Devon

from Ursula K Le Guin's "A Message About Messages":

If that were true, why would writers go to the trouble of making up characters and relationships and plots and scenery and all that? Why not just deliver the message? Is the story a box to hide an idea in, a fancy dress to make a naked idea look pretty, a candy coating to make a bitter idea easier to swallow? (Open your mouth, dear, it’s good for you.) Is fiction decorative wordage concealing a rational thought, a message, which is its ultimate reality and reason for being?

sometimes people will say something like "One Piece is secretly left wing" and i involuntarily 🤔 as 1) it's not particularly subtle about its position on subjects like imperialism, and 2) i don't understand how such a statement imagines "secrecy" works in authorship. i think le guin's piece there hits far closer to the mark re: how people actually create and read things.

the closest examples i can think to real authorial "secrecy" are artists keeping temporarily quiet about innuendos and subtexts to get them past censors and executives, eg Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. but i'd guess Verhoeven didn't see himself as a sly mass indoctrinator, a Trojan Horse deliverer (your audience sits ahead of you in time, anyway; you can't truly know them). he was tasked with adapting a fascist work and did so in a way that was true to his own ideals. i think most authors understand that the wish to be clearly understood can devour whole most other creative desires, to the great detriment of the work.

yeah there's the part that personally affects me most as a nonbinary service worker--you don't know what someone's gender is by looking at them. sometimes i go more femme, sometimes i go more masc. By going sir or ma'am you might be misgendering someone you never met and making their day worse. this happens to me at least once an hour when on register. i don't think that part will be much news or disagreed on by basically everyone on cohost.

but think about the tone in which sir or ma'am is often said towards any food service or retail worker. sure, its on its face respectful, but its often quite condescending. you know what tone i mean, "excuse me, sir". "uh, ma'am?". People say sir or ma'am to someone they feel above, most of the time, in contrast to its surface level formality. they're talking down to you. hell ive even caught myself slipping and doing this tone to annoying customers. it doesn't help anything

i wish games/media in general cared about paying artists more because having character artists see making splash art for free-to-play games as the end game/"i made it"/steady source of income makes me so fucking sad

you can be so much more than the most boring form of digital art in existence but it's like the only gig that pays well because it makes millions off the back of extracting pennies from people with poor impulse control

woo gay rights