As part of his Nerd Curious series, in which he goes back and explores artifacts of culture he missed in his youth, my friend and the AV Club’s television editor Todd VanDerWerff took a deep dive into Ray Bradbury’s short stories and emerges with what I think is one of the best summaries of what makes Bradbury’s work distinct, the element of nostalgia and emotional irrationality in decision-making, even in science fiction where we’re supposed to be enhanced–or at least, where rationality is supposed to rule:

In The Martian Chronicles, as happens so often in Bradbury’s work, people don’t look at the destruction of their world and run as far as they can from the mushroom clouds or the astronauts bearing chicken pox. Instead, they run toward them, trying in vain to preserve something that’s already gone. The Earthlings who have settled Mars decide to go back to Earth after nuclear war erupts there. That seems a very curious decision—wouldn’t those who had escaped such destruction by virtue of being so very far away count themselves lucky?—until it is situated in the context of Bradbury’s bibliography. The characters are haunted by memories of a past they can’t ever shake. In that context, their actions make perfect sense. They aren’t driven by practical sense; they’re driven by emotional sense, until both worlds are mostly dead and barren, a handful of survivors of two species straggling out a life on the margins.

You should really read the whole thing, which has too many big ideas to get into here. But I thought that was lovely and astute.

In a fascinating bit of cross-cultural misalignment, Michael Yaki, a former San Francisco supervisor and now a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, got Bravo to cut the use of the acronym “JAP,” which is colloquially used, often in a self-referential way, to stand for “Jewish-American Princess,” from its promos for and episodes of a new show, Princesses: Long Island, about privilege young women from the New York area. The San Francisco Chronicle explains:

“This promo ran again and again and I got madder and madder and said, ‘This is not right,’ ” said Yaki, a KRON-TV political analyst. “I’m the son of a Japanese American who spent a part of his childhood behind barbed wire in an internment camp in the Arizona desert. It is a term that offends Japanese Americans and Asian Americans.”

On Friday, Yaki sent a letter to executives at Bravo, saying, “While I understand that there has been a regional colloquial use of the word, the time is long past that it should be a word that Bravo actively promotes on its network. You can see that it is so offensive to me that I cannot even spell the whole word out.”

The use of the acronym has nothing to do with the slur against Japanese-Americans, of course, originating separately in novels by Jewish men and magazine articles about Jewish women–Frank Zappa even wrote a 1979 song called “Jewish Princess,” that brought the Anti-Defamation League down on him. The questions of whether or not it’s a slur, and whether or not the term’s been officially and widely claimed are up for debate. But wherever those conversations settle, it makes sense that hearing a word that in another context is absolutely derogatory must be jarring.

No word, of course, on whether Yaki or the Commission are going to go after any of the other stereotypes on Bravo, from the presentation of Italian families on The Real Housewives of New Jersey, Persians in Shahs of Sunset, or women in general on the network. Maybe because the people who fall into those stereotypes are playing them for fun, profit, and tabloid covers, they come across as less objectionable. Or maybe we see so many images of Italians being loud, African-American women being dramatic, and women in general undermining each other that we’ve lost the capacity to be jarred by more of the same.

The trailer for the upcoming Civil War drama Copperhead conveniently doesn’t mention that the movement its titular characters were affiliated with wanted the Union to make a peace with the Confederacy that would allow for the preservation of slavery, and that it was naive enough to believe the Confederacy would come back to the Union on its own terms. But given the pop culture trope of the sympathetic or victimize Confederate, I’m not actually surprised that a Civil War setting is one of the few ways we could get a movie about people who have been dramatically marginalized in our political conversations and even in civil society: war resisters.

Right now, I’m reading Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars, his terrific history of resistance to World War I. One of the things that’s striking about the book, particularly the section on the suffrage movement, is the reminders it offers that the things we do to people who have been designated enemies of the state now, Western countries did to their own citizens a century ago. Horrified by the forced feedings of hunger strikers at Guantanamo? The British government force-fed suffragettes, many of who it imprisoned for extended periods of time for civil disobedience. Angered by the treatment of people who oppose war as if they’re mentally ill or radical? Bertrand Russell lost his job at Trinity College for his pacifism and served time in jail under the Defence of the Realm Act, which among other things, forbid people from publishing writing that could cause alarm or “disaffection” among the British populace, and pacifist socialist Jean Jaurès was assassinated by a nationalist in France.

