Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

This round of Tropes Mris Is Sick Of is a little different, because it gets personal. I am really, really tired of long-lost family in speculative novels. Really. No, really. I am particularly tired of it being a major plot point that someone is biologically related to someone else. Done now! Something else please!

I know a woman who recently met a half-brother she never knew she had, and her response to their first meeting was, "He was a very nice stranger." I said, "Yep, that's what he is to you." He knew he was adopted and didn't know he had a biological sister--but he had a sister already, and the genetic half-sister wasn't that person. She, in turn, didn't even know he existed. This has been the source of some weirdness, but not great social upheaval. If some evil sorcerer wanted to, I bet he could get this guy to scream, "Get away from my sister, you bastard!"--about his sister, his real sister, the one he spent his childhood with, not about my friend, who is...a very nice stranger to him, and ought not to be menaced by evil sorcerers, but.

And I have my own long-lost relative. My dad's father opted out of our lives for incredibly stupid reasons when I was 3. My dad reached out to him and got rebuffed, and we didn't skip family gatherings where he would be, but he did when he knew we'd be there. Then when I was 21, he wrote to me to tell me self-justifying, poorly constructed lies, some of which were easily externally verifiable as counterfactual. (Note to would-be liars: do not lie about things that are on a public record. It's insulting as well as dumb.) Here is how this works: your family is people you have actual relationships with. When you have declined a relationship? Not family. Relatives, possibly. But not family. So "You have to save him! he's your grandfather!" would have about as much meaning for me on this front as, "You have to save him! He's a fellow human being!"

So when long-lost relatives show up in books--when someone turns out to be someone else's ancestor or sibling or some other biological tie--I am not thrilled. I do not gasp with the shock of how powerful that is. I yawn. Or I roll my eyes.

I suspect that one of the things going on here is the same as one of the things that's producing all the sexual violence in the field that's making me read new SF braced for the worst: we somehow have the idea that violence by itself is not enough. It's not horrible enough if you-the-protagonist kill someone, it has to be a blood relative. But you know what? Killing people is pretty horrible. Or it's not awful enough if someone is in peril, it has to be sexually violent peril. Again: the peril. If you take it seriously, it's quite perilous enough. And when Ambrose Bierce had the million and one Civil War stories where someone turned out to be killing someone they knew...he recognized that your best friend or next-door neighbor could also be powerful. He recognized that relationship was important, and even in his gimmick stories, blood wasn't everything.

You know what I'd really like to see? I'd like to see a fantasy story where they assume that blood will work for something only to find that it's completely useless for people who don't particularly know each other or have a history together. "Now we will bind you by sacrificing...your father!" "Uh, dude, my father is the guy who raised me. This is the sperm donor. Now I will win." Or else I would like to see it in reverse, where sympathetic magic works along emotional/social bonds, so adopted siblings would work far better than biological siblings who didn't live together.

Mostly, though, I just find it boring. "I am your father, Luke!" was a line that had gotten into my brain before I remember it doing so--it's not a very interesting plot twist by now. Let it lie. Find something else.

Dear Sir:

If, by some horrid mischance, you find that you have exited the privacy of your home or motor vehicle without fastening the fly to your trousers, one can easily see that you would wish to remedy this situation as soon as it became apparent to you. You may not have noticed while you walked across half of the parking lot; that is understandable.

However, reaching for your crotch and grinning sunnily and lengthily at me while taking a leisurely approach to attending to it is not what we call Minnesota Nice. There are times when a friendly smile and eye contact are truly not called for. This is one.

Aaaaaaagh,
mrissa

I am extra, extra careful about giving my characters my point of view on comparatively obscure things. For one, it's not always appropriate, and for another, I don't really like having people assume that I mean to use some character or another for a mouthpiece in general just because we agree on a particular point.

So I have thought long and hard, and I am absolutely sure that Carter feels as I do about godparents. It is appropriate and right that he should do so. His world--both the one in which he grew up and the one in which he finds himself now--requires it. Your godparents help give you your name, they help fix your identity to you, they give you a place to stand, somewhere you can move from wherever you will go. Your parents should do all that, too, but it's a big job. Standing with the kid, teaching them what they need to know, taking on all comers: it's more than parents should have to do alone. And it's not just my relationship with my godfather that makes me say this*, and it's not just my relationship with the godkids. It fits with the magic structure of the world Carter lives in.

