can, but usually don't, bring that background onto the page and into the characters. Traumatic, life-changing experiences become jokes, and the ages-old "Well, she deserved it for wearing that outfit / being out alone at night / believing him" is at best addressed in a metaphor with vampires but more typically doesn't even make the cut in character motivations except in shoehorned revelatory backstories about childhood abuse. There isn't the understanding that fear of rape is present, in whatever small doses and buried under however much denial, in every woman's daily life from the day she's old enough to know what it is. It informs clothing choices and activities and dating partners, and while those writers capture the form of it, very few grok that the fear extends towards the male heroes too. So we see a fantasy world that resembles ours, but with off-kilter differences, and sometimes that's a good thing – Dr. Merlin watches cartoons preferentially because sometimes a Y-7 safety zone is the best thing to maintaining one's sanity – and sometimes it's a reminder that, to half the population, we are often as exotic and incomprehensible as Moon maidens.

That doesn't mean men can't write female characters. That doesn't mean men shouldn't write female characters. It means that any given male writer is, from time to time, going to screw up writing about women, that he's going to get called on it, especially from female fans who have seen these same damned problems before, and that he's going to have to decide whether to get defensive or fix the problem for next time. It means he's going to have to stand back and see the world from the point of view of someone raised female in a culture that celebrates masculinity and denigrates things associated with femininity (while fetishizing particular body parts, as if those are not part of the whole). Worse, it means having to examine his place in that world, and what he's done, or passively allowed to happen, because it's easier to maintain that status quo than get branded an extremist, or worse, a pussy. (Word choice intentional. It's a common insult, used to call someone weak, using a slang term for an uniquely female body part. This is what I mean. Just so we're clear.)

Okay. With me so far?

Writing a culture you do not share, be it Japanese culture, Chinese culture, Inuit culture, American Black culture, any of the myriad of African cultures, any of the many NDN cultures, anything, is like male showrunners writing female characters. No one is saying don’t do it. People are saying do it right, do it respectfully, and admit it and fix it when you flub those two. Even when it's metaphorical. I am by far not the only fan sick of the only CoC on a given SF series being the semi-primitive alien who speaks in stilted English, who is the brute muscle on the team, and whose character development ends up tracking closely one of a very small handful of well-traveled stereotyped paths. Also, setting your series in a location where one would typically expect to see a reasonably heavy concentration of non-White faces, and yet casting all the stars and guest spots the same pale shade, is not magically made better by putting in vampires and demons and then saying people aren't interpreting your metaphor properly. This also applies to blue, green, and purple aliens.

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This means doing your homework. This means researching, and not just with books describing a sterile past. This means getting out of your comfort zone and talking to people. Then talking to more people. It means not making your one Black (or trans, or Irish, or what have you) friend responsible for your education, nor for becoming your single source for the One True *insert life here* Experience. Being human means having a plethora of experiences, and no one person can or should have to speak for everyone in their group. But do try to listen, and do pay attention when told "UR DOIN IT WRONG," even if you disagree, and do learn from your mistakes.

It's important. Yes, even when it's "just fanfic" and not, say, the plot arc of a successful television or book series. The latter is contributing to the culture at large, and can make people think new things, or can reinforce stereotypes and old opinions for a whole new generation to absorb. The former doesn't travel nearly as far, but it's much more personal. That story you write over the weekend, the one about that show you like, it'll go live sometime next week, assuming your beta gets back to you soon. It will be read by all sorts of people. Some of them will be from backgrounds different from yours, and believe it or not, they're NOT going through the fanfic archives with a mind towards complaining about how authors screw up female/queer/poly/Black/Asian/Vulcan/etc/etc characters.  (Well, maybe the Vulcan characters.)  They're us, and we're all here to read the 'fic and meta the shows and have our squee. When we write it wrong, when we stick the characters we don't have as much in common with into roles that don't fit them, when we let poor canon choices dictate our own poor uses of characters, when we use our own experiences of being outsiders from the "acceptable" mainstream (and we're all geeks here – ain't none of us who hasn't felt like the kid from Mars from time to time) as an excuse rather than a means of empathizing with our characters, well, then we fail our friends and we fail ourselves. We fall into the trap of taking the easier, lazier path, and we teach ourselves nothing by our own prose except new synonyms for sexual organs. It matters because when we fall to the default, when we exclude and minimize and play to norms we tell everyone, whether we intend to or not, that anyone outside of those norms does not matter, does not count as much, is not as important. You don't want to be that fan, young fanthing.

