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carriagelamp · 3 years

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April l was apparently the month for me to revisit some children’s authors who are steeped in controversy at the moment. So here’s my hot (well, lukewarm) takes on issues that absolutely do not need a single other person talking about them. Also some actual good books that I read this month!

Badger in the Basement

The Animal Ark books are a childhood classic — though I recently found out that apparently there’s a difference between American and British publications, and the American versions didn’t include a lot of actual COOL animals which is… bizarre. As a Canadian stuck in the middle of this, this nonsense drives me nuts. This one was about the main character, the daughter of pair of vets, trying to protect a local badger sett from men wanting to participate in badger digging and baiting. These books are always feel-good, and it was a nice single-day-read while I waited for a library book to come in.

Chi’s Sweet Home

The cutest manga series about the misadventures of a little kitten, Chi, who has been adopted by a loving family. I’ve never bothered to read them in order, but apparently this time I stumbled across the last in the series -- whoops! Still, stood on it’s own pretty easily, and it was a fun read! Things get tense when the family realize that they may have found Chi’s original home… and may have to give up Chi forever.

Earth Before Us: Dinosaur Empire!

This was an odd graphic novel, I feel like I’m not sure who the target audience was exactly. It was a nonfiction comic done in a Magic School Bus style, with the purpose of teaching current, up-to-date facts about the animals that lived in the Mesozoic Era. If you’re into dinosaurs, you’ll probably enjoy this! The art is absolutely adorable, I love the dinosaur illustrations, and I learnt some really neat facts. That being said, the pages are really dense, and there’s a lot of info crammed in… some of it will probably go way over a child’s head without specific additional teaching or a very strong personal interest. But that being said, a dinosaur obsessed kid is still probably going to really dig this… as would a dinosaur obsessed adult. It wasn’t my cup of tea exactly but I’m sure it is someone’s.

assorted Dr Seuss Books

I love these types of controversies because it means getting to listen to every moron who has never had an opinion on Dr Seuss ever start generating a mile of them out of the aether. So many people are so mad about the six books that are getting retired and I bet most of them haven’t even read them. These are not the friggin Cat In The Hat or The Lorax or even the likes of Yertle The Turtle. I was raised by a grade one teacher, was a voracious reader who loved Dr Seuss, and wrote my university thesis on children’s literature, and I still only knew two of the six books on that list. So by all means, if you want to write an essay explaining why those specific books are worth clinging to, feel free, but if you haven’t even heard of them maybe it’s not a big deal. *grumble*

Anyway, my grousing aside, it gave me the urge to reread a bunch of Seuss books, including the two retiring books I personally knew: McElligot’s Pool and To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street. I do still enjoy both, especially McElligot’s Pool which always sparked my imagination, but it’s obvious why they’re being retired and I personally think it’s the right choice. There’s so much good kidlit out there, we can survive without these.

Goodbye, My Rose Garden

A f/f romance manga, fairly standard fair though cute if you’re looking for some historical angst, pretty dresses, and mutual pining. A young Japanese woman moves to England in the hopes of meeting a writer (Mr Frank) who she has long admired. Along the way she is employed by an enigmatic woman with plenty of money, rumours, and melancholy following her. I’ll be honest, uncut romance isn’t really my genre, but I’ll probably still try to the second book to see if the story picks up.

From The Holocaust to Hogan’s Heroes: The Autobiography of Robert Clary

It’s no secret that I’ve been on a Hogan’s Heroes kick. This is the autobiography of Roberty Clary, who plays my favourite character in the show, Louis Lebeau. And holy shit what a life this man has had. He was a Jew growing up in France before the start of the war, and who was one of many children taken away from his family and sent off to the concentration camps in Germany. This was an amazing, intense, inspiring, and heartbreaking read… it has Clary’s voice all over it, and it tells everything from the charming childhood he had, to the horrors of the concentration camps, the brutality of survival, and then about his exciting journey into the entertainment industry afterwards. It’s an experience, would recommend if you’re a fan of the show.

The Ickabog

The second controversial author I read this month. Originally I was going to give Rowling’s new book a miss, given everything that’s been going on over the past few years, but in the end my curiosity got the better of me. Politics aside, it was a fun read! Not groundbreaking, but enjoyable enough and written in an interesting style. It didn’t read the same as a lot of modern kidlit, it felt more like a cross between a classic fairytale and a Dahl book. Perhaps a bit like Despereaux. It tells the tale of how an idyllic country gradually falls into ruin through the ignorance, inaction, and greed, and how a supposedly fictional monster hides the very real, human monsters at the heart of the country. It was cute and pleasant and I’m glad I decided to get it from the library, though for anyone who is choosing not to engage for political reasons: you aren’t missing anything major.

Franklin In The Dark

A Canadian classic. I don’t think there’s a single person my age who hasn’t read or been read a pile of these books, and the nostalgia is so comforting. I found this on Youtube and listened to someone read it to me, and honestly 10/10 would recommend for a calm evening.

The big reason I decided to seek this one out though, was because I finally got to the M*A*S*H episode that inspired this entire series! In the episode C*A*V*E, in which Hawkeye is freaking out over his claustrophia while the camp is forced to take shelter in a nearby cave during some intense shelling, he mentions that if he had been born a turtle he would have been afraid of his own shell, and that the other turtles would make fun of him cause he’d be forced to walk around in his underwear. And so this first story about a young turtle who’s afraid to sleep in his own shell and drags it around behind him. So if you were ever curious, Franklin the Turtle is in fact named after Dr Benjamin Franklin Pierce. (this is also why the French version is named Benjamin!)

Wolves of the Beyond: Lone Wolf

I loved the Guardians of Ga’Hoole books as a kid but I never read the Wolves of the Beyond series. This first book was an interesting read, Lasky does a great job creating worlds and societies for the animals that inhabit them. Lone Wolf is about a deformed wolf cub who was abandoned in the wilderness to die. And he would have, if a desperate mother bear, who had recently had her only cub killed, hadn’t stumbled across him and saved him, vowing to raise him as her own...

Petals

A “silent” graphic novel. It has beautiful artwork and is told entirely through pictures, no text at all. It’s loves and heart-wrenching, though it left me feeling somewhat unsatisfied… I felt like there should have been more. Still, a neat story.

The Southern Book Club‘s Guide To Slaying Vampires

What a banger of a novel!! I can’t recommend this one enough. It’s about a group of suburban mothers in the ‘80s who form a book club out of a shared need for community and a love of grisly true crime novels. But when a strange drifter appears in town and starts setting down roots… and when children begin disappearing… these women need to band together to confront the horrors that have invaded their neighbourhood, and face down not only a terrifying monster among them but the patriarchal system that allows it to flourish. To quote the preface:

“Because vampires are the original serial killers, stripped of everything that makes us human — they have no friends, no family, no roots, no children. All they have is hunger. They eat and eat but they’re never full. With this book, I wanted to pit a man freed from all responsibilities but his appetites against women whose lives are shaped by their endless responsibilities. I wanted to pit Dracula against my mom. As you’ll see, it’s not a fair fight.“

The Weirn Books: Be Wary of the Silent Woods

I love Chmakova’s graphic novels, though I’ve only ever read her slice-of-life middle grade series before. This one is pure fantasy and very fun. It’s about two cousin “weirns” — witches with demon familiars — who attend the local night school. Things get strange though when an ominous figure appears outside the old, abandoned school house deep in the Silent Woods, and begins tempting children down its path…

I’m very much looking forward to word of a second book and was honestly kind of surprised that I haven’t heard more about this book given how popular her other series is. This has all the same charm and quirks but for those of us who prefer stories based in fantasy rather than reality.

And A Bonus...

For some masochistic reason I got a Garfield book out of the library. Jeez, if I didn’t love these as a kid, I found them absolutely laugh out loud hilarious, and now I just don’t see it anymore. But here I will share the one strip in the book that actually made me laugh

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drivingsideways · 4 years

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in search of a better dream

This is about three pieces of South Korean media that crossed my path recently: the dramas Search WWW and Flower of Evil, and the novel Kim Ji Young, Born 1982.

Disclaimer and context : I'm not Korean, I don't speak the language, and I've watched a very limited set of kdramas. The criticisms I make in this piece are not to single out kdramas, or kdrama fandom, as what I've described exists in Western and other Asian media and fandoms as well.

Under the cut for length:

There's a scene in the first episode of the hit 2020 k-drama "Flower of Evil" that made me want to quit watching the show within the first ten minutes. The scene goes like this: our protagonists, Cha Ji Won and Baek Hee Seung meet Baek Hee Seung's parents along with their four year old daughter. The occasion is Baek Hee Seung's birthday, and loving wife Cha Ji Won has set up a special birthday dinner for them. On the way to the restaurant, the daughter has already complained about how she's scared of her grandparents, and they don't like her. When we meet the grandparents, we see the truth of this- they are as cold as the Arctic to all three, but especially to their daughter-in-law and granddaughter. In a bid to smooth out the social awkwardness, Cha Ji Won instructs her daughter to greet her grandparents the way they had "practiced" earlier- a cutesy little greeting where the adorable Eun-ha makes a heart over her head and chirps "I love you grandma and grandpa". When this fails to soften them, Eun-ha retreats, looking scared and disappointed. Not to worry, Cha Ji Won has this completely figured out: if you try harder, she tells her four year old daughter, they'll eventually love you.

Reader, I was, as they say, mad.

We find out soon enough that this stellar bit of parenting follows from an abiding principle in Cha Ji Won's life. Her romance with Baek Hee Seung starts when a handsome oppa walks into the family store, and is a saga of her stalking and pursuing a man who repeatedly tells her he's not interested, until he finally gives in. The power of her persistence pays off when the emotionally distant and abrasive man, in a classic beauty-and-the-beast transition, becomes a loving boyfriend, and then later, husband and father. It's a fantasy- some might even say feminist fantasy come true- he's handsome, supportive, reliable, artistic, the primary housekeeper and caretaker of their daughter while she pursues her demanding "dream" job as a police officer, and they have enough money to live in a charming and lovingly set up two-storeyed house in ruinously expensive Seoul. This is heterosexual female wish fulfilment at its peak, and it is all made possible because she persevered.

It all threatens to come apart with the discovery of the perfect man's dark past- for a brief period, she's forced to contemplate the idea that he's actually a serial killer who's conned her for the entirety of their relationship of fourteen years; that the perfect life was, in fact, a lie.

However, since this is written and billed as romance melodrama, this horror is short-lived. As the story progresses through increasingly improbable, violent and sometimes downright hilarious twists and turns, we grow closer to the (inevitable) happy ending. Baek Hee Seung/ Do Hyun Soo is no killer, just a traumatized child with a horrific past. The lies are the result of psychological damage inflicted by a society that unfairly deemed him a monster; the cage of repressed emotions that he'd locked himself in needed only the unshakeable conviction of Cha Ji Won's love to be broken open. "I wish you could see yourself as I see you" she tells him, in one of the show's endless supply of tearfully emotional moments, "I wish you could understand yourself the way I understand you."

This framework continues right to the end, when a bout of short term amnesia (!!) has Do Hyun Soo questioning himself and her: do you know, he asks her, when I'm lying to you, and when I'm not, because I don't. The show answers that almost immediately- it doesn't matter, because it's her vision of him that he wants to be; in other words, he chooses the version of himself that she wants. The horror of the lie was a red herring, Cha Ji Won was right from the start about her husband- all it took was the power of her love and her perseverance to overcome the lie at the heart of her marriage, to restore it to its previous shape- quite literally. The dream house they built together, which was destroyed by the villain, is shown in the last shots as unchanged from how it was in the beginning. One of the last shots we have of the couple is of them kissing in the artisan husband's workshop, an almost perfect recreation of the first time we see them. Paradise Regained, and all of us- and Cha Ji Won- can breathe a sigh of relief. You, the twenty-first century woman, are the architect of your own fantasy and can have it all. What could be more powerful than that?

In Kim Ji Young, Born 1982 , a novel published in 2016, and often credited with kickstarting a new conversation about feminism in South Korea, the eponymous protagonist's story is also one of perseverance. It's a starkly written tale, an everywoman tale, a dryly narrated fact finding mission report complete with citations and references, about a woman born in the late twentieth century into a rigidly patriarchal culture, whose very existence is an aberration- her parents didn’t opt for a sex-selective abortion unlike many of their contemporaries when they found that their second child would also be a girl. Kim Ji Young, like the rest of us, grows up immersed in a misogynist culture. Even before she understands it, she learns to work around it and through it, rationalizing the micro-aggressions, burying the anger at the casual and institutional sexism that permeates her life, compromising and coping with it all, and achieving some semblance of having it all: a job, a decent, loving husband, a child. However, it's when motherhood arrives that it all falls apart- Kim Ji Young, faced with the exhausting carework of having a baby at home and another regular, full time job, does what so many women in her position do- quits her "outside" job for her parenting one. Fighting exhaustion and depression, a casually cruel and misogynist remark from a stranger in a park proves to be the proverbial final straw; Kim Ji Young suffers a mental breakdown, dissociating herself completely from her own life, and "seamlessly, flawlessly" taking on the personalities of other women she's known- her mother, her friend, her colleague. The novel ends with a narrative twist that's both horrifying and appropriate: we learn that our narrator is actually her male psychiatrist. Kim Ji Young doesn't even get to be the voice of her own story; instead, it is told by a man cocooned in his own privilege, who displays the same paternalistic and misogynist behaviour that he correctly identified as the cause of her breakdown.

There is no escape here for Kim Ji Young save that of a complete break from reality. In the light of the narrative that leads her to that point, it feels both inevitable and even more horrifically, a blessing. This is a horror story told as it is shorn of any hope; the ending is death or insanity.

Reading Kim Ji Young, Born 1982 was to confront the familiar and heart-breaking and horrific neatly distilled into 200 odd pages; it's "fiction", but not really. My only surprise was how similar the culture described there was to my own in specifics; how incidents in Kim Ji Young's life were things I had actually experienced myself or seen other women experience, in a country several thousand miles away.

I read this novel just after watching the 2019's Search WWW, a show with a bit of a cult following, I think. Before I started watching it, one friend assured me that I would love it, that it was made for me; another said that she dropped it because it "rang false" to her at the time. I've seen the show described several times as a feminist power fantasy, sometimes, if the reviewer wanted to demean it, with the qualifier, unrealistic.

This seemed an odd sort of criticism to me- after all, who turns to k-drama romances or really, any romance, for realism? Female wish fulfilment, which is the cornerstone of romance as a genre, whether in books or film, is still written and recognized as fantasy. So what was particularly unreal about Search WWW?

Well, simply put, it is written like the patriarchy doesn't matter, and has never existed.

The three female protagonists are all in their thirties, in powerful positions in their careers. As such, they are constantly walking into meetings where women speak more than 33% of the time. There are men in the room, but they never outnumber the women, and they don't silence the women.

The interests and decisions and choices of women in the show- even the lead antagonist, who is an older woman whom we often see casually making beefy young men pose nude for her paintings- matter, not just to domestic and private realms, but to society at large; the antagonist is a power broker whose reach goes right up to the highest echelons of the country's politics; the younger women's ethical choices directly affect the republic's functioning as a democracy.

What about the men? It's not that they've been ignored; it's just that their place in the narrative has been decentered. Do with that what you will, the writer seems to say, as she writes in speaking roles for women wherever possible—every second side character is a woman— I have no time or inclination to justify that choice.

As for romance- it's not just that two of the three romances fall into the "noona romance" category, which is subversive in itself. It's that the power of decision making in these relationships clearly rests with the women.

