Can you copyright Sun Powers?

December 23, 2023 5:30 PM

Since I know you expect to be updated on the latest SFF YA writer drama, here you go: … since the infamous Lauren is trying to delete her racist tweets while simultaneously still harassing BIPOC authors, I guess we're doing this instead.
posted by signal (46 comments total)

I feel like I have read things with “sun powers” before 2023….
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:27 PM on December 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

> I feel like I have read things with “sun powers” before 2023….
> posted by GenjiandProust at 6:27 PM on December 23

*Kal-El has entered the chat*
posted by Scattercat at 6:30 PM on December 23, 2023 [29 favorites]

Marduk rules
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:34 PM on December 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

I can make vitamin D out of sunlight.
posted by mittens at 6:48 PM on December 23, 2023 [18 favorites]

Well they’ve produced plenty of ammunition for the anti-woke crowd. A bit of a Pyrrhic victory.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:52 PM on December 23, 2023

Does this... matter?

Is it affecting book sales?

If anyone feeing affected by this just stopped going to twitter, would their lives be better or worse?

I do have empathy for anyone feeling harassed online, but this feels so very very niche that I'm not sure the stakes are enough to warrant the emotional energy? Maybe I'm not reading any of this closely enough, and I'd be happy to be shown I'm wrong.
posted by hippybear at 6:58 PM on December 23, 2023 [11 favorites]

Does this count as "writer drama" when one of the two isn't even published? And there's no actual lawsuit, just random threats of one?

This is bad behavior, no question, but probably doesn't merit global attention. Let this awful woman sink back into the oblivion she came from.
posted by praemunire at 7:34 PM on December 23, 2023 [10 favorites]

You always wonder to what degree the foolish person genuinely doesn't understand copyright and to what degree they're just like "oh I can stir up some racist drama and get attention by acting like I don't understand copyright".

Also, it is so surprising to me how fast this genre of...post-YA? Light romantic fantasy? has blown up into a major publishing category and become so completely bananas toxic. It's really stupid (unless it's just racist trolling) to act like this, because when people are fans of light genre fiction, they tend to read a ton of it - to have long to-read lists and actually read them. So one book about a girl who controls the sun would, if anything, build market for another - people would be interested to read both to compare how they were handled.
posted by Frowner at 7:42 PM on December 23, 2023 [12 favorites]

Does this... matter?

Is it affecting book sales?
hippybear

In this particular case? Probably not. But crazy YA author-world drama like this can and has indeed gotten book sales tanked or even books pulled by their publishers. There've been previous MeFi posts about it.

Well they’ve produced plenty of ammunition for the anti-woke crowd. A bit of a Pyrrhic victory.
Tell Me No Lies

The YA writer world has somehow become the living embodiment of the conservative "woke gone mad" stereotype. It seems absolutely psychotic.
posted by star gentle uterus at 7:42 PM on December 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

Hippybear, these days, Twitter harassment is not something to be safely ignored. There are people who actively look for excuses to unleash their bot armies and human brigades on anyone they consider a good target. In a world where Kiwifarms and Moms For Liberty exists, t
"just ignore the troll" has been bad advice for a very long time now.

Setting aside the fact that book sales are not the only measure of harm, (normalising racism is harmful all by itself, why should anyone have to tolerate it ) a debut writer, especially a black debut writer who doesn't live in the UK, USA, Canada, or Europe, is vulnerable to publishers deciding that taking on their book is not worth the hassle if it draws this kind of attention.

This phenomenon (white global north writers attacking non-white writers) is not a phenomenon caused by and confined to Twitter. Twitter just makes it very visible. Calling it out is, in fact, important.
posted by Zumbador at 7:47 PM on December 23, 2023 [26 favorites]

I mean, I guess? But the actual number of people participating on Twitter/X is decreasing day by day, and maybe you're suggesting that actual physical harm can come to people if they ignore the scene on that website? But the number of people doing things on Twitter/X has never been a large number and is now significantly smaller than it was a year or two ago. And its societal connections have been severed continually across the past year or so.

You say that "twitter harassment is not something to be safely ignored". Do you mean, here and now in 2023 that people are under physical threat, that the people in this particular instance will meat physical harm, if they just ignore all this bullshit?

And if book sales aren't being harmed, and that's the measure by which these artists are likely measuring their wellbeing in this capitalist marketplace, and twitter has an ever decreasing marketplace as people stop logging in there anymore... I'm not sure exactly what harms in the greater society are being realized in this Nazi Bar that nobody treasures anymore.

