Miscellaneous Mondays: ECCC Round-up Part 3

If you’re still on the fence about buying access to the Emerald City Comicon footage, here’s a small snippet from a panel with Felicia Day and Wil Wheaton, the “Geek & Sundry Panel of Awesome”.

Audience Question: As a female in a largely male-dominated genre, how do you maintain your femininity and keep the girly thing going?

Felicia Day: I just do whatever the hell I want.

Wil Wheaton: Yeah! Bravo.

Felicia Day: A lot of people want to make girl gamers or girl geeks a controversy. A lot of people are trying to make it their identity. I respect everybody. I’m just myself. I am a girl who loves what I love. I don’t know a lot about some things, like I don’t know deep lore about Star Wars; that doesn’t not make me a gamer or a geek. If I don’t know how to play Call of Duty, great; I’ll kick your ass at Skyrim. I do whatever I want. If I dress sexy, it’s ‘cause I feel like it, not for somebody else. It’s all just me being me, and it’s incidentally I’m a girl. I love ordering shoes. These are pretty good; I got them off a set, but generally... I just like the things I like and I represent myself, and a lot of those things happen to be “geek genre” things, but I’m not one thing, and nobody is just one thing. And to allow yourself to be pigeon-holed defeats all of us, ‘cause then we’re just a label and a mash-up T-shirt, and we’re all more than that.

Wil Wheaton: If you’re one of those people that makes that question need to be asked, fuck you.

Miscellaneous Mondays: ECCC Round-up Part 2

“This year, the geek community’s strained relationship with diversity came to a head. Conflicts over exclusion, identity politics, and what makes a “real” geek have exploded into the mainstream media. Creators, curators, community leaders, and critics on the front lines examine the fight over geek identity and barriers to diversity in geek communities and media; and propose concrete steps toward a diverse and inclusive geek culture. Join industry leaders Rachel Edidin, David Brothers, Andy Khouri, Regina Buenaobra, Sarah Kuhn, Cheryl Lynn Eaton, and Kate Welch, as they discuss this hot-button issue.”

This is the description for the ECCC 2013 panel, “Looking Past the Target Audience.” I was there. It was awesome. It was not recorded and streamed for the at-home viewer. I was not amused.

However, I was prepared, so I can share with you a transcript of that discussion, as well as a link to the Tumblr where the panel will continue.

I love that ECCC is giving these kinds of events the opportunity to exist. I love that they booked hours of time for a film festival featuring short films made by women (that never happened, although that was in no way ECCC’s fault), not because it would be popular (based on the size of the group gathered, it decidedly wasn’t), but because such an event should be part of Comicon. I love that “From Victim to Hero” is available for me to view again and again. I do not love the fact that “Looking Past the Target Audience,” an important conversation that needs to be had at a pivotal time in comics history, is relegated to a Tumblr askbox.