I’ll actually be covering this next week at MuseHack, and expanding on my thoughts.

I think any constructive action is a good idea as it encourages action. Action is a habit.

I think Victoria makes a good point that deconstructing things is a good form of action as people analyze, understand, and learn from the experience.

Thanks for answering, Steve. You make some excellent points.

Victoria,

It’s been pretty much anywhere I’ve looked the last couple days and it’s loud. But I could also just feel overwhelmed by it.

And I appreciate what you said. I suppose I tend to look towards more direct action. I’m not taking away anyone’s right to be angry. I just feel like doing something, even writing an angry email, is a forward motion that might create change.

And that’s what I want, more than anything else. I want readers to walk away thinking, “That was fucked up, and when *I* am writing my television show, I am going to try not to be as oblivious about how I portray my fucked up things.” Hopefully that will extend to D&D for future seasons as well, and hopefully they’ll acknowledge that they could have handled the scene in question better someday. But more than anything else, I want us as a society to move away from those pervasive and dangerous tropes TOGETHER, and we can’t do that without talking about them openly.

But now I have a question for you: where are you seeing what you would describe as “rage?” Are you talking specifically about Twitter, or Tumblr, or website comment threads? Where are you seeing anger that you would consider misplaced?

Now, to the thesis of your post, which is one that has been on my mind for some time as well – outrage.

Outrage is an understandable reaction to many things – including this incident. But your question is appropriate – after the outrage what gets done? Outrage does not provide us with an endgame aimed at a possible solution- and as nothing is solved, there is more outrage.

Our media feeds on outrage (and being outrageous) but does little to offer solutions – after all solutions don’t feed outrage.

My take is this is that those of us who are concerned about anything really should:
* Accept they’re outraged. It’s human.
* Ask what has outraged them specifically.
* Decide on what they want to do with it – what is the end result?
* Organize to achieve it.
* Along the way, other potential areas of activism will also present themselves.

Thanks for the post and the chance to participate in this important discussion.