In the "main" romance track, in a reversal of the usual trope, the woman is the one who is emotionally unavailable, and whom the man has to convince to take a chance on their relationship. What was hugely refreshing was that the reason for her emotional unavailability isn't trauma, that the man has to help her heal from, unlike the gender reversed versions we often see, eg in Flower of Evil. Instead, it's a difference in perspective that has its roots in the years of experience she has compared to him; it's the difference in life perspective of a twenty something man, and an almost-40 woman. She considers the implications and possibilities of entering into a relationship with a man who wants marriage and kids, while she doesn't want either and is unlikely to want them in the future. She thinks through it, and sees the pitfalls of it, perhaps all too clearly. In the end, when she makes a decision to commit, it's with the understanding that she's choosing to live in the moment, that he makes her happy; that they make each other happy and it is worth something, even if it doesn't last. But both of them understand that her happiness is not centered in him or their relationship being successful. The other two romances end on a similarly open note- the possibility of love with the man you just divorced, but there's no hurry to get there; and a long distance relationship that may or may not last the two years of military conscription the man has to undergo.

The happily ever after in this series is not the perfect heterosexual family unit; it was always going to be the complicated, thorny and intense queerplatonic relationship between the three women, who, in the end, literally drive off along an endless open road under a blue, blue sky, to "a place with no red lights", as one of them describes it.

For a week after watching Search WWW, I wandered around in a daze. How did this show get written, I kept asking myself? How did it get produced? Aired??? What magic was worked to put it in my eyeballs, and how can it keep happening?

That feeling intensified when I read Kim Ji Young, Born 1982. But the book also provided the answer, at least to the first question. Because it is Kim Ji Young's voice in Search WWW. This is the fantasy that Kim Ji Young would have wanted to live in; a society and a life where she's seen as a person, entire, and it's not something she has to fight every day for. The gigantic leap of imagination that the writer of Search WWW took was only because that fantasy has been yearned for, in a way only a person growing up in Kim Ji Young's world- our world- could.

"Flower of Evil"- and other dramas like it— are also, undeniably, products of this world. It's unsurprising to me that in many ways, Cha Ji Won's little fantasy domestic world in Flower of Evil, on the surface, looks exactly like a post-feminist world. If the real revolution is men doing housework and childcare, then that fantasy has already been achieved on the individual level for Cha Ji Won. Sure, she's the only female member on her squad, and maybe the entire police force, for all you see women in her workplace. Sure, the other female characters with speaking roles exist mostly to be tortured for manpain by the narrative or literally by men as part of the plot. She seems to have no friends outside of work, which means that all her friends are men. As for relationships with other women, except her mother, who exists mostly to share the burden of childcare, and her mom-in- law who turns out to be an evil sort herself, there are none. When she meets her sister-in-law, the entire scene gives off a strange catfight vibe- her sister in law is the only other woman who can legitimately be said to have a claim on knowing the real Do Hyun Soo, and Cha Ji Won's reaction is to deny that claim and tell her to buzz off, basically. "I'm his family now" she tells her sister in law, "He has a wife"; firmly establishing the primacy of a heterosexual romantic relationship over all others.

Her "dream" job means nothing much despite the work she has put in to get it; for most part of the narrative she ends up betraying every professional ethic and her squad- her only friends. Of course, she is easily forgiven for it, without doing any of the work to earn that forgiveness, but that's really because who has the narrative time to develop those relationships which do not matter, like her work, which is shown up for the narrative prop it is, just like her daughter? Even her sociopath (but not really, poor baby) husband ends the series with a tentative sort of friendship with a person he's not married to, but not Cha Ji Won, whose entire world by the end of the series has narrowed down to the four walls of her perfect little house and her perfectly-rescued husband. "I can't be happy if he's not happy," she tells her mother, who suggests that maybe it's time she let go of her not-so-perfect husband. "So please accept him."

In the end, the fantasy is based on this : self-improvement as the winning strategy, not structural change. Try hard enough and you'll get what you want. In the fine print, easily ignored: as long as what you want falls within the bounds of heteronormative patriarchal standards. It's an attitude that is passed down to the next generation; Cha Ji Won's early conversation with her daughter is an example.

The writer's vision is clear- what could have been an interesting and intimate look at our deepest fears in a relationship- that the other person will see us for who we are and horror-struck, leave; or even a deconstruction of the heterosexual woman's fantasy of The Perfect Man, is instead a tired repetition of the Beauty-and-the-Beast trope. You can dress it up and put a gun-toting, career woman wig on it, but that disguise falls apart pretty quickly. Cha Ji Won openly states not once, but several times, that she would rather live the comfortable lie; it's only when even that isn't an option- and not because of her choice or agency, but circumstances and the man coming to a decision, that she begins to let go. But only for a little while- barely ten minutes in show time- because ultimately, this is a female wish fulfilment fantasy, isn't it? Her longsuffering perseverance is rewarded when he decides to mould himself to her fantasy version of him, and the past is erased, and time reset, complete with soft lighting and soaring soundtrack.

Some love stories are horror stories, but others are horror stories masquerading as love stories. Why are we so often sold the latter, and so accepting of the narrative gaslighting? When I look at the popularity of Search WWW vs Flower of Evil, I feel bitter despair and quite a lot of anger. Why do so many women- and it is women, who are producing this work, for women, primarily (I mean, romance, as a genre)- settle for so little? It's the twenty first century, I think, why are we still here, I rage, gnashing my teeth, and indulging in the vicious satisfaction of giving Flower of Evil a single star rating that will make not a dent in its popularity. If we can't demand and aspire to a better class of fantasy, what hope do we have? As you dream, so you will do.

I often think that these days feminism is made toothless because we're shaping it into something that will validate every little feeling of ours; we don't want to be made uncomfortable by it. But feminism is not meant to make anyone comfortable; interrogating your own desires and pleasures is as much a part of smashing the patriarchy as fighting for fundamental human rights like bodily autonomy.

I guess, in the end, what I want to say is this: for the love of sanity, dream better.

#flower of evil #search: www #kim ji young born 1982 #unpopular opinions cw

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tillidontneedfantasy · 4 years

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A Track-by-Track Breakdown of Taylor Swift’s 8th Studio Album: ‘folklore’

Taylor Swift’s 8th studio album, folklore, starts off with the lie, “I’m on some new shit.” Perhaps to someone who hasn’t been paying attention this would seem to be true. But to those listening, folklore is the essence of her skill and success throughout her entire career stripped down for all to see, but more refined, enhanced, and impressive than ever.

Even prior to her pop-world domination with 1989 (2014), Taylor’s storytelling ability has always been her most compelling strength as a writer. In 2010, she released her third album, Speak Now, penned fully solo to prove to the cynics that she does, in fact, write her own music. And it’s damn good. Widely considered her best song, “All Too Well” from Red (2012) is a five and a half minute epic about love had and lost, all in walks through autumn trees, almost running red lights, dancing round the kitchen, and a scarf reminiscent of innocence, unreturned.

Yet her pop prowess over the last six years perhaps leads to her storytelling being overlooked to those more focused on the music. There is a particular genius in writing a successful pop song, let alone three successful pop albums, that still has hard-hitting lyrics underneath the synth. Take the excellent “Cruel Summer” from Lover (2019) for example. The song is just under 3 minutes, and the production is so enthralling and infectious that it can take such a hold on you, you might miss the tale being told along with it about a fraught summer relationship that was actually just the beginning of her own love story.

But without the pop production, her stories on folklore demand attention. Swept up by a strong wave of creativity and inspiration, Swift secretly wrote and produced this album in around three months with Aaron Dessner of The National, one of Swift’s favorite bands, and long-time collaborator and friend Jack Antonoff. A surprise album is a new endeavor for Swift, as she generally spends months meticulously planning an album rollout. It is refreshing, and as a dedicated, long-time fan of Taylor, it is thrilling. Due to the album cover where she is standing in the woods, and the genre of the album itself, there have been think pieces regarding the “man in the woods” trope and what it means that Taylor seems to be embodying it. As a result of over-exposure, people are unable to stop focusing on her image and the way she presents herself. It’s understandable, as she is a very smart and deliberate businesswoman, and clearly cares about how she is perceived. But with this album, it is clear that none of that was at play. We are in the middle of a pandemic. Her mother has been battling cancer for years. Isolate a creative person in a dangerous world and they will dream up an escape. She understands more than ever how precious each moment is, and does not want to waste another one. The woods being the landscape for the photo-shoot is most likely attributed to the fact that it is the safest place to have one under these circumstances. She’s not pretending she removed herself from society and became enlightened, she didn’t dabble into a more alternative sound to prove anything; she is just sharing stories she wants to tell that she is proud of, and nothing more.

Of course the music of the album is important, but the lyrics are the heart of it all, and I wanted to focus on them. Upon its release, Taylor explained in a foreword that the album was a mixture of personal and fictional accounts. The beauty of stories is that once they are shared, they never live one single life; each person who consumes a story interprets it uniquely, and the story becomes a multiverse, with different meanings and outcomes than what initially drove the pen to the paper. As explained by Swift in a YouTube comment prior to the album’s release, three songs on the album are all one story, which she has dubbed “the teenage love triangle.” The three points of the triangle are “cardigan,” “august,” and “betty.” But if someone had not seen her say that, they might not have figured it out. Maybe they’d interpret each song as their own story, and connect it to their own. Taylor knows this. It is why she loves storytelling and is why she is so good at it. The album itself is a mirror ball, shimmering with every version of the stories being told, reflecting a bit of each person who listens. These are my interpretations, but they can mean whatever you make of them.

1. the 1 The melody of this song helps set the scene; picture yourself skipping rocks on a lake, reminiscing on the one that got away. “the 1” is about learning to assimilate into a life without them, resentfully accepting that they might be moving on, too. She ruminates on what went wrong and what could have been. In a very Swift fashion, she puts the blame on herself when she sings, “in my defense, I have none / for digging up the grave another time.” Perhaps this song is fictional, perhaps it’s a revisit of a past feeling or relationship, but its relatability makes it feel real and present. She searches for explanations, restraining herself from asking, “if one thing had been different, would everything be different today?” But it’s good she didn’t ask, because she’d never find the answer, anyway. Best lyric: “We never painted by the numbers, baby, but we were making it count / You know the greatest loves of all time are over now.”

2. cardigan (teenage love triangle, part 1: betty’s perspective) “When you are young they assume you know nothing,” Swift sings in her smooth low-register on this Lana del Rey-esque single. “But I knew everything when I was young,” she asserts. They say wisdom comes with age, but there is wisdom lost, too, of what it felt like to be young; but she has held onto it. In this track, the narrator (Betty) is looking back on her relationship with someone she once loved (James, as name-dropped in “betty” later on in the album). Her insight on his character was always spot on; she knew he’d try to kiss it better, change the ending, miss her once the thrill expired and come back, begging for her forgiveness in her front porch light. As soon as she was feeling forgotten, he made her feel wanted, his favorite. The ending in question is unclear, whether she granted him her forgiveness or not. But what is clear is Taylor’s understanding of the pull of young love, the intensity, the immortalization of all the smallest of details, the longing to be someone’s favorite. It’s why we look back on it so often, read stories and watch films about it, even as we grow old. It’s the cardigan we put back on when we want to be Peter Pan and remember what it was like to fly with Wendy. Best lyric: “You drew stars around my scars / but now I’m bleeding.”

3. the last great american dynasty The story of Rebekah Harkness and her destruction of the last great American dynasty, Standard Oil, is documented in this track, as each verse covers a different part of Rebekah’s life, going from a middle class divorcee to one of the wealthiest women in America by marrying into an empire. Swift paints Rebekah as an outcast, the Rhode Island town blaming her for her husband’s heart giving out. Rebekah used her inherited fortune on her ballet company, throwing lavish parties with her friends who went by the “Bitch Pack,” playing cards with Dali (Yes, as in Salvador Dali. It’s not clear if they actually played cards together, but her ashes were placed in an urn designed by him), and feuding with her neighbors. Then, fifty years later, Taylor Swift bought that very house and ruined the neighborhood all over again, bringing with her the triumphant return of champagne pool parties and women with madness, their men and bad habits. It’s a note on how women will be blamed for tarnishing what is sacred to men rather than celebrated, specifically when its related to wealth and power. They will call them mad, shameless, loud. But just like Rebekah, Taylor learned to pay them no mind, and just have a marvelous time. It is also interesting to note that Rebekah went by Betty. Perhaps Taylor felt inspired by and connected to her and gave her a whole backstory, and thus the birth of “the teenage love triangle,” or maybe it’s just a coincidence; but that’s the fun of it all. Either way, this track is a standout showcase of how Swift has truly mastered her craft as a songwriter. Best lyric: “Holiday House sat quietly on that beach / free of women with madness, their men and bad habits / and then it was bought by me.”

4. exile ft. Bon Iver You know that feeling when your parents are fighting and it’s upsetting you but you can’t help but listen? That’s kind of what listening to this song feels like. Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon co-wrote the track, and he lends his gorgeous vocals to play a man who has been exiled by his ex who has moved on with someone else while he desperately tries to understand where it all went wrong. The bridge is particularly poignant, both proclaiming, “you didn’t even hear me out,” while talking over each other. He thinks he was expected to read her mind, but she is adamant that she gave him plenty of warning signs. Miscommunication is one of the most common downfalls of a relationship, and the emotion in Swift’s and Vernon’s voices really draws you into the argument with them, transporting you back into your own exile from people you once called home. Best lyric: “I couldn’t turn things around / (You never turned things around) / ‘cause you never gave a warning sign / (I gave so many signs.)”

5. my tears ricochet Taylor describes this song in the foreword as “an embittered tormentor showing up to the funeral of his fallen object of obsession.” If you know enough, you can put the pieces together that the tormentor is Scott Borchetta, the head of Big Machine Records, and the funeral is of their professional and personal relationship. Taylor was the first artist ever signed to Big Machine. Borchetta and Swift had to trust each other in their partnership for it to be a success, and oh, how it was. But prior to Lover’s release, Taylor announced that she would be signing to Republic Records as her contract with Big Machine had ended and Republic offered her the opportunity to own all of her masters moving forward and negotiate on Spotify shares for all their artists. It all could have ended amicably there, but then Scott Borchetta sold all of Big Machine, along with Taylor’s masters from every album prior, to Scooter Braun. Braun manages some of the biggest stars out there, and had previously managed Kanye West. Taylor publicly spoke out about this purchase, stating that she was not made aware of this before the announcement, and how much of a betrayal it was considering she had cried to Scott before about Scooter’s mistreatment of her. Taylor has continued to be vocal about this, and so she sings, “I didn’t have it in myself to go with grace.” There is a lot to unpack in this song, but the main takeaway is that this betrayal hurts him just as much if not more than it hurts her, because his career was built on her achievements. He buried her while decorated in her success, becoming what he swore he wouldn’t, erasing the good times for greed, all just to be haunted with regret for pushing her out and stealing her lullabies. The pain is palpable, and it is notable that this is song is placed at track 5, the spot generally reserved for the most vulnerable on the album; it shows that there are different types of heartbreak that can shatter you just as much as those from romance. Best lyric: “If I’m dead to you, why are you at the wake? / Cursing my name, wishing I stayed.”

