PapaSkwat 12 points 17 days ago

Thanks for this. I knew the meme, but I didn't actually know the history of this situation. The original sci-fi story by Isabel Fall is pretty great. I hadn't read it until I looked it up because of this post.

Very sad what happened to her after her story was published. She had a tough time with it all.

One of the writers involved in the backlash, Arinn Dembo, later realized she had judged the situation too quickly and wrote a long, thoughtful apology about what happened and the dangers of rushing to conclusions about people: A Public Apology to Isabel Fall: https://www.patreon.com/...

I have a couple of downvote bots (created by my Lemmy stalker) that follow me around, so this comment may get downvoted. Ignore my downvotes though, and read the Wikipedia article from the OP and the Patreon apology I linked. The whole situation is super interesting, and something that many quick-trigger posters on Lemmy could learn some lessons from.

Thanks, OP. Definitely informative.

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clove 7 points 17 days ago

I'm trans and was personally never able to get through the entire story when it was first published. It irritated me somehow, but it was more of a flow/word choice thing for me, I found it tough to absorb the content/context.

I can still remember the backlash, and I'm still incredibly mad people rushed to judge the author. That seems to be the most common reaction to everything now. "How can I get mad about this thing, rar rar?!?!" Nice to see she got some apologies, but why can't people hold their judgement for a second anymore (thanks, Internet!).

Sigh.

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PapaSkwat 2 points 17 days ago

I missed all of it until I looked into it because of OP's post. But I've seen pile-ups happen, especially on Lemmy. Some people read the title of a news article then assume that just posting the article means that the poster must be a fascist, or nazi, or transphone, or whatever. I've been accused of being a fascist for posting articles from AP News. l posted some Daily Mail articles and people told me to kill myself. People just go off the rails for the smallest things sometimes. Crazy.

So I can only imagine how actual writers must feel. In this particular case, the lack of nuance really did a number on her. And it's sad because I enjoyed helicopter story. But I do agree with you its flow and some word choices.

It's easy to say "just ignore the haters," (like I do) but some people just don't have the inner constitution to do that. Sometimes, we need to step back and remember that there are real people on the other side of the keyboard.

It's a tough challenge though, because there are also plenty of people online who just wanna watch the world burn and don't care what happens.

But I think the personal insults hurled at the author back when the story got published would be 10 times worse if she had published it to Lemmy. Throw into the mix that people would just accuse her of using AI or something too. Probably why we'll probably never have a serious author community here.

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