appropriate icon is appropriate

Argh, I just want the whole Evelyn Evelyn thing to go away or go back to being a cute jokey song or two on Myspace. I hate drama and I am pathologically incapable of picking sides, and this is hitting simultaneously with RL friend-drama with a similar dynamic, and I am a very Why Can't We All Just Get Along panda at the moment. I didn't even LIKE the Evelyn Evelyn stuff all that much aside from that one Have You Seen My Sister song, the actual performance sort of squicked me out, and when I saw that it was going to get big I cringed, and now exactly what I thought would happen is happening.

Just so nobody has to ask me, if they think it's important, full disclosure: my reason for not wanting AFP to be doing this is identical to my reason for not being personally offended by it. I am not a conjoined twin or any kind of similarly physically disabled person. Neither is she. Maybe she's talked to enough of them to feel comfortable speaking for them - I have not and am not. Or maybe she just didn't think about it. Many people don't. It makes them thoughtless, not bad people. From what I can gather this appears to have started as a clever attempt to get around her record label's claim to the next album with her name on it, so I guess she just didn't approach it from the Real People Like This Exist angle. Also I assume she got hit with the full flood of anger that the internet can provide filling her inbox all at once in the aftermath of this article, under which circumstances most people are not at their best.

(I'm not trying to make up excuses here, btw, the way I respond to all ~drama is by trying to unravel the causal chains involved. It's just how I process.)

Although honestly I was completely surprised that people took this tweet as anything other than "yes, I know about this issue. Now I need to get back to work" especially in conjunction with the next three or four tweets. But I guess after reading everybody's upset posts about it I can see how it's sort of poorly worded.

Anyway. I'm not upset at anybody who's experienced a radical de-pedestalling of Amanda Palmer and is screaming about it on the internet, because losing a hero is a shitty, shitty experience and I think all emotions (unlike all opinions, natch) are valid. I'm also not massively upset at Amanda because I completely saw this coming and, in any case, I lost that pedestal gradually and without fanfare - she's a person. People make mistakes. This one doesn't affect me, and I'm not going to defend her to people it does affect, but neither am I going to try to speak for them to her or any pedestal-keeping person who tries to insist that her actions are unproblematic.

I'm sitting this one out.