This article also appears on the Association for Mormon Letters blog
1.
Someone tagged me on Discord–“Calling Liz Busby!”–with a link to a profile of Brandon Sanderson on WIRED.
The tagline got me really excited: “He’s the biggest fantasy writer in the world. He’s also very Mormon. These things are profoundly related.” Yes! Yes, they are!
Studying the humanities can be very lonely, especially when your passion involves the intersection of a genre typically looked down on by the academy and a religion looked down on by both the religious right and the secular left. Reading through the article, my only thought was, “This is great! Someone else recognized that Brandon Sanderson’s work is influenced by Mormonism. And look at that great quote from Brandon. I’m totally using that in a future paper!”
I posted on Twitter that I was disappointed that they hadn’t consulted my work for the article, but overall, I was pretty happy with it.
2.
Then I started chatting with Mormon lit friends about the article. Most of us were excited for Brandon to be getting this recognition and even that someone in the mainstream media had almost recognized that Mormon lit is actually *a thing.*
Then the little doubts started dripping in. “Isn’t it weird that he insults Brandon’s writing to his face?” Yes, but even Brandon admits he’s not a flowery writer. We aren’t here for the prose, and acknowledging that is fair. “What’s with the author’s elitist attitude towards pretty much every restaurant in Utah?” I guess understandable. I myself miss Seattle’s Asian food after moving back here. “Are those side-long insults Brandon’s family and friends?” “Or towards the fans at Dragonsteel 2022 when he claims to read predominantly science fiction and fantasy?” “Is this author attempting to do a ‘why do people love these books so much’ article and just forgetting to actually include the upswing?”
I open the article again and as I reread it, and suddenly it’s everywhere. The snide reference to Dragonsteel employees as “people/Mormons,” the putdowns of Brandon as “unquotable” and “boring” seemingly because he’s a family man without a dark past or drama of any kind, calling his writing group lame because they eat apple crisp instead of drinking cocktails.
Have I just read an anti-Mormon article and had the whole thing go over my head?
3.
The rage across LDS author Twitter spreads quickly. Many of them are friends of Brandon, personally slighted in the article by name (or omission) or by association. Even those who don’t read or like Brandon’s work are baffled that a mainstream publication would put out such a poorly written article. The craft is frankly bad, not to mention the outright rudeness of insulting someone who lets you stay in their home and eat dinner with their children. It drips of coastal elite-ism, something that both Mormons and fantasy fans are familiar with wiping off their faces.
And there’s even more anger in the Sanderson fandom sites. I feel vindicated as the messages of wrath pour into the 17th Shard Discord. I compulsively watch YouTube takedowns of the article to assure myself that I am justified. Though most of them focus on the disrespect of Brandon’s person life, his success writing commercially successful books, and the speculative fiction community writ large, most of them also find the side-eye comments about Mormonism to be weird and inappropriate.
Most of this anger is put back under wraps after Brandon’s response to the article is posted. I vicariously pat all Mormons on the back for taking the high road and get a few chuckles out of the Reddit comments, thinking I’ll move on with my life.
4.
Then another pattern.
Jessica Day George sums it up beautifully: “Hot take: You can denigrate a poorly written article about a Mormon author without adding that you hate the Mormon church and all Mormons.” I am reminded again of the comment made to McKay Coppins, now ubiquitous in these kinds of discussions: “your people have absolutely no cultural cachet.”
I think back to the YouTube takedowns and how they were careful to say that it’s okay to criticize Mormon doctrine because, who wouldn’t disagree with those crazy people? A recent Pew survey shows that Mormons are the most universally disliked religion in America, and the only one that also likes all other religious groups. Sometimes being Mormon feels like you’re that one nice kid in middle school who just can’t seem to make a friend. The one who probably reads large fantasy novels during lunch to hide that he has no one to talk to.
Now I consider Brandon’s carefully worded response in a new light: is he just continuing the long tradition of Mormons taking it on the nose and then smiling and thanking them for the publicity? Taking out an ad encouraging people to “read the book” after they’ve watched a play that treats your whole religion as a joke? Some people comment that they wish he had taken the opportunity to at least say, “Hey, this wasn’t cool.”
5.
At this point, I start noticing a pattern in the posts on Twitter: “Man, I wish there was an interesting article about the connection between Mormons and science fiction/fantasy, but this ain’t it.”
Something snaps inside me and I decide to start spamming posts: We’re here! Mormons have been writing about this for a while, and it might do you some good to read what we’ve already said before jumping into the conversation as if you invented it. In fact, there’s an AML conference coming up to discuss Mormon genre fiction in about a month. Watch it on YouTube! Check out these essays! Please listen!
Sometimes it feels like screaming into the void, but at least I can still hear the echoes and know that I was there.
