#AND EXCEPTING THE. RACIST BITS.

[drumlincountry]

Us "adopts the speech pattern of the whatever we're reading" girlies really take our lives into our own hands reading Jeeves & Wooster

#What ho and all that #Me Fein #If I start saying rummy irl shoot me #THAT SAID maybe this is a better choice than appropriating AAVE for ppl who want some new slang? #(Not the song by the shins) #AND EXCEPTING THE. RACIST BITS. #p. g. wodehouse #jeeves and wooster #got to the commie bit last night it was great

[judeiscariot]

ok im not even gonna like. dwell on this because that was a great show and i had fun like always but fandom racism is genuinely so prevalent and some of you are not. subtle about it. anyways

#its the same thing as that one streamer who like didnt show ray at all im nottt calling this person a capital R Racist #its just like. idk its a bit suspect #you're taking five hundred thousand deafening screenshots of every band member except one? idk #jude.txt #mcr

[zazagundam]

CAN ANYONE HELP ME FIND OUT WHICH ZETA-ERA GUNDAM THIS IS?????????? CAN YOU GET ME HER NUMBER?????? CAN YOU TELL HER I WANNA FUCK HER????

#gundam #gunpla #plamo #mecha #ZETA #zeta gundam #gundam zeta #grandmas boy #this movie is so funny so far i love it #well except for the real fuckin racist bits :////////////////////////

[lovinnelily]

Y'all do know you can't make Jason be NOT white without changing his whole character, right?

For other characters, yes, because their physical appearance are not that influential in their story, on how they are viewed by people, on their personality formation — you can have a black/asian/indigenous/arab/brown/latino/etc Nico and yes, the hate he gets will have a undertone of racism but at the same time nothing significant on his story, motivation or personality will need to change. This is also true for other characters: Clarisse risks repeating the "aggressive WoC" stereotype but the character itself doesn't change.

This isn't true for Jason, whose main character trait is how he is perceived by others and how he showcases himself to others based on that perception. (specially with how little effort Riordan put on him besides making him perfect-er Percy who's somehow also weaker and less important than him).

Let's not pretend a black, Arab, indigenous, Asian, Latin man, etc, in the USA would ever be treated with the universal reverence Jason gets from New Roma, you can't have the illusion of perfection and most of all, of invincibility they have about him when you see him suffering racism or xenophobia in the middle of a mission. Nothing in his life has ever gone wrong, that's his image, destined to be king, he is supposed to have no weakness on his peers eyes.

He is not trying to prove people wrong, he is trying to prove them right; he isn't worthy despite their prejudice, on the contrary, he only tried to make himself worthy to fulfill their expectations. He can't be a woman or an immigrant or have a visible disability or any other thing that strays him from a perfect ideal by western society standards, and be that same character.

#Different from the other white character in the series he was never questioned or doubted #There's a presumption of perfection with no exceptions that society doesn't give to us (women poc immigrants visible minorities in general) #His privilege (handsome white man with no visible disability son of Zeus etc) also prevented anyone from worrying for his well being #This illusion/expectation of him having no weakness/being untouchable pushes himself too far and clouds his judgment. #I headcanon he didn't even consider the possibility of myopia because that wouldn't fit Jason Grace Son of Jupiter so it wasn't an option #And you think it'd be the same character after facing racism? Because ain't no way he'd be praetor without going through racism #I think I'd love him nonetheless since I'm very weak to the whole golden boy tearing himself to save the world but it'd be a new character #jason grace #I know racism in USA is different from here but I know how different a “non-racist” white person treats me and treats my white friends #Also for him to not be an entirely different character if PoC would be incredibly disrespectful and racist on its own #It would fail to recognize the difference in how we are read (and written). I hate that a lot. #I remember that when Cody told Brandi “I see no color” she told him “then you don't see me” and that's so fucking striking #We ARE different. treated differently. if you act like you don't see it then you also turn a blind eye to the violence that comes from it #This is straying from my point I got a bit heated banalization of things I care about usually does that to me #Point is please don't change Jason on the very few things that man actually bothered writing about him #I actually think this is true about Octavian too. A lot of what he is allowed to do would not be possible if he weren't a white man. #Same for Rachel Elizabeth Dare. I mean you can work around making her poc but it will truly be pushing A LOT #Let's put it this way: a woc doing a street performance is perceived very differently from a white woman doing a street performance. #Specially in the eyes of cops #Pjo

