Talk:Jessica Telephone/Archive

After reviewing the edit history, I am removing the flat earth joke. It was a drive-by edit not made by someone who collaborated with the Pies discord community and shouldn't be on here. Nesblitt (talk) 19:15, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Tone and Content

Not to be that guy, but can we talk about editing pretty much everything under "Peanut Shells and Rap God?"

On the shallower end, it doesn't fit with the tone/flow of the wiki. It's very prosaic and sounds more like fanfiction than the 'faux Wikipedia' aesthetic of everything else. Fanfiction is cool, but there's a style guide for a reason. Also, none of her previous characterization/content slots in with the goofy vape skateboard meme thing? It's funny, but it's out of the blue and doesn't match the rest of the page. Can we add that stuff to any of the 20 other players who have vape bro energy? Or even to players who don't have a lot of personality already?

The main thing that bothered me though is the similarly out of the blue dirtbag thing. Nothing so far would suggest that she's awful to her partners/women in general, so it seems incongruous with everything else. More importantly, there's a persistent and harmful stereotype in media characterizing trans lesbians as abusers/dirtbags/sleezy, and this seems like it's leaning very far in that direction. Not that trans lesbians can't be flawed characters of course, but in that particular way it falls into the same camp as having a black father be a deadbeat dad or having a Jewish character's fatal flaw be greed. In a vacuum it's okay, but altogether the implication isn't. Good.

I don't want to say that it's intentionally malicious, but I think that it's close enough to a damaging caricature that I uh. Would not want to touch that area. So while of course I'm not the King Of The Wiki (I made an account just for this post, actually) as a trans lesbian I'd like to beg you folks to rework this. (from Quickfix00)

Thanks for starting the conversation, this is a good opening. Just a small thing, please sign off your posts with four tildes (~~~~) which will post your username for easy identification. You can indent messages with colons, one for each indent you wish to make. BlaseballSteve || Admin, Founder || Steven_#3235 (talk) 16:44, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

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So the thing that is not necessarily clear here is that the "dirtbag" conception of JT is not in the abuser/sleazy/deadbeat way. "Dirtbag JT" as conceived is specifically a dirtbag teen. She wore a tuxedo t-shirt and JNCO jeans to Hlomecoming. She dropped two No-Doz into a can of jolt and calls it SKATE JUICE. She's into Eminem and Mindless Self Indulgence. She vapes and skateboards wherever she's not allowed to, and she stays up til 4 AM breaking glass bottles against the side of a barn. Maybe we could stand to make this vision of Jess a bit clearer in this section, but this is something that we [the Philly Pies segment of the official Blaseball discord, who incidentally came up with the conception of JT as a time-travelling poly trans lesbian in the first place] have been workshopping for several weeks now and feel very strongly about. Something we have been considering, but haven't quite nailed down yet, is potentially adding a section to JT's page that provides details about her different 80s decade iterations. Dirtbag JT is (tentatively) the 2080s iteration. Maybe you feel more connected to her 1980s iteration. That said - we also want to avoid making an infinitely expanding list of different JT iterations that anyone can fill in with whatever, because they're not actually alternate versions. We feel very strongly that these are all the same person, but at different points in her life. Anyway, I hope this helps you understand where we're coming from, and I strongly encourage you to come to the discord and collaborate with us! We're very friendly and love welcoming in new people (and we have quite a few trans lesbians FWIW, myself included). Like you, we are not the Kings of the Wiki, and we are very invested in coming up with a solution to this that makes everybody happy. --Hayley Kpaxxxxx (talk) 16:53, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

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Aha! Yeah, I definitely do understand where you're coming from now, I didn't get it from just reading the wiki. I will totally go talk to you folks on the discord, and now that I understand your ideas/changes I do really like them. I just want them to be less confusing if they're also confusing people other than me lmao. Thank you for taking the time to explain! Quickfix00 (talk) 17:23, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

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The problem I see is that what you describe and how that particular section is written are not the same thing. 'Dirtbag' is not being used for code as 'haha look at what a goofy skater kid teenaged jerk she was', it's being used as 'ah, look at the inherent scumminess of JT as she always was and has been, now on full display'. To the extent that she is actively causing problems which her relationships by being that way and then actively refusing to change or improve. At the very least the wording is not well phrased.

I don't think that saying it's just a different iteration/different era of the character really cuts it with the page as it stands and with how it's written is a pretty sharp veer from what had already been established. Why is it necessary and essential to include? Why is it something that is felt strongly about? Even if it's 'lore you came up with in the first place' it's now established and ingrained and this subsequently damages the consistency and perception of the character. What is wrong with JT just being the cool older sister to the league and time travelling lesbian which most everyone seems to love as an interpretation?

