11:27 in Sokvabekkr

Stop playing with me ‘fore I turn you to a song. – Kendrick Lamar

Ever since Monday there’s been this Draugr following me around. Weirdest thing. 

OK, look, let’s say up front, this is a petty footnote. “Exiting the Draugr Castle” is a major work on my part—a big swing essay tackling important topics. This is some bullshit—an update to enliven the holiday weekends of the sort of people who check Eruditorum Press on a holiday weekend. 

The essay went over about how I expected. Good number of people who are still cool with me, more who aren’t. Landing slightly more punitive than I’d hoped—caught some Facebook blocks from people I’d honestly expected more empathy from. But like I said, you don’t write an essay like that unless you’re ready to lose friends over it. The good news is that nobody’s played “collective guilt” and taken it out on Penn or something. 

Except, like I said, this one fuckin’ Draugr. And the funny thing is, he’s the one I hemmed and hawed on including, cause I was less sure I thought he deserved it than some. Needn’t have worried, turns out. Cause the Quisling went on an absolute unfriending spree, dropping not only Penn but a swath of other friends of mine, and also managing to blow up his local community in the process. Must have been something I said.

Thing is, some of those blocks I caught seem to have been in response to him accusing me of “all but doxing” him. And as that’s lie worthy of Tyr himself, I think it’s time for one last ray of disinfecting sunlight. 

So, here’s the thing he’s pissed at me for—a Bluesky post I made where I included these two screenshots.

Now, as you can see I went through and blacked out everyone’s names there except, of course, David Carron’s. I labeled the two people who had been characters in Draugr Castle, and left their Facebook icons, which I suppose means that if you really wanted to go scavenging around Facebook you could probably find them, but come on. That’s not fucking doxxing. For one thing, I’d already identified the Quisling as Associate President of the Troth. In what is probably not a surprise to you, the Troth’s website will readily inform you who its current Associate President is. Anyone who was terribly interested who the Quisling was could have figured it out from the original essay, which has been read by 2500 people at this point, and had a far easier time than they would reverse engineering his Facebook icon from a screenshot.

And I knew that when I posted the essay. I, in fact, put a lot of thought into exactly how identifiable people were. I wrote it so that anyone in the community could trivially solve the roman a clef for most of the main figures, but so that readers from outside the community would not. The only two exceptions were David Carron, because fuck him, and the Quisling, because it was impossible. He’s the second highest ranking person in the country’s largest heathen organization, which is to say that he’s a public figure, which is also why I didn’t worry so much about the fact that he was identifiable. The threshold for doxing public figures is a lot higher, and requires some properly psychotic stalker shit; posting a screenshot of what he’s saying in front of his 1.9k Facebook friends ain’t it. If he’s upset to have been caught with his pants around his ankles then he probably should have kept his damn belt on. 

But my point here isn’t to defend my moral calculus so much as to point out that I made it. Because that essay is actually fairly intricate, as such things go, and I gave it a lot of thought. That’s the thing that I found funny enough about those screenshots that I posted them. You’ve got the Quisling and Mead Mommy saying that it’s word salad, and meanwhile bestselling writer of The Wicked + The Divine, DIE, and Journey into Mystery Kieron Gillen is retweeting it, and two time Hugo winner Arkady Martine is replying to it saying “daaaaaaaamn, girl.” Which, frankly, I’m tempted to do an essay collection just so I can include “Exiting the Draugr Castle” and print a book with the blurb “‘daaaaaaaamn, girl’ – Arkady Martine (A Memory Called Empire)” on it. So really, a diversity of perspectives there.

The thing is, “Exiting the Draugr Castle” isn’t for the 125 people at Northeast Thing. It’s not really even for the heathen community. It was for the general public. The reason it worked as an essay is that it wasn’t just grinding in-community axes, it was telling a story about the nature of religious experience, the disappointment of dysfunctional communities, and the pain that arises when those coincide, and framing that story in an engaging and funny way. That’s the difference between it and this one, really—this one is about petty community drama; that one was about spiritual warfare. And I wrote it knowing it would be reasonably big because, and this is the thing I don’t think the Quisling and David Carron and Mead Mommy quite understand, presumably because they lack any sort of frame of reference for the concept, I’m a serious goddamn person. 

It’s not, to be clear, that I’m less insecure and in need of constant validation than these clowns—just look at that namedropping a few paragraphs back. It’s just that I handled that need by getting good enough at something to reliably obtain validation from an audience of fans instead of by floating along until I found a pond small enough for my ambitions. Not only am I not still coasting off of being the President of my college’s pagan club, I’m not even coasting off my damn PhD. I built a damn living wage career as a critic entirely off of word of mouth crowd-funding. And the reason I did this absurdly improbable thing is because I’m an obsessive craftswoman with aesthetic ambitions who puts in the work. 

Like I said, I didn’t expect them to know who I was. Sure, I was, with one or two plausible exceptions, the most famous person in the room at that event, but much like talking to god, I don’t mean to make that sound impressive. I’m the most famous person in most rooms I’m in, but that’s just because most rooms are boring and it doesn’t actually take much. The way in which I’m a smug and arrogant bitch isn’t that I think my modest accomplishments are oh so impressive; it’s that I’m a godly fucking woman and I have standards.

And so when I attempt, in all seriousness and earnestness, to contribute to a community and what I get are subpar middle school dramatics, I find myself to mostly just want to demonstrate what happens when serious people decide to engage in bitchy dramatics. These clowns aren’t mad I went too far or got too mean. They’re mad that I was actually good at it. They’re mad that, for all their event was formative for me, I don’t need it, and I’m not emotionally dependent on their approval. They’re mad that their biggest accomplishment in life is inspiring for a really good essay about spiritual disappointment. And y’know what? That’s fair. That’s absolutely a reasonable thing to be mad about, cause right now it does in fact suck to be them.

But I didn’t fucking dox Kyle Aaron Reese.

Ah, shit.