But it's also in mine, and apparently I need to give fair warning yet again: I don't approve of ignorant prejudices in general. None of us do, or we would call them "sensible notions" instead of "ignorant prejudices." But if you say something ignorantly prejudiced in an area that pertains to one of my godchildren, either them personally or categories they belong to? You should consider yourself lucky if I don't pull the heavens themselves down on your head. That is not what we do, folks, and there's one less person welcome in these parts today than there was yesterday because she apparently forgot it. Do not. Mess. With my godkids. Really serious, people.

So in related but actually Carter-ish news, if he says he doesn't want to say it until he's at the font (because Tommy Heikkanen trained him good) but he knows what he's going to name his son, do those of you who have read some of the stories know what it has to be?

*Like Jessica Lin-Laird, like my own godkids, I have three godparents, two male and one female. I love my other godfather, and I love my godmother. But when I say "my godfather," I always mean Dave. And Jess will always mean Carter when she says "my godfather"; if she means the Puck, she will say his name or "my fairy godfather." Jess is not me, and Carter is not very much like Dave at all. But sometimes you have my godfather, and that is that. I mean. My godfather. You know.

As many of you know, I'm an only child; when I refer to my brother, I'm talking about the one I went out and got for myself in my late teens, not one who was parentally provided. And he is a very fine brother and all one could ask for in a brother...and does not affect my only child brain processes in the slightest. He is very much loved, but as for how my brain works by default, it's all in only child mode.

This got to be a problem this Christmas, because I have several sets of small child siblings to buy for. Very small child siblings. I am, I flatter myself, good at buying presents for little kids. I know about various picture books with dinosaurs and pirates and knufflebunnies; I keep track of where to buy toys that come with spaceships and toys that roll into little magnetic balls and toys that build a million different things that aren't pictured on the box. I even found some soap in the shape of Hello Kitty this year for a little extra, making me officially awesome in the eyes of my Hello Kitty-obsessed goddaughter.

But when the gifts are going to siblings, it's not the same as buying for a kid and then buying for another kid. I have learned--oh how I have learned. There are times when it's okay to buy one kid books and the other toys, for example, and times when it is not. (Buying the older, more mature kid who freely and joyfully admits to reading on his own a toy, and then his younger, supposedly pre-literate sister books? Not so much.) And then there are all the things it's awesome to buy for an 18-month-old...that you already bought for an 18-month-old last time they had an 18-month-old, and you have no reason to think they've thrown the thing in the garbage since. So then you have to come up with something else. That won't be too redundant. And it can't be something somewhat too old for the littler kid that they can grow into, because if you do that, you've de facto given the older sibling two presents and the littler one zero. If it's too directly age-appropriate, they'll grow out of it in five seconds flat; if it's not limitedly age-appropriate enough, you risk the older, bigger kid sidling up and taking it over.

("I don't think that's a big problem," said markgritter, himself an oldest. Hah. I watched it happen.)

And if you have opposite-sex siblings to give gifts to, and you look and say, "Well, what don't they have around the house already?", the answer is often highly gendered. And you really don't want the message to be, "Big sib is the oldest, so they get the cool stuff: the telescopes, the building toys, the best books. And you get the really gendery Girl/Boy stuff, which frankly kind of sucks." Even if they will not, before they are out of preschool, see the suckage--that's kind of the point. They won't. But I will.

This will all be so much easier in just a few years, when the younger siblings in question can say, "Auntie Mris, I want a--", or their parents can say, "You know, he/she is really into--" and then I can go off and get that sort of thing, or something tangentially related to it. Four-year-olds--contrary to our culture's common beliefs--have opinions and interests. Eighteen-month-olds do, too, they're just not as good at expressing them in advance. Moral of the story is not to get too attached to them adoring any given present, I guess; I have that one down for all the kids. I just...I think it comes down to not being comfortable with intrafamily conflict over presents. It alarms me. Probably if I'd given some other kid a good whack to make them let me have my Ewok Village back, I'd feel more comfortable about this, but I didn't, so I don't.

So Eureka appears to be on hiatus until after Christmas, giving me plenty of time to fuss, fume, and explain why its treatment of its major autistic character, Kevin Blake, makes me want to punch things.