I get the calling out racism is important, but this feels like pretty small ball play because twitter ain't shit anymore.
posted by hippybear at 8:06 PM on December 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

Well, if the xits in the linked post have any validity, as far as book sales go, it is only going to help "Marve", who's name I can't find right now. Lauren isn't published. Maybe there's grifter money in it for her...

I hear ya hippybear... NO SECOND "W" AND AN EXTRA "E"!

Sheesh...
posted by Windopaene at 8:14 PM on December 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Does social media really drive sales for writers? Maybe it would be better to just hire a PR person and spend their time writing books.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:36 PM on December 23, 2023

It's not so much Lauren's racism, it's her stupidity.

She's almost smart enough to understand this or that concept, but she keeps missing the point. Utterly.

I keep saying it: It's the dumb ones that worry me most.
posted by Relay at 8:45 PM on December 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

Apollo has entered the chat
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:46 PM on December 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

Does social media really drive sales for writers?

In certain genres, like YA fantasy, social media is an enormous driver of sales.

Also Romance, I believe?

Maybe explains why there have been so many similar social media controversies with YA writers.
posted by Zumbador at 8:54 PM on December 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

In a world where K*w*farms and Moms For Liberty exists, t
"just ignore the troll" has been bad advice for a very long time now.

I do agree with this broader point, but there is probably a practical difference between an unpublished, unconnected rando making some racist tweets and the two "institutions." If anything, calling broader attention to her (obviously you can't and shouldn't ask anyone in her immediate blast radius to be quiet about it) is more likely to get her fed into that vile ecosystem and thus make the situation worse.
posted by praemunire at 9:36 PM on December 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Sun powers, off the top of my head:

Superman
Supergirl
Starfire
A character from a Robin McKinley YA novel
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:59 PM on December 23, 2023 [8 favorites]

the McKinley novel is titled, and the character nicknamed, Sunshine
posted by clew at 11:22 PM on December 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

Chuck Scarsdale would like a word about this.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 11:34 PM on December 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Given what I know about the modern YA publishing world and its history on Twitter (I'm kind of adjacent to it in my day to day life):

Lauren has almost definitively talked herself out of a book deal with anyone but a conservative spite publisher. Being vocally "proudly MAGA" won't fly in the current YA scene (you can dislike Biden, but only from the left), but starting drama with other writers by attacking or harassing them is also a big issue. See the Cait Corrain niche drama from a few weeks back. For the most part, the scene is indeed extremely concerned with social and racial justice, with diversity, and so on.

This doesn't mean that Merve's book will sell well, but the attack on Merve is really a bad look for Lauren before we even get to Lauren's politics or history, which would definitely be subject to a boycott by the target market. A MAGA ex-cop is going nowhere with people who are mostly recent graduates of the school of Tumbr/Twitter SJWs, and those are her putative readers. They will almost certainly not be interested in hearing anything she has to say as a writer. Her best hope now (if she doesn't get Ben Shapiro's attention or something) is to self-pub and hope for friendly coverage from the far right, and even then, she's not gonna find a huge audience.

(Also, lmao, Alina from the Grishaverse series also has sun powers? This is well-trod territory even in recent popular mainstream work!)
posted by verbminx at 11:52 PM on December 23, 2023 [11 favorites]

uh Birdman
posted by Shepherd at 3:03 AM on December 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to copyright the sun.
posted by kyrademon at 5:36 AM on December 24, 2023 [39 favorites]

Lauren has almost definitively talked herself out of a book deal with anyone but a conservative spite publisher.

I think this is the outcome that most surprises me. Not that traditionally-published authors are paragons of professionalism and virtue, but the squabbles that come out of self-publishing have such a self-destructive character. I've mentioned here before watching acquaintances' nascent self-publishing careers be destroyed over just the shallowest stuff. And it all comes down to your reaction, as an author--will you wallow in righteousness and rage and a sense that you're not getting what you deserve, or will you button that top button even though it's too tight, swallow your pride, and act like an adult? Yes, social media makes it all worse because you can have ten thousand people (well, not that many, this is small-time drama) judging your actions and pushing back and you feel against the wall, and if you don't take a stand now-- Well. Thinking your life is a narrative where you're the underdog hero and the world is against you, is conducive to neither good stories nor good behavior. (And who, who does these things, without recourse to advice? Who are these people that confidently make bad assertions about copyright without asking other writer-friends?)
posted by mittens at 6:02 AM on December 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

who are these people that confidently make bad assertions

I feel like the proclaiming that one is MAGA and "confidently make bad assertions" does have an extraordinary Venn diagram overlap, so this very specific mystery isn't a difficult one to solve, but I take your general point about the sector.

