“90% of everything is crud.” – Sturgeon’s Law
Theodore Sturgeon was a sci-fi writer who had his first sci-fi fiction story published in 1939. In the early fifties, he first stated what eventually became Sturgeon’s Law. Tired of being told that 90% of sci-fi was crud, he retorted that it was true of all genres, but it was only sci-fi that specifically got called out for being crud. He pointed out that when people talked about mysteries, they mentioned the elite writers (which is funny because when I got into reading mysteries in the nineties/aughts, it was definitely considered lesser than literary fiction and lumped in with sci-fi).
It’s been adapted into “90% of everything is crap”, whereas I say, “90% of everything is shit”. In addition, I’ve upped it to 99%, although I will generously concede that it might be closer to 95%. The point is that true art is a very small percent and everything else is shit.
I would point out that there is even more effluvia these days simply because it’s so easy to put things on the internet. That makes me hold firm to my idea that 99% of everything is shit. In fact, I would probably up it to 99.9%. Just because anyone can, it doesn’t mean that anyone should.
It’s daunting to even find anything remotely consumable on any given subject. I’m not talking art, by the way; I’m just looknig for good content. So, the top 10%–not five or less. I put “autistic” in YouTube, and the first fifty or so videos are by white men and women. In fact, one of them is one of the videos I saw by a white man talking about masking for autistic woman–and did not have a female guest in his video. He thought wearing a wig and talking in a higher voice would be enough. Which….yeah. That’s not it, my dude.
There’s a lot of videos on autistic people with ADHD, which I’m pretty sure is not me. The Asian woman I’ve mentioned in a previous post (the last post? Not sure. Time. What even is it?) is not in the first fifty or so videos. I put Asian American in the search box, and the Asian American woman I mentioned is the second hit. And there are many videos with the gender pretty split between the two binary genders.
I found one person who was queer, nonbinary trans, autistic, and Korean American. I am including one of their videos below because in it, they talk about representation in media, intersecitonality, and the hope that one day, they will have plentty of mediocre media that reflects themselves to choose from.
I’ve made that joke, by the way. That the day when I can be a mediocre person of color and not be called a detriment to my race or other signifier.
When I was getting my masters in Writing & Consciousness (do not ask. I don’t want to talk about it), my advisor and I had a fight over one of my stories. Oh, that was my project for the program. We had to write…I don’t exactly remember what, but it was something like 50-100 pages of short stories, all around a theme.
My theme was death (which is not a surprise if you know me). One of my short stories was basically a revenge fantasy. The main character was a Taiwanese American woman who lived in San Francisco. She became obsessed with cases of men getting away with gruesome crimes against women and decided to enact revenge on them by dispelling of them in the way they tortured their victims.
It was exceedingly graphic, which was not and is not my style of writing. I’m not a horror fan, and I am REALLY uncomfortable with body horror. But, the idea came to me, and I was enamored by it. Would I write it again now? Nah. Am I glad I wrote it? Yes.
My advisor was Mexican American and told me I should make the main character white so people wouldn’t get sidetracked by the fact that she was Asian. I understood what he was saying because minorities are viewed as representative of their race in a way white people simply are not. I did get that by making a repellant Taiwanese American character, there was a chance if people read my story, they would fixate on the race aspect.
To which I said to my supervisor (in admittedly a huffy tone) that I was not interested in writing only positive Taiwanese American characters because that was too model minority for me. Meaning, it’s just the other side of the coin when it came to racism. It was still presenting a two-dimensional character who was more stereotypes than real.
Again, I get why he suggested it, but I flat-out rejecetd it. I kept my character Taiwanese-American, and, yes, she did awful things. I mean, really terrible things. She was a horrid perrson, and I was quite pleased with how she turned out.
Back to content creation.
It’s so difficult to wade through the morass to find something worthwhile. I also hate that if you watch one video on something, YouTube will suddenly flood your feed with hundreds of similar videos. Yes, I can occasionally find a gem, but usually it’s hidden among fity to a hundred terrible videos. The amount of sexist, homophobic, racist, any other kind of ist shit I get is depressingly high.
One interesting thing Courn (the content creator I included above) is that while they talk about intersectionality, they also say that you can’t get everything in one representation. That’s why they want more representation overall. They said that the reality was that movies (that was the example they gave) would not give a character several minority traits because the character has to be relatable (to cishetwhitemen), so only one deviation from the puported norm is allowed.
That’s why you will have the autistic character, the gay character, and the black character, but you will rarely have all three in one. You mightget two, but that’s not that common, either. And if it is, it’s usually queer and PoC. They said it’s not gonna happen any time soon (having multiple minority traits in one character), which is why we need more representation in general.
I’m a bit freaked out that I found them, honestly. Why? Because they fit so many things I am looknig for in content creation. They don’t have many videos (more shorts than videos), but tI have liked what I’ve seen. They alo have body doubling videos, which I may try out when I want to get to work.
I think for me, I’m more realistic than I have been in the past. Or rather, I have modest goals. Finding a few content creators who I can relate to on more than a superficial level? That’s much more realistic than finding several or a group that does the same. I’m still going to look for the latter, but I’m less likely to find that, I think.