6. mirrorball On Lover’s “The Archer,” Taylor expresses her anxiety over people seeing through her act, her own grief at seeing through it herself, wondering if her lover does and whether he would stay with her regardless. “mirrorball” is about the act, one of the more obviously confessional songs on the album. She talks about how a mirror ball can illuminate all the different versions of a person, while also reflecting the light to fit in with the scene. Taylor’s critical self-awareness is heart wrenching, and it’s clear that the anxiety that surrounds the public perception of her is still prevalent. She describes herself as a member of a circus, still on the tightrope and the trapeze even after everyone else has packed up and left, doing anything she can to keep the public’s attention. It hurts to hear the desperation in her voice, but there’s hope in the song, too. She is speaking to someone (we can assume her long-term boyfriend, Joe Alwyn) and thanking them for not being like “the regulars, the masquerade revelers drunk as they watch my shattered edges glisten.” In 2016, the height of Taylor’s fame and subsequently her farthest fall from grace, all the people who pretended to be her friends and attended all her parties celebrated her (temporary) demise, continuing to dance over her broken pieces on the floor. But he stayed by her side as she put herself back together. And so now, when no one is around, she’ll shine just for him, standing even taller than she does for the circus. Best lyric: “I’m still a believer, but I don’t know why / I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try / I’m still on that trapeze, I’m still trying everything / to keep you looking at me.”

7. seven Her voice gentle and haunting, Taylor recalls the freedom and innocence of her childhood in Pennsylvania. She asks to be remembered for how she was, swinging over the creek, before she learned civility when she would scream anytime she wanted, then letting out a very pretty one. She sings to her old friend soothingly about taking them away from their haunted house that their father is always shouting in, where they feel the need to hide in a closet, perhaps literally, or figuratively, or both. They can move into Taylor’s house instead, or maybe just to India, just be sure to pack their dolls and a sweater and then they’ll hit the road. She can no longer recall her friend’s face, but the love she had for them still lives in her heart, and she wants it to live forever through story. Just in the way that folklore itself blends reality and fiction, but the truth within it passes on, so will the purity of that love and friendship. Best lyric: “Please picture me in the weeds / before I learned civility / I used to scream ferociously / any time I wanted.”

8. august (teenage love triangle, part 2: the other girl’s perspective) If you had to assign the feeling of longing to a song, it’d be “august.” It’s when you’re teetering at the edge with someone, unsure of where you stand with them, clinging to anything they give you and doing anything just to raise your chances, “living for the hope of it all.” August, the last month of summer, its heat causing it to slip away the fastest in a haze before reality hits. This track is a display of how sometimes losing something you never had causes an even deeper ache than losing something that was yours, and Jack Antonoff’s signature production intensifies the emotion even more. It’s the story of shattered hope, and the longing for the days where it could still fuel you. Best lyric: “To live for the hope of it all / cancel plans just in case you’d call.”

9. this is me trying “this is me trying” is like a drive through a tunnel at night, hearing your loudest anxieties and insecurities echo all around you, caving in. The track is another apt insight into Swift’s struggles with her self-image, with the pressure she puts on herself, so much so that she sometimes pushes herself too close to the edge, her fears luring her out of the tunnel and down, down, down into her own cage, stunting her own growth and keeping those who care out of reach. She tells us how she was “so ahead of the curve, the curve became a sphere.” Every action has an equal, opposite reaction, meaning that she was pushing herself so hard, she rolled back to where she started, and now has to reset. This could be referring to the period between the end of the 1989 era and the release of reputation (2017), or a different time in her life, or just a general sentiment. It doesn’t really matter, though, because no one’s growth is a neat, straight line; growth is jagged. Just like any of us, Taylor will always have to face new obstacles, new pitfalls, new reasons to get back up. She sounds most vulnerable as she cries, “at least I’m trying,” and you feel comforted knowing someone so beautiful and successful has to push herself to try, too, and yet that motivates you more to try yourself. Best lyric: “They told me all of my cages were mental / so I got wasted, like all my potential.”

10. illicit affairs A quiet, slow-build testament of the passion, the tragedy, the secrecy, the inimitability of a romance that shouldn’t exist, “illicit affairs” demonstrates how you can ruin yourself for someone from just one moment of possibility or truth, quite like the narrator of “august” does for the hope of it all. An illicit affair can be many different things: infidelity, forbidden love, a love that can never be fully realized, a relationship that is inherently wrong but electrifying all the same. It’s a reminder of what so many of us would do just to see new colors, to learn a new language, even if the one moment of enlightenment destroys us forever. We might lose the iridescent glow but we don’t forget it; we carry it with us, but must be careful to remember its blinding effect, to remember how fatal the fall is from the dwindling, mercurial high. Best lyric: “Tell your friends you’re out for a run / you’ll be flushed when you return.”

11. invisible string Clearly the most outright autobiographical track, “invisible string” is the plucky pick-me-up needed. The song is like sunshine, as Swift endearingly links all the little connections between her and her boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, since before they even met. She compares the green grass at the Nashville park she’d sit at in hopes of a meet-cute to the teal of his yogurt shop uniform shirt, and gives a nod to her smash hit “Bad Blood” from 1989 with the delightful line “bad was the blood of the song in the cab on your first trip to LA.” She reasons these coincidences as a fateful, invisible, golden string tying them together since the beginning, always destined to meet at the knot in the middle. She thanks time for healing her, (a callback to “Fifteen” from Fearless [2008]), fighting through hell to make it to heaven, transforming her from an axe grinder to a gift giver for her ex’s baby (the ex in question, Joe Jonas, and his wife Sophie Turner, happened to have their first daughter two days before this album’s release). As she has on her previous two albums, she uses the color gold to illustrate how prized their love is to one another. It’s sweet to know in all the gloom that the string has not been severed, and the trees are still golden somewhere. Best lyric: “Cold was the steel of my axe to grind for the boys who broke my heart / now I send their babies presents.”

12. mad woman Throughout her entire career, Taylor Swift has defiantly defended female rage, all the way back from throwing a chair off a platform on her Fearless Tour during the impassioned “Forever & Always,” to her patient, vengeful reliance on karma in reputation’s lead single, “Look What You Made Me Do,” to her most recent tackling of the matter on Lover’s last and final single, “The Man,” where she explores society’s acceptance and encouragement of angry men yet disdain for angry women. “The Man” is catchy and upbeat, and a fun thought experiment into how Swift’s career would be perceived if she was a man, something that is even more interesting to think about now as she releases an album in a genre heavily dominated and lauded by males. But on “mad woman,” she further explores the creation and perception of female rage, though masked under a smooth, haunting piano melody, her vocals subdued, taunting. In the album foreword, she describes the inspiration behind this song as “a misfit widow getting gleeful revenge on the town that cast her out.” This could be the continuation of Rebekah “Betty” Harkness’s story at her Holiday House in Watch Hill, RI, and how she further alienated herself from the rest of the neighborhood as they cast stones at her for the collapse of the last great American dynasty. (Or perhaps Daenerys Targaryen’s descent as the Mad Queen played a part in the song’s inspiration, as Swift has spoken of her love for Game of Thrones and her character specifically.) Taylor herself could also represent the widow, her music and masters as her love lost, and the men behind the crime as the “town that cast her out.” In the first verse she sings, “What do you sing on your drive home? / Do you see my face in the neighbor’s lawn? / Does she smile, or does she mouth ‘fuck you forever’?” It’s the first f-bomb of Taylor’s career (though a much more playful one will come two tracks later in “betty”) and it speaks volume. Taylor has received a lot of condemnation for expressing her anger at their transaction, for calling out their greed for what it is. Some view Swift’s stance on the ordeal as petty and trivial; they see the men as orchestrating a good business deal, and Swift as the girl throwing a tantrum. Ask any woman, and they can tell you about a time a man told them they were crazy for being justifiably angry; it only makes us angrier. “No one likes a mad woman,” Taylor states, “You made her like that.” Swift underscores that here, how they will poke and poke the bear but then blame it for attacking, as if they had never provoked it at all, and how dare it defend itself. Just as they blamed Rebekah for her husband’s heart giving out, they somehow manage to blame Swift for not being allowed to purchase the rights to her own work. And yes, she’s mad, but the song is measured and controlled; she’s used to her anger now, and knows just how to wield it. Best lyric: “Women like hunting witches, too / doing your dirtiest work for you / It’s obvious that wanting me dead has really brought you two together.”

13. epiphany This is another track Swift provided some background on, stating it was inspired by her “grandfather, Dean, landing at Guadalcanal in 1942” during WWII. The first verse paints this image, while the second verse depicts a different kind of war, happening right now, fought by doctors and nurses. She speaks of holding hands through plastic, and the escape folklore has granted you suddenly lifts. Watching someone’s daughter, or mother, or anyone suffer at the hands of the COVID-19 pandemic, just as watching a soldier bleed out, helpless, is too much to speak about. As she points out, they don’t teach you about that vicarious trauma in med school. We are living in a tireless world with barely any time time to rest our eyes, but too much going on while we’re awake to make sense of any of it. “epiphany” is a cinematic prayer, pleading for some quiet in order to find an answer in all the noise. We’re still waiting for that glimpse of relief. Best lyric: “Only twenty minutes to sleep / but you dream of some epiphany / Just one single glimpse of relief / to make some sense of what you’ve seen.”

14. betty (teenage love triangle, part 3: james’s perspective) It makes sense that a song reminiscent of Fearless would exemplify some of the best story-telling on folklore. The final puzzle piece of the teen love triangle, “betty” is a song sung by Swift from the perspective of the character of her own creation, James, attempting to win back his true love, Betty, who he slighted in some way. He proclaims that the worst thing he ever did is what he did to her, without explicitly stating it. Though the infamous deed is unclear, here’s the information we collect from this song: James saw Betty dancing with another boy at a school dance, one day when he was walking home another girl (from “august”) picked him up and he ended up spending his summer with her yet still loved Betty, and though he ended things with his fling and wanted to reconcile with Betty, he had returned to school to see she switched her homeroom (James assumes, after saying he won’t make assumptions. Classic men). So in order to make it up to her, he shows up at her party with the risk of being told to go fuck himself (the second and charming “fuck” on the album! Which is repeated!). Upon his arrival, there is a glorious key change (ala “Love Story”) and all the pieces fall into place for the listener; we realize Betty is the girl singing in “cardigan” as he lists the things he misses about her since the thrill expired, like the way she looks standing in her cardigan, and kissing in his car. He’s 17 and doesn’t know anything, but she knew everything when she was young, and she knew he’d come back. The way I see their story conclude is that she led him to the garden and trusted him, but as they grew older they grew apart, but the love she had for him never faded completely. Listening to this song is like being back in high school, whether you were the person who did someone wrong or the person so willing to forgive in the name of young love, or Inez, the school gossip, you’re right there with them. The other great thing about this song is that it is sung to a girl, and though it is set up so we understand it is most likely from a boy’s perspective, it doesn’t have to be. It’s really great that girls in the LGBTQ community can have a song in Taylor’s voice to fully connect to without changing the pronouns or names (even James, which is unisex and is one of the names of the daughters of Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, Taylor’s close friends, mentioned in this song). That is the beauty of folklore: the infinite ways a story can be told, perceived, retold from a different perspective, and told again. Maybe you’ll hear it from Inez. Best lyric: “But if I just showed up at your party / would you have me? Would you want me? / Would you tell me to go fuck myself, or lead me to the garden?”

15. peace One of the most beautifully solemn songs of her career, “peace” echoes the same fears explored in “Dancing With Our Hands Tied” from reputation; will the person she loves be able to weather the ever-present storm that comes with the life of a superstar, but also dwells within herself? Will holding him as the water rushes in be enough? Will giving him her wild, a child, her sunshine, her best, be a fair consolation? Presumably another confessional track and about Alwyn, Swift puts him up on a pedestal, praising his integrity and his dare to dream. She proclaims that she would die for him in secret, just as she told him she’d be on her tallest tip toes, spinning in her highest heels, shining just for him in “mirrorball.” She highlights some of the greatest gifts of love, such as comfortable silence and chosen family. She knows what they have is special, but she also knows the value of peace, the ultimate nirvana, and does not want to deprive him of that. It is so deeply relatable- to me, at least- to feel like you can give someone so much of yourself but know it still may never be enough, and to fear either losing them or robbing them of something better. But looking at what they have together, maybe peace is overrated. Or maybe, she’s looking for peace in the wrong places. The calm is in the eye of the storm, and sometimes, there’s nothing more freeing than throwing away the umbrella and soaking in the rain. Best lyric: “I never had the courage of my convictions / as long as danger is near / and it’s just around the corner, darling / ‘cause it lives in me / no, I could never give you peace.”

16. hoax The truest enigma of the album, the closer, “hoax” is a devastatingly dark ballad about the uncertainty, or perhaps incredulity, of someone’s love for you, a love that is your lifeline. The lyrics are ambiguous, which gives way to a plethora of interpretations. Perhaps she is speaking about a hypothetical situation that has yet to happen (and hopefully doesn’t) in which someone she loves and trusts betrays her. Maybe she is talking about a relationship, real (hopefully not) or fictional, in which despite the torment it brings her she holds onto it for dear life. I’m most inclined to believe that the song represents her difficulty in accepting that someone is willing to love her through such dark periods, that their love must actually be a hoax, but she chooses to believe in it anyway and uses it as the motivation to rebuild her kingdom, to rise from the ashes on her barren land. And even through the downs that come at some point in every relationship, she can still see the beauty in it all. Yes, their love is golden, but waves of blue will crash down around any partnership, because life does not exist without them. So even when things are as blue as can be, she’s at least grateful it’s with him. Best lyric: “Don’t want no other shade of blue but you / no other sadness in the world would do.”

Although we still have yet to hear the deluxe track, “the lakes,” as a fan of Taylor for almost 12 years, it feels so obvious that this is her strongest work yet. The storytelling I fell in love with on Fearless as a teenager (which, much like folklore, was highly inspired by imaginary situations and real emotions) is even sharper now as we have both grown into adults. The music on this album might not be everyone’s speed, and that’s okay. But it allowed Taylor to dip back into what made Fearless such a success: using pieces of her own truth and the whims of her imagination to develop a multi-faceted narrative that becomes universal. During her Tiny Desk concert, before performing “Death By A Thousand Cuts” from Lover, Swift explained the anxiety she felt around the possibility of stunted creativity when people would ask her what she would write about once she was happy. Taylor has released an abundance of beautiful, fun, complex love songs since the start of her relationship almost four years ago now. But “Death By A Thousand Cuts,” which is a fan favorite, helped her prove to herself that she can still write a killer breakup song while being in a happy, fulfilling relationship; the song was the last track written for Lover and was inspired by the film Something Great on Netflix. And so it makes perfect sense that Taylor used folklore to continue exploring this new avenue for songwriting. All of her discography and all of her life experiences have culminated to the folklore moment: as all the best artists do, she will never stop finding inspiration in hidden corners of this dark, mystical, wondrous universe, and falling in love with new ways to share those wonders. And that love will be passed on.

DISCLAIMER - REVIEWER’S BIAS: I love Taylor Swift more than any person in my life, yes including my parents, they are aware and have accepted this fact long ago ❤️

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runolllo-fanboygirl · 3 years

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I'm going to start by clarifying that these are messages I got in response to my post here /// LINK /// After this, I'm not replying to messages about this kinda thing in a long time. Talking about sexualization and such other topics is important but I'm not in a state to be made the center of it. Please, don't come to my inbox asking for discourse, go and create your own posts if you want to raise awareness or vent.

And now to answer to these new asks:

FIRST OF ALL: while I love the way Murata draws men, robotic stuff, monsters... I actually HATE the way he draws ladies! I prefer their proportions in the OPM anime and games. Murata is literally SO BAD at drawing women compared to the level of expertise he has drawing men, and it's all ‘cos he keeps drawing ladies "the h0rny way". We all know this, let's move on.

