There is so much about Pavilion/Lancers that reminds me of current social justice activism. Whilst many modern activists tend to publicly repudiate respectability politics, there's still a pressure to conform through the kinds of language, models and cultural references that the community has chosen as a kind of tacit norm. They've simply replaced mainstream society's norms with boxes of their own creation, like Blackbirds' 'fires' model. (Which is... whilst I can understand recognising that each person has their own qualia or who-they-are-ness, they've managed to explain it in a way that seems deliberately obscure. I have an especial hatred for deliberate obscurantism, especially in philosophy. I can often slog through that language, but I keep thinking they could have used clearer language to describe the same concept.) Pavilion seems to have missed the entire point of dismantling society's arbitrary strictures about multiplicity by engaging in ineffective respectability politics and imposing its own attitudes about 'functionality'.



~K.