#parsepositive

Okay, so.

I’m a Kent Parson stan, no two ways about it. I love the little shit and I only want the best for him. 

And over the past couple years, it has definitely felt like Ngozi went from being a Parse stan right along with me–calling him her favourite character, making fun tweets about him, drawing him in cute ways–to kind of disowning him. Talking about how he was a problematic white boy, deleting those fun tweets, diminishing his role in year four, emphasizing how he has to apologize and atone for how he’s acted in the past. And I have definitely felt abandoned and betrayed by her, as have many other Parse-positive fans.

But I think that in our disappointment, we’re missing out on why she’s stepping back from him.

Because she’s said why it’s happening, and it’s because of all the hatemail she gets about him.

When she said that, fandom kind of reflexively assumed it was coming from the Parse-positive side of fandom, which I felt kind of confused by because I didn’t see any proof of it. These days, I’m personally far more persuaded it was the opposite. I think she’s talking about hatemail by people who hate him. I think she stepped back from him as a character because she was affected by the volume and vehemence with which people really, really hate Kent Parson.

When I step back from my own feelings, from the betrayal of my own parasocial relationship with her, what I think is: That’s really fucking sad for her. I am really sorry that her own fandom scared her away from her artistic vision, that she lost faith in one of her favourite parts of the story and felt she had to make choices that basically feel like grovelling to his haters–”See, he’s barely there anymore, and look, he’s atoning for how awful he is.”

And honestly?

I think that the increasingly OMGCP-critical turn of the #parsepositive community–the tendency of Parse fans to respond to her decisions with anger, hostility, and incredulity, and to assume that she’s a bad artist who is fucking things up–is part of why she stepped away from him as a character.

Ngozi’s incredibly close to her fandom. Too close, in my own personal opinion, and not really clearsighted about which fans she encourages and validates vs which ones she gets offended by and thinks are trolls, but still–she’s really tuned into the fandom. And it’s really hard for anyone, as an artist, to operate in a vacuum. I think one thing there hasn’t been for her is a consistent Parse cheering section that will actually… appear happy when content about him appears, and reward her for making it. Instead, when she produces anything about him, his haters grind into high gear, and his lovers bitch about how inadequate it is.

And well… artists pretty much all respond to carrots way better than sticks. In the face of criticism and hostility from both sides, I’m really not surprised that she’s gone, “Yeah, this character is too much of a hassle to bother with.” If posting content about him online makes her life unlivable, I’m not actually surprised she’s stopped doing it. (I probably won’t pay for the new book, so much as duck into a bookstore and read the one single page he’s in, and then put it back on the shelf.)

But I am pretty tired of Parse fans acting absolutely outraged by her decisions, as if 1) she’s a shitty creator who deserves to be blamed for everything bad, and 2) that we, as fans, played no part in things getting to where they are now.

Honestly, as the sun sets on OMGCP, one of the things I feel worst about is that I spent so much time thinking about my own personal grievances with her (and yeah, I have very personal and specific reasons to gripe about her and how she’s treated me personally) to go, “Wow, I wonder what life is like for Ngozi right now? I wonder what her experience is. I wonder if she needs some of the positivity I’m trying to inject into fandom itself.” The most basic role of a fandom is a cheering section; I’ve been so used to fandoms where the creators are distant and hostile, where fandom is so massive that surely there are thousands of other people who will provide mindless validation, that it genuinely never occurred to me that I might make the creator feel that, despite my love for this character, I thought she, personally, was a piece of crap.

I really regret walking away from this fandom with everything in this state.

#wipitgood WIP amnesty: The fic I keep wrestling with but never make progress on, the “How Kent Parson Discovered Paganism” story. The poem quoted is real; it’s by Franco Buffoni. 

—

The year after my life fell apart and I made it big, I googled, “why is god cruel?”

Holy fuck, that got me so many stupid answers. I’d already tried to read When Bad Things Happen to Good People the summer before and given up a few pages in, and this was pretty much that in Google form. Everyone’s so desperate to tell you that God doesn’t reallylet bad things happen, they’re not really bad, they’re just secretly good things in disguise or something and it’s all going to work out in the end.