"He's drawing all the monster girls sexualized" Did the fact that Manako's genre reveal deconstructs the trope "the default is male" totally go over your head? That Psykos's reveal as a woman running the whole MA was a big deal for this same reason as well? There are a bunch of female monsters… you just assume they're all male unless you see big b00bs and then complain about that very fact. They literally made a whole point about this specifically!

"He changed Mizuki's shorts to p4nties to please fanboys" I liked the shorts better too (just because I find her whole character design a bit more balanced that way) so that change bothered me as well, but the "p4nties" are actually standard athletic wear for competition. Shorts are not. Technically, she’s drawn more accurately now.

"Sports Bras don't work that way he just wants to draw b00bs" neither do the shirts and bodysuits the guys are wearing. You can see all their muscles and manb00bs and cr0tch lines, just as much as with Fubuki and Tatsu's hero outfits and Mizuki's top.

"But when the boys are drawn that way, it's not to please the ladies, it's male power fantasy" THERE IS NO HETEROSEXUAL MALE POWER FANTASY BULLSHIT THAT CAN POSSIBLY EXPLAIN THE WAY MURATA DRAWS GAROU, FLASH, SONIC, STINGER AND SOME OF THE OTHER GUYS. The fact is that the way he draws eye candy of them appeals to other collectives other than the cis het men and he knows exactly what he's doing. Period.

"He constantly draws sexualized art of Mizuki to please the fanboys" Why exaggerate so much? This is simply not true. She's a woman in athlete wear, most of the time she's either standing up talking or fighting, no weird angles or anything. There is like 1 sexy cover of her, the back cover with all the girls in bikinis and then that infamous watermelon sequence. That's all the sexualization you are talking about.

"Mizuki only gets so much screen time because of how much p0rn of her there is" oh yeah Mizuki got a grand total of, like, *drum roll* 1 chapter and a half dedicated to her! Wow! Which is NOTHING taking into consideration how dense Garou's arc is and the fact that they will need at least 2 seasons of the anime to finish it.

But think about this: OPM desperately needed more female presence, in special with the prospect of finishing Garou's arc in the anime. Making anime is hard and COSTLY. Most of the people who is going to watch the anime haven't read the manga and they'll be like "what the heck there are no female characters in this anime for like 3 seasons?" and there is no team that's going to risk it working with such prospects. We know why.

Of all the expansion that Garou's arc got in the manga adaptation (and later in the anime), one of the most sensible and balanced decisions was to add more ladies. They put all those monster ladies for season 2, and then for season 3 we get Manako and Mizuki having some strong presence, Shadow and Kamaitachi there a bit in the back too. It benefits the pace and balance of both the manga and the future season 3 so immensely because Fubuki, Tatsumaki and Psykos take a LOOONG while to be relevant during Garou's Arc… in special with all the filler the manga put in between (but all that filler is of the S-Class boys getting development and a reality check which is kinda important too lol).

Point is: the screentime Mizuki got was VERY necessary to balance things in between of all the relentless Garou fights and the boys being boys. Sure Mizuki is beautiful and sexy and all, but really EVERYONE was waiting for a new female character that was relevant, likeable, fun… and on top of everything, it's so rare to see a strong 2m tall girl in fiction in general, not even just anime. Everyone got instantly excited about her because she's exactly what we needed AND MORE. And sure, people draw p0rn of her like they do with most other popular characters, what did you expect.

"The ladies are always more sexualized-" YES, in the OPM manga, the ladies are a little more sexualized than the men –but not by much AND not during plot stuff. By that I mean that most of the so called "sexualizing the girls" happens in the covers, back covers and promotional art very exclusively, and not during the story itself. HOWEVER, a lot of the sexy men bits do happen during the story, curiously.

In the anime though, there is almost zero ladies fanservice (which makes sense since there is almost no female presence in the first 2 seasons anyway). Yet it's full of naked dudes, sometimes for a good reason, but mostly just so we can look at them being sexy and silly.

I personally don't care if the man candy and ladies fanservice is not perfectly even in Murata's manga adaptation, because there is enough of both in his work, as well as other official OPM stuff like the anime and games to bring a very nice balance in the s3xy department.

"The way the women are dressed-" Most of the background ladies are wearing skirt uniforms and shit, but all the relevant ladies primarily dress in nothing you can call "sexualized" except for maybe Tatsumaki with her strong leg game. To recall:

Lilly wears the same as the men of the Blizzard Group; Twin Tail just dresses like a jester; Mizuki is the first to show so much skin, but she's still wearing real standard competition wear for athletes. All the other sportwomen (Hornet and Swim) and martial artists (Shadow, Suiko, Lin Lin) wear standard clothes for their respective professions too. Sure we've seen Shadow wearing some, uh, ninja bikini thing under her ACTUAL work clothes, but for actual fights she's fully dressed and surprisingly not stuffed in a tiny nylon bodysuit that rips like stocking, like all the ninja men in the series do lmao.

Fubuki and Tatsumaki are, like, the only ones wearing dresses and they can because they use psychic powers anyway. Fubuki doesn't even show ANY skin, ever! She just happens to have big b00bs! Kamaitachi is the other one wearing a "skirt" but it's similar to what Japanese martial artists would wear, too.

So, again… all this sexualization we are talking about is not even happening anywhere except in Murata's covers and some promotional art. ONE is famous for treating ladies very fairly, even if Murata tries very hard to exploit the sexy out of every single of the ladies ONE creates. All these ladies have their own agenda and personality that have nothing to do with being pretty or f*ckable. In fact, in-universe, no one ever mentions if the heroines are beautiful or sexy and no one ever talks about liking them for those reasons (except for Lilly and Erika who are gay for Fubuki and Tatsumaki respectively, amazingly enough no hetero characters mention it). I think the first time we've ever seen a relevant character talking about dating another relevant character is when Suiryu told Saitama and Suiko to date (but Suiryu is the resident h0rny fuckboy of the series, if someone was going to say something so stupid for all the wrong reasons, it was going to be him).

For being an adult series, a seinen that parodies shonen tropes and all, OPM is seriously very tame in the sexy ladies department. For this series, the sexy is just a luxurious accessory, just one more little thing. It's always pretty weird when people get so angry and disappointed about a new sexy girl cover or a couple of compromising panels, like they don't know what to expect.

"He only draws that way to please the h0rny fanboys" Murata IS a h0rny fanboy himself and draws shit that appeals to him as much as he feels he’s allowed to insert in the series. Please remember he's the insane fanboy that reached up to ONE to beg him to continue One Punch Man and offered to make a manga adaptation to promote OPM.

From the moment Murata started drawing OPM, the tone of the manga was set and never changed: lots of blood and guts, comical and non-comical nudity, irreverence, sexy angles, Genos ripping his shirts off, ninjas in body suits that rip like they are nylons… people in shirts, tanktops and dresses so tight you can see all their muscles, boobs and even belly buttons whether they are men or women or otherwise… h0rny chapter covers, stupidly h0rny monsters…

Just reading the manga to the point where Genos and Mosquito Girl first appear, you know what you are in for with OPM. I don't know what some fans are expecting to see in OPM next, but I'm going to take a wild guess here and say: you should expect more of the same.

At the end of the day, the manga is Murata's work with ONE, and if he likes drawing h0rny ladies more than boys, that's how things are! This is just 2 guys with their passion project. I don't expect of them the same as if there was a bigger team with a big budget behind the series, like it happens with many games and shows. In this last case, I would be a lot stricter about all this, because with more resources you're expected to do better things.

#one punch man #captain mizuki #tornado of terror #blizzard of hell #psykos #manako opm #fubuki #tatsumaki #opm #manako #lunamaria on the phone

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elenajohansenreads · 3 years

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Books I Read in 2021

#84 - The Glittering Court, by Richelle Mead

Mount TBR: 70/100

Rating: 1/5 stars

What did I like about this? It was digestible. Having just come off a heavy, plodding, disappointing fantasy read, the easy YA tell-don't-show narrative style went down smooth like a slushie on a hot day.

And that's the best thing I can say about the whole book--it read fast and easy.

What didn't I like?

1. The fact that this touts itself as fantasy when it's not in the least bit fantastical. I don't require my fantasy to have magic or creatures or zombies or anything, but if you're going to call something "fantasy" it should at least be about fictional cultures that the author has invented. This is just England colonizing the Americas with the names changed. The only thing that could be said to be "fantasy" is that the population they're displacing in the process isn't an indigenous one, it was established by previous outcasts from their own country--though that wasn't clear to me until the first time we met them and they were white, blond, and used woad as decoration. So they're not supposed to be Native American analogues, they're supposed to be displaced Picts?

2. Either way, it's still racist and pro-colonization, because even if the Icori aren't meant to represent an indigenous people, they're still clearly Other, and constantly labeled as "savages" in order to justify taking their land, which all of our protagonists are participating in, in some form. Does it matter what color this fictional group of people is, if the narrative is parroting real history and real racism?

3. The second half of the plot feels, at best, tenuously related to the first half. The change in fortune for our protagonists that happens at the midpoint struck me as so flimsy and unbelievable that it was hard to take the rest of the book seriously, and that made it more obvious to me who the real villain was, despite whatever weak red herrings were planted along the way. Seriously--the first half of the story is The Bridgertons but the second turns into Little House on the Prairie. It's too big a genre shift to make the transition seem natural.

4. There were times when I was approaching a reasonable level of sympathy for our heroine, despite her many flaws, but every time the story had a chance to explore those flaws and perhaps let the character do some work on them...well, she just kept being headstrong and selfish and whiny, right up until the LHotP section where after a single pep talk from the hero, she's completely changed, resolved to her new station in life with a determination that seemed half-delusional and certainly out of character. She didn't work for it, so it didn't seem real.

5. I did not know, having picked up this book in isolation, that the rest of the "series" is actually the same time period from the perspective of one of the other girls, specifically the two best friends of the heroine. Now that I do know that, the giant blank spaces in this story where Mira and Tamsin constantly fall out of it without explanation--or with the pointedly obvious lampshade "it's not my business so I'm not going to ask"--make sense structurally. However, that doesn't mean I don't think it's a terrible flaw, because these holes are constant and irritating. For a while in the middle of the book, it felt like every time I turned two pages, the heroine was asking out loud, "Where's Mira?" And pretty quickly I knew that question wouldn't be answered in this book, so why keep asking?

6. I never found Cedric compelling enough a hero to justify the constant sacrifices that Adelaide made for him. I don't think he's a terrible character, and I enjoyed some of their banter and their occasional fights, but I'm also not about to add him to my book-boyfriend list, so it was hard to imagine myself, or anyone for that matter, doing as much for him as Adelaide did.

7. Religion. Woooo boy. I guess this part is the "fantasy" I was lamenting the lack of earlier, because if the accepted and heretic forms of this fictional religion are supposed to correspond to real-world counterparts, I didn't pick up on it with enough certainty to tell. But my problem is that it's suddenly a Very Big Deal that one character is a heretic, when religion had played such a small part in the story leading up to that revelation that I was mostly operating on the assumption that the main religion was socially performative, and that no one in the story was especially devout. Adelaide certainly doesn't seem to be. But since this heresy becomes central to the conflict later on, I wish it had been better established in the beginning, because (again) the second half of the book seems wildly different than the first, and this was another aspect that made it hard to take seriously.

8. Heteronormative AF. There's one token queer person who has a minor role, showing up just long enough for Adelaide to realize other women/cultures don't abide by her society's rigid norms and to feel briefly uncomfortable about it. But there's no follow-up, no depth, no opportunity for Adelaide to grow beyond what she's been taught. To some extent, I'm okay with that--not every story has room for fighting LGBT+ battles, and even more simply put, stories are allowed to be about other things. But parading just that one wlw character out for a moment, and making her a foreigner to reinforce her otherness, strikes me as a really poor choice if the story didn't actually want to fight that battle. Why bring it up at all? Especially as this is supposed to be fantasy, why couldn't the Glittering Court be an institution that provides marriage candidates to both men and women? If the candidate pool was both male and female, and so was the clientele, then many forms of queerness would be covered by it without having to dig into specifics about each character. (It doesn't directly address ace/aro people, but presumably they'd be less interested in a marriage mart anyway, on either side, and self-select out of it.) I mean, I know why, because that would mean that in the New World there would have to be women in positions of power who needed husbands (or wives, yes, but this wrinkle is about men.) And there's no shortage of men in the colonies, so that doesn't track logically the same way the actual setup does. But again, if this is supposed to be fantasy....

#booklr #book review #the glittering court #richelle mead #book photography #my photos #my reading challenges #mount tbr 2021

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tlbodine · 3 years

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Literary vs Genre Fiction

The divide between literary and genre fiction is one of those topics that gets endlessly debated in writer circles. You’ll see it making the rounds on social media every time a book gets some buzz for busting out of its category. You’ll hear it in MFA programs across the country. But what even is literary fiction? How is it actually different from genre fiction? Is one better than the other? Why does anybody care?

A lot of smart people before me have thrown their hat in this particular ring, but I’m going to try tackling this one anyway.

First Off: What Do We Mean When We Say “Literary Fiction”?

Defining the thing is almost the hardest part of this whole discussion, and that may be part of the reason why people argue so endlessly about the literary vs genre divide -- if you don’t have a clear definition of the categories, that divide can be drawn up just about anywhere.

So before we dig into characteristics of literary fiction, let’s look at some clear examples. The Booker Prize is a literary award specifically given to works of literary fiction, so it stands to reason that winners of that award would be the best examples of the category, right? Here are some recent Booker Prize winners (as pulled from Powell’s bookstore):

Margaret Atwood - The Testaments The sequel to A Handmaid's Tale, told as testaments from three female narrators in Gilead, a dystopian setting where women have been stripped of their rights.

Bernardine Evaristo - Girl, Woman, Other Twelve central characters, mostly black British women, lead intersecting lives with struggles of identity, race, sexuality, class, etc.

Anna Burns - Milkman A girl identified as "middle sister" catches the unwanted attention of "the milkman," a local paramilitary, and has to deal with the threat of violence and spread of rumors.

George Saunders - Lincoln in the Bardo A father-and-son story about Abraham Lincoln and the 11-year-old son who died of illness in the midst of the civil war, leading to them both struggling in a type of purgatory.

Paul Beatty - The Sellout A satire about an isolated young man who ends up at a Supreme Court race trial after trying to reinstate slavery and segregate the local high school in an attempt to put his town back on the map.

One thing becomes immediately clear about literary fiction when skimming through the titles and summaries of these award-winning books: These novels are well-nigh impossible to summarize in a way that actually sounds enticing.

So okay. What are some genre fiction books, for comparison? There are genre fiction awards, like for example the Hugo award for Sci-Fi/Fantasy:

Mary Robinette Kowal - The Calculating Stars A cataclysmic meteor collision in 1952 causes an accelerated effort to colonize space, leading to a woman fighting to join the astronaut team in this alternate-history book.

N. K. Jemisin - The Stone Sky The third in a trilogy of post-apocalyptic novels about two women with the power to avert destruction of mankind.

Cixin Liu - The Three-Body Problem Against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project makes contact with aliens whose civilization is on the brink of destruction, leading them to plan a takeover of earth.

There’s also the Edgar Award, which is given to mystery fiction (it’s named after Edgar Allan Poe):

James A McLaughlin - Bearskin A man on the run takes a job as a park ranger, but runs the risk of being found by the men he's hiding from when he tries to expose some poachers.