[nomsfaultau]

Reverse Fault Au for April 1st

Basically, what if SBI + Tubbo were humans working for the SCP Foundation, as well as anomalifying villain ocs at the end (which is where most of the tws come into play) 

Tommy: Thomas. A Threat Assessor, like Dr Blake. He has an uncanny knack for driving even the most docile objects to bloodlust, which is useful in ascertaining exactly how much resources must be allocated to containing that SCP. No one is quite sure how he does it, only that a simple conversation can send objects into rages that somehow never touch the man. Thomas simply wears a delighted grin as devastation unfolds. Why does he do it? Why, the love of chaos of course. He’s only bringing out their innate evil, after all. The anomaly wanted to do it, he just gave it the push to act upon its violent nature. 

Philza: Dr. A. Gon. Is an ancient decrepit old man from The War. He picks up little favorites among the anomalies and is super kind to them. Basically acts as a father figure for them, offering advice, giving little treats, limiting punishments, and helping them cope with the trauma of the Foundation…up until the moment he grows bored. After that it’s experiment after experiment trying to squeeze any last drop of interest out of the object before he discards them and moves onto the next. Anomalies tend to be completely psychologically and physically wrecked by the time he’s done with them. Likes to trap anomalies in complex promises that the Foundation can exploit easily. His cane is actually a sword stick, and the cape he has (to mimic wings) can act as a weighted net. 

The Blade: Agent Boore. An MTF captain who leads a squad that somehow literally never manages to fail to recapture an anomaly thanks to his leadership. A lot of anomalies are terrified of him, as he tends to handle the containment breach punishments after catching them. Anomalies don’t tend to try to escape ever again after encountering Agent Boore. He armed to the teeth with near batman levels of gear. Tactics include pumping adrenaline into his veins, filling a room with toxic gas (immune bc of his gas mask (he wears it even while sleeping)) and the humble bazooka. Definitely on steroids. Agent Boore sees a containment breach as a challenge. He likes proving humanity (but mostly himself) stronger than monsters. Is insanely paranoid and tends to be the straight man who is secretly more insane than everyone else. Met Dr. A. Gon in WWII but got Captain America’d, and is actually now trying to sue marvel for using his life story. He does the job in order to protect the poor orphans of the world (evil)

Tubbo: Security Camera B. Is a security officer. Not a single thing goes unnoticed in the entire Foundation. The second an anomaly is out of line they’re reported and appropriately punished. Their personalities are represented in reverse fault by their favorite monitors. Jasmine has a picture of a dinosaur as her screen saver, Rhodes is a picture of an apple tree and technically it’s the oldest of the new computers but they run a mean legal complaint software that really saves the Foundation’s hide. Rosalind is a pic of someone meditating in a field of flowers and Sec Cam B secretly uses that computer to play games to distress. Sec Cam B also works as a recruitment officer given how much conviction about the Foundation they have. ‘It’s the moral thing to do, you have to join. Don’t you want to save humanity?’ They’re insufferably righteous in moral conviction. Lawful evil. 

Wilbur: A. Void. Initial contact researcher, as he has a sharp eye (the other lost to an anomaly years ago) and an even sharper tongue that tends to not only save his life but also weasel out information from the object that would otherwise not have been gotten. His prejudices are flipped from Fault Au. Now, he thinks it unfair that anomalies have more power than humans, and that such a dominance would only lead to subjugation if given time. After all, the powerful always abuse such might don’t they? He believes everything he does is necessary for his own survival. He thinks his punishments are fair, which they could almost be considered to be compared to actual sadists like Agent Boore or Dr. A. Gon. 

