Scan barcode
A review by mrobison576
Finding Faeries: Discovering Sprites, Pixies, Redcaps, and Other Fantastical Creatures in an Urban Environment by Alexandra Rowland
1.0
Tldr: yeah, yeah, we’ve all read the Tumblr text posts about how truck stops are liminal spaces
I’m going to be upfront — Alexandra Rowland’s writing style has never particularly gelled with me, but I’ve kept giving it the old college try because they write a lot of genre fiction that aligns with my interests, and they also attended the same undergrad as I did (albeit at different times). I really thought if a book of theirs was going to appeal to me it’d be the Spiderwick Chronicles-esque/Dragonology-inspired faerie encyclopedia book. I love fiction that is presented as nonfiction — one of my favorite recent reading experiences was DC’s Anatomy of a Metahuman — and actually, the last book I read and gushed over was a fictional true crime book rife with footnotes from fake interviews with fake witnesses. It’s a can’t-lose format for me! So the bar here was pretty low. I went into this book with a lot of goodwill, despite previous swings and misses with this author’s work.
Unfortunately this was not the book to turn me around on Alexandra Rowland’s oeuvre.
So, the question of when/how credit should be given when it comes to using popular internet text posts and memes in published books is a complicated one, and I don’t have a cut-and-dry answer for it myself.* Tumblr has always been the Yes And! website, I mean, look at Goncharov. It’s pretty much standard operation on Tumblr to make a post like “Haunted by the idea of a Carol Channing cover of If You Seek Amy,” or “So what do you think renter’s insurance looks like in Gotham City?” and get a response from someone being like “OP I went ahead and made that audio file for you,” or “here you go [ao3 link to insurance policy recreation where the original Tumblr post is linked in the author’s note].” It’s collaborative, fun, and almost uniformly well-received. A huge part of that, though, is the fact that Tumblr posts are nested so that the original post is included as part of the reply, like in an email chain. Credit to the original author and idea is baked into the exchange.
It gets dicier when you’re taking a post out of the Tumblr/Twitter/etc. ecosystem and writing it into your original fiction, which you’re then using to make money. I’m really not trying to be unfair here. Inspiration is a deeply complicated thing, and I generally try to err on the side of “more art is better” rather than “Only One Person, Ever gets to write a book about werewolves/faeries/poltergeists, and everything else is a morally and creatively bankrupt copycat that should get sued out of the publishing landscape.” Also, there are a lot of text posts that have just been absorbed into the cultural consciousness. Does every book that drops the phrase “Then perish” need to include a footnote crediting Tumblr user spooky-grimwhoire’s viral Obama roleplay? I don’t think so; there’s a Know Your Meme page for that.
But I do think if what you’re borrowing is longer than a sentence or two, you’re being kind of an asshole if you don’t give a shoutout in a footnote or endnote or author’s note somewhere. Now, I firmly believe in calling a spade a spade when it comes to plagiarism, and this book is not plagiarism. Nothing has been stolen word for word, and nothing deeply original has been taken in such a way that would prevent an original poster from publishing their own faerie fiction based on their ideas. And it’s certainly plausible that the New And Subversive Faerie Mythologies presented in this book occurred to Alexandra Rowland independently of all the Tumblr users who were posting faerie headcanons and hot takes during Tumblr’s “truck stops are liminal spaces” phase. But considering that Alexandra Rowland was active on Tumblr then as well, I have some doubts. I also get that it can be hard to remember where you’ve read what, and that the Tumblr interface isn’t the best for hunting down specific posts. But I didn’t have that difficult a time just googling phrases from posts I could remember from five years ago, and there wasn’t even a vague mention in the acknowledgments of this book of the widespread Tumblr faerie phase that clearly inspired the majority of these encyclopedia entries. I don’t know, I just found it tacky.
Another complication: when someone makes a post about their own experience or identity, there’s not really a burden of proof on that person unless they’re, like, actively demanding something from their readers. For example, when a person with autism makes a post theorizing that the changeling myth was inspired by neurotypical parents failing to understand their children’s autism, even if that blogger is really certain in their conviction, I am not reading that post thinking, “Hey, where are your primary sources?” because that blogger is not presenting themself as some kind of end-all-be-all authority on anything other than their own lived experience with autism**. But in a book whose gimmick is to serve as the end-all-be-all authority on which faerie myths “count” and which ones don’t, this entire section rubbed me the wrong way:
“Changelings: The simple fact of the matter is that the faeries do not leave changelings, period. Many modern scholars and psychologists believe that these myths and accounts were, in actuality, the only available explanation at the time for what we now suspect may have been the onset of autism symptoms—nearly all the identifying traits of “changelings” in myths map quite closely to many of the common presentations of the disorder in young children (including social disinterest, an aversion to touch and eye contact, a delay in speech acquisition or low rates of verbalization overall, highly focused and specific interests, lack of empathy, repetitive movements—even children on the less severe end of the spectrum, presenting only with a “dreamy” demeanor or not-quite-right social cues, have been described as “touched by the faeries”). Even in modern times, many parents of autistic children express a wish of wanting their “real child” back. This is, obviously, a hugely damaging attitude to have, one that centers the feelings of the parents over the basic welfare of the child—but the “changeling” explanation in a historical context must have been better than the alternative of having no answers at all.”