Does writing for YA require people to approach everything with the chutzpah and inherent thirst for drama that seems to hit an all-time peak between the ages of 13 and 17?
posted by Shepherd at 6:31 AM on December 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

Thinking your life is a narrative where you're the underdog hero and the world is against you

Since this is precisely the core plot device of so many YA books, maybe it’s not a surprise that At least some aspirant YA authors seem indulge it as a self-image.
posted by AdamCSnider at 6:41 AM on December 24, 2023 [9 favorites]

>Thinking your life is a narrative where you're the underdog hero and the world is against you

Since this is precisely the core plot device of so many YA books, maybe it’s not a surprise that At least some aspirant YA authors seem indulge it as a self-image.

Just came to say that. It's the infamous reverse self-insertion.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:08 AM on December 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

Can I just not care about the writer when I'm reading a book I like? This is a serious question.

I like to read good stories, and I don't give a flaming crap what demographic or political party the author belongs to. In fact, I'd rather not know: a lot of great writers were/are frankly terrible people. And I've never yet been clearly wrong in my longstanding belief that nothing that happens on Twitter is worth thinking or talking about.

I've written a YA novel and am getting ready to query it now: swashbuckling gunpowder navy officers in a matriarchal world. But one of the things that's holding me back is that my chosen pseudonym has no social media presence and won't, and this will be perceived as a drawback by agents/publishers. I mean, I'm sure I can put up a Twitter account and say something bland and positive every couple of days, but I'm probably going to end up paying my teen daughter to do it. I'm just like... there's the book, read it, enjoy it—why on earth would I spend any time arguing on Twitter? I could be doing laundry.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:41 AM on December 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

outgrown_hobnail, in my experience, the degree to which publishers and agents expect you to have a social media presence has been vastly overblown. They will ask about it, but it is usually way farther down on the list of things they care about than whether your book is good and/or marketable. There are exceptions to that, and I could get into the weeds and details of why and when, but for now I'll just say send your book out and don't worry about the social media aspect too much.
posted by kyrademon at 8:07 AM on December 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

Can I just not care about the writer when I'm reading a book I like? This is a serious question.

Oh, this is a wonderful and much debated question. It is more often phrased as "Can a work of art be divorced from its creator?"

The 'no' argument is often that one should not give money to people who will use it to continue to hurt society -- I think the money argument is too limiting in that artists often thrive on the number of people seeing and commenting on their work. I would not give money to someone who hurts people, and I would not boost their ego either.

The other side would be that, providing that the work itself does not propagate the hurt, it's origins are of no concern. Cows live in a sea of shit and yet the result is steak. I can eat the steak without thinking of the cow.

For me the final argument is that there are many books in the world and none of them are so irreplaceable that I need to get adjacent to slime for my own recreation. If someone has given up their seat at the common table of humanity they can take their works with them.

My $0.02 USD.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:16 AM on December 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

The 'no' argument is often that one should not give money to people who will use it to continue to hurt society

Okay, but I guess the question then becomes "what level of 'hurt society' makes it such that it behooves me to not buy their book?" I mean, yeah, she's a murderer, okay, but how much of a garden variety dick can you be and still be permitted to make money writing? This all presumes that the writing is actually good, of course: the woman in question here has both never been actually published and also is MAGA, so you know her book is going to suck ass.

Keep in mind here that while I'm way to the left of most Americans, I'm way to the right of the average person here, and am not about to consider a lack of adherence to progressive principles a sufficient reason to consider someone a bad person or hurting society.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 10:03 AM on December 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

You say that "twitter harassment is not something to be safely ignored". Do you mean, here and now in 2023 that people are under physical threat, that the people in this particular instance will meat physical harm, if they just ignore all this bullshit?

This is basically saying "have you tried not participating in society?" here. People with privilege forget that being able to ignore abuse is itself a form of privilege, because when you can't rely on society to back you up, dismissing abuse is a luxury you cannot afford.

Also, using physical harm as the benchmark for "when does this get serious enough to matter in my opinion" is a horrible demarcation. It's saying that emotional harm does not exist, and that you have to show bruises and such for your abuse to "count". It's a terrible line in the sand to draw.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:22 AM on December 24, 2023 [9 favorites]

I guess my metric for buying living authors' books is a mixture of "will I feel ashamed to tell people I bought this book", "if someone asked me about this book would I feel honor-bound to warn them about the writer" and "am I going to be able to sink into reading the book knowing what I know". For dead authors, the bar is a little lower since they won't make any money and for the most part their reputation is already in place; also, I often have more information which may complexify my understanding of them - not that it's okay to do awful things because you've had awful experiences, but it sometimes softens the yuck factor.

