It would be far better for the entire country and world if we could just expatriate all members of the #gamergate mob to, say, Jupiter.

Or straight into the sun, just to be sure.

While I agree with the sentiment of most of this, this line made a made procession of LOLs stream across my brain.

You cannot ever separate a character with their creator.

That the statement is not grammatically sensible isn’t what did it, but rather of course you fucking can separate a character from its creator. This statement is facile and not supported by reason, all to jam a narrative into a place where it does not fit.

If written well enough, a character is its own entity, with little to do with a creator – all the fan fiction in the world would attest to that. But it’s more than that.

How many people have written Wonder Woman, Batman, etc., over the years? Does Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird or Celie from the The Color Purple exist outside of each of their respective works? I’d posit that they do.

A well-written character can have – does often have – more of a life, can feel more real, and seem to exist more than the (often-boring) author or creator.

For instance, the character Johanna Mason –- mainly due to Jena Malone’s* astounding performance — feels more real to me and I can imagine her (sad) life far better than I can imagine or even know anything about the lives of those who nominally created her.

She lives for me apart from them, and really has nothing at all to do with them.

Tumblr is a hive of dumbassery, admittedly, so I shouldn’t have bothered to write so much about this, or perhaps I should have made it a bit more intellectually focused, but too much already in life is obscurantist just to make oafish people who happened to learn some long words in college look smart.

I’m tired of that, really.

*In fact when I was writing that paragraph, I originally wrote, “mainly due to Johanna Mason’s astounding performance.” She seems more real to me than the woman who portrayed her in many ways, subconsciously. Because I don’t know Jena Malone. But now I do know Johanna Mason.

This happens a lot.

My grandfather had the cops show up to “take a look” at his garden that had okra growing in it.

That was when I was eight or nine.

My grandfather was one of the few people in my extended family who was actually not a criminal of some sort.