———————————————————————

And on to the villain SCPs!

Webb: A humanoid SCP with eight eyes, six arms, mandibles. Webb has incorrectly healed surgical scars on its throat from an encounter with Dr. A. Gon’s scalpel. An anomaly that can shoot out tendrils of spiderweb that, when making contact, suppress heightened emotions. Effect is strongest while webbing is attached to both object and target, though loses effect about ten minutes after creation, so it is sometimes used to capture other anomalies. While not strong, it is important that Webb doesn’t escape because any urge to recontain it will be suppressed. At most extreme, it can shut down a person till they’re paralyzed, which on a few occasions was enough to stop a human heart because continuing to beat was simply too much effort. 

Dr. Blake: The Scimitar Smile. It is a set of 32 humanoid teeth with a crack through the upper right incisor due to an encounter with Agent Boore. The teeth can move somehow, and tend to hunt in a pack. On their own, a person within their aura will be acutely aware of their own flaws. Often persons with disabilities such as PTSD or anxiety will be triggered by its presence. Exposure to this object leads to strong self loathing and occasional suicides.

It’s when it gets a Host that the Scimitar Smile is at its most dangerous. Once a Host is selected, the teeth will crawl up them and burrow like ticks into the flesh of their cheeks in the arrangement of an external smile. The Scimitar Smile prefers to keep Hosts for a while, but will inevitably abandon it, and during escapes will take many Hosts in rapid succession. Old Hosts tend to scream when they hear their own names, have very little agency, and are incredibly compliant to orders.

Once assimilated, both the Host and the Scimitar Smile’s mouths will begin to speak, saying different things. When recorded and replayed, it sounds like chattering nonsense. Despite being unaware of its contents, the noise is regarded as a cognitohazard as it tends to drive people insane. Only a few reports of what individuals hear in person exist, as those that survive are left in psychological annihilation and refuse to talk about what they heard and did as a result. What we can piece together is this: Past being aware of their flaws, a listener is manipulated into acting on them in the most self destructive way possible.

The Scimitar Smile brings out the worst in people.

#I feel like Thomas would be the most tolerable to hang around #Except for the racist rhetoric #Like Sec Cam B probably gets the fewest people killed but they’d be insufferable #Scp Webb does swing around like spider-man #The scimitar smile is kept in one of those freaky baby teeth wooden boxes #I think Dr. A. Gon is horrifying but still probably less evil than fault Philza #Just bc Philza is a bit of a dad yandere #happens to the best of us #I loved contorting their flaws in order to make them villains. Just pushing them all to extremes until they became awful #scp ocs #scp au #sbi scp au #dark sbi #sleepy bois inc #scp tubbo #scp philza #scp tommyinnit #scp technoblade #scp wilbur #villain oc #Oh let’s see about those tws #body horror tw #teeth cw #suicide mention #human experimentation #emotional abuse #scp oc #fault au #something to nom on #sbi au

[13eyond13]

one of the lesser talked about fun things about intentionally reading more books is finding new stuff to be a bit of a hater about tbh