Walter Mosley - Down the River Unto the Sea After spending a decade in prison for a crime he was framed for, former-detective King works as a private investigator whose investigation of his own frame-up leads him to cross paths of a journalist with a similar story.

Sujata Massey - Widows of Malabar Hill In 1920s India, Bombay's only female lawyer investigates a suspicious will on behalf of three Muslim widows, a case that takes a murderous turn.

These aren’t the best summaries in the world, but there does seem to be a stronger sense of both plot and character in the story concepts. At least, when someone asks, “What’s that book you’re reading about?” the genre fiction ones will have a somewhat easier time explaining it.

So What REALLY Separates Literary From Genre Fiction?

There are a lot of battle lines drawn between genre and literary fiction. I’ve heard it argued that literary is about character while genre is about plot; that literary is about the quality of the prose while genre is about the story; that literary is about experimenting while genre is about adhering to formulas. That literary is about expanding horizons while genre is about escapism and comfort. That literary is about realism and genre fiction is about fabulism.

I think there’s a nugget of truth in all of these, but I’m not really happy with any of them.

So I’m going to toss out my own hypothesis: I think the difference between literary and genre fiction is the way tropes are employed.

“Okay, great, but what are tropes?”

I’m so glad you asked. Fiction tropes are a type of shorthand. They are things that we the audience have seen before, so we know immediately what they mean. Tropes exist in characters, plot points, settings, concepts -- you name it. Here’s a sampling of tropes you might be familiar with:

The tough lady-cop whose dad was a police officer

Thanks to a mix-up, two people with hidden romantic feelings book the last available room at a hotel but there’s only one bed

A man goes on a quest for vengeance but destroys himself in the process

The wise old man who teaches the young hero valuable lessons but then dies before the pivotal battle

And so on, and so forth. Every genre has its own tropes -- a formula, if you will. In that sense, genre fiction is formulaic, but that doesn’t make it easier to write; actually, a big part of the challenge is in giving fresh twists to familiar tropes. Readers of genre stories demand certain tropes; the author has to deliver on those demands in a fresh way.

By comparison, I would argue that literary fiction does not rely upon tropes. There certainly are tropes and conventions that emerge in literary fiction -- a middle-aged academic struggling through divorce, for example -- but these tropes are more often than not met with irritation, not delight. Readers of literary fiction are looking for fresh insights and innovations, not familiarity.

Tropes are powerful tools. They are the mythic seed of storytelling. They are the archetypes that pass down through generations. They are a sacred backbone of mythology and folklore. Genre fiction, at the end of the day, carries the torch for storytelling in a long and (ha, ha) storied tradition from our prehistoric days huddled around a campfire.

Literary fiction, on the other hand, eschews tropes -- with their agreed-upon meanings -- in favor of assigning fresh meanings to things. Literary fiction is chock full of metaphors, but it’s the author, not convention, that determines what those metaphors mean and how they’re employed. Literary fiction reinvents the wheel. When it succeeds, it hits on depth and emotional resonance that can be life-changing for the reader. When it fails, it comes off like so much navel-gazing nonsense. So it goes.

Fiction Wars and Gatekeeping

The problem with the literary vs genre fiction divide is that it never stops with “This is how these categories are defined.” The problem is that people will insist on ascribing moral significance and hierarchy to them.

Literary fiction is viewed as being smarter, deeper, more meaningful or more valuable than genre fiction. If a genre fiction story manages to break out and gain wider appeal, suddenly people will start ascribing to it literary attributes (whether or not the book and many others in the genre had them all along). And that is all a bunch of nonsense.

It’s the exact same thing that happens in horror fiction -- when a horror story goes mainstream, suddenly it becomes a “psychological thriller” or a “dark drama” or anything other than horror, because “horror” is an inferior genre.

The fact of the matter is that literary fiction gets elevated over genre fiction for systemic reasons:

Most MFA programs focus on writing literary fiction, which means that a lot of lit-fic authors come out of those programs, which means that literary fiction is often the domain of upper-middle-class, frequently white, people who can afford to graduate from those programs

A focus on dense prose and “difficult” writing means lit-fic books must be analyzed and interpreted; it’s hard to read, making it exclusionist to people who lack formal education

Lit-fic dominates awards, gets pushed heavily onto book clubs, is talked about more often on daytime TV and so forth (because it is perceived as being better/more important, thus creating the ongoing cycle)

Basically, lit-fic gets held up as an example of Fine Culture. And any time something is designated as Fine Culture and High Art, it is subject to a completely arbitrary classist distinction meant primarily to keep out an undesirable element (women, BIPOC, poor people, you name it).

That’s not a problem endemic to lit-fic itself. It’s really a problem of the culture surrounding it, and attempts to hold it to a higher esteem than genre work.

Cross-Pollination Is Inevitable and Desirable

How do tropes get made?

Someone comes up with a new metaphor, concept, character, or idea that resonates so deeply that others who follow borrow that same thing and its meaning, and it gets repeated enough times that it becomes a stock trope.

In other words, every single piece of genre fiction exists because someone writing in some other established tradition decided to experiment and go off on a tangent to create something really fresh and new -- and knocked it so far out of the park that people were compelled to follow.

People like to pretend that the overlap and blurred lines between genre and literary fiction are somehow a new trend, but the fact is that this has been the trajectory of fiction-writing for the whole history of storytelling.

Literary agents have a term for this: Upmarket fiction. Books that “transcend” genre definitions to appeal to readers on either side of the aisle. And those are highly sought-after books, because they have the potential of bringing in double the readers.

So, snobby gatekeeping aside, is there any real reason to argue about the definition of literary vs genre fiction?

I’d say...no. Not even a little bit. I’ve got a mix of both on my shelves. I incorporate a mix of both in my writing. And I don’t see that changing any time soon.

A Final Note

I mentioned above that lit-fic tends to be written by people in MFA programs, and I wanted to touch on that again as an MFA drop-out and someone who was once warned by a teacher not to bring “any more of that genre nonsense” into the classroom.

I can understand, from a teaching perspective, why writer’s workshops would want to focus on lit-fic. From the perspective of learning how to write, forcing writers to derive stories from their experiences, to dig deep into themselves and ascribe unique meaning to things, to develop their own metaphors and hone their craft at the sentence level -- all of that makes a lot of sense. Banning genre tropes is a way to force writers to hone their craft without leaning on the work of generations of storytellers before them, and as a teaching tool I think that’s actually really valuable.

But I think it’s pretty important that we keep that in context. The lit-fic focus in writing classes should be a teaching tool first and foremost. It should not be the end-all and be-all of writing classes.

This post topic was voted on by my Patreon subscribers. If you would like to vote for future posts and get early access to posts before they go live on tumblr, you can become a patron here: https://www.patreon.com/tlbodine

#writing #literary fiction #genre fiction #on writing #long post

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amandaklwrites · 3 years

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TV Series Review: Miss Scarlet and the Duke (2019)

Genre: Historical Fiction/Murder Mystery/British Period Drama

Rating: 10/10

TV Show Review:

I. LOVE. THIS SHOW.

Pretty much this review will be me talking about everything I love this series, just a warning. I hope you love it too, so you can enjoy my blabbering and gushing!

I will do this review a bit differently, since it’s still relatively new, especially here in the US. I’ll talk about my general thoughts, and then I’ll do a “keep reading” when it goes down into spoilers for each episode.

So, here, for the spoiler-free part of my review:

Let me start out by saying that these characters make the whole damn show. Yes, the mysteries are great and all, but it’s the characters in this series, for me, that drives the whole thing. Eliza Scarlet is a masterful main character, and I love everything about her—from her determination, her willingness to fight the crowd to be what she wants, how she’s willing to admit some issues, that she still relies so heavily on her father after he passed away. Her humor is so incredible, and I think she’s just someone I wish I could be. Her feistiness is so wonderful. And then our Inspector Detective William “the Duke” Wellington is… one of my favorite leading men, fictional of course. I like that he’s overprotective of her (sometimes, to funny extents), that he does his job well and follows a lot of the right paths, that he doesn’t seem surprised by much of anything, and that he’s willing to fight even when he’s falling apart at the seams. And their relationship! They are so clearly in love with each other (probably have since that “chaste kiss” when they were teens…), they bicker like a married couple, and though they annoy the living hell out of each other, they would die for one another. I like that their relationship isn’t perfect and they take note of that in the show, but it feels real. It’s one of the most real relationships I have ever seen.

Moses and Rupert are such important characters and I LOVE their relationship with Eliza, their friendships that seem so different, but they just fit. I can’t go much into detail about either of them, or it will spoil entire plotlines of mysteries, but I will say that I love what the story does with their characters, how it gives them breaths of their own, that they become some of the most dynamic characters in the show with so much to them and that take a life of their own. That they feel real and important and interesting, and I love the representation. That’s all I’ll say about them in the spoiler-free review.

Now, the mysteries, were incredible. They kept me guessing through every episode, and I would have some feelings about things/people, but I wasn’t sure how it would get there. At times, I thought of the truth, but figured that they were going to trick me with it (my grandpa always told me that I have a brain for a detective, if I had some training, so that’s fun!). But still, they were so innovative and different from other mysteries that I had experienced. And I liked that each episode felt a bit different—we had a taste of ghost story feeling, even an intense thriller. They were really, really good mysteries, to me at least. And I do love me some mysteries.

Okay, so the costumes, sets and music. MY GOD. It was all SO BEAUTIFUL! Eliza’s clothes were magnificent and they had POCKETS!!! William was way too sexy in those clothes (can we bring those back??? We can leave out the discrimination that came with the time period, but let’s bring back the clothes at least!). Everyone had gorgeous clothes. And the sets were beautiful—those dirty, Victorian, coal covered streets… I loved it! (My mom says she’s not sure why I’m so in love with the dark atmosphere of the Victorian era, but I am!). The MUSIC. Can they just upload a damn soundtrack already? I need to listen to this music all the time! It sounds different and cool and I’m just so in love with it.

THE HUMOR! My god, I had never seen a murder mystery show set in another time that does humor so well. I love how they travel between scenes to make it funnier, the lines they say to one another. It makes me feel like these actors absolutely had a blast filming this show. They were so on point, and some of the funny scenes made me laugh harder than any comedy movie I’ve seen.

As you can see, I’m obsessed with this show altogether. I love it, and I want to watch it over and over. The vibe, the love stories, the characters, every. single. thing. is my jam. I know they’re planning a second season and I cannot wait for it. Ugh. My god. It’s wonderful.

So here ends my spoiler-free review. After this, I’m going to talk spoilers. So if you have seen the show and/or want to read the spoiler-y thoughts, please click on the “keep reading.” If not, see you around after your watch the show! It’s well worth it!

Let me start out by explaining more of my thoughts on the relationship between William and Eliza, because I worried that some of what I had said would give away possibly too much. So here’s that part:

The (hilarious) way that William mutters “oh jesus” whenever he finds Eliza waiting in his office, or the fact that Eliza calls herself his wife (or in one instance, something worse, but to save herself) to get what she wants also feels like a sly to personally agitate him. How that he would toss her into jail/into court when she went against things he said she shouldn’t do (though he released her/got her out at some point) never got old and even funnier to me each time. I told my mom, she was like a toddler—he couldn’t keep her in sight, so he had to lock her out. But I liked that she still argued with him despite it. Their back and forth was perfect.

I will say here, that I have seen people’s comments online how they wish that William was more on board with Eliza’s detective dreams and support her 100% much earlier on. And I get that, that he can seem like an ass at times. But honestly, I think he feels more realistic that he’s a little harder about it in the beginning. Trust me, I love this show and the way they play with characters and storylines, and that they are so forward (I mean, Eliza is so forward-thinking and modern, it’s amazing), but to me, if they made EVERYONE, i.e. William especially, it wouldn’t ground me into the time very well. I like that it was more gradual for him, to fully support her. And actually, I think for a man in the Victorian Era, with his position, he supported her as much as he could. Though he fought her on it at times, he eventually gave up trying to stop her. And I do think, in some respect, he was trying to protect her, because he does care for her. He was a man of his time, in his position, and he is changing. Can we at least give him that? Because, in all throughout history, it took a while for things to change. And it was men like William that started to understand, that started to recognize that, that helped make it happen. Plus, Eliza didn’t let him pull shit all the time, and she did fight him on it.

Now, I’m going to comment on each individual episode with my thoughts. I’ve never done this before so yay! Here it goes!

EPISODE ONE: Inheritance

I knew the weird uncle wasn’t the girl’s uncle. I didn’t expect that it was her husband (I should’ve!! We knew he was a cheat and a conartist!!), but I knew it wasn’t her rich uncle. I knew from the moment he came on screen—I remember thinking, this guy looks too young around his eyes. His beard and mustache look fake. So, I was right to an extent.

I can’t be the only one who was horrified to discover what the police did to women who worked as prostitutes or in dance halls—they could be arrested and searched for venereal disease? Seriously??? For men who were so obsessed with wanting their wives to “stay safe” and “be protected,” they sure were fine with flipping the case when it came to women that they would also gladly pay to sleep with? Why don’t they check the male clients who are PAYING for this industry. It was appalling and horrendous, and it made my skin literally crawl as they tried tying Eliza down to the chair.

On the note of that scene, Eliza calling herself William’s favorite whore to save herself is literally one of the funniest (though, darkly) things—especially in the next scene, when you see the two of them sitting in his office in silence and William is mortified, annoyed, and I think amused at the same time.

I loved how Eliza tricked that bastard husband—she set him up, AND she gave him laudanum to make him pass out? This woman knows what’s up!

Instantly from this first episode, I knew I loved this show and these characters. Eliza shows her charm and wit and humor and smarts. She’s skilled and I love her personality so much. Though I can see how she could be aggravating to others. William absolutely adores her. Rupert annoyed me a bit at the beginning, but by the end—when he asked Eliza to not marry him, I knew I would like him. And Moses! A Jamaican man brings in the race question of this dark, old world, but I love that he likes Eliza and finds her interesting. He’s terrifying, but I think he’s a good, decent man, he’s only trapped in this world because no one will let him be anything else. But he’s such a rich, interesting character.

EPISODE TWO: The Woman in Red

This episode brings in the reality of homosexuality in this world. That it has always been there (damn those bastards who think otherwise), but it has been hidden away. That men and women have to fear for their lives, and also marry people they do not want because they want to not be noticed. I loved finding out Rupert was gay—my mom called that one!—and the friendship he develops with Eliza. That he trusts her to tell a secret that could literally have him killed and ruined. And that Eliza doesn’t even blink, that she’s willing to keep his secret to the grave, and I cried when she basically told him that. It’s quite beautiful that Eliza even seemed to be grateful that he trusted her enough to give her that secret.

Which was used in interesting juxtaposition to the gay man, accused of murdering his lover, and his wife. I understand the woman’s hurt, that she loved this man and it turned out he didn’t love her in the same way. But that didn’t mean her willingness to let him die for a crime he didn’t commit was at all good or called for. With Eliza talking her down, to prove that the woman’s husband was innocent, I think proved that though she was hurt beyond reason, she did love that man who was her husband and didn’t want to see her die. It’s really a hard situation, especially during that time, when people were constantly shoved down their throats that homosexuality was bad. Not that I’m giving her a “it’s okay,” but I can understand the pain and confusion she went through. Especially because she pulled through.

