Divine Punishment 1: The Fall
Julia remembered the exact moment things had gone wrong. Another intern had called in sick and she had been sent to the literary conference in his place. At first, it had seemed the perfect job for her and a way to stand out from the other interns at the magazine. How could she possibly fail? Yet, failed she had.
She hadn't had time to properly prepare and do some research on the invited speakers taking part in the various discussions. However, she had thought her knowledge of the subjects they'd be talking about would be enough. How wrong she had been. The conference hadn't been about what was on the page and how it could be interpreted. What she'd witnessed as she walked from one panel to the next wasn't Death of the Author - it was Death of the Author After Which We Will Dance on their Grave in Between Crouching to Take Dumps on It. By the time she had got to the Helen of Troy discussion, she'd passed Reclaiming Carmilla and Laura's Lesbian Romance, A Black Perspective on Lovecraft, No More Hiding Behind ‘Depiction Isn’t Endorsement’: Author Responsibility, and Should Harry Potter References Still Be Acceptable in Modern Literature? Each one featured such bizarre interpretations that Julia wondered if she had slipped into an alternate universe. Despite her annoyance, she'd held her tongue, even when one of the white speakers at the A Black Perspective on Lovecraft panel had outright asked for her opinion, likely expecting an outpouring of praise for denouncing the racism of a writer who had died in the 1930s. She had found it rather insulting - of course he'd expected a black woman to agree with him - but had merely replied she didn't know Lovecraft’s work well enough to answer. Judging by the way everyone looked at her, not knowing what you were talking about was no longer considered a reason not to have an opinion on it.
Helen of Troy: Trouble Beauty had been the last drop in an already overflowing glass. She had stood there as an ugly, angry-looking woman talked about Helen as the ultimate femme fatale trading on her looks to get what she wanted. Because apparently what Helen had wanted was to be kidnapped by a grown man before she had hit puberty, handed over as a trophy to a random man, and spend a decade in a besieged city, popping out babies for that same man. And in the middle of all that, she'd also wanted to fulfill the fantasies of a teenage boy. It seemed like the only thing Helen hadn't wanted had been to marry the man she'd been allowed to choose. Helen's beauty had caused trouble. For her. Because she couldn’t control it. It hadn't helped that the speaker's only evidence to support her thesis had been Dictys' account of the Trojan War. Once more, Julia had held her tongue, but this time she'd needed to vent and had decided to do it on her personal Twitter account. It hadn't been nice, but she'd uploaded a video of part of the speaker's ridiculous theorising and written:
The bitterness of understanding you'll never know what it's like to be a beautiful woman.
She hadn't tagged anyone, but the reaction had been nearly instantaneous. In less than two minutes, her tweet had received dozens of replies accusing her of being transphobic. All because the ugly, angry-looking woman had turned out to be transgender. Had Julia done the usual research about the participants in the conference, she would've known that and no matter how much she had been annoyed by the speaker's asinine take on Helen of Troy, she would never have tweeted about it. But by then, it had been too late. The replies ranged from the standard accusations of transphobia to insults over her appearance. Julia was not-so-kindly told how her slender figure was mannish and her sleek hair looked greasy. Her slender features were dissected until she felt like a Picasso. No one had dared to say anything about her skin, and for the first time in her life she had been grateful to be black, sure that if she'd been a white woman, the reactions would've been a hundred times worse. Julia had also been lucky that no one had come to her defence, as that would've surely made people angrier. She had been even luckier that J K Rowling had decided to tweet about an unrelated transgender issue and everyone had left her to go wish death at their bête noire.
The same boss who had scoffed at the Right-wing trolls’ diatribes about cancel culture had swiftly let her go even after she had tweeted a clarification of what she'd really meant. The angry Twitter people might've forgotten her, but that didn't matter for her prospective employers, who feared a return of the cyber lynch mobs if anyone found out they had hired her. There'd been one exception and by then, she'd been desperate enough to accept. So there she was. One of three nonwhite employees in the newsroom of an alternative online news outlet, surrounded by crypto fans who idolised Elon Musk. That there was a newsroom had always baffled her - how could that need a physical newsroom? - but she knew it could've been worse and she was also confident that one day she would be able to move to a real newsroom in a real newspaper. Most of the days. However, there were some when she just wanted to scream.
Despite her dislike of her current position, Julia did her best to get along with her coworkers. While she felt like an outsider, she didn't want to be seen as the antisocial weirdo sitting alone at her desk while people talked and laughed around her. It didn't come easily to her, but she made an effort to be more social. Sometimes, though, she wished she'd stayed silent. Like when she'd made the mistake of asking Gary why he was upset. This resulted in a very long speech on how the immaturity of some Berserk fans made the whole fandom look bad. Apparently one of these immature fans had sent someone from another fandom a meme with a cartoon horse. After Julia had innocently asked why that was a problem, she immediately regretted it.
'That's the Rape Horse.'
'There's a Rape Horse?'
'Yes, but the series is deeper than that.'
Thankfully, he'd received an e-mail right then, and she'd been able to leave without having to come up with anything else to say. As she returned to her desk, Julia made a mental note to avoid Berserk like the plague.
Ironically, the most openly hostile were the other non white employees. On one hand, she understood why Trevor would have reasons to worry about her presence there - as much as Dan insisted he'd never hire people based on their skin colour, the overwhelmingly white make-up of the newsroom told a different story. For years, Trevor had been the only black face there, and it wasn't paranoia to wonder if her arrival could mean his departure. On the other hand, he was no angel and nowhere near a good a writer as her. Trevor might be black, but he was also a man who was dismissive of women and clearly didn't like being bested by one. He was more careful around the white women, but didn't bother hiding his annoyance towards her. If they'd been characters in a Hollywood film, they would bond over their shared experiences as black people and would team up against the white people who had pitted them against each other. However, Julia knew that, in real life, some people didn't need incentives to be sexist jerks. Jin was different. An errand boy who saw his work there as a temporary situation before classes started again, he had accused her of assisting a very questionable news operation. Julia had pointed out that he was also helping them, but Jin hadn't let go so easily.
'I'm fetching them coffee and takeout, but you're making them look better than they should.'
Julia hadn't been able to argue with that - she was a better writer than the others. At first, she had tried limiting herself to only report facts, but her boss hadn't been happy.
'I don't want this Julia,' he had told her. 'I want Twitter Julia.'
When Dan Weinberg had created his alternative news outlet, he hadn't looked to traditional reporting legends for inspiration, but rather Nick Denton - he wanted his site to be as fearless, outrageous, and mean as original Gawker had been. Except, as he'd told her during her job interview, they would go after the right people. After doing some googling, Julia hoped that the differences between the two would be greater than that. Despite its death, the Gawker site was still online, and she'd been able to read some of the journalism that had inspired Dan. She'd found much of it painfully unfunny and dumb. The grand conspiracy that had taken out this beacon of truth and defiance turned out to be embarrassingly simple: refuse to settle and take the lawsuit to its conclusion. Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel hadn't taken out Gawker - Gawker had taken itself out with a string of very stupid decisions. Still, if that was what Dan wanted, she'd do it. So, she had started inserting sarcastic commentary into her posts. Every time she hit publish, she felt she had lost a little of her journalistic integrity. Hopefully, she'd be able to move somewhere else before it was all gone.
