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Reading up on RaceFail09 is interesting, periodically outrageous, and all that, but somehow I feel very distanced from it.
I'm realising it's because it feels like reading about things happening in a foreign country. I thought I was a fan of sf/f; I'm realising that while I approve of the existence of genre fiction in general terms, and all, and am quite familiar with the general tropes and context and so on... it's mostly kind of alien to me, all of it. I've never heard of the authors involved. I've read almost no genre fiction published... well, in my lifetime, actually. Almost all the sf/f I've read I read from my parents' collection as a child.
Part of it may be ADHD, actually - I have difficulty sustaining my interest past the first paragraph of a novel set in an unfamiliar universe, with unfamiliar characters, and since it's a difficult thing to try and push past that, I'll only read books if they're by authors who've written short stories I've really enjoyed... and I'll only usually try short stories by authors I don't already know if they're under ten pages.
And I don't seek them out.
So I've pretty much narrowed my potential reading field to zero, already. Very rarely I'll read something recommended by a friend, but even then I'll generally not get past the first book of a series. I don't read much fiction. I read a little fanfic... but only, again, if it's written by authors I already like, or who are personally recommended by friends whose judgement I trust.
Mostly, I read non-fiction. I read history. I read the New Yorker. I read course materials, when I'm studying, and I read blogs and journals. It all means I'm really quite conversant with the trops of sf/f fandom up until around the time I was born (although some of that is because I studied it to write a history essay about Star Trek), and looking on with bemused non-recognition about the present.
It's probably a good thing - RaceFail would have hurt instead of just being bemusing and outrage-inducing. While I do still fangirl certain TV shows, the current ones are pretty much all Japanese, and Euro-American-Australian-etc racial issues are, unsurprisingly, highly unlikely to trouble me while watching something where every single character and actor is Japanese. (Actually, in a couple of my shows there have been occasional appearances of non-Japanese people, all of whom have been portrayed very negatively, but I don't have to feel complicit in Japanese racism towards non-Japanese people, and I can choose to believe that the hideous stereotypes of foreign tourists totally don't have to apply to me.)
It's all just so wrong. But I can't fix the world, so I shall go back to reading history.
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