Fuck that.

But I found a poem.

From Mars cruel god of war
The desire to tie the corpse to the chariot
And drag it around each morning,
From Mercury the idea to put a stop to that
And buy the body back.
Because everything sooner or later becomes a musical
Or a collectible card or figurine

And that was… holy fuck. Nothing I’d ever read had made me feel like that.

In middle school we did a thing on Greek mythology. We actually got to do a field trip to the movie theatre to see Troy, and I actually got to go, which I basically never do. (Hockey.) It was awesome, and I remember our teacher reading us the opening lines of the Iliad, “Sing of the rage of Achilles.”

I didn’t really like school. I actually kind of hated it. That was before I moved to Quebec, and before the school actually realized that I needed things read aloud to me. Like, I’m notilliterate, but reading is hard and I’m slow at it and it makes my head hurt. But that was with the one teacher I really liked and I remember it. I remember being in school then and thinking, “I wish it was like this all the time.”

And, well. We talked about the movie in class and how the war had really taken ten years and the movie wasn’t totally accurate and Carrie said, “They totally didn’t mention the part where Achilles and Patroclus were gay,” and the teacher agreed with her. Like, Brad Pitt Achilles was gay, and in the movie they made them just cousins.

Everyone else was arguing about it because there was a girl in the story and that proved he couldn’t be gay but I actually raised my hand and said, “Wouldn’t he just be like, bisexual and cheating?” and I could tell Carrie was going to talk to me after class about it. We were really good friends last year and she thought she was maybe a lesbian. I wasn’t actually sure if was was okay for me to be friends with her again, because the hockey season was still over, but it was still… I didn’t actually know if it was okay anymore. My coach still thought I’d be going into the OHL and he still parked across from the school sometimes, so I just packed up my stuff and left without letting her catch my eye.

I looked it up later though, and she was literally right. They were totally… bisexual or something. So I knew that was the story. This guy killed Patroclus, and it made Achilles so angry that he killed the guy and dragged his body around behind his chariot, even though he shouldn’t have done it. I’d imagined feeling that, back then, like: Finding someone really important to me, and having them die. How much I’d want to get revenge. What I’d do even if it made me a horrible person. I’d never really been in love, but I could imagine then.

So it was like I was being stripped, turned inside-out, by that poem.

Because everything sooner or later becomes a musical
Or a collectible card or figurine
Hitler or the Fierce Saladin
Dracula the Impaler
All stripped of any awareness of suffering:
There is no voice in stones

I’d been a trading card for years. Like, a literal trading card. Top NHL Prospects of 2010. People would ask me to sign them when I was in the Q. “An investment for my grandchildren for when you make it big.”

People still asked me to sign stuff with Jack on it. Memorial Cup… memorial stuff. Or from World Juniors. Every time I did it I’d just kind of wonder: How the fuck do you ask something like that? Like, what makes you look at a picture of two people, one of whom nearly died and might never be okay again, and ask his buddy if he’ll autograph it for you? Why the fuck would you ask, “Do you miss him?” How the fuck do I answer that? “Yeah, I guess?”

For a moment, reading that poem, I could imagine myself in a box like a Barbie doll, wired to a plastic card, with a plastic tray that kept me pinned down, in the right position in the display window. They always took so much patience, finding the invisible tape. I used to open my sister’s for her because she got so impatient, she tried to wrench the whole package apart, so I took it away from her, felt for the edges of the tape, took the cardboard apart and untwisted the ties.

That night I looked up “Achilles” in the Apple audiobook store and bought a double volume of The Iliad andThe Odyssey, and I fell asleep listening to the gods fighting over an apple.

I have never actually written this headcanon, which feels incredible. How.

I headcanon that when Kent was a rookie at a team party, someone threw out half a cheese pizza into a trash can that had just had its liner changed. It was perfectly clean. So one of his teammates took a video of him pulling pizza out of the garbage and saying, “Jesus, you guys, there’s nothing wrong with this! It’s still good!” and eating it.

So his nickname among fans on Twitter has been “Trash Panda” ever since and for all that he has a very bland Hockey Dude Persona in public, Kent secretly loves it to bits.