Through this whole episode, we thought it was the wife that had murdered the lover (the other man). I was surprised to find out that he had killed himself, cut his own throat (which I had heard wasn’t possible to do—but my grandpa, who had worked as a detective, told me that is a myth people talk about, that it’s really easy to cut your own throat). That was a shock, and it made me so sad. That he was dying because he was unhappy, because he hated what he was, because of damn society telling him so. I actually started crying, because as someone who is bisexual, I would be condemned in this time during for openly being with men and women, though I couldn’t even compare to people who are gay or lesbian, because the situation is not the same. But I could connect, I could understand. And I hated knowing the pain all those people were in, that a man had killed himself because of what he was, and that another man had to live with that. It truly breaks your heart.

William’s response to finding out the dead man was gay was interesting. I thought his comment “in my line of work, nothing surprises you” funny, but also telling. He didn’t act disgusted, he didn’t mistreat the husband when they questioned him afterward. The show didn’t directly say his thoughts on homosexuality, but I got the vibe that he was “whatever” about it. Like he knew it was there, and he wasn’t condemning it publicly. That gives him credit, in my book.

Another great episode that got deep and beautiful.

EPISODE THREE: Deeds Not Words

Is this show just obsessed with getting right down to modern issues that were also faced in this time, but not as strongly discussed? Because I’m all for it! This episode was all about the suffrage movement. But I liked the take they did on it.

Yes, they spoke out about the treatment of women. That men, white men, controlled this whole world. But I also thought it was interesting that they made this main suffragette not the greatest person. It made everything complicated. Like, everything she said to Eliza made sense, and I found myself cheering with her. But she shot a man in cold blood, she was willing to bomb a whole building of men—even though it seems justified because of what their club represents.

I think this episode was discussing the balance. That there can be change, but when you attack the people who you are trying to change, it may not work in your favor. At least, that was the vibe I got. Not to stoop to their levels, to become just as horrible as them. Her ideas and words were great, but her actions were a bit… skeptical.

Eliza and William’s response were interesting as well. Eliza felt a passion for the cause, William thought it a bit extreme. But, to me, by the end of the episode, they had a common understanding, they had reached a comfortable middle. I think, this show was showing that was how change came. People seeing eye to eye, and then it spreading from there. Of course, William has faults, but I think he’s truly trying. Especially with each episode. And the more Eliza and he grow.

EPISODE FOUR: Memento Mori

We got our ghost episode! I wasn’t even expecting it, it was incredible! A ghostly image of a dead wife that had killed herself reappearing in photos? How wild and cool is that idea!

I didn’t know that the Victorians had a thing where they took photos of their dead loved ones, looking like they were alive (y’all, the Victorians were obsessed with death…), but it’s an interesting concept. Maybe even sweet. I get what they were trying to do, even if it did seem morbid. How I feel about it is, if it brings you peace, then go for it (as long as it’s nothing disturbing or harming anyone).

The twist was one I had a hint of but hadn’t expected the whole thing. I knew the daughter had something to do with it (how disturbed is this poor girl??), but I hadn’t expected that the mother had planned this before she killed herself because she knew the woman and her husband were already having an affair. It was interesting and a creepy twist, but I was all for it.

Still, I loved how we had moments of eeriness and the haunting feeling in the house when Eliza stayed over. I felt scared and freaked, and most people that know me know that I do not like horror. But this was the perfect eeriness, which I do love.

That scene from this episode where William screams at the poor telegram young man to give them the message or he’ll break everyone bone in his body and then being like “are you crying?” was the funniest thing I had ever seen. I laughed so hard that I couldn’t breathe. I mean, it’s terrible, but the way it was done was hilarious and amazing.

EPISODE FIVE: Cell 99

This episode was… dark. I liked that it was set in an abandoned prison, and my god, was it creepy as hell. I loved all the shots of William walking through gave me the chills.

This one felt like a thriller to me. How it was filmed, set up, how everything went down. Except for the hilarious scene when they are both so annoyed with each other (Eliza and William, that is) that they both scream in frustration is brilliant. But otherwise, it took a dark tone that made me feel like something was watching my back. Especially as that big, scary guy came walking down the stairs when William and Eliza were trapped, ready to kill them both. I was nearly screaming at the tv in utter horror.

My mom had called it—and I had a feeling—that Eliza’s father had been murdered, not just drinking himself to death and found in the gutter. And there’s a gang now? How interesting!

The masked man was strange, as well as the forger locked away. But he was shot and killed, and it confused me.

I have a strange confession to make: that whole time with William in his dress shirt (without the coat), with his arm covered in blood, was weirdly…. Hot? Please don’t ask me explain. I have weird things to me. But I think it was also hot that though he was hurt and bleeding, he was gearing up to fight that big, scary man to protect himself and Eliza. I like that kind of shit, so much.

This episode was twisted, and it left me with more questions than anything.

EPISODE SIX: The Case of Henry Scarlet

My mom knew William’s boss was in with the gang! I liked that they actually explored the reality of corruptness in the police force (my grandpa had personal experiences himself, and that was why he left), and they laid it all bare. Despite the things that we are learning in this present day, it’s always been there. Which is horrifying and disturbing. That these police who are supposed to protect us are willing to delve into the corrupt world to bring themselves more power and money. Because that’s what it boils down to, doesn’t it? Powerful men wanting more and more.

I liked that William was okay with the truth unfolding, and not fighting it, trying to prove innocence for his boss. To me, it made me feel like that he knew something was up with that man (just beyond not liking him). For his character, it made me think that he was one of those people that was actually good and good at his job, trying to do the right thing. Even if he got distracted and didn’t give Eliza credit where it was due, and fought some things, he was trying to do what he thought was right. He didn’t kill anyone, he didn’t go after anyone specifically. Though him and Moses had some standoffs because he wasn’t sure about the other man, he gave him some thanks and shook his hand. Which is huge for that time period.

I did suspect William’s buddy. I always felt like something was happening with him, and that he would be the perfect bad guy because he knew what was going on at all times. And it was proven right! Though it wasn’t any less terrible, William having to realize that his close friend at Scotland Yard as the bad, bad guy who killed their boss when things were turning ugly.

But Moses to the rescue! I loved that he swooped in, teaming up with Eliza, and taking the guy out! I love Moses so much, he’s one of my other favorites.

And their ending, with a promise of dinner, of love on the horizon was exactly what I needed.

Lasting thoughts:

Besides all the amazing storylines and characters they brought in, besides Eliza and William’s chemistry and relationship, to me, this felt like a story about a daughter and her father. We see flashbacks of Eliza as a child with her father, how he taught her his detective work, when that wasn’t something men did typically in that time, and how she would still talk to him after he had died. That though she had chosen this profession for herself, it was also some way to connect to her father. Something they had shared when she was motherless and only had him, and he gave her these skills and talents, helped her hone in on them. And once he had passed, she fought like hell to keep it, but make it her own. I liked that their relationship wasn’t perfect, but they loved the hell out of each other. She was a grown woman, who believed in herself, but she still turned to him—a ghost, a memory, or whatnot—when she felt at the bottom.

This series is incredible, perfect and just all around so masterful in so many different ways. I knew from the moment I heard about it that I would love it. And it turns out I was right, but even more than I had expected.

Now, I think it’s time for a rewatch.

#miss scarlet and the duke #eliza scarlet #william wellington #i love this damn show #tv series review

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sleepingfancies · 5 years

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We Need to Talk About SJM

I was recently anonymously asked what exactly my issue with Sarah Jane Maas is, and ended up writing what was essentially a thesis paper about it. Unfortunately, Tumblr pulled a Shitty Website move and deleted everything I wrote under the ‘read more’ tab, so I’m compiling my reasons here on a masterpost, for your reading leisure.

EDIT: Read more tab continues to not work for me, so I apologize to all of you who have to suffer through this. I’ll tag is as a long post accordingly.

Let’s get started

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Reason 1: She preaches messages that no young girl needs to (or should) hear.

Granted, I know the a lot of the YA genre are adults who are no strangers to smut and aren’t phased by toxic behavior in characters. But on the same token, a lot of the YA genre is fueled by young girls age 12-20. Now I’m not going to sit here and pretend like girls in that age range aren’t reading/writing smutty fanfiction or dating. I know they do, I did, most of my friends did. But at that age, young girls are still trying to figure out who they are and who they want to be, including in terms of relationships. That’s where my problem with Maas comes in.

Maas writes, almost exclusively, toxic relationships - at best. Straight up abusive at worst. At one point in ACOTAR, I had to put the book down because I was so disgusted by what happened. Rhysand assaulted Feyre. I’m not kidding. He kissed and groped her against her will, telepathically asked whether she was wet about it, and wondered aloud what she looked like naked. The entire goal of doing this was to piss Feyre’s then-boyfriend off, and for Rhysand to assert his dominance as a Fae lord or whatever the fuck (y’know, like rapists do). Feyre was left shaking, nauseated, and scared for her life. But the worst part? It was written like this was something sexy and desirable. Literal penetration was all that stopped this from being a horrifying rape scene, and I couldn’t believe Maas wrote about it like some hot erotica. It wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t cute. It was disgusting, violating, and I was furious when I read it (especially given Feyre actually ends up with Rhysand eventually. What the fuck).

In Throne of Glass - and subsequent sequels - there are couples (namely Rowan and Aelin) who quite literally spit on each other, punch each other, and bite each other. No, not “love nip” bite, I mean “I’m trying to tear your skin off” bite. But we’re meant to believe they’re endgame, meant to be, and a totally healthy relationship. Let’s not even get into emotional abuse and manipulation, because holy fuck does every single character in these books act like a goddamn villain if we were to go over that in detail. All you need to know is that “if you don’t do xyz then I’ll leave and never come back” “what made you think I cared about you? You’re nothing to me. Just kidding, I love you” and similar sentiments are rampant in these series.

While we’re here, what is up with this “mates” nonsense? Every character pairing we see by the end of the ToG series has a “mate,” and swears off everyone they’ve had before, claiming them to be “false mates.” This whole “mates” business sounds a lot like somebody desperately trying to reassure their insanely jealous partner that they don’t still have feelings for their ex. That’s not healthy! That’s not okay! Your exes helped you narrow down your search. They helped you understand yourself more and what you want (or don’t want). And y’know what? It’s okay to have happy memories with an ex. It’s okay to not hate your ex. Telling young girls that all that matters is their future husband (which erases LGBT+ girls, as well as straight women who don’t want to get married) is harmful as hell, and contributes to the idea that a girl is only “complete” when she finds her “soulmate.”

Girls 12-20 really do not need to be given the message that it’s normal - nay, romantic - for their partners to hit them, humiliate them, or assault them. You may be saying, “Clara, come on, girls know fiction isn’t reality and no girl is actually going to stand for that kind of thing in real life.” But I can’t tell you how horribly my own view of relationships was corrupted for several years after all the books I read as a tween where the protagonist had to defend her flirty boyfriend from the advances of other girls. I didn’t trust boys not to cheat on me. I didn’t trust my girl friends not to try and steal a boyfriend. I thought girls who dressed up and wore makeup and dated a lot were sluts. It took me years of conscious effort to unlearn those ideas. Fiction can and does influence the reader. So again I say: teaching girls that it’s “hot and sexy” when men literally abuse you is not a message a 12-20 year old should be hearing. Ever.

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Reason 2: What exactly does Maas want her readers to be?

Y’know, Maas thinks Caelena/Aelin is a role model for young girls. But here’s a brief list of things Celery/Alien has done throughout the Throne of Glass series:

1. Tried to smash a flower pot over a girl’s head for showing interest in courting Prince Dorian. Despite said girl literally being present at the castle for that purpose and Caelena was not.

2. Very nearly murdered Dorian for absolutely fuckall reason, and then she got mad at Chaol for trying to stop her (keep in mind: Chaol and Dorian are supposed to be best friends. So like... yeah, he’s gonna come to Dorian’s defense).

3. Straight up said, “if I get bored being queen I’ll just go and conquer more lands for my kingdom.” Imperialist there much, Aelin?

This is Maas’ role model material? Half the shit she does from Heir of Fire onward could be described as “war crime” and the other half could be described as “selfish.” Maas seems to think that a shit ton of half-baked “witty” lines and a few “badass” fight scenes completely makes up for having an amoral character as the protagonist you want to flaunt around as an icon for young girls.

It would be one thing if Maas said, “I don’t want anyone to be like Celery/Alien. She’s not a good person and I want my readers to be able to identify how and why she isn’t a good person. The moral is what not to be like.” But she does the opposite and claims time and time again that Celery/Alien is some kind of feminist warrior, when in fact Celery/Alien is the very epitome of white feminism and false feminism. She’ll be all kinds of gung-ho for herself, but as soon as another woman mentions her own unique problems or lifestyles, Celery/Alien thinks she’s a “whiny bitch,” “dumb slut,” or something similar. Celery/Alien ends up looking down her nose at basically every other female character. The lack of female friendships in Maas’ books is frankly astounding.

No girl needs to be Celery/Alien. Celery/Alien is not a role model, she is not a feminist, she is not a figurehead of a well developed female character or even a compelling antihero. She’s sexist, she’s misogynistic, she has serious anger issues, she’s manipulative, she’s abusive. This is not who young girls should be looking up to.

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Reason 3: Maas has no place in the YA genre.

I’m not really sure I need to elaborate much on this. Let me give you a scenario:

Imagine you’re at a book signing for your fans. They’re mostly girls 15-20, so you kind of just sign their copies without thinking much about it. But then a smaller girl comes up to the table, you ask her age, and she says “I’m ten.” A 10 year old girl is standing in front of you, clutching her copy of your book where you wrote and published the scene, “he buried in to the hilt and roared. Over and over he spilled inside of her, the lightning outside flashing soft and lovely long after he stilled.”

Look me in the eye and tell me that shit is appropriate in the YA genre. At all. Ever.

You wanna write romance? Go for it. It can be cute! It can be healthy! It can be intriguing! But this? This? This is just... erotica. If you’re publishing stuff like this in the YA genre, in a book that isn’t even on the ‘tween/teen romance’ shelves, then you better be ready to take full responsibility for teaching 10 year olds what a blowjob is, what an orgasm is, what BDSM is, what a fucking foot fetish is.

I know JK Rowling isn’t the most popular right now, but even she did better than this. The first 3 Harry Potter books you can generally find on the children’s/middle grade shelves. They were cute, fun little adventures about wizards and magic and fantastic creatures. Books 4-7? Those are on the YA shelves. People are dying, magic is dangerous, fascist organizations are on the rise -- it isn’t fun for Harry anymore. It isn’t about the wonders of magic. It’s about life or death, war, and fear. So yeah, of course those book aren’t going to be on the children’s/middle grade shelves! They’re dark! They’re scary! That kind of material shouldn’t be advertised as appropriate for younger kids!

Maas never extended that courtesy. Maas took her books full of badly written erotica and plopped them down right where all the rest of the completely tame YA books went, because she wanted the sales. She didn’t care if she was exposing kids who were too young to explicit sex scenes. She never posted a disclaimer, she never posted any kind of warning on social media when the books came out. Nope. She just silently took advantage of the market knowing she’d get more sales in YA. But it has no place in YA. It’s not YA. And I don’t think I’m ever gonna be okay with that.

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Reason 4: Diversity? Never heard of it!

Maas’ books are so incredibly white and straight that it’s painful. Rowan and Aelin? White and straight. Feyre? Rhysand? Chaol? Dorian? Manon? Hey, you guessed it! They’re all white and straight (despite Chaol, Dorian, and Manon being heavily LGBT+ coded for like, the entire series till the last book)!