My big sorrow on this front is that I no longer enjoy the work of Franco Moretti, long my favorite literary theorist and also plausibly accused of sexual assault and stalking of graduate students on multiple campuses. I mean, I loved his books and now I yearn for them but they are too ick. A secondary sorry is that erstwhile favorite China Mieville is also plausibly accused (but has mostly managed to silence accusers and scrub accusations) of some really unpleasant emotionally abusive behavior toward a women writer of color. Moretti is just a left academic; Mieville was supposed to be a radical, and reading the woman's account of his behavior to her and others just made me feel bad, man. I occasionally manage to re-read The Scar and The Last Days of New Paris, my favorites, but again, I get the ick.

The ick ruins the book. Thinking that I am honor bound to tell friends about the ick because I know they probably wouldn't want to buy the book if they knew just intensifies the ick. It's just, like, for pete's sake, you don't have to be a saint not to stalk your students, you don't have to be a saint to be truthful to romantic partners, you don't have to be a saint to avoid nasty little racist digs - I'm not holding people to an extremely high standard here.

In re Harry Potter, I just read fanfic now when the urge strikes - there's some surprisingly good gen and moderate romantic element stuff out there if you dig around enough. Granted, I was never a huge fan, but I did use them as comfort reading when I was depressed back in my twenties. A weird side effect is that I have literally forgotten what is fanon and what is canon. Did a youthful Sirius Black attend muggle punk shows? Was Draco Malfoy genuinely gifted with clockwork? Is Remus Lupin Welsh? Did Hermione express an interest in working in the magical beasts part of the Ministry in order to reform it? I no longer have any idea.
posted by Frowner at 10:52 AM on December 24, 2023 [8 favorites]

People get stalked IRL (and swatted) and doxxed these days once they become a target online. You can't just ignore it. At BEST the only option may be to delete your account before anyone decides to see and target you, but a lot of people also may have to be on social media for work/promotion and hell if i know what to tell those people.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:58 AM on December 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

I guess my metric for buying living authors' books is a mixture of "will I feel ashamed to tell people I bought this book", "if someone asked me about this book would I feel honor-bound to warn them about the writer"

That seems like a pretty reasonable metric. The author would have to be pretty fucking awful for me to have to feel ashamed or honor-bound about it. I don't think either one of the examples you gave would trigger it for ME, but if you said what you said to me, I would likely at least question whether I'd buy the book. Much more so for your first example than your second, but I've read several Miéville books and they're all dreadful anyway. Super cool worldbuilding, absolute trash story. Thanks.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 11:04 AM on December 24, 2023

I am really disappointed, if not surprised, to see a Mississippi fantasy author turn out to suck. It’s not, of course, that I don’t think other Mississippians have amazing fantasy writing in them. I only say “surprised” because they wouldn’t put “Ole Miss Grad” in their Twitter bio first, if at all, unless they were problems, like this lady is.

Recently I got into reading Foxfire books, which are amazing and fascinating artifacts of an Appalachian past, as well as being a long-running high school student project that survives today. I wondered why I don’t hear more about it, what with cottagecore and other nesting trends. Turns out that the high school teacher who founded it was sexually assaulting the teen boys who worked on the project, year after year. It was an open secret. And yet the project was so valuable that some of those same boys grew up to work on the foundation. I feel that the work, especially the oral histories, is still absolutely worth reading, since the guy didn’t have his hands on the substance of it. Yet it’s haunting to see the old photos of boys working on baskets, in cabins, etc. and to realize what they paid to be there.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:38 AM on December 24, 2023 [8 favorites]

Okay, but I guess the question then becomes "what level of 'hurt society' makes it such that it behooves me to not buy their book?"

My personal take is this: if someone holds views I think are problematic then I will argue with them and try to at least come to a mutual understanding of each other. This applies to the vast majority of people.

When someone steps over the line into advocating (or worse, legislating) against people who are doing them no harm I have a problem. A famously sad case of this is an author who produced a number of beloved works and then used the platform of his popularity to push taking away the children of gay parents.

The works are still as good as they were (although you definitely find yourself reinterpreting authorial intent when you know more about the author) but this is a person I will no longer give any support to and would feel the slime if I were in the same room with them.

