I do not like to tell my readers what to believe, so I will simply "speak on something that fascinates me" instead. That is our form for today-- please do not distort its shape, even if the evidence of your eyes tells you otherwise. But I have been thinking that a lot of people don't make room in their lives to be provoked by media lately.
I used to be very involved with my readers-- something I sort of regret now, and which I have taken steps to remedy.
Nowadays, I usually hear about "Unjust Depths *takes*" from friends who see them in the wild. So I'm still exposed to it, but in a curated form.
And a lot of the takes baffle me because it feels like people just not wanting fiction to provoke any discomfort from them or challenge them, which is really alien to me.
This obviously isn't a phenomenon that affects only my work either-- I think generally people are cautious, scared even, of art that provokes challenging emotions.
However, everything in the world is more exciting when it happens to you personally, so I will use my work as an example.
There are a lot of parts of Unjust Depths that are written in a fashion as to provoke responses from the reader. There is not just one type of response I am seeking but many-- the chapters end in cliffhangers to provoke anticipation and even frustration and hopefully excitement for the next thing (wherever it may come, given I have abandoned a schedule for a bohemian life of simply "writing my little stories whenever I want to"). That's just one obvious trope that is meant to provoke a response. I am not saying this in the mold of "discourse creation" around whether clifhangers are problematic or something-- I am just being real with you, I do the cliffhangers because I know how they make *me* feel and I expect they do the same to you.
Similarly, there are times where my writing is trying to provoke thought, particularly around some heavy issues I've experienced, like racial violence and oppression, colonialism, the mentality of the besieged people in a world that subjugates them. To be thought provoking you have to understand whose thoughts you are provoking. I have a target audience-- it is the self-described leftist living in the anglosphere. It is not *necessarily* just trans women or queer people generally-- I am hoping that anglosphere leftists of any gender can enjoy the story. And I also hope that there are times when the story makes them think a little, challenges them. Provokes them. Makes them sit with themselves uncomfortably and have to sort out those feelings.
And also I mean-- the story has a bunch of sex and all the characters are described really attractively or at least, in the ways I find people attractive. I try not to make characters "ugly" even if they are described in ways that are "unconventionally" attractive because I find all sorts of people sexually attractive. Semyonova is the most beautiful girl on the Brigand and she's also like, my size and body type, which is definitely not the median size for "hot sex women" in our society. But she is one to me. And sometimes those beautiful characters get squashed into a fine paste. I find that attractive too. I think it's handsome to get your guts pulled out in a fight and then fall off a building and drag your bleeding blob of a body into the sewers to escape.
Anyway. That's also a form of response that I want my writing to draw from the reader. I hope you think all the sucking and fucking is hot. It's obviously okay if you don't but you can look at the text and see the effort and passion I put into certain things and come to the conclusion I'm doing all of this for a reason, right?
I do have a target audience like I said. I don't say this to be exclusionary, but simply because it's my reality-- I am a mixed race queer person with marxist, anti-colonialist beliefs, I was raised by parents sympathetic to my birth country's nationalist independence movement from colonialism. But I am also a person who was largely educated in English, even though my native tongue is Spanish. I was raised in the anglosphere internet of the 90s and 00s-- I wrote fanfic when I was 12, in English, on mainly English-speaking websites. I read books primarily in English. I do not know the literary form of my native tongue as well as I know the conventions of English fiction writing. I can't write a book for the latinoamerican leftist primarily because I don't write stories in Spanish, just like I can't write a book for the Chinese leftist primarily. While I hope my story has a more universal appeal than that, the "target audience" and thereby, the person being provoked specifically by the themes and tropes, is the anglosphere leftist reader. This is also a person I'm just really familiar with-- all of my friends and many of my coworkers at my day job would describe themselves as leftists. Some have complicated relationships to those politics, like I do, but they will at the end of the day settle in that "demographic."
This is also the person that I have been and that I am and that, in some complicated permutation, I am "being" and "unbeing" at various points, whether I like it or not.
Unjust Depths has a lot of weird shit in it-- my fascination with lovecraft and conspiracy theories and theosophy and several sexual fascinations-- there's all sorts of weird indulgent stuff. But when I'm looking to make a prodding criticism it's more targeted than that. Unjust Depths does not possess a criticism of Chinese society, for example, as several American creative works of this period might have because of current day American liberal geopolitical fixations. It does possess a criticism of, for example, ways that (anglo) leftists idealize struggle, the ways they idealize identity itself, and the ways they avoid making themselves vulnerable about the realistic difficulties of intersecting contexts and histories in the movements. My experiences and biases and history with politics and people and land color the way I write. I'm also a student of history and I love historical allegory and I deliver those criticisms through the mirror of the past as well. I hope that by doing this I also provoke people to think about these moments and these movements and their own personal context in a new and vulnerable way.