“He looked at his friend, perhaps for the last time, and said what he had always known, from the moment they met, ‘I love you.’” (Queen of Shadows)

Hello? Sarah Jane? I’m all for male friendships, but there’s male friendships and then there’s actual romance. Chaol and Dorian are about as gay-coded as they could fucking get. And this isn’t even the only time this happens! Check this out:

“Dorian surged from his chair and dropped to his knees beside the bed. He grabbed Chaol’s hand, squeezing it as he pressed his brow against his. ‘You were dead,’ the prince said, his voice breaking. ‘I thought you were dead.’” (Queen of Shadows)

But wait, there’s more!

“‘I’m not leaving you. Not again.’

Dorian’s mouth tightened. ‘You didn’t leave, Chaol.’ He shook his head once, sending tears slipping down his cheeks. ‘You never left me.’” (Queen of Shadows)

I mean come on, Sarah!

Also, Manon. My girl Manon hated men, pretty explicitly, for the entire series. In case you don’t believe me:

“There were few sounds Manon enjoyed more than the groans of dying men.” (Heir of Fire)

Oh, and other characters even imply Manon has never had a heterosexual relationship in her fucking life. See:

“‘That golden-haired witch, Asterin...’ Aelin said. ‘She screamed Manon’s name the way I screamed yours. How can I take away somebody who means the world to someone else? Even if she is my enemy.’” (Queen of Shadows)

Tell me that’s not gay as fuck. I dare you.

Manon had a whole lot of love to give women! She was always affectionate towards other women. Particularly Elide. This is a woman who was about as lesbian as you could get. Had no interest in men, every interest in women, rejected typically expected roles for women (getting married and having kids, etc.) but guess what happened? Guess what fucking happened?

This warrior who was friends with and rode on a big fuckoff wyvern completely and totally submits to Dorian as her lover. I don’t mean that metaphorically. They literally do some BDSM shit where he’s her “master” and she “kneels to him” or whatever the fucking fuck. This entire thing pissed me off more than Chaol and Dorian being all “no homo bro,” because Maas used every possible symbol and subtext for Manon being gay, and then said “just kidding!” Her relationship with Dorian came out of nowhere. All of a sudden she was just as thirsty for mediocre dick as Aelin.

At this point I honestly have to wonder if Maas is really this ignorant or if she’s - dare I say it? - taunting her readers who have complained about the lack of LGBT+ representation. Maas has, historically, not reacted well to people criticizing her work. I would not put it beyond her at all to intentionally queer-code characters only to turn around and rip the rug out from under her readers by pairing them up in heterosexual relationships. And not only is that shitty writing, but it’s... really malicious and rude.

Of course then there’s the issues with racial representation. Again, Maas doesn’t even try. She includes 13 characters of color only to immediately kill off all of them in a suicide pact. So there’s that. Not sure I need to say more than that.

Maas knows what diversity is, but as per her famous quote, “I just don’t want to force diversity into my books.” So. Y’know. Writing a black or gay character (or!! God forbid, both black and gay!!) is asking a little too much of her, apparently. She doesn’t want to force anything as unbelievable as someone who isn’t white or straight, don’tcha know? In these books about fae people and dragons and gods fighting mortals and explicit erotica, an LGBT+ character or a character of color is high fantasy, not YA. *Sarcasm*

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Reason 5: The woman can’t write.

This is pretty straightforward. She cannot write. My proof? She plagiarizes the living fuck out of everything she can to avoid actually writing her own original work.

1. “You’re gonna rattle the stars.” - from Disney’s Treasure Planet

2. “The Queen Who Was Promised” - from GRRM’s ASOIAF, where Dany Targaryen is often toted as the exact same thing. Oh, and The Prince Who Was Promised prophecy in ASOIAF also mentions Azor Ahai being “the Heir of Fire” so, uh.... yeah.

3. Aelin basically being Aragorn. Lost royalty spends years as an outcast, denies their claim, teams up with elves (fae in Aelin’s case) to defeat a greater evil, becomes known as the people’s champion, falls in love with an elf (fae) and makes them their consort, crowned by the people, ends their coronation scene with a “you bow to no one” (I’m not kidding).

4. Nehemia dying for Aelin and it later being revealed that Nehemia was “grooming” Aelin to face great evil, and potentially give her life to stop it. How much you wanna bet Maas tried to give Aelin a name as close to “Harry Potter” as she could get?

5. Manon lighting a series of beacons across a mountain range to call for aid during war. I mean seriously? This is one of the most iconic scenes in Peter Jackson’s rendition of Lord of the Rings. It’s moving, it’s powerful, it’s awe-inspiring. And Maas knew it. So she just... took it. I don’t have a lot of respect for writers who can’t write their own moving scenes.

6. Kingsflame blossoms, which only bloom when the rightful monarch is on the throne. So... the White Tree of Gondor. Got it.

7. The Hand of the King being a royal court position. Like... jesus. GRRM, come get ya world-building, SJ stole it again.

8. A paralyzed Chaol has a specialized saddle made for him, because he wants more than anything to ride a horse again. GRRM! Please! She’s taking Bran Stark’s story now!

And besides all of these horribly plagiarized points, there’s nothing even slightly compelling about these books. There’s literally zero substance, and the last few books in both the ACOTAR and ToG series have been nothing but a smut-fest. Plot who? We don’t know her.

Trauma, both physical and mental, is erased at the drop of a dime (Aelin lost physical scars, Chaol’s paralysis was basically cured, series of events that should’ve left characters absolutely fucked just... didn’t phase them). The battles are rushed and sloppily written, and Maas has a particularly nasty habit of focusing on exactly the wrong people in the middle of what should be an action packed scene. Instead of showing alliances forging and plots being made behind people’s backs, instead of showing us people gearing up for battle by saying tearful goodbyes to their infants and spouses, Maas shows us Rowan and Aelin banging on a beach, or a tree, or a ship, or wherever the fuck they happen to be at that moment.

None of these characters lose jack shit. There is no sense of urgency or stakes, because we knew since Heir of Fire that Aelin and her precious uwu fae “mate” would be just fine. Why? Because nobody shipped Rowaelin as hard as Sarah Jane Maas did. Consistently the only people who suffer in these books are background characters (who, coincidentally, are almost always the characters of color and LGBT+ characters). By the end of Kingdom of Ash, literally everyone is fine. And paired off to be married, too! Because a happy ending isn’t a true happy ending if it doesn’t end with Babies Ever After and everyone in a heterosexual relationship, of course, right?

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Reason 6: World-building doesn’t even go here! Sorry, she just wanted to be a part of something.

Maas’ world-building is... how do you say... shitty. New lore pops up in every book, having never been mentioned before, and is for some reason of utmost importance (but only for this book. It’ll be forgotten again as soon as it isn’t relevant). Religions who? Culture where? History what? None of these things exist in Maas’ world. None.

Now before anyone jumps down my throat with “but The World of Throne of Glass is coming out this year!!!1!1!!” let me gently establish something. Speaking as a fantasy author: if you do not have your most basic world-building - that being religion, culture, language, and history - already established, then you have no business making a “world of” book to cover all the bases your ass never bothered with in the original series.

I said what I said.

Tolkien and GRRM are masters of world-building because they spent decades working to forge their worlds before they ever put a pen to paper and wrote their stories. Not to toot my own horn, but my own fantasy series has been developing for almost 7 years now. What am I doing with it? I’m outlining governments in different societies, why people came to worship what they do, and I’m making a fucking world map on my bedroom floor (that now has cat paw prints on it, so it’s not exactly final product material anyway).

I give not a single hoot for Maas’ “The World of Throne of Glass.” She could be saying anything she wanted to and it would all just have to be canon, because she’s establishing what this world is after already finishing her series. Yes, it does piss me off, because it’s pretty obvious she didn’t have a clue what her world was, or who was who, or why things were the way they were. She made shit up as she went along, nothing more. There was no grand scheme. There was no planning, and it shows.

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TL;DR: I have a lot of issues with Sarah J Maas’ writing, including her world-building and handling of diversity. But most of all I despise the potential impact she has on the YA genre and on the young girls reading her work. They deserve better than this. They deserve better than Sarah Jane Maas.

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shadow-djinni · 4 years

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Generalizations in Fandom

Or, some idiot on my dash made an underinformed comment about shipping trends and now I have to go prove them wrong.

I’m a day late with my griping, but much better-researched for it, which means this post (under the cut) is going to be even longer now. Apologies in advance. If you’d like to read my exceedingly long-winded griping, hit the readmore button.

A quick preface–and some background–to my complaining, which will be important going forward. Though I’m by no means a fandom old, nor am I claiming that status, I’ve been in and around fandom for over eight years now, and have been an active content creator for seven and a half. In that timeframe, I’ve been in and out of a wide range of fandoms, all with different fannish climates and behaviors, so I like to think I have a fair bit of experience in these spaces.

So, yesterday, a blog I had been following–which, up until this point, had expressed views on fandom I generally agreed with–made a post complaining about the proliferation of slash fic in fandom. I’m not going to link the post or @ the blogger in question, mostly because I have no intentions of picking a fight with said blogger or with their fans, as I understand they have a relatively large following, but the post was something to the effect of “fandoms always lionize overwhelmingly white noncanon m/m ships at the expense of women and POC”. Now, at a glance, that looks…correct, right? At least considering the fandoms you usually see on Tumblr. But that statement looks…really off to me, given my own lived experience, and the longer I looked the more off it looked, and the more complaints I had with it.

The first problem with this statement, and others like it: there is no such thing as a pan-fandom issue. Statements like these posit that all fandoms, regardless of the source material, always have or develop the issue the poster sees and wishes to discuss. It’s a good way to get attention, but it lacks the nuance to really support itself under scrutiny. The truth of the matter is that the source material a fandom draws for has influence over the sort of fans who are drawn to it and the material they have to work with, which therefore effects the trends in tropes and shipping the fandom in question develops–and while broad similarities may be drawn across multiple fandoms with similar elements to them, no two fandoms develop alike, an effect which is compounded by differences in age, genre, and location of origin of the source material.

For a personal example, I’ve been active in four fandoms I would consider strongly influential in terms of my taste in fiction and my writing ability and style. Without getting overly specific, those fandoms are:

a video game franchise begun in the 80s, which has seen new installments released every 5-10 years

a magical girl manga (and later anime) produced in the early ‘00s, which has not seen new canon since

a popular and ongoing live action American movie series, which began release within the last decade

and, for good or ill, Voltron (an animated cartoon released in summer ‘16, which ran through December ‘18 with an utter shitstorm of a fandom)

If we believe statements such as the one above, one would expect that all four of those fandoms would have exactly the same inter-fandom issues, namely the sidelining of women and characters of color in favor of the white slash pairing of the day–but, having been in these fandoms, that’s true for exactly one of them. I’d give you all three guesses, but let’s face it, the answer is obvious.

It’s the live action American movie series.

In fact, the initial statement is fairly accurate when assessing that work, and other live action American movie series and television shows, and there’s a number of reasons why. American live action media often gives disproportionate representation to white men, particularly when it comes to lead roles, while consigning women and POC to supporting roles. As such, the (white, male) leads garner more development than the support roles, which makes the leads easier and more appealing for fic writers and shippers to work with. Media with black leads, or other leads of color, also often have smaller fandoms overall, and as such don’t make the big, obvious waves large-scale fandoms like…say, Harry Potter or the MCU make on Tumblr.

Canonical (female) love interests are also often sidelined by live action media fandoms, for a number of reasons–namely, in canon they are often granted less screentime, less depth, and less subjectivity than their male castmates, and are frequently treated as objects by the camera. This makes it harder to empathize with them, especially given fandom is majority women who may be rendered too uncomfortable to work with the characters–there’s a good deal of baked-in misogyny that would need to be untangled from the character herself, and in most cases only the most committed of fans are actually going to sit down to do the work.

Now, mind you, these do not apply to all fandoms. Voltron had some of the same problems with sidelining canonical love interests–but Voltron’s fandom flagships gag were between a half-human character of indeterminate ethnicity and two men of color, one of whom is canonically queer. The magical girl manga fandom I mentioned above, ironically enough, has issues with sidelining a subtextually canonical f/f ship in favor of splitting the pair to put them in het ships. And the video game fandom used to have issues with slash shippers in what was a majority het fandom, and still has lingering issues with slash depending on which corners of fandom you frequent.

And yet, if I were to say “fandom has a problem with ignoring canonical queer subtext” or “fandom has a problem with inordinate aggression towards slash ships”, can you imagine the sort of ridicule I would face? Most people discussing social issues in fannish contexts would look at me as though I’d sprouted a second head, when those issues are in fact present and in need of discussion–just not in the large, obvious fandoms in the Tumblrsphere, which seem to be the only fandoms these people consider deserving of discussion.

My second point can be summed up in a single sentence: it is not the responsibility of fandom to correct the issues present in the source canon.

No canon is perfect. Creators are human, and flawed, and they will inevitably fuck up no matter how well they generally handle things. And while those fuckups do impact the way the fandom creates (see my first point), fandom does not have a duty to fix those fuckups. Fandom is not, and should not be, an activist space–it’s a creative space foremost, and it’s full of people with all sorts of baggage they pack in with them. It’s unfair, and arguably cruel, to force people to engage with aspects of canon they find squicky, or even triggering, to ‘correct’ flaws in canon that your “activism” takes issue with. (note: the link in the paragraph preceding this is mostly talking about shipping activism and while it makes some points about slash I disagree with, it makes plenty of good points about other sorts of fannish activism and the way fans who take their activism too far impact other fans and people unfamiliar with the source media)

And, additionally: unless you’re paying them, fan creators don’t owe you content. Yes, even if they primarily create for that dreaded noncanon m/m ship and you’d rather they make content for your favored f/f ship. Yes, even if your favored ship is actually canon, because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with shipping noncanon ships rather than canon ones–if I kept that mentality I wouldn’t create at all. If you want content, you have to make it yourself, or commission it.

And, my final point: if you don’t enjoy things certain fandoms are doing, learn to use your blacklist and filters.

If, like the op of the post I’m complaining about, you’re tired of the proliferation of slash ships you have ideological disagreements with, blacklist them and the fandoms that produce them! If there are particular common aus in a fandom you hate, figure out the tags and filter those! Particular ‘hot takes’ you’re sick of seeing? Seas of endless shitposts that make you roll your eyes? One particular writer who does a ship you otherwise enjoy in a notably squicky way? Blacklist, filter, and block.

Because I guarantee you, no matter how many angry posts you make about people making content you personally dislike, you won’t make anyone stop producing it.

And you might even piss some of them off.

Now if you’ll all excuse me, I have a non-canon slash fic to work on.

#fannish salt #salt #this is absolutely not something i usually do and i don't intend to repeat the performance #but i was so pissed off yesterday i was literally seeing red #like!!! gods!!!!!!#just because mainstream live action american media franchises dominate tumblr #that doesnt mean issues those fandoms have are applicable to every other fandom everywhere!!!#and if you insist they are youre a fucking idiot and i wont apologise for saying it #like its beyond reductive to pretend theyre universally applicable #and frankly by assuming that worldview you miss a lot of issues actually present in the media in question #like the structural issues in vlds narrative that thoroughly borked their second and third arcs #and caused the surface issues that so much of the fandom fusses about rather than looking a little deeper for the common threads #but thats another post for another day

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aworldforgirlslikeus-blog · 4 years

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Greetings all!