#and i know sometimes im probably just not properly picking up whatever the writer is putting down but whatever it's still fun #to actually know what you think about stuff like the highly regarded classics and extremely popular hyped up things #here are a few writers im a bit of a hater about w my opinions now btw #neil gaiman: does not do it for me at alllll #have read the graveyard book and american gods and hated almost every minute of both #in american gods i just found the aesthetic ideas and characters completely unappealing and in the graveyard book #i thought it was dreary and not well described enough... kept feeling like it was too bare bones in some way to picture things properly #i was like 'hmm i wish this was one of his graphic novels instead bc i'd like to be able to see what's going on here a bit better...' #also his humour just never lands for me and i do not often get his references either #ray bradbury annoys me in a similar way to neil gaiman but also somewhat oppositely like where #the way they write characters and plots and ideas and the stuff they care about gets on my nerves in an almost identical way #that i don't know how to define except to say i had a bit of a 'same energy' experience reading Something Wicked This Way Comes #and some of neil gaiman's stuff #but unlike neil gaiman i think that ray bradbury attempts to describe things unusually so much and TOO much #to the point that it takes me out of the story in a different yet similar way #to how the lack of description in neil gaiman's stuff does #what else have i become a bit of a hater about or did not get the appeal of lately? hmmm #oh hp lovecraft hahahaha #least scary stories ever god everything he's scared of is so dumb #like even aside from his extremely racist takes and fear of the 'exotic other' his fears about being cosmically insignificant are just like #yeah and? whats so scary about that hahaha i literally just dont get it #also the amount he writes dialogue in heavy accents annoys the shit out of me #p

[everymeloneveryday]

I fucked up and let q run out ill refill it soon I prommy

#literally only happened bc i forgot + got distracted #did you know ff14 is fun? dont play it tho its so fuckin racist it makes my skin crawl sometimes #it takes WAY too long to get to shb which is like genuinely fun AND doesnt make me feel like im being called slurs #and i actually liked arr except for the bits where theyre furry racist for possibly the worst reasons ever #like if youre going to have a self perpetuating cycle at least acknowledge it more than one or two times #hums. anyway #its my birthday on the 4th. thats exciting #melon speaks

[silverskye13]

I'm reading The Ruins right now and realizing I watched approximately 10 minutes of the movie based on this book. This serves to make the current plot both really, unbearably slow and kind of stupid--

#spazzcat barks #spazzcat reads #its a horror book about killer plants because im doing research for the horror fic about killer sculk i wanna write #this is in theory a good idea except i now know what the monster [plants] is -- since i recognize the movie #im a bit intruiged tbh because i watched enough of the movie to know what The Horrors TM are but not how the mcs make it out #or how many of them die #now im stuck waiting on the characters to Figure Shit Out while becoming increasingly aware of the author's blatant attempts #to make their inevitable deaths tragic #Stacy is nicknamed Space-y because shes haha so random and dumb and Too Pure For This Scenerio #Amy is a horrible pessimist if we listened to her we wouldnt be in this mess -- but by Tragedy Rules b/c shes a pessimist we dont listen #xyz guy characters who want to be doctors or teachers who had their whole lives ahead of them etc etc #i will say noticeable improvement from movie to book: #in the movie this takes place in somewhere vaguely tropical [amazon] with wild angry natives trapping the MCs #it was incredibly random and incredibly racist #in the book the Mayans in a Described Location (not random) have a known language barrier #and it is Stacy (Space-y) panicking coupled with the language barrier that puts the MCs in contact with the Evil Monster Plants #and the Mayans knowing these kids are doomed now force them to stay in monster plants to keep them from spreading from a Contained Location #it makes logical sense and isnt steeped in terrible racism #so good for the book i guess

[pronouncingitwang]

throwing up. btw.

#every time i read the book i remember how the book girlies are so right about everything forever #except for when i run into the racist bits. not looking forward to seeing newt's car again #personal #emeto mention

[timeisacephalopod]

Love atheist communities that hate Christianity but reproduce every single issue Christianity has right down to the racism, wild misogyny, and of all fuckin things evangelizing atheism by sending religious people rude ass 'gotcha' type reactionary content to like idk, recruit people to atheism the way Certian Brands of Christian recruit literally anyone to their religion.

Like yes this atheism is what I see a lot of white men participating in, but like how dense do you have to be to only ditch the GOD part of religion and nothing else while claiming you're intellectually superior to religious folks like a great many incredibly talented and smart people in various sciences weren't religious?