In the Pilot, we meet Kevin, and he's just a kid. His mom, who runs Global Dynamics, explains to the new sheriff, Jack Carter, that Kevin is brilliant but severely autistic, that he rarely interacts with anyone. He interacts with Jack, however, and helps to Save The Day, and the young actor who plays Kevin does a pretty fair job of holding both his body and his chalk like some autistic kids we've known. There's a little bit of the Magical Autism Powers problem, but on the whole Kevin gets to be a contributing member of the team. While his mom is a little overprotective, the other people say, hey, we have a problem, it's in Kevin's field of expertise, well done Kevin, good show. Like, y'know. He's a person or something. Go figure. So when timprov and I first watched this, we had great hopes that Kevin would continue to be a character who was treated like a person--a person with autism. A person who didn't want to do social chitchat with the other characters, a person who sometimes had very specific sensory issues that provoked severe reactions. Still: a person. Good good.

Things go downhill from there, with Magical Autism Powers coming more to the fore and treating Kevin like a person being less of a thing--alternating in, of course, with the regular television problem: if an adult character has a child who does not receive top billing, that child only exists when it's convenient to the plot. Being a single parent with an autistic kid never, ever means that you have to go home suddenly for his sake or that childcare is an issue or that there are any issues at school or...anything even remotely inconvenient. He requires no attention in public places unless he is about to do something plotworthy. He is no longer Kevin, person, potential team member. He is now Magical Autism Powers Source.

Then it got worse.

( spoilers for Season 4 )

When I was small, I had a record of Sesame Street songs that included Big Bird singing a song about making mistakes. And since I was a perfectionist little thing, this got some significant play at our house. It included the lines, "Everyone makes mistakes, oh yes it's true: your sister and your brother and your dad and mommy too. Big people! Small people! Matter of fact, all people!"

And I was thinking about this when I was reading the comments on papersky's Tor.com post about the Suck Fairy. Because people were coming in talking about taking authors as products of their times and taking their sexism, racism, etc. as products of their times. (What boggled me is that some of these people seemed to be talking as though Jo, of all people, needed to have taking things in historical context explained to her. Jo. Riiiight.) And to a certain extent, I can totally get behind that. We can't and shouldn't expect authors to be products of our times and to mirror our own contemporary attitudes. It ruins a lot of historical fiction to project backwards, it makes history less interesting to assume that everyone ought always to be the same, and it's just not realistic.

However. I sometimes get uneasy when I hear people using this too blithely. Because I have heard it used to excuse too much. Sometimes people say, "Oh, well, it was another time then," and then don't check the copyright date. Sometimes you need to make sure the other time was not 1985. Sometimes even 1955 was soon enough to know better. Sometimes you need to look at what else was really going on at the time, what other things were being written or discussed or enacted in the wider world, and say, "Well, yes, this author was a product of the times. But this author was also a product of choices. And some of those choices were bad ones. I like these choices in this book. And I don't like these other choices here, whether they're political or aesthetic or typographical."

That's okay. It really is. It is all right to say, not just that a book makes mistakes, but that it is is written by one of your favorite authors and makes those mistakes. It is okay to say that one of your favorite authors wrote a book that has elements in it that were bigger mistakes than its era really justified. Sometimes mistakes can ruin a book, and sometimes they don't have to, but you don't have to defend the mistakes to defend the bits that aren't mistakes. And you don't have to condemn an entire era in order to like a book from it. Sometimes your favorite author had a blind spot that not everybody had. Pretty much every time, in fact. We all do. Your sister and your brother and your dad and mommy too. There doesn't have to be a caveat about historical context every time. Sometimes it's not the history. Sometimes being a jerk--for whatever reason, to whatever person or group of people--really does get to be our own fault.

A lot of conventions have panels about who can write SF, or who can write hard SF, what the qualifications are. And I always want to say that the people who do write hard SF should read more social histories, because it would get in their way more in ways that it should get in their way, and then we wouldn't have those embarrassing stories that are all concept and the concept is outdated before the story is published.

When I wasn't looking, because I don't tend to look at the front inside page, because it's all gossip, the Strib started running a celebrity tweet of the day. A celebrity tweet. Of the day. People. This is not cutting edge. This is not what the wave of the future looks like, a celebrity tweet of the day. This is not adjusting your thriller plots so that people's cell phone batteries have been accounted for. It's the bit in the history of the turn of the millennium where the historian has this baffled tone where she's describing how the old media tried to latch onto this new phenomenon that was perfectly good for writing haiku about backup catchers for those who cared but really stupid for reprinting a randomly selected singer's not particularly trenchant observations about his lunch from the previous day.

This is exactly like my ability to tell you that you will look just fine in that shirt in pictures fifteen years from now, but those trousers, eeeesh, not so much, I think. You can have that ability, too. I believe in you. It's not hard. I was not bitten by a radioactive historian.