So I know my writing will land in certain ways with certain people, or at least, that's what I expect-- and I know it will fail others. It is what it is.
It's delivered in a provocative way, an exaggerated way, because that's how I like to write and what I like to read. I like works of fiction that have a lot of pathos. I'm a *huge* fan of A.C.G. media ("anime") and I like the storytelling form of it. I love the bombast and *enormous* feelings on display, the excessive pathos and the incredible honesty and self-seriousness with which it delivers drama. Its exaggerations of both the physical and emotional forms of people are something that is deeply embedded in me. In a manga you can feel like a high school badminton game between a girl and her estranged sister has life or death stakes. That's the kind of fiction I want to get invested in and it is the kind of work I want to do-- except like not about sports but about the ULTIMATE sport which is *WAR*. The most DANGEROUS GAME. (That's me being irreverent tone indicators tone indicators tone indicators tone indicators.)
I'm also a fan of being emotionally manipulated by media. Right now I'm playing Reverse Collapse: Codename Bakery, which has a plot that's basically time loop misery porn. Jefuty goes through so much delicious delicious angst in that story. I want to write a whole blog post on what it's doing in Chapter 4 because if they pull off what I think they are intending to do with this chapter I might fucking cry and the tears will also be delicious, possibly because I have a great diet with balanced nutrients and good macros or because the drama hurts that good that it makes my tears delicious. I aspire to get that sort of response from people and I have in the past and it's been amazing to me. But there are people who don't want that to happen to them and I don't understand what they actually want from art. Not in like a judgmental way just that this is my own experience and I create art from those experiences, my creativity springs from my desires when I interact with fiction. I am not interested in stories that perfectly match my sensibility. I like them to attack me out of nowhere and betray me, even if it sucks-- those provocations, those moments where I sit with discomfort about what I'm seeing and doing and it makes my insides gnarled, it's a really electric feeling even if I hate the thing the story did.
This is why I've watched like 10 seasons of Star Trek-- some of those episodes are GOD AWFUL but I've never thought about a television show as much as I've thought about Star Trek the past few months. Because if there's one thing Star Trek is always trying to do is provoke a response from me. It's trying to make me think and get uncomfortable sometimes and like, it doesn't work a lot? Because I'm not a liberal american dad tuning into the cable box after work and catching a random syndication episode of Star Trek where lesbianism is supposed to shock my sensibility-- I am not the target audience here. Similarly I don't care when a character's boyfriend dies due to his uncompromising belief in putting the good of his nation ahead of his personal relationships, and whether that sacrifice was wasteful or noble-- because I don't like him, I exist in a constant state of wanting Jakey to die. But it does work sometimes.
The episodes about for example, what it means to be a "rogue Jem'Hadar" and what those guys think and want and their tragedy. That one sticks with me as a really effective episode of Star Trek where I got so invested in the universe, I took so many gut punches, and at the end, I was kind of mad, it made me reframe certain characters I liked, and I resented the actions they took. It's that kind of media that I really like, it is those moments that make me want more, and it's also some of what I'm trying to do with Unjust Depths. I hope this won't get reduced to "Madiha is just trying to do cheap shock value to all of us" because I'm trying to do a lot of other things creatively with Unjust Depths too. My intention is not solely to shock and I hope that is evident-- but it is also part of the story's intention, to challenge, to draw out emotions.
I am hoping that readers of my work will sit with discomfort and think about it and have a unique experience in that fantasy. That it's not just pure unchallenging escapism that solely leaves them in a comfortable place.
But also sometimes I do drop those kind of stories if I'm too pissed so I understand all of you and don't judge you. Honestly sometimes I think Unjust Depths could use *less* readers these days. I used to want everybody to read it and now I understand what that means. Sometimes when you get what you want it sucks. And that's the same experience as when I'm reading a terrible light novel about an isekai boy and he has cute interactions with a girl and then he gets the girl and I'm initially so satisfied with this (a rare feeling as I almost never want a boy to get the girl in a story because I want the girl to get a girl) and THEN it fucking sucks its the absolute worst and both of them hate it and everyone's sad and it's a huge bummer and I'm just pacing around the room at how bad this is and then I'm like damn. Shout out to Re:Zero for doing me like that. For taking my desires and crumpling them up and stomping on them. It is kinda bold to do something like that and we can talk about the objective qualities of those books all day long but what they have in spades is those awful feelings I crave to feel. And like that's related to writing too I guess.
Anyway I don't have a good landing from this leap I've taken. I'm just kind of floating in the air, pondering, with the grenade in my hand and the fuse lit.
If you don't want to read Unjust Depths anymore that's fine. If you think I'm a bad person that's okay. But hopefully in the process you at least explored your own beliefs and feelings about it and that you will take *something* away.
(Is this post as hard to read as Unjust Depths? You tell me. Or don't.)