A long-distance review of 'the Marked'

This tale will start like many tales of old.

Four or five years ago I was in a discord server...

...as wannabe writers often are, providing critiques, beta-reading, desperately trying to have my pieces read and validated by similarly struggling new authors. I remember reading this novelette in the works we’ll call ‘the Marked’.

To be completely honest with you, I have no idea if the authors managed to turn the idea into a book. I've scoured three pages of Google and Goodreads results looking for it. If this book was published, it might be under a completely different name.

There’s a solid chance it was never finished and it went, eventually, forgotten.

Still, I often think about ‘the Marked’ now.

The premise was simple enough. Some people – apparently at random, and at random ages – would get a small black spot in the white of their eyes. This would be enough to mark them. This served as a quite obvious metaphor for discrimination. Marked people would suffer it at every step, mirroring past and present forms of prejudice.

In the context of the story, the marked couldn’t open a bank account by themselves, some public spaces would bar them from entry, and some jobs wouldn’t suffer them to apply. They would suffer racist slurs on the streets and a very tangible threat of violence. The story was told from the perspective of a marked character navigating their life.

I wasn’t convinced by the premise.

The marked were a stand-in for any kind of minority you can think of. And in being so generically, widely marginalized, they failed to capture the specifics. Sure, we need stories to address the issue, especially in a world that seems to be going backwards – but a generic ‘discrimination bad’ is not going to cut it.

Ironically enough, the Marked seemed to be too ‘black and white’, if you pardon the pun. It split the word between the discriminated and the discriminating, which fails to encapsulate how intersectional any society is. A black/white setup cannot explain, for example, how second-generation immigrants can still hold racist views towards more recent immigrants. It doesn’t account for different political climates, or how tenuous alliances can be formed between different groups against a third party.

But I also had another reason to dislike the Marked.

As an emerging writer I was trying to make it, by any stretch of a definition. Reaching out to agents. Trying to connect with my peers. Joining writing groups and trying to offer useful feedback. Most of all, trying to learn the ins and outs of American culture as a non-American.

It was by any stretch of a definition an experience. Back then, as a 20-something, I assumed that my serviceable English was enough to make myself understood. It was and it wasn’t. The problem was not my liberal and often incorrect use of prepositions, but my tendency of expressing opinions without ‘reading the room’ correctly. More than once, I was involved in a game called "asshole or European?"

My opinions seemed to come off too strong. My language was too direct, or distasteful. Even when I explained that I operated under different cultural norms, my failing to relate to the majority was still seen as a character failure. This shouldn’t have surprised me, and now I know better: norms are such because they are considered normal. Even in the most multicultural environment, failing to pick up on the chosen norm is at best a rude quirk.

Some those communities ended up kicking me out with much fanfare despite my best efforts. I should say that I tended to gravitate towards left-wing spaces, that prided themselves on being inclusive. Ironically my social blunders marked me as an internet troll.

Something in my way of conducting myself had somehow signaled the wrong message. I had, in a way, been marked.

But I didn’t bring up an obscure, unfinished work of fiction just to complain about some in-group out-group policing mechanisms.

I’ve been recently diagnosed as a special brand of neurodivergent. I’m not interested in discussing the details of the diagnosis, except for its implications. I’m now forced to look back at the whole of my life. Was my struggle to pick up on social cues a cultural thing, a neurodivergent thing or an asshole thing?

Since our social media overlords caught wind of my diagnosis, an endless stream of content tailored to my experience. It’s tempting to look back at my previous social blunders and blame them on a society that was not made to accommodate ‘special’ needs.

Make no mistake: society is not tailored to my needs, no more it is tailored to any other real person (as opposed to a vague, aggregate average). I might be damned to be an outlier in society as I was an outlier in said American servers. Yet, blaming the whole of society leaves me none the better.

"Neurotypicals bad!" goes the meme. Yet after the quick hit of dopamine, and the obligatory nodding, nothing new is gained, nothing is changed, and there's no new insight.

But I often think about 'the Marked' and its author, because of the underlying theme.

What if people outside notice something about you - something you can't escape - and is this a new Scarlet Letter?

I wish I could walk into that unknown discord writer's study and say: “I understand, now.”