#winters ramblings #its so funny that the so called 'skeptic' communities on youtube and reddit claimed ti be SOOOOO skeptical of things #but never took a fuckin second to check their misogyny or racism and badically applied shite christian values to everything they do #but think they arent doing that because they openly denounce god. like bestie youre doing ALL the same shit i have a problem with #in teligious spaces except you have the balls to claim youre inherently smarter and more intellectual #which is why youre SO SMART you cant figure out how to be a halfway decent human being #like its so funny when i see athiests like this around where it feels like religion is the only thing they felt held them back #and not in the ways PoC queer people and women deal with- THEIR athiesm is usually rooted in #'christians told me i was black because i have the curse of ham and thats fucking racist as shit' or some other discrimination event #plus your average religious truama and in my case just a lack of desire to participate in religion and also no belief in it #but then you have white dudes whove never had a real problem in their life doing all the same shit as them Nasty Christians they rail on #without a H I N T of the irony while also wondering why it is that their spaces seem so... homogeneous lmao #almost like women PoC and queer people know all you did was reject the GOD bit not any of the underlying discrimination tendencies #no need for them to unpack that i guess because theyre Very Smart Skeptics they dont seem to think #that they believe just as much dumb shit as any religious or non religious folks out there except theyre insufferable about it #also the nonsense of science being inherently opposed to religion like tell me you know nothing about the history of science #without saying you have NO IDEA what youre talking about. so much science was trying to understand gods creations #science and god arent diametrically opposed to each other and in fact went hand in hand for a long time #not as much any more but ill bet a huge number of scientists are still religious because being smart #doesnt mean youre an athiest like HELLO youre not smarter than anyone for not believing in god #the same way you arent smarter or better FOR believing in god lmao

[gaal-dornick]

i finished reading solaris, so now i'm gonna detox by reading the stupidest erotica i could find on good reads

#personal #solaris is good tho except for the racist bits and for the boring bits

[manstrans]

sharing this in the hopes that people can learn from it, I think the biggest thing I've done to be an ally for people of color is to stop being scared of being racist. not that I stopped thinking racism is bad, but I learned that society puts a racist tint on everything that goes so deep I can't expect myself to be free from it. and at some point it starts to feel silly to be afraid of having any spec of racism inside of you, because it's so deep in the roots of everything that how can it not be there?

and once you let go of that fear you can actually work to start uprooting all this shit. you're not an irredeemable person for being affected by something so deeply rooted in every corner of our society, but being ignorant of it doesn't help anything except the system that keeps racism so prevalent in the first place

I remember a few years ago I was at a gas station, and a guy, I think latino? was in a hoodie next to me just getting a soft drink. I remember feeling nervous then realizing, wait, I feel nervous next to this guy because he's latino and wearing a hoodie. that's racist. and stuff like this still happens, I'll still think or feel something, and then go "wait, that's racist"

and I tell this story so people can learn from it, because if we don't talk about the way racism manifests in our minds it only further isolates us from the truth of how ingrained racism is. it's not good that it's normal, which is why we need to realize that it's normal, so we can all fight it more effectively!

I really do feel that worrying about any little spec of racism inside of me exists held me back from being able to actually challenge that racism because I was too afraid of it existing in any capacity. and I feel lucky to be able to have had this realization that not being racist is a process rather than a personality trait, and it's definitely not something I came up with on my own. I do have countless people of color talking about racism to thank for where I am in trying to uproot it in myself!

I just want other people to also have this realization. I want it to be perfeclty normal and mundane to be able to tell yourself "that's racist". I want the sense that everyone else is simply never ever racist even a little bit and if they are they're irredeemable to be gone, because it keeps people too scared and complacent to actually do the work of trying to not be racist

any additions from people of color are welcomed of course! this is just the perspective I've had of my own growth, I don't want to center myself in the conversation on racism! I just hope that sharing my experience helps someone

[artbyblastweave]

I think about Star Wars a lot more than I post about Star Wars, and I've had some free time recently to type up some thoughts on Episode 7 that've been swirling around in my head for a couple of years. There were a few ideas and plot beats, and moments of apparent self-examination in Episode 7 which I thought were fairly compelling, even though they ultimately paid no dividends:

First was Finn’s character concept. “Star Wars as experienced from the perspective of a Stormtrooper undergoing a crisis of faith” is a rich hook; humanizing and giving a face to what's basically the platonic implementation of the faceless mook. Unfortunately, the potency of the arc was undercut by the pre-existing textual ambiguity as to what stormtroopers actually are. Star Wars extended canon has settled on the idea that each trilogy features an entirely novel cohort of white-clad mooks, each with a fundamentally different underlying dynamic. The clones and the First-Order forces are different flavors of slave army; in contrast, the stormtroopers are more frequently portrayed in the expanded universe as military careerists, stormtrooper being a thing you work up to rather than a gig for a fresh conscript. A slave-soldier who defects is a very different character from a military careerist who defects, and they invite different analysis. There's a bait-and-switch going on here, in that Finn gestures in the direction of the familiar OT stormtroopers but can't comment on or examine them because he's actually part of a novel dynamic invented for the new movies. And there's one final nail in the coffin here, signaled by the number of times I've had to invoke the expanded universe so far. When Finn debuted, the racists were of course, legion, but I also ran into a number of people who were sincerely confused as to why they'd recast Temuera Morrison. Going off the seven films that existed at the time, it wasn't unreasonable to read the prequel trilogy as an origin story for where the OT stormtroopers came from. Going only off the nine films that exist now, it still isn't unreasonable! It's muddied from so many different directions by their failure to establish the ground rules in the mainline films before they tried to put on subversive airs about it. I am still irritated by this.

Next up is how Han Solo was written. I actually liked the tack they took with him quite a bit. Because initially, right, his role in the movie is just to be Han Solo. He's back, and he hasn't changed! He's still kicking ass and taking names, he's still the lovable scoundrel you knew and loved from your childhood- and the principle cast members react to his presence with the same reverence the film's trying to invoke in the audience, they've grown up hearing the same stories about him. Except that episode 7, at least, is also very aware of the fact that if Han Solo is still recognizably the same guy thirty years on, it indicates that things have gone totally off the rails for him. We find out that the lovable rogue routine is the result of him backsliding, his happy ending blown up by massive personal tragedy rooted in communicative failures and (implicitly) his parental shortcomings. It feels deliberately in conversation with the nostalgic impulse driving the entire film- here's your childhood hero back just as you remember, here's what that stagnation costs. And it also feels like it's in conversation with what was a fairly common strain of Han Solo Take- the idea that Ep. 6 cuts off at a very convenient point, and that Han and Leia's fly-by-night wartime relationship wouldn't survive the rigors of domesticity. Obviously, that's not the only direction you can take with the character; the old EU basically threaded the needle of keeping Han recognizable without rolling back his character development gains. But it felt like they were actually committing to a direction, a direction that was aware of the space, and not a reflexively deferential and flattering one, which at the time I appreciated! The problem, of course, is that for it to really land, you need to have a really, really strong idea of what actually went down-of what Han's specific shortcomings and failures were. And given the game of ping-pong they proceeded to play with Kylo Ren's characterization, this turned out to be. Less than doable.

Kylo Ren is the third thing about Episode 7 that I liked. His character concept is basically an extended admission by the filmmakers that there's no way to top Vader as an antagonist. Instead, they lean into the opposite direction- they make him underwhelming on purpose. Someone who's chasing Vader's legacy in the same way any post-OT Star Wars villain is going to, pursuing Vader's aesthetic and the associated power without really understanding or undergoing the convoluted web of suffering and dysfunction that produced Vader. It's framed as a genuine twist that there's nothing particularly wrong with his face under that helmet. Whatever it takes to be Vader, he doesn't have it, and he knows that he doesn't have it, and the pursuit of it drives him to greater and greater acts of cartoonish villainy. The failure to one-up Vader is offloaded to the character instead of the writers, and it was genuinely interesting to watch. For one movie. The problem, of course, is that if the entire character archetype is "Vader, but less compelling," you can't try to give the bastard Vader's exact character arc. You can't retroactively bolt on a Vader-tier tragic backstory when you spent a whole movie signaling that whatever happened to him wasn't as compelling as what happened to Vader. You can't milk his angst for two more movies when it's the kind of angst on display in "Rocking the Suburbs" by Ben Folds!