I just saw a commercial in which BP was talking about the Gulf Coast and had their spokesperson say, "BP will be here until the oil is gone."

"We'll suck your region dry of its natural resources and then pull up stakes and leave!"

Wait. That may not be quite what they meant.

One of my friends has posted a bit under friendslock about dealing with a health-related thing that is also a work-related thing; you can see why this would be understandably private and not the sort of thing I would be poking this friend to unlock. So I wanted to pull what I was thinking out here where I can poke at it and not poke at my friend's private issues as well.

The thing is, I think we are, as a culture, sort of in love with the broken leg model of illness, injury, and disability.

Here's what makes the Hollywood broken leg model so shiny.

With a broken leg, you:
*know what has happened.
*know when it happened AND
*know it right away.
*know what to do to fix it.
*know about how long it will take to heal.
*know that it will not suddenly get less healed for awhile in the middle and then jump back to more healed again.
*can easily predict which things will stress the injury.
*know that it will be completely fixed when treatment is done.
*have at least some theory of where the person experiencing it falls on the continuum of sinner ("What were you doing on top of that water tower at 3 a.m. anyway? You're lucky it wasn't your neck!") to saint ("Hit by a drunk driver while helping an elderly nun across the crosswalk? Let me fluff that pillow for you, you poor baby!").
*do not have any doubt as a casual passerby whether there is something wrong, or what.

Of course, not all of this is actually true of broken legs, even! (I have edited in a few spots to add "Hollywood," because I want it to be absolutely clear that I know that my friends' leg injuries to not come with these magical advantages.) It's just the assumption from people who don't have the said broken legs. But it is a mighty convenient set of traits for an illness, injury, or disability to have. And the farther from this model your actual illness, injury, or disability goes, the more frustration you are likely to face from other people, because their questions are likely to be centered around the broken leg model.

Why didn't you go in sooner? they will snap. Sometimes they don't even notice that they are snapping, and if you point out that they're snapping, you need to stop being defensive. But see: if you break your leg, there are bits of broken leg sticking out, and you are an idiot for not going right in, right now! But what if you wake up just exhausted one morning? Should you go to the doctor that morning? "How long have you been exhausted?" the doctor will say. "Since this morning," you say. Wrong answer. Get more sleep, or less sleep. Get more exercise, or less exercise. Eat differently. Change something up. What if you feel a little dizzy? If you're female, does this correlate with your menstrual cycle? Well, if you've only had it for one day, you can't really say, can you? Why didn't you go in sooner? Because some things are not a broken leg. And if you get a history of going in and mentioning things that have not really been a problem very long, if you're not very lucky, you get a doctor who writes down "hypochondriac" or "drug-seeking," and then when it's still a problem later, you've got that to deal with. The cardiac surgeon's memoir I read recently acted as though women could go in with fatigue and find out whether they'd had a heart attack every time they had fatigue, since fatigue is the main symptom of heart disease in women, and I laughed and laughed. It is not some feminine perversity that makes that not happen. Really, really not.

Why don't you take meds for that? they will ask. Because naturally there are meds for that in existence. And they work for you. And they don't interact badly with anything else you have to take. It's just spite that makes you not take them, or spite that makes you take them wrong so that they don't work perfectly. This is the twenty-first century! They can fix things! Who can? You know--They! They can! Them! They would have already if you had only gone in sooner! What these people mostly want is for you to have a big plaster cast on your kidney, your endocrine system, your ears, or whatever else is not working--in some cases your actual broken leg that was not perfectly fixed by divine fiat somehow, because the world does not magically work like that--so it can fix the thing, they can sign it, and then in a few weeks somebody can come along and saw the thing off and everybody can go skipping merrily along. Most of us want this too. It just doesn't happen to work that way.

I'm pretty sure I do this to people, because one thing I've learned in the last few years is that we are all really terrible at spotting the ins and outs of illnesses, injuries, and disabilities not our own, so one of my new self-checks before I open my mouth is going to be, "Am I trying to treat this like a Hollywood movie of a broken leg again?" Too many of the formal things we have set up for employment and compensation are working on the broken leg assumption. The least we can do is not perpetuate them when we have the option.

The rule is not actually, "If you can't say anything nice, say something really passive-aggressive instead."

This is actually only not the rule for real people. As long as they're willing to take their knocks for it, fictional characters can ignore this with impunity.

And maybe should. Hmm.