We’ve become very comfortable lionizing the risks soldiers take on the battlefield, in part because those celebrations feel like a way of paying back people who are willing to experience extreme danger and the trauma of killing other people on our behalf. But we’re still reluctant, apparently, to treat people who try and fail to keep us out of wars, or as was the case with many World War I activists, to point out the disparate impact of conscription along class lines, as if they’re reasonable, much less admirable. I’m not an absolute pacifist myself, but I do think that the courage to stand up against some conflicts is admirable, and the amount of it required is more considerable than we generally acknowledge, given the risk that you’ll be labeled treasonous or mentally ill. I just wish that instead of Copperhead, we were getting a biopic about Charlotte Despard, a wealthy British woman (and sister to British war leader John French) whose pacifism grew out of a range of social concerns, including her work on poverty and her suffragist activism–in other words, a movie that can put war resistance in its social context, rather than one that in its advertising is hiding the uncomfortable truth of the Copperheads’ acceptance of slavery.

The bridge is yours. I’ll be out of the office tomorrow, but posts should go up in my absence. Have a great long weekend!

-Well, this is an unhappy format for a reality show.

-Honey Boo Boo as American cultural ambassador.

-Indie games won’t be able to self-publish on XBox One.

-Blake Shelton is doing a tornado benefit on NBC.

-If you need something to dance to this weekend, Ciara and Nicki Minaj have you covered:

In his writing here about the dearth of openly gay players on the active rosters of professional sports teams, Travis Waldron’s discussed a range of issues that have factored into the perception that athletics are a largely heterosexual pursuit. There’s the theory that the locker room is an unfriendly environment that’s been partially dispelled by straight allies like Chris Kluwe and Brendon Ayanbadejo. The persistent use of homophobic insults by fans suggests that the problem might be more in the stands than in players-only areas. And there’s the question of how being publicly out of the closet might affect a player’s negotiating power or sponsorship deals.

But this week’s given us a different kind of story about homophobia in sports, that of Giants reliever Jeremy Affeldt. Raised in a conservative environment, playing professional baseball sent Affeldt to cities where he met actual gay people, and gave him experiences that broadened his horizons. In Cincinnati, a gay Starbucks employee welcomed Affeldt’s son. And as he came to know San Francisco, Affeldt also came to learn more about people who had previously frightened him so much that he literally hid from the public. As the AP reports:

The ex-military brat said Monday he was so uncomfortable in San Francisco that he would seclude himself. ”I didn’t leave my hotel room when we came to play the Giants or A’s. I didn’t want to go out or see anyone,” he said. ”There was a profession of being wrong. I’ve come to that from a deep angle. I’ll probably get a lot of flak from the church for it, but I believe I’m right.”…

”There’s a chapter in there of me coming to San Francisco and being hesitant because I had homophobia, and now I don’t,” he said. ”I see more San Francisco as a city of love and a city of passion and compassion. It’s unbelievable this city. To see that and to have my heart change as a city I didn’t ever want to come to, to a city that I’m so thankful I’m going to be part of for a long time, it talks about that. For me, it was an awesome deal.”

We normally think about sports in terms of their ability to give different kinds of people the opportunity to excel, and through that athletic success, to disprove stereotypes about, say, the masculinity of gay men, or the temperament of African-Americans. But sports also put us in the stands with people who are different from us, and take young men and women to places that they might never have been able to afford to go, or brave enough to go, on their own, and expose them to ideas and people they might otherwise have never encountered. Someone like Chris Kluwe might have come into the NFL a straight ally, but if Major League Baseball turned Affeldt into one, and specifically into someone who is publicly reconciling his Christian faith and his renunciation of homophobia, that speaks to the power of professional sports to change minds in a very different ways.

I’m glad we’ve got the first trailer for Don Jon, the directorial debut of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, because it gives me an opportunity to talk about something I’ve been thinking about since I saw it at SXSW this year. As romantic comedies have hit a financial and creative rough spot, one of the best responses to that lacuna has been a crop of movies about failed relationships and the things we learn from them that could be termed unromantic comedies:

The unromantic comedy isn’t precisely new territory for Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who starred in one of the most resonant examples of the genre, Marc Webb’s 2009 hit (500) Days of Summer in which Tom (Gordon-Levitt) pursued Summer (Zooey Deschanel), falling in love with her in defiance of her repeatedly stated lack of seriousness about him. When they inevitably broke up, Tom was devastated and blindsided, especially when it turned out that Summer was capable of being serious about someone, just not about him. But the movie ended with him meeting another woman and sensing the prospect of a new relationship. The triumph in the film, and the indicator of Tom’s growth, wasn’t that he got together with Summer, but that he got over her.