I don’t have autism, but my fiancée does, and these were Molly’s thoughts about the section:
“Oh this is fully just that one Tumblr post. And I liked that post when I saw it the first time it came around, but it’s a very different feeling when you’re looking at a piece of meta about fiction rather than encountering this idea in the fiction itself. ‘Maybe changelings were inspired by children with autism’ is dependent on the changeling narrative in fiction existing. And, for me, enhanced by the fact that changelings are kind of cool in the same way that ‘maybe vampires were inspired by queer people, for better or worse’ has a sense of reclamation to it. But I’d find it very jarring to be reading a book where ghosts, werewolves, selkies exist but then the vampires are just regular queer people who are being hunted and killed with stakes. Now you’re suddenly taking me out of the fun mysticism and throwing violence against a marginalized group in my face. Parts of changeling mythos center around burning changelings with hot pokers or even killing them to get the original child back. That is not fun or escapist or interesting to read about in a Magic Book if the changeling is actually just an abused child who’s being abused for being what I am. Maybe if this book was a full-length historical thriller from that child’s point of view, solely focused on that topic, it would have the space to be handled more sensitively, but not in a one-page encyclopedia entry that then moves on to how sometimes faeries grant special humans magic powers. It actually really bothered me that the very next section after “changelings are just abused children with autism,” was “sometimes faeries grant regular people magic powers!” Such a tone shift; it didn’t seem to care for my reading experience as an autistic reader at all. The whole section, really, did not seem to consider that some readers might actually have autism.”
Some additional thoughts from my best friend Anna: “You’re complaining about fae lore in your faerie book? …. It just feels so, like, trying to catch the reader, being like ‘Wow I bet you think changelings are real! PSYCH! You hate autistic people actually!!! And it’s like, I’m just trying to read a book, thx!”
Also, can we talk about the “Many modern scholars and psychologists…” opener? Which ones? This is a fictional book where all the “research” leads to fictional sources, but at the very least present some fictional evidence for me! This is, in fact, a problem throughout the book. There are a handful of fake primary sources, poems, letters, diary entries, and footnotes scattered within the encyclopedia entries, and those are charming, but I would say those account for around one in six stacked against how often this book will just say “Scholars have documented,” “Scholars have proven several times now,” “It has been known to scholars,” etc. In fact, searching the words “scholars” in the ebook yields 74 results for a 174-page ebook whose illustrations make up a quarter of the page count. I get that this is a fictional encyclopedia and not a comprehensive guide to cultural mythology, but Dragonology was too, and those books always put in the work to include letters, maps, and notebook pages in little pockets for us to look at ourselves! Alternatively, this book could have gone the route of Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide or The Atlas of Monsters and included a fictional narrator who is speaking from their own experience and pulling from their own notes from the field. Instead, we just got “Scholars have not even agreed,” “Scholars have confirmed,” “the best explanation scholars have been able to provide,” and so on ad infinitum.
Here were a few more things I took issue with during this reading experience:
1) the way certain categories of non-Western folklore (Jumbies and Yōkai were the most egregious) would be reduced to one very vague encyclopedia page, but things like flower faeries got broken down into all their little subcategories
2) the attempts to be inclusive about gendered mythology still imposed a VERY rigid gender binary (ex. banshees ONLY scream in the presence of women, but occasionally it would seem as though one screamed in the presence of a man! Those men ALWAYS came out as trans women later in life, though)
3) the constant allusions to fictional scenarios of white, male scholars stealing the work of their marginalized female or BIPOC colleagues were just wild to me considering how much of this book was lifted from uncredited Tumblr users — truly can’t tell if Alexandra Rowland had situational blinders on, or if this was a the-one-that-smelt-it-dealt-it misdirection attempt
I could go on, but honestly, I’m ready to be done thinking about this book and dive into a Spiderwick Chronicles reread to wash the taste out of my mouth. To conclude, I do not recommend this book. Not for seasoned faerie enthusiasts, not for people who want an introduction to the topic, or for people who enjoy stylistically nontraditional narrative formats. The illustrations by Miles Äijälä are gorgeous, but that’s pretty much all I’ve got. Maybe if you and your friends were really active on SFF Tumblr in 2016 you can have fun looking for rephrasings of your posts like you’re watching for yourself on the Jumbotron at a baseball game, but for everyone else, let me save you the time — just read Faeries.
*I can say that I made a very dumb viral one-sentence text post once when I was a teenager that I will still sometimes see on Etsy mugs and Amazon journals, and I have seen it crop up nearly word-for-word in a few of those Very Online pastel-colored contemporary romance novels marketed toward Twitter millennials. And I’ve never been, like, upset by it in an “I can’t believe my intellectual property was stolen” sense, but depending on how bad the book is, it does sometimes make me be like “wow I can’t believe you couldn’t come up with a better joke than this stupid inside joke my high school friend Tom and I came up with in Mrs. Heideman’s web design class.”
**I do really recommend this post by tumblr user vampireapologist that talks about some complications with accepting “changelings are just autistic children” as a cut-and-dry statement of fact. For those who don’t want to read the entire thing, here are the pertinent bits: “There has been talk back and forth in the last threeish years that these [changeling] myths now belong “only” to people with ADHD and Autism, and that those without are not “allowed” to discuss, study, or adapt Changeling lore. The trouble starts with: it is not up to, say, an American person with Autism (such as myself) to tell Norwegian people they have to give up their folklore. Next: Not all changeling lore fits the category of ableist child abuse. These tales span dozens of cultures and go back thousands of years. It is not possible to prove that they were invented specifically to dehumanize and abuse neurodivergent children and adults, nor does surviving lore support that claim. … In fact, sensationalizing Irish Changeling lore WAS weaponized by England to further the colonization of Ireland … English (and U.S.) media was quick to jump on the case to further the idea that the Irish people were “barbaric,” “superstitious,” “untutored,” etc., and therefore unfit to govern themselves, and that they needed to be protected from their own "rural” ways by English rule.”