So I had some Thoughts™ about this reply on my post about YA Twitter. They're not directed at the user specifically (hence I've cropped their username), but about this phenomenon in general.
I think we all agree that we don't like to give our time and money to people who are causing harm, especially when that harm is to our communities and friends. For example, when I find out an author is transphobic, it makes me deeply regret spending money on their books, because why would I want to give money to somebody who hates me and doesn't want me to exist comfortably in the world?
But that isn't the problem with YA Twitter. That isn't what has authors, particularly marginalised and debut authors, terrified to express themselves online in case they become a target. And that isn't what I wrote my post about.
What concerns me is the rise of a kind of... morality policing -- particularly in YA, where adult gatekeepers treat authors as educators rather than entertainers and consider literature to have to be suitable for younger readers. I don't deny that YA authors have a certain responsibility for the stories they tell that goes above and beyond the responsibility an Adult author, writing for an audience with more life experience, would have. But I also think teens are more discerning than a lot of these gatekeepers give them credit for being. They don't need to be spoonfed. They don't need, as somebody jokingly suggested, for every action in a book to be indicated by "(this is moral)" or "(this is immoral)", to be sure where the author stands on the topic.
And yes, some authors do go on social media and explicitly express harmful and dangerous viewpoints. It's clear that those are their views, not those of their characters, and that they have no intention of changing or listening to anyone. The harm they do can be real and intense; readers are totally within their rights to block that person and never read their books if they feel that's best. But they aren't the ones being impacted by Book Twitter, YA Twitter, whatever. They're not the main victims of this culture; they're not the focus of this intense scrutiny that has sprung up over the last few years.
The issue is that there's been this weird trend lately where people make assumptions about what authors believe or what their values are based on what characters in their books do or say. It's similar (and probably connected to) purity culture in fandom -- the idea that if you write something bad, it reflects your own behaviour or at least your own desires. They'll hold the author accountable for every opinion a character expresses. They'll screencap excerpts and quotes and use a character's behaviour as evidence for the author's prejudices. And then thanks to the nature of social media, others, who haven't read the book, will see that and accept it and cancel their pre-order or whatever. But characters ≠ authors! It seems strange that we even have to say this. I don't condone murder just because my protagonist is an assassin, and I hope nobody would assume that I do. Yet I regularly see authors held accountable for opinions expressed by fictional characters.
And that's the trouble with assuming we know somebody's agenda and basing our judgement of them and their work on hearsay. I read a book recently that reviewers had called out for racism, braced for disappointment. But all of the quotes I'd seen floating around social media were either spoken by antagonists and clearly meant to be wrong, spoken by the very acerbic protagonist who was judgemental of everyone (and wasn't praised for being so), or harmless in context. I believed those reviews and felt let down by the author because for a moment I allowed myself to buy into the "fiction as evidence" narrative... but even the fiction didn't hold up to scrutiny as evidence for the perceived beliefs of somebody who has not otherwise displayed harmful, racist behaviour.
Even when an author has unambiguously expressed something "problematic", there's absolutely no opportunity for growth in an approach that takes a "one strike and you're out" angle. Maybe an author did mess up. Maybe they were homophobic at one point, or said something racist out of ignorance. But there's a lot to be said for second chances, and cancel culture doesn't give them. And that ignores the fact that many authors are young; it ignores that nobody is teaching them how to handle social media (there are no PR courses for random YA authors!); it ignores that they may have had a sheltered upbringing. It also ignores cultural differences and language barriers and differences in accepted terminology among different communities. You cannot demand perfection from day one. You can't hold people to impossible standards and then punish them when they fail. If you want people to walk away from harmful groups and viewpoints, they need to have somewhere to go, and shunning them for their past mistakes will not incentivise them to change and grow.
Truth be told, the vast majority of the time, you probably don't know what an author's "agenda" is, or if they even (consciously) have one. Even ten years ago, it would be weird to imagine having the level of access to an author's thoughts and viewpoints that we have now, and I think it's these parasocial relationships that have developed which have led to assuming we can know an author by what they write -- not just on Twitter, as themselves, but in their fiction. And this correlation of art with artist, author with fiction, leads to nitpicking details in books, interrogating authors for their "right" to write about certain topics until they're forced to out themselves or recount their trauma, making assumptions about their views based on those of their characters, and punishing mistakes.
And THAT'S what makes it toxic, way before you hit the level of death threats. That's the issue here; that's what scares authors so much. Not that they'll be called out for their views, but because they'll be harassed for what strangers perceive as their views, or because they'll be constantly forced to violate their own boundaries and expose their private life to defend the artistic choices they made.
So that's a huge part of the toxic Twitter culture I'm talking about -- the one that's based on rumour and hearsay and decontextualised quotes, the one that holds authors to impossible moral standards and allows no forgiveness, the one that equates fiction with reality and punishes anything subversive or risky. The purity culture run rampant that subjects authors to intense and unpredictable scrutiny.
But then alongside that morality policing runs fandom culture and stan culture that violates authors' boundaries and makes it unpleasant for them to talk about their own work, and that harasses authors to fulfil their particular fandom wishes. See Tess Sharpe's experiences with her "fans" who harassed her not because of her "agenda" but because she wouldn't tell them a character's birthday so they could use it for astrology, because she didn't know. See Maggie Stiefvater's decision to walk away from the Raven Cycle world when the Dreamer Trilogy is finished, despite her love of it, because writing alongside online fandom can be unbearable. That has nothing to do with calling people out for their harmful ideas and everything to do with a social media culture that encourages entitlement and boundary violations. Readers now have unprecedented access to authors -- and with great power comes great responsibility, but not everybody is exercising it. And the ones who aren't are creating a cesspit of abuse, even against the authors whose work they claim to love.
This is a side of it that a lot of people "outside" book Twitter don't see, or don't realise is happening. (But I'm pretty sure it started on Tumblr. There's a reason Maggie Stiefvater left this platform a long time before she went updates-only on Twitter; Tumblr is not innocent in this.) This is the dark side of fandom. The entitlement that becomes abuse. The enthusiasm that becomes harassment. The love of characters that becomes demands about the direction of the books which stifle the author's creativity. And the violation of boundary between reader and author where certain readers treat authors as if they're in on the joke -- but an author doesn't know whether a death threat is a joke or not. All they see is violence. And if it happens once, maybe you can brush it off, but it happens to people for months and years on end. Imagine how much worse it is for those with trauma in their past.
All of this to say -- YA/Book Twitter's toxicity runs far deeper than overzealous responses to harmful agendas. Sometimes it's a case of reading agendas into fiction where they don't necessarily exist, but at other times, it has nothing to do with that at all.
