Notes on Art and Audience Interactions

I read too many posts, so here's a blog article.

What's this about?

I won't be the vaguepost king and bury the lede. This post was prompted by discussions around the furry visual novel Campo Largo, by Toledo. However, this post is not actually about the specific interactions between people related to this VN or about the content of the VN itself. Rather, I saw a lot of expressed viewpoints that informed and pervaded the discussion surrounding it as I took a look to see what people are saying. I disagreed with many of them, but I didn't think duking it out in the microblog format would be of any help to anyone. Instead, I wanted to explicitly discuss some of these ideas and offer my perspective on them. Regardless of how you come down on this specific situation or the themes/framing of the VN, I hope you can still see where I'm coming from regarding the broader culture that's produced this specific kind of discourse.

I'm going to structure this as a series of rhetorical questions and statements. All of them are based on real posts I've seen people make, but I do not want to call anyone out in particular for reasons I hope are obvious. Consequently, I've elected to paraphrase and summarize the positions in question. Please understand I am giving my honest interpretations of people's stated beliefs.

How relevant is an author's personal beliefs or identity in analyzing their work? Should it be available on demand?

My view: It's not necessarily irrelevant, but "my art speaks for itself" is a point of view I strongly empathize with and overindexing too much on a creative's identity can lead to unhealthy social dynamics.

Countervailing views:

• "We deserve to know the author's personal beliefs... evasiveness is a cause of suspicion. They could end this at any time by stating something, which implies [they are a bad thing]."
• "If the author is [bad thing], that proves this is propaganda. If the author is [former bad thing], that doesn't exempt them from criticism either."
• "If the author is [bad thing], that proves this is propaganda. If the author is [former bad thing], then it's fine."

Discussion: I am willing to give grace on this. We live in a very duplicitous age where people who are willing to lie about the dissonance between their stated beliefs and actions are more visible and powerful than ever. It's an understandable impulse. However, I think there needs to be a difference between how you evaluate a liberal politician and a furry artist. One of those is deserving of significantly more benefit of the doubt and privacy!

Hangups around the identities of authors of queer media are not new. In my opinion, they are also frequently misguided. Becky Albertalli was relentlessly criticized for years for writing queer fiction before she finally came out as bisexual. Isabel Fall's controversial debut piece generated extremely intense accusations:

One criticism above all got to her: that Fall must be a cis man, because no woman would ever write in the way she did. . .
(from Vox)

And where'd that lead?

The person who might have been Isabel has given up on actually building a life and career as Isabel Fall. And that is a kind of death.
(from Vox)

Now, I'm using these examples because they're well known, but I recognize they're not one to one with the Campo Largo situation that prompted this. These two are about the alleged absence of a "preferred" identity (queer in general, trans woman respectively) as opposed to the presence of a "unfavorable" identity (mormonism.) However, the actual mechanics of the social dynamics are what matter to me, and here there is intense overlap. Queer creators are essentially always more vulnerable to harassment, and they are also very prone to having their work weaponized against them. This is a bad state of affairs, and I don't think you should exploit it to score points in an art argument.

Furthermore, it's fundamentally immaterial to the matter at hand. For one, as shown with Fall's case, one can simply decide that the artist is lying and continue on from there. Viewpoint two above also gives the game away, I think:

If the author is [former bad thing], that doesn't exempt them from criticism either.

There is often an admission in critiques like these that it's not actually relevant and is merely a point-scoring exercise. If the creator is contemptible no matter what, then why are you asking? It is very difficult to do something like this in good faith, and I don't think most people meet that bar.

I also have personal experience with this kind of misinterpretation. People regularly assume things about me based on my written works - my mental state at the time of writing, kinks that I do or don't have, viewpoints I do or don't support, all manner of things. I get off easy because I am writing pornography which people give a free pass compared to media like Campo Largo. (Put a pin in this.)

Fundamentally, I find it objectionable to suggest that the entirety of an artist must be on the table for us to dissect in the interpretation of a work. The mere act of creating something does not obligate you to open up your innards for the masses to scrutinize with a microscope. It's easy to forget we did not always have instant access to our entire cohort, but access does not mean entitlement. The mere presence of charged subject matter in a work also does not entitle you to this. Do we intend to scrutinize the personal history of everyone who has written a story featuring something that might be influenced by or outside their lived experiences? This would be literally everyone, a massive amount of policing for no benefit.

Again, for public figures, this kind of thing is unavoidable. But I think it's clear applying such scrutiny to small-time queer artists is not warranted.

Does all queer fiction have an obligation to show "good messaging"?

My view: No. It's a laudable goal; but there's no need to make everything didactic, and queer artists do not have a special obligation in this realm.

Countervailing Views:

• "Queer fiction has an obligation to contain good morals and impart them onto the reader."
• "FVN readers are too stupid to be trusted without explicit instructions on the topic of the work."

Discussion: For most behaviors and minority groups, we would recognize this as a fundamentally bigoted impulse. All of these fit the same mold:

• That [group] person is making us look bad by doing [X]!
• That [group] person should know better than to have [Y] opinion!
• That [group] person shouldn't be making art that says [Z]!

The most common use of this mode of thinking crops up in racist attacks, but it's generally applicable to any minoritized population. I have a few problems with this idea.

For one, if this kind of obligation exists, why does it exclusively fall on queer creators? Topics are often featured in a work that are not fully explored nor criticized in the work. Much contemporary art is set in the world created by capitalism and does not fully dissect and critique it - as much as it's deserved! This is because some stories are not about that directly, but rather about something else and using it as a backdrop or for legibility to us. Yet this expectation is rarely imposed on mass culture. It's much easier to impose it on minoritized creatives because they are more vulnerable and accessible.

Secondly, this would just be boring if it were true. Art is a messy and complicated process. We make fun of the Hays Code to this day for this reason. Forcing all of one's artistic output to fit a mold results in much more sterile, uninspired creation. It's very strange to me to see people demanding didacticism when we rightly criticize people for asking for it with - say - violent or sexually provocative media.

Thirdly - time for the pin to come back. I can't help but notice everyone is all about "save problematic media!" and everything when it's porn. On the other hand, explosions happen the moment a slightly murky, maybe even genuinely problematic thing hits public awareness. I benefit from this double standard but I can't abide by it.

Can we trust the audience to sit with a work on their own or not? If you read my work as completely uncritically supporting the actions of the protagonists, you'd get WAY worse moral messages than the vast majority of fiction. I'm not fond of this doublespeak. If we're willing to meet erotica where it's at, then other furry genres deserve at least some of the same grace.

Is it possible to create a furry visual novel that brainwashes everyone who reads it?

My life would be way easier if it was; I'm comfortable dismissing this possibility out of hand. If you have good evidence here, let me know.

In Conclusion

It's completely possible that Toledo, the writer of CL, will tomorrow post "Yes, you got me! I am a mormon operative trying to make it more palatable to furries." Astronomically unlikely, but it is conceivable. I really want to stress this would not change or affect anything I've written above. Put bluntly, if I can swallow my outright antitheism to work with religious queers and animals, I have faith that we can be more normal as a community together.

If you're still not convinced, thank you for hearing me out. If you want an amazing work of art on this topic - whether you agree with me or not - I highly recommend The Beginner's Guide by Davey Wreden.