There's a level on which I feel like Moff Gideon was a semi-successful implementation of Vader-Wannabe concept; he's the same kind of middling operator courting the Vader Aesthetic for clout, but he's doing it in the context of the imperial warlord era, where there's a lot of practical power available to anyone who can paint themselves to the Imperial Remnants as a plausible successor to Vader. Hand in Hand with this obvious politicking, Gideon is loathsome, which relieves the writers of the burden of having to plausibly redeem the guy; he's doing exactly what he needs to do and there'll never be a mandate to expand him beyond what his characterization can support. Unfortunately, the calculated and cynical nature of how he's emulating Vader precludes the immaturity and hero-worship elements on display with Kylo, which is unfortunate; the sincerity on display in Kylo's pursuit of authenticity is an important part of why he worked, to the extent that he worked at all, and it'd be worth unpacking in a better trilogy. As he stands Kylo is a clever idea, and that's all he is- he lacks the scaffolding to go from merely clever to actively good.

#and these are my unsolicited star wars thoughts #thoughts #meta #star wars #star wars sequel trilogy #kylo ren #moff gideon #han solo #star wars finn #star wars meta #sw sequels #the force awakens #analysis

[nkjemisin]

Hello! I’ve been seeing a lot about your work on social media lately and would love to read your books. What series do you recommend I start with?

Thanks ☺️

That depends on your taste/interest. I don't really write the same kind of thing from series to series, because I get bored easily and often want to try new subgenres/styles/etc. So I'll just briefly list my series and you can pick the one that appeals the most.

There's the Inheritance Trilogy, (link goes to the first book) my first published novels. A secondary world that has enslaved its own gods deals with the repercussions of that, from the POVs of three mortals. There's an overarching plot arc for all three books -- and there are some side-stories for this trilogy, too -- but each has a different narrator and takes place at different times. First person past tense, if you care about that sort of thing. (I don't, but some people seem weirdly attached to/repulsed by particular persons/tenses, so I'm including that info here.)

Then there's the Dreamblood Duology, which were actually written before the Inheritance books but I couldn't get them published at first because publishing in the 2000s was hella racist, basically. (I know, it hasn't changed much... but that little bit of change was enough for me to break in.) These books are as close to traditional fantasy as I'm probably ever going to get, except that they take place in faux ancient Egypt instead of faux medieval Europe. The story follows priests of the dream goddess as they're forced to deal with a conspiracy that threatens to inflict horrors on their society. Third person past tense for both books.

Next up is the Broken Earth trilogy. That's my experimental one, with first, second, and third-person POVs, present tense, a completely non-Earth world, and some heavy themes. All three books form a single story spanning, oh, forty thousand years or so, but mostly they're centered on one incredibly angry middle-aged mother who is on a roaring rampage of revenge/revolution. Features earthbenders, anti-magic groomers, magic statue people, and the apocalypse (again). Lots of "dark" themes and horror moments (harm to children, systemic bigotry, people-eating bugs, more).

My most recent books are the Great Cities duology. Urban fantasy set in modern-day New York, third person multiple POV ensemble cast. Turns out cities come to life once they hit a certain point, and then they claim a human avatar to represent and protect them. New York turns out to have six. It's also got some very unwanted tourists in the form of Lovecraftian entities that are trying to destroy it, along with reality as we know it. I meant for these to be lighthearted and silly and I think they kind of are, but there are still some notable political elements in them. (I mean, it's set in modern-day New York, and I started them the year Trump got elected, so...) It's lighthearted for me, anyway.

So, pick your poison!

#answered asks