When we take things from other cultures without making the effort to understand what those sparklies (and sometimes those horrors – again see the Krystallnacht wank) mean to the people who owned them before us, we tell those people, those fellow fans, that their experience isn't as important as ours. That we, as tourists on a fanficcing holiday, get exactly what it's like to live every day in, for another example, a society that was established based on the imprisonment, slavery, rape and near-annihilation of one's family. That we get to tell this story, not to bring it into the light, but to use it as a backdrop for something else, and pretend our work is more relevant this way.  (see: Mary Sue Holocaust 'fic where Mary has a romance with Hitler -- FF.net is one of the circles of Hell, really.)  That it doesn't matter anyway, because we're just having fun and people who complain are just being spoilsports. (I am establishing a new law: Anyone who has ever had a heated argument on any board or community about who Batman could defeat [with adequate time to prepare] who then uses the phrase "It's just a show/comic/book/movie" to shut down complaints about racism, misogyny or homophobia in the source immediately loses their humanity roll and also gets a boot up the ass for good measure.)

This is hard. It's easy to throw up one's hands in frustration and say one will never write women/minorities/gays/Vulcans again. Given our chosen genre, that is in fact sadly very easy to accomplish. (Except for the Vulcans. Those guys are EVERYWHERE, omg.) It's much harder to learn, to do the research and make the effort and make the mistakes and learn from them and not assume that complaints are kneejerk and to hear the difference between "this thing so-and-so wrote reinforces this stereotype" and "so-and-so is a raving bigot/misogynist/homophobe/Vulcan-hater," to acknowledge the strange and glorious variety of human and non-human existence we have to choose from around here and celebrate that. But it's worth the journey and the effort. The story, the one you as a writer must always bow down to or your Muse will kick your sorry butt, will get better in the telling. Really it will.

Think of it like family stories, that one where your mom did that crazy thing with her best friend when you were a kid, maybe. Someone heard about it from the best friend's cousin, and starts telling people who've never even met your mom or you. It's your family story they're telling, and worse, since they don't know that one thing your mom said was actually talking about her uncle and that car trip she took as a kid, the new person is getting it wrong. Worse, when you go to explain the background, the person telling the story says it doesn't matter, because it's her/his story to tell now. Even though your mom is still recovering from part of it. Even though it shaped her relationship with you and thus shaped how you grew up. After all, s/he is smarter than you (doncha know) and a better storyteller, adding the duck makes it funnier, and anyway, it's just a story and you're oversensitive.

Don't be that fan. Be instead the fan who does the work and makes the effort and researches and edits and learns from criticism and takes off the goggles to see the world from someone else's perspective and tells her/his friends when their goggles are tied on too tightly. Treat others' family stories with the same respect you'd want your family's stories to be treated.  Take the time to look at other cultures (even those within your own outer culture), not with a tourist's gaze but with the gaze of a friend who wants to learn even when the things you learn are hard to hear.  Treat your characters like people, not as metaphors, idealized fantasies or dolls dressed in the cultural attire of the week. Treat them as people who come from their particular backgrounds, not as solely defined by those backgrounds. Treat your fellow fans as people, and listen to them when they critique your work; every single person you meet online or off is coming from a different place than you are, and you can only benefit from more perspectives on your work, especially if you want that work to ring true and reach a wide audience.  Apologize when you screw up and try not to make those particular mistakes again.  Recognize the difference between making a mistake and getting caught doing something you know is uncool; "I'm sorry I got caught" is not the same thing as "I'm sorry what I did hurt you."

Don't be a jerk.

(On an related fandom note, outing fans is also STILL NOT COOL.)