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Post By
CrazySugarFreakBoy!

Member Since: Sun Jan 04, 2004
Posts: 1,235
In Reply To
HH with an issue for CSFB!'s story

Subj: There are a few reasons I posted that story as a reply, rather than doing anything to distinguish it as an "in-continuity" story ...
Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2008 at 03:35:34 pm EDT (Viewed 392 times)
Reply Subj: We haven't done the party chapter yet. Well, you haven't read it yet, but I've just posted it.
Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2008 at 01:01:48 pm EDT (Viewed 3 times)

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> ...then I read CSFB!'s tie-in.

it's the price we pay for having a shared universe.

> *shudder*

Actually, the bigger question that slightly bothers me on a second reading is Glitch's unquestioning acceptance of sex slavery and her willingness to use or abuse innocents for her own gratification. If that scene had been about CSFB! hiring Caphan virgin girls to fondle their privates we'd all be wanting to crucify him by now.

... One of which was the collection of credible continuity issues that Jay raised in his reply, since I also doubt that Caphan society would adapt to the new status quo quite that quickly, and the other of which was the potential out-of-characterness of it, although I have to admit, with that one, I was thinking more along the lines of not disrupting whatever you had planned for the next installment of this chapter.

That being said, Shrike is absolutely right; Glitch is an alien, and moreover, as much as we've explored and challenged many aspects of Caphan society, I'd argue that we've all danced around other potentially offensive aspects of it, either for narrative convenience or for comedy (please note, this is not a criticism), to the point that I think we could (and should) get away with at least one broadly comic "turnabout is fair play" scene of Caphan slavery applying to the other gender.

Indeed, in many ways, Glitch and the Caphan male slaves were on a much more equal footing than gender-reversed scenarios that we've read and written regarding Caphans before, because both Glitch and the Caphan male slaves are eager young virgins. While the majority of men in Caphan culture would obviously have problems with the concept of women owning men, I contend that there would be some minority of men, however small, who might not mind the prospect of female domination as much.

Hell, William Moulton Marston made that the basis of a significant percentage of his stories in the Golden Age Wonder Woman comics, and it's a point that even a number of the character's feminist fans have admitted to finding problematic in the years since; after all, if you're framing feminism as a war against a male patriarchy, and asking men, "How would YOU like it, if YOU were the ones who were objectified and reduced in status?", it's got to be a bit disconcerting when a few male voices say, "I'd prefer it," and they actually mean it.

As for Glitch's willingness to "take advantage," this fits with my idea of her paradigm. As a result of being Earth-based, most of the robotic and AI characters' arcs intersect with the idea of robot and AI rights serving as an allegory for human civil rights, which is probably inevitable for most sub-groups on Parody-Earth, unless something happens to make humans the minority of the population. However, because Glitch comes from a planet populated entirely by robots and AIs, her arc has nothing to do with this idea, and in fact intersects with almost the exact opposite idea, one that I've seen a few Fans of Color online refer to as "The Adventures of Whitey in Blackland." At best, Glitch is a well-meaning white liberal who a) earnestly wants to help those different from herself, but b) can still be remarkably insensitive to their status as actual people. At worst, she's the sheltered suburban white girl who's gone slumming with the "dangerous" black boys to piss off her parents. With liberal white people, racism often manifests itself as something that's trying desperately not to be racism ("Lord knows, I cherish black people" being a common white liberal refrain in America during the 1980s). With Glitch, that unintentional insensitivity is manifesting itself in a different way, which I've made deliberately ironic - Transformers were action figures in real life, so Glitch's metaphors, aside from the Fred Perry comics, were all framed as consumer electronics metaphors, of DVD rentals and personal computers. She doesn't even realize she's doing it, but there are times when she treats humans like toys, cooing over their ability to sweat and grow hair the way a little girl fusses with a talking doll.



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