That’s my line. As always, your mileage may vary.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:53 AM on December 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

One thing I don't see mentioned is that based on the excerpts Lauren is an AWFUL writer. If you haven't read them to back and check, her prose is painful to read.

chariot pulled by cassowaries A character from a Robin McKinley YA novel

If you're thinking of Sunshine it's very much not a YA novel. Considering how much of McKinley's stuff is YA it's not an unreasonable assumption, but it is incorrect WRT Sunshine.
posted by sotonohito at 12:20 PM on December 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

Sunshine it's very much not a YA novel

What are the distinguishing traits?
posted by clew at 1:01 PM on December 24, 2023

Well, the rather graphic sex scenes are probably the one that would grab the attention of Citizens Against Nearly Everything or whatever the Republican book burners are calling themselves today. I think mostly I say it isn't YA simply because it's more complex and uses a larger vocabulary than most YA does.

I think mostly it falls outside YA though simply because it wasn't marketed as YA. Or, at lest it originally wasn't. Now it apparently is being marketed as YA in some places so maybe I'm totally wrong?
posted by sotonohito at 1:53 PM on December 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

One thing I don't see mentioned is that based on the excerpts Lauren is an AWFUL writer. If you haven't read them to back and check, her prose is painful to read.

She is also unable to follow a line of argument or express herself clearly in writing.
Neither of these things bode well for her future as a writer.
posted by signal at 1:55 PM on December 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

sotonohito -- In more recent years, YA has become a somewhat different, somewhat racier category than it was back when Sunshine was published. When I was a kid and when I worked in bookstores as a young adult, McKinley was usually published in the same category where you'd find other Newbery Medal honorees (I think it was typically called juvenile or intermediate fiction). Often the same place where you'd find Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, Diana Wynne Jones, etc. Sometimes it would be stocked in the paperback fantasy section.

But I read The Hero and the Crown for the first time when I was 11 -- an age it was marketed to at the time, though it was also marketed to kids a few years older. The protagonist is in her late teens or early twenties by the end of the book, and she takes a lover, although their affair isn't depicted explicitly. There's a lot about it that's in line with today's YA. There are some things that aren't.

Circa Twilight, the old "Young Adult" that used to be abbreviated as YA became a different, somewhat more mature category actually called YA (not just an abbreviation). This probably doesn't make a ton of sense on the surface, but it's an assertion I've seen over and over in Booktube videos.

One undeniable thing that has been happening in the past 5 years or so is that any fantasy fiction with a female protagonist tends to be marketed as YA because publishers believe it will sell better. One thing that caused the category to become more adult is the collapse of the "new adult" category (basically, books that can include explicit sex, and have female protagonists in their late teens or early 20s, and often include romance in a significant way). Sarah J Maas wrote A Court of Thorns and Roses and its sequels initially as New Adult books, but when the category collapsed, they were published as YA. This was the most significant thing to push the envelope of content, and as far as I know, it's also one of the things that made "romantasy" a viable subcategory. It remains to be seen if romantasy can stand apart from both YA and paranormal romance, but the success of Fourth Wing added to the success of books that Sarah J Maas really didn't write for 12-year-olds definitely suggests that things might go in that direction. I hear the word a lot lately!

All of this is to say that this is why I think Sunshine's publisher may have chosen to market it as YA in recent years. Not only has the category changed in a way that makes marketing it that way more acceptable, it may also be that they no longer think they can sell it as adult fantasy, or that they simply know that it suits the tastes of current YA readers and will sell more if they're the target buyers.
posted by verbminx at 4:03 PM on December 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

Sarah J Maas wrote A Court of Thorns and Roses and its sequels initially as New Adult books, but when the category collapsed, they were published as YA.

I think the SJM era of authors mostly carried over their fanfiction level of smut to their published work but its going to be interesting to see what happens now that authors and publishers are aware that if you write Icebreaker level graphic it can go mega viral with kids.
posted by zymil at 4:59 PM on December 24, 2023

I think the SJM era of authors mostly carried over their fanfiction level of smut to their published work but its going to be interesting to see what happens

Freya Marske's trilogy The Last Binding contains the most explicit sex I've read in YA (and obviously nurtured in the gardens of fanfiction). My eyebrows, they were raised, especially in the third book, which spun off from the good and wholesome gay and lesbian sex of the first two and moved onto lovingly detailed (fairly mild, I suppose) BDSM scenes. The mainstream, it does shift.
posted by jokeefe at 10:16 AM on December 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Maybe it would be better to just hire a PR person and spend their time writing books.

At this level the cost of a decent pr firm might be about the same as the entire advance on a book.
posted by bq at 7:06 PM on December 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Sarah J Maas wrote A Court of Thorns and Roses and its sequels initially as New Adult books, but when the category collapsed, they were published as YA.

Which is hilarious, because the first volume was ‘sex scenes that are not super explicit’ and the latest ones are more like ‘hard core erotica’
posted by bq at 7:09 PM on December 25, 2023 [1 favorite]