Izzyclu (talk) 17:26, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

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I can't speak for others, but I've felt extremely uncomfortable with the character being most commonly depicted as a pretty, skinny, white woman without flaws or rough edges. The way fans have defended the purity of this image by contesting any interpretations of the character that veers from "good and pure" feels like a defense of the white supremacist ideological sanctity of white womanhood.

Dirtbag Jessica Telephone is an established, collaborative reinterpretation of the character by a group of fans who have, for one reason or another, felt uncomfortable with the existing lore. I don't think it should exist to the exclusion of contradictory fanons, but I do think it has a right to exist on this wiki. Speaking for myself, it has made me feel comfortable with a character who had previously made me feel very uncomfortable with Blaseball fandom at large.

There is a larger conversation to be had about allowing characters to be messy, about whether fictional depictions of harm constitute real harm, about who is allowed to create what, but I think that's probably outside the scope of this wiki talk page. In the meantime, it's probably okay for conflicting interpretations to coexist without necessitating conflict over control of canon, even if different interpretations might make different people uncomfortable for different reasons. Which is to say I think the "good and pure" Jessica Telephone and the "dirtbag" Jessica Telephone can coexist without conflict. Solanaceae314 (talk) 18:06, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

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Jessica is very frequently depicted as a person of colour. Do not evoke accusations of white supremacy because other members of community don't like the idea of making a really cool character have secretly been a scumbag all along. There is nothing in what was stated above about wanting her to be a perfect paragon.

Nobody is trying to say that characters can't be nuanced or flawed, but this 'established' reinterpretation which I use in HEAVY quotes because I do not think it is established at all, actively damages other peoples' enjoyment of the character. It is a harmful and hurtful retcon, not a reimagining.

Izzyclu (talk) 18:21, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

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We are willing to concede that the line about how JT's dirtbagginess is now straining her relationships was poorly conceived. Making JT out to just be a totally scummy person was never our intention. I believe that detail was written in that way because, at the time, the page had a very long list of JT's "wives", which just kept getting longer and hornier, and we were growing increasingly uncomfortable with it, especially because people were adding a lot of real people to the list. At this point, I think we should get rid of that line.

Dirtbag JT is not a scumbag. She's a rowdy teen. And when she's a little older and more mature, she's also the cool aunt/older sister that was very embarrassed when she lost to York Silk when they were playing DDR at the arcade, but then bought him a big stuffed animal with her tickets. They're the same person.

Our development of Dirtbag JT happened collaboratively between several hundred people in a public space over the course of a few weeks. You weren't there to see it happening and to participate, so I'm sorry if it feels like it came suddenly and from out of nowhere, but it didn't, and we would love to have you there to collaborate with us in the future.

--Hayley, Kpaxxxxx (talk)

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Either relegate 'Dirtbag' Jess to an IRM or remove it entirely. It's clearly contentious material that members of the community have repeatedly found uncomfortable, and incongruous with how the character is popularly perceived. Kerascene (talk) 17:35, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

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Hi there! I think that there are certainly improvements we could make to the framing of the shelled section, but to be perfectly honest, there's a substantial contingent (of a few hundred people who have actively collaborated on all parts of Jessica's lore) that find the "dirtbag" version of her as the most beloved interpretation, and that we think it's compatible with previous lore. All of the discussions we've had about her character and wiki updates have been agreed upon, workshopped, and done in a relatively public space everyone has access to.

We balk at the idea that there is one popular perception of Jessica Telephone that is being damaged by this interpretation. What is established for Blaseball as a fandom is that no fan interpretation is canon, and different fans and artists have created their own versions of Jessica Telephone with great results. We do not agree that a communally created and extensively workshopped development of the character, by fans of Jessica Telephone’s current team, is a less valid candidate for inclusion on the wiki than any other.

We want this to exist alongside existing interpretations of Jessica, and to be fully integrated with the existing lore on the wiki. To that end, we welcome constructive criticism on how to allow this new contribution to exist alongside the rest of Jessica Telephone’s lore. That said, characterizing this interpretation as “harmful” due to personal discomfort with it seems like a non-starter to us, because many of the fans who workshopped our version have also expressed discomfort at other interpretations of Jessica. We aren’t sure how to resolve this fundamental clash, except by allowing these interpretations to coexist. We also reiterate that we are not trying to create a “scumbag” Jess who is intentionally cruel or problematic, but simply a messier and differently relatable Jess.

We would like to collaborate with you all to find a way to work this into the page in a way that makes sense, but the character arc where she has a skater/vape/attention-seeking phase as a result of being trapped in the peanut is really important to us. We actually have some creative ideas regarding how getting trapped in the peanut interrupted the temporal field that she was used to existing in, which may have brought on some of these changes - we'd like to work on that sort of thing, but we need to get past this first. We ask you to meet us halfway. None of us are able to speak for the Blaseball fandom as a whole, but we are able to try and understand, or at least accept, that differences will exist (and can coexist!) in such a massive community.

Abs0luti0n11 (talk) 18:49, 29 September 2020 (UTC)