Don Jon, which explores what happens when Jon (Gordon-Levitt), a porn junkie pickup artist with some serious road rage, meets Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), who appears to be the girl of his dreams, but in a parallel to his own addiction, aspires to live out one of the romantic comedies she loves. It’s evident almost from their first meeting how terrible Jon and Barbara are for each other. Jon’s the kind of guy, as he tells us, hilariously and profanely in voiceovers, who believes things like “In real life, if you want to get head, you have give head. I know there are guys who like to eat pussy, but the thing about that is, they’re f—–g crazy.” Barbara, by contrast, measures her power over Jon by seeing how much she can get him to change his life and behavior for her, asking him “You take one class for me, just one little class?” when they make out at her doorway, and luring him to a ridiculously girly princess party for one of her relatives. Part of her behavior-modification program includes insisting that Jon give up porn and taking him to rom-coms with her instead, including a truly brilliant parody starring Channing Tatum and Anne Hathaway under assumed names. As Barbara puts it “Movies and porno are different, Jon. They give awards for movies,” a distinction that’s both wrong in fact and ignores the extent to which romantic comedies have shaped Barbara’s worldview, and not for the better. The tension in Don Jon comes not from the idea that Jon might be unable to overcome his addiction to porn and as a result, lose out on Barbara, but that these two horribly mismatched people might end up together because it’s what they expect they’re supposed to do.
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Much has been made of the fact that E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, the erotic novel about a wealthy industrialist into BDSM and the young college graduate who falls for him, started out as Twilight fan fiction, and became a phenomenon once James changed the names. But she was hardly the first writer to hone her chops in fan fiction: Cassandra Clare, who started out in various fandoms, had a young adult fiction hit with her Mortal Instruments series, which has now spawned a movie adaptation with a $60 million budget. The Star Wars Expanded Universe is a professionalized version of fan fiction, giving authors space, within specific guidelines, to build out new stories and characters within a preexisting world. And given how many people have spent so many hours laboring over their keyboards for so many years, maybe the really surprising thing is that someone hasn’t figured out a way to monetize their work without changing the names or making them invent new stories before.

That changed yesterday, when Amazon announced its Kindle Worlds program, which is cleverly set up to benefit both the creators of original content and the people who write original stories set in the worlds invented by those creators and makes use of their characters. Authors of fan fiction published and sold through the Kindle Worlds program will be paid a royalty rate of 35 percent for works longer than 10,000 words, and 20 percent for short stories between 5,000 and 10,000 words. It’s not quite clear what percentage or flat fee the original creators of that licensed content will receive. But Amazon suggests that most of the pieces sold through the program will be priced in between $.99 and $3.99, though I can see those figures getting higher if Amazon gets its hands on some of the popular, book-length projects that have circulated in various fandoms for years.

Works can get rejected from the program–Amazon’s reserving the right to kick out submissions that provide a “poor customer experience,” and the guidelines for the program say it won’t accept pornographic material, which constitutes a significant percentage of fan fiction, work that uses racial slurs, employs excessive violence, or relies on heavily profane speech. And perhaps the biggest constraint right now is what fictional universes it’s possible for writers to work in. Kindle Worlds debuted with the rights to some of the content from Warner Bros. Television Group’s Alloy Entertainment, a notorious content factory, including Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries.

It makes sense that Kindle Worlds starts with content from Alloy, a publishing house with a highly-defined style where authors have been known to be assigned to projects cooked up because they seem likely to sell well, and to adapt well for film and television, as proved to be true for the three properties that are kicking off the Kindle Worlds universe. And while Amazon’s announcement of the program said that they’d be announcing many new licenses for fan fiction writers to work in, I would bet that it’ll be difficult for the program to get access to some of the properties that have inspired particularly lively fan fiction communities, like Harry Potter or the West Wing. It might make sense that Alloy’s authors, who are part of a profit-oriented program, don’t have much anxiety about other people playing in the universes that they built out. But authors who are more proprietary about their characters might be more twitchy about the prospect of other people getting paid to play in the worlds that they created. I can see someone like Charlaine Harris, who is ending her Southern Vampire series because she feels the universe is wrung out, and is under enormous and irrational pressure from fans to continue, wanting to definitively close off the world they created.

The question, then, will be whether standard author contracts make it easy for publishing houses to sign the works they publish over to Kindle Worlds, or whether this is a provision they’re going to have to negotiate as an addendum, and find standard language for in the future. And it’ll be interesting to see which authors decide they’re interested in participating and which hold out, in part as an indication of how proprietary authors feel about their creations. It could be very strange to see authors of original works get eclipsed by writers playing in the worlds other people have created as has, to a certain extent, been true with Fifty Shades of Grey.