Things the Beast Fears

The beast fears rape culture.  And also fears that it's going to be looking for funding on Indiegogo, if ever it goes looking, because, really, I'll just let Casey Malone speak for me on this one:

"This isn’t harmless. People come to these boards because they are scared of being humiliated, and they are saying to the world, “Tell me what to do, because I don’t know what to do.” And this guy has chosen to tell them, 'You should be a rapist.'"
A man who writes a manual for sexual assault kind of needs to die in that which the beast was originally said to fear.  And Kickstarter is, of course, free to continue to allow the project to go on, but I am also free not to use or support anything on Kickstarter, and that kind of sucks, but there it is.
Other folks have had more cogent things to say about it than I do.


The beast fears Jon C. Wright.  Actually, the beast could care less about him, funny little man he is, old-man-yelling-at-clouds, the beast fears him not one whit.  That said, finally catching up with this piece of his six months on, I've been struck with an interesting notions about the funny little man and that propelled me into a thought.  First the notion: Jon C. Wright thinks he's Edmund Pevensie facing down an army of Eustace Scrubbs.  Mostly straw Eustaces, but whatever.

I can go on my tumblies any day of the week (not during working hours, mind, it is tumblr, after all) and I am all but guaranteed to see at least one gif of Brienne of Tarth being swordly, being in a bear pit, hanging out with Jaime Lannister, something.  Every day, someone, different people, mind, is posting pictures of this woman.

According to Jon C Wright, no one likes Brienne, no one *can* like her.  She's inherently incapable, by her nature of being a character that strikes a chord, elicits any enjoyment or excitement or genuine interest from anyone.  It's impossible, and anyone who claims to like her, or any character like Brienne, is only doing so because of the dictates of feminism, or of Satan, the apparent author of feminism, or something.

The devil made me do it.  Like Eustace and his vegetarianism, his interest in nonficiton and farm equipment (or something).  No one can like those things, except out of perverse stubbornness and rejection of received truth.  Not only does God have opinions about how you need to behave, but also that you need to think that farm equipment is boring, bacon is tasty, and warrior women always and absolutely break suspension of disbelief.  I'm watching Fringe, right now, because the devil.  Normally, this doesn't gall me, not when there are so many better targets in an essay that includes this line: "That stubbornness is a hallmark both of noble savages and of oriental decadence." No really.  But tonight it does, the notion that we cannot take pleasure in the things Wright thinks we shouldn't any more than we can truly ignore the fact that that Christ is the sole ruler of the universe - we're all just pretending, for the joy of being dicks, I suppose.  Or because we're really stupid.  You see, this old man is yelling at clouds because he knows our minds better than we do.

So I read the comments, because I like things that are inherently unlikable, and was reminded that the funny little man was a comparatively recent convert to Christianity (Catholicism, to be more precise), having once been an athiest.  I've flirted with atheism in the past, and by flirted, I mean gone home with and made sweet, sweet love, but these days, I haven't been feeling much beyond 2nd base, and guys like Wright are one of the reasons why.  It's been a thing on the internet recently that some folk are coming to believe that the worst thing about atheism is atheists, and I have trouble disagreeing.  There certainly is a kind of atheist that I see a little too often, one with a very full invisible knapsack, for whom atheism seems to stem from an inability to conceive of a smarter or more powerful consciousness than his own.  And I have been at least partly guilty of that, which makes me increasingly uncomfortable.  If there is a God that will make me behave like a little less of that kind of a dick, I think I am willing to listen to what that God has to say.


The beast fears when SFWA lets its white supremacists out of the linen closet.  Where Wright is kind of fun to poke, because I am unregenerate and cruel dwarf and he thinks we live together in Narnia, Beale is a poisonous shit that scars the pipe, disgraces the sewer and shuts the treatment plant down in shame and despair for weeks on end.


The beast fears a lot of other things, things about which the prevailing bestial feeling is hopelessness and rage, and it is not for nothing that the thing about which I can write most is the least relevant to anyone's existence.  It is because I know too little and feel too much despair to talk about things of real substance.