ICYMI! I hand-picked three wonderful books that I bet you haven’t read yet, and you can pre-order this summer reading bundle from Green Apple Books. It’s a lovely care package with extra goodies inside.

Also, the paperback of my mother-daughter witch novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster comes out in August. You can pre-order a lovely signed limited edition with fancy sprayed edges!

Okay, now for some noodling about stories, therapy and ownership…

Every human being is a collection of discordant voices chattering away — and sometimes shouting — inside a fleshy shell.

Some of those voices come from your upbringing, or from messages that you internalized via media, your teachers, or your friends. Some of those voices come out of experiences you have had which shaped the way you think about things. Different aspects of your personality pipe up at regular intervals, loudly or softly, as you face various situations.

The work of being a decent person includes deciding which of those voices to listen to — and to broadcast out into the world — at any given time. Having character, or integrity, means coming up with an idea of what sort of person you are and what you want to stand for, as an organizing principle for choosing a narrative from the jumble inside your head to trust or prioritize, especially when the situation grows shiznasty.

(You see this especially clearly with trans people: the process of transitioning often reshapes how someone behaves to some extent, but also reframes their past and makes them think differently about the person they have been, and the things that have influenced their behavior in the past.)

This is something I think a lot about, both in my own life and when I'm creating fictional characters. And, to some extent, but I'm dealing with other people. We all have ugly voices inside of us, but we also have kind thoughts. It's why people talk about “the better angels of our nature” and all that. 

But this is also true of stories. Every story is a jumble of narratives, some uplifting and some deeply horrible. If you start teasing apart all of the elements of a particular fictional scenario, especially one that's hung around for a while, you will find bits that lean toward grace, and other bits that sink naturally into rottenness. It's usually a matter of which elements and valences you want to put emphasis on, or draw out.

Everything from literary criticism to fanfiction is part of a massive, communal attempt to bring one interpretation, or one version, of a story to the surface and place it at the center. People fight over this shit because it's super important, often in ways that go beyond the reach of a particular made-up story.

This is why I put so much emphasis on intentionality: on knowing what story you want to tell, rather than just letting the elements of your story pull you this way and that. (A lot of my book Never Say You Can’t Survive is kind of about intentionality.) It's also why I make a point of showing my work to plenty of beta readers and often sensitivity readers, to ensure that any ugly undertone hasn't become actual noise. I’ve never written a story that didn’t have shitty or harmful ideas buried in its floorboards somewhere.

And this is something I think about when online trolls insist that Star Trek or Doctor Who has become too progressive or inclusive. I believe in the cradle of my soul that both Doctor Who and Star Trek are fundamentally about inclusion, solving problems without brutality, and creating a better, kinder world. I can easily point to Star Trek's early embrace of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations and the richness of its groundbreaking cast back in the mid-1960s. And it's almost too easy to find progressive messages in Doctor Who, going back to the beginning as well.

But the truth is, you can cherry-pick whatever meaning you want from pretty much any long-running piece of media. If you want to construct a version in your mind of Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel Comics or whatever that supports brutal oppression and creating a fixed hierarchy of people, you absolutely can find bits and bobs that back that interpretation up. This is partly because even if something was progressive for the 1960s or 1970s, it's still contains a lot of the attitudes of that time. It's also because every story simply contains multitudes, and some of them are going to be fucking dreadful.

I'm not at all saying that the haters are correct, or that I agree with them — I'm saying the opposite: that we can't take for granted that our most beloved stories will always support any egalitarian, pro-human point of view. We have to use all the power of fandom and cultural criticism to encourage the better reading of these stories and to call for versions of them that embody it. 

But this point also comes back to my long-standing preoccupation with the public domain. Bear with me here. 

I think one of the reasons why our culture feels so ossified and so trapped in the past — in addition to issues like our steadily worsening gerontocracy — is the fact that so many of our most beloved stories are owned by corporations. Those corporations have a built-in financial incentive to avoid upsetting anyone who might buy a tube of toothpaste, as super-genius comics writer Christopher Priest once observed. The longer a piece of intellectual property stays an asset on a corporate balance sheet, the likelier it is to get stripped of anything too provocative or challenging. Worse yet, many of these corporate owned stories have been around for a very long time, amassing lots of material which make it easier to cherry pick bad narratives from them and also make them further entrenched in our hearts. They also have a lot more baggage, coming from the 20th century. 

So I'm evolving a grand unified theory of culture: a culture is healthiest when most of its favorite stories are either A) brand new or B) controlled by no one.

A story that's brand new has plenty of room to grow, and is often more responsive to the feelings of its audience members. It can be tended and nourished, like a sapling, into something beautiful that speaks about our highest aspirations to lots of people from different backgrounds. A young story is also usually the product of one creator, or a handful of creators, whose idiosyncrasies and obsessions shape the text and generate a ton of illogical, often contradictory features. There’s a lot of energy, and even joyfulness, in seeing a fictional world come fresh out of the oven, even if it’s in a familiar genre.

And obviously, a story that belongs to everyone can be whatever anybody wants it to be. When the blessed day arrives that Superman enters the public domain, he won't be able to fly (at first) — but he will have a much more awesome power: the power of embodying the imagination of anyone who cares about Superman. I will be the canonical writer of Superman, and so will you. Anybody who likes Superman will be canonized. It’ll be up to the audience to decide which version of Superman they like best, and I hope the audience chooses well. 

A character who is neither brand new nor in the public domain is in many ways the worst of both worlds. Such a character has been handled by tons of different creators, each of whom has tried to push it this way or that. Often this character has simultaneously gone through two seemingly opposite processes: a lot of the early weirdness has been sanded down and sanitized, while at the same time the core concept has gotten iterated and overdeveloped, to the point where its become too complicated for any normal person to follow.

My go-to example of this phenomenon is the Silver Age Green Lantern: the early stories about Hal Jordan are extremely silly, and include oddball elements like Hal’s ring not working on yellow. In recent decades, most of the silly stuff has gone out the window, and the ring works fine on yellow, depriving the character of some of his whimsy (and a real weakness.) In its place, creators have added a dense, overcomplicated mythos that makes even a Green Lantern fan like me clutch my head. In addition to Green Lanterns and a few yellow lanterns, there are now lanterns of every single color.

There’s also the well-documented phenomenon whereby something starts out being for kids — or for all ages — but fans get older and demand that it be cater to them, becoming more grimdark and “mature” and losing some of its whimsy. But that’s a whole other topic.

It can, of course, be super awful if a property is still controlled by its original creator and that person happens to be a toxic individual. See here for my thoughts on Harry Potter.

As longtime readers of my newsletter will remember, Shakespeare only stayed popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — and began to achieve the iconic status he now enjoys — because people were regularly rewriting his plays to give them a better ending, or to add more women.

Anyway, back to the thing about how every human being is a cacophony of voices inside a bag of flesh.

The process of figuring out which of the voices inside you is a canonical part of your personality — which represents the "real" you — is part of therapy. I sometimes think that popular fictions need therapy as much as human beings do, to root out the malign influences and toxic detritus they have accrued over time. And I believe corporate control keeps us from getting our most popular stories the therapy they deserve. We need to find the good in our most-loved stories and root out the shitty parts, but corporations keep a tight grip on them.

To finish bringing things full circle: I put a lot of time and energy into trying to find the least toxic, most honest version of every story I tell. This feels a lot like the same process as trying to be the best version of myself. I believe one our culture feels a bit sick is because many of its greatest cultural treasures are unable to do the same thing because they are held hostage by giant mega-corps.