I’ve decided to start this blog to keep track of some of my interests, particularly my reading life. I’m a librarian, and I read a lot of different books that cut across many different genres. But I’m particularly passionate about romance novels, because that’s where I get my daily dose of much-needed female gusto and hero-ine-ism. But I wasn’t always a romance reader. In fact, I didn’t discover romance novels until I was an adult in my 30s. Oh sure, I read some titles that you might consider “romance adjacent,” such as YA titles that featured love stories. I also read fantasy and sci-fi novels that had romantic pairings aplenty, and some pretty risque erotic scenes.

But pure romance novels? Those trashy paperbacks with half naked cowboys or Scottish kilt wearers with rippling abs on the front? No way! I considered myself a well-educated young feminist, and I bought into the negative hype against these novels hook, line, and sinker. I truly thought they had nothing to offer me, and I believed critics when they claimed that these sorts of novels were poorly written, full of sexist stereotypes about both men and women, and backwards-thinking about sexual situations.

So I grew up never reading romance, although I read widely in pretty much every other genre. That is, until the day that something strange happened.

I remember I was waiting in line at a CVS for a prescription because I had just gotten out of the hospital. I was suffering not only from a strange and mysterious illness that had sent me to the hospital with uncontrollable vomiting, but also from the traumatic and sudden death of my mother a few months prior. Everything in my life was spiraling out of my control, and it sounds cliche to say it, but it’s true - my entire life was full of darkness. I couldn’t see any way out or any kind of way forward. I had always considered myself strong and independent, but the trials I was going through at that time were so far beyond me that it constantly felt like I was drowning in my own terror and sorrow.

But while I was standing in that line, a book happened to catch my eye: Julia Quinn’s “The Girl with the Make-Believe Husband.” At the time I thought it would just be something amusing to read for a few hours. And if it was awful, I figured I could always regift it to the Friends of the Library in a resale.

But instead of just being a pleasant diversion, this truly remarkable book wound up changing my whole perspective on the genre. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it definitely was a pleasant diversion. It took me away from myself and my problems for hours and hours. However, even more than that, it was incredibly well-written and witty, and it was chock-full of playful banter and dialogue that made me laugh out loud, and an engaging plot line that had me turning page after page trying to figure out how it ended. And that’s all before I even mention the sexual tension! Whoa boy, that was also pretty engaging, to say the least!

When I turned the final page the story had resolved itself in a very satisfying way. However I wasn’t satisfied at all - I wanted more books! I immediately sought out more books from Julia Quinn, and started a steep nose dive into the romance genre as a whole, one I haven’t been able to pull out of since.

Romance novels are truly delightful to read for many reasons, most of which I’ve already listed above when talking about Julia Quinn. Romance novels tend to be incredibly well written (no matter what many critics might want to say), and they have to be, because romance readers are some of the most discerning critics out there! Historical romance readers know so much about their favorite time periods that even mentioning the name of a color that didn’t exist during that time period could be a potential criticism.

Romance novels also need to have gripping plot lines that truly draw you in from start to finish. There are so many of them sitting on the shelves that if you don’t open one and know from the first line that you simply have to read it, then it’s not going to flourish in this genre. There are so many introductory paragraphs that have totally sold me on a book before even looking at the description, and when I try to compare regular fiction titles to romance in this regard, there’s truly no contest - romance novels win every single time!

And a lot of this has to do with the witty writing that romance writers employ. Some of the wit is humorous and some of it is not, but in a genre that was (arguably) birthed by Jane Austen, is it any wonder that romance writers are some of the best at engaging dialogue and eviscerating takes on the foibles of every day life?

All of which leaves out the beating heart of romance novels: the characters! Speaking of Jane Austen, just say the name “Mr. Darcy,” and think of the powerful feelings that name has conjured up in legions of Austen fans around the globe. Some men may be groaning as they read this, grumbling to themselves that that’s really all romance novels are, just hot men that make women have impossible standards.

But I counter that with these words: Elizabeth Bennet. Because in the end, who is more important to the plot and final outcome of Pride and Prejudice, her or Darcy? You could say, “Well sure, Darcy must be more important, without him there’s no romance at all!” But the real reason why the love story happens in this infamous novel is not because of Darcy at all. It’s because of Lizzie, and the powerful awakening that happens internally that changes her into the woman who Darcy eventually marries.

Just like most heroines, Lizzie starts off with a blockage. This is often the reason why the heroine’s life is a bit stunted or unfulfilled. These reasons are often internal fears or worries that then manifest themselves as external issues in their work or love life. So the heroine must then make a journey to resolve those issues, and she is often prompted either by the obstacles presented in the plot or by the appearance of the hero to do so. My favorite romance novels usually revolve around a plot that challenges both the heroine and the hero to overcome their issues at the same time, and this dual “awakening” of consciousness is the hallmark of every great romantic story (in my humble opinion of course).

In the end, romance novels are not about the shirtless hunk of man meat on the cover. Romance novels are actually about the heroine and her internal journey as she struggles to come to an awakening in her own life that leads to a sense of empowerment that then changes her life and allows the romance to flourish. Her romantic success is not her primary attainment in the story, although that’s what some people choose to focus on. The reason that she gets the romantic happy ending is because she’s already done the hard work first - that of finding true fulfillment in herself. That is to say, the man isn’t the birthday cake, he’s just the icing on top.

So apart from being great entertainment, romance novels also provide a wonderful road map to a more fulfilled and joyful life, because they show how you can go from a blocked or stagnant life to a more open and passionate one. Sure, we might not all find a Mr. Darcy (although we sure can hope for one!), however we all can undergo our own personal awakening to find greater pleasure in life via a job change, a new hobby, or a more expanded social network of friends.

And yes, you can’t take everything in romance novels literally. Most of the action that takes place is a bit more exaggerated than what actually happens in real life, but the heart of them beats to the drum of the emotional truth of life, and in the end, that’s what I think I find truly inspirational. And yes, I also admit that there are other issues with the romance genre that need to be addressed, such as having more representation of diverse authors and characters. I’m glad to say that I think the genre is moving in this direction, but there’s still a great deal more work to be done in this area.

In the end, I’d like to say that romance novels helped to cure me of the terrible grief that consumed me in the wake of my mother’s death. That they somehow made me stronger, or showed me a positive path forward. But that really wouldn’t be the truth. Years have gone by at this point, and I’m still struggling. But romance novels have given me some important survival tools.

For instance, the humor in them reminds me of the joy that’s still left in the world, and their intricate and involved plot lines help me to escape to another world when living in the real one sometimes becomes unbearable. The heroines found within the pages also help to motivate me to reach my fullest potential, and remind me how important it is to forgive myself when I sometimes fail to reach that potential.

I’m truly inspired by romance novels, no matter what the haters might say. And I hope that this blog helps to spread the gospel of the romance novel to others who may never have heard about them before, or may never have considered what these novels have to offer them. After all, there might still be women out there who, like me a few years ago, don’t know that it’s okay to ignore the naked man on the cover, and focus on the true message of the story, which I would like to argue is female (and male) empowerment.

Can you imagine standing inside of a bookstore and seeing signage for “Female Empowerment” instead of “Romance.” What a concept! For now, I’ll still be proudly staking the shelves, looking for new reads and suggestions. Hopefully you will be too :)

xoxo, Jessica

#romance novels #literature #julia quinn

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ginnyzero · 5 years

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Good Books are Hard to Find

I have spent my fair share of time looking through the science fiction/fantasy section at book stores and browsing through Amazon trying to find that next author to read. The one where, no matter what they write, you’re going to want to buy every single novel because they are just that good. And when you do find a writer who exhibits the signs of being decent, you have to stand there and cross your fingers that as the series progresses they remember their own premise, world building and don’t go off into the badlands of ‘bad fiction tropes.’

I try to give every author I try a good three books (if they’ve got 3 books published) to hold my attention. Sometimes, I make it to four books. However, by the third book usually I can tell whether or not the author writes the types of stories that I want to read. (The first book is usually their best effort and doesn’t always translate into the second or third books. Sometimes writers do improve.) Or, other times, I figuratively throw the book across the room and into a box for Becca to read and review later. I try to give the authors a fair shake. If by the third book, I’m not happy and they have more published. I’ll go ahead and read the summaries for the next stories to see if they get any better. So far, this actually hasn’t worked.

Here are some of the reasons of why some books just don’t work for me:

They’re a knock off of a better writer.

Look, no one owns the basic building blocks of a fantasy world. If a writer wants to write a noir style detective in an urban fantasy world, then more power to them. But changing the name and changing the color of a coat doesn’t an original or an engaging story/character make or else, you’re just a poor rip off of Jim Butcher’s Dresden files without Butcher’s spark. I already own the Dresden files. They’re long. They’re engaging and you have to have more than an interesting title to keep my attention. Or else, I’ll just put it back down on the shelf and go buy the latest Jim Butcher book.

Love Triangles.

I’m no longer in high school. In fact, I never observed this behavior even in high school. So, the love triangle just confuses me completely. I understand the fantasy aspect of it. But past the age of sixteen, whether or not you’re dating two guys at the same time isn’t really that big of a deal as long as they both know about each other. In fact, usually, by the time we’ve met both guys. I don’t care for either one of them because they’ve been so obviously set up to be the main female character’s perfect mate. It feels so forced and stilted. Characters first, relationships second, love relationships third, please.

Serial Love Interests.

This is the next step after love triangles. I want to be able to root for somebody romantically. I don’t like picking up each book, having the same main female character and then having to get invested in a totally new male love interest. Only to find out from the next book’s summary that they’re not even going to be in it anymore. It makes me wonder what is wrong with the girl that she can’t keep a guy! I can understand that it is somewhat realistic for women to date several men over the course of their lives. If we must have several love interests over the course of a series, let them stick around for a few books so we can figure out exactly why they’re not any good for the main female character.

(I suppose this can be said about male characters too, but I see this more with female protagonists than I do male protagonists.)

Premise that Doesn’t Fit the Plot.

I chalk this up to poor research or the “and they solve crime,” meme. A lot of the books in the urban fantasy genre in particular I’ve noticed seemed to be shelved in the wrong section. Because, honestly, they’re really mysteries. And while I like a good mystery, sometimes the premise of the stories don’t actually fit with a mystery conclusion. Or, the premises would be much more interesting than the ‘they solve crime’ that the writer defaulted to. I have seen this multiple times. Basically, if you choose a profession for your character, then make sure your stories actually follow that professional line of work.

Look, if you’re going to write a bounty hunter. Then read and watch stuff about bounty hunting so you actually know what a bounty hunter does. They tend not to work for the type of people they actually hunt and security work isn’t their forte.

If I see a story where the premise is the main character is a nurse in a supernatural setting, I’m really hoping for a Grey’s Anatomy, House, ER style story lines where we have an interesting hospital staff diagnosing and curing interesting diseases and dealing with distraught families. I don’t want to see the nurse solve crime. That’s not what a nurse does! Leave the solving crime to the police detectives and private investigators. Please. There are so many more interesting stories than just ‘they solve crime.’

Also, if I do pick up a book about “they solve crime.” I want the books to be about “they solve crime” not the zany life, lack of character growth and whacky love life of only one of the characters. If the premise is two kickass female characters start an agency to solve crime, then make sure it’s a story about two kickass female characters, not one mildly kickass character.

Unqualified Main Characters.

You’d think I’d be talking about the mechanics, bounty hunters, security agents and nurses running around with a note pad and a camera solving crime. But I’m not. I’m talking about the private investigators who don’t know how to investigate or creatures who don’t know about or don’t want to know about who they are and the type of people they’re investigating! If you are a vampire and you are a private investigator that is supposed to solve vampiric problems, it is in your best interest to know a bit about vampires! Otherwise, I end up flipping to the back of the book to make sure the character survives. (Of course they survive, there wouldn’t be the next book if they didn’t, but I’m still morbidly going “how in hell are they going to get out of this intact?)

I swear, there was one book I read where the main character was so under qualified for what she was doing, she spent half the book bawling. Look, even I like dropping characters into absurd situations where they are unprepared, but there is rallying and trying to do it and then there is hysterical sobbing in a ball in the corner. One makes for amusing reading and the other does not.

Basically, I don’t really care what profession your character has, but unless they are still in college or first two weeks on the job, make sure they actually know what they’re doing, especially if they are supposed to be solving crime.

Contradictory Main Characters.

Okay, have you ever been reading a book where the author tells you one thing and then as the story progresses she shows you something completely different? Sometimes it’s a corollary of the above. The author is sure that their main character is a kung fu master, but really they’re just going hiyah, hiyah to a mirror in their bedroom?

Now when this happens around a female character, it usually involves her love life. I like to call this the princess/nerd syndrome. You see, on the outside the female character is a nerd and nobody wants to date her, but on the inside, really she’s a princess waiting for the right man to come along and see her for who she really is. Well, over the course of the story it isn’t just the ‘right man’ who comes along, it’s four or five ‘right men’ all at the same time! So much for no one wanting to date our helpless, socially awkward, powers pariah, nerdy female.

Usually later this is explained away by some random hand waving power of bullshit that the character has no control over. No. She’s not really that great of a girl. She just smells good, has fairy charisma, she can bear the man’s children without her or the baby dying or is the ‘chosen one’ of prophecy.

I understand this is a fantasy. No. I don’t get it. I don’t want to get it. It drives me crazy. I stop reading.

Shock Writing.

This is what happens when I’m reading along in the book and things are going fairly well. We’ve got a strong character and suddenly I turn the page and the character is being brutally raped! Shock writing is when the writer uses something horrible an awful (rape, kidnap, murder, character death, false accusations, power loss) to grab the reader’s attention and “shock” them into keeping reading.

Some writer’s go overboard with it. You can pick up a book start reading and discover that everything that could possibly go wrong with this character will. It’s shock writing over saturation.

I personally don’t read books to be led through a sewer. Scenes such as sudden rape in an effort to appear edgy in what was previously a book I could recommend to my mother really turns me off. And if everything possible has to go wrong with your character for the writer to feel the story is interesting and good (often the character stops growing at this phase), then I’m not going to bother to pick up any more of their stories.

Flat Main Characters.

A lot of times, I’ll stop reading a book because I just can’t get invested into the main character(s). Sometimes this is because the writer just hasn’t allocated enough book space for their character to shine. This might be the difference between plot driven and character driven stories. Just, no matter how much I like the plot or think the premise is interesting. If I can’t get behind the main character and feel some sort of empathy for them, then there’s no way I’m going to be able to stay interested in the story. Sure, there are plenty of writers willing to tell me in their books about the likes and dislikes of their characters, but they never take the time out away from their main plot to show me.

Some writers are so focused on their action. They forget that the characters they’re working with aren’t plastic puppets on strings. That these characters should have hopes, dreams, likes, dislikes, things in their pockets and thoughts before they go to sleep. In an action fueled plot, there has to be pauses and that is when you learn about the characters, in the pauses. I find plot driven works to either be boring or exhausting. And a lot of times when I finish the book, I don’t know anything about the main character or they haven’t grown at all.

These are just some of the general trends I’ve come across while searching for new books to read. So, while the books were readable, they just didn’t fit what I was looking for in a story.

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wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 6 years

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A Look Back on the Twilight Saga

I have never felt older than I have this year, in which the film adaptation of the first book in the Twilight Saga turns ten. Ten years ago, that movie came out, three years after the book. And what a book and movie they were! They inspired so much rabid devotion and equally rabid pushback, with people gushing over the beautiful romance in equal amounts as people saying how the books were offensively awful and filled with misogyny and romanticization of abusive relationships. Golly, I sure am glad discussion of fiction has improved since then and we don’t have dumb arguments like that anymore!

All joking aside, it is pretty interesting to look back on the series. With the passage of time, and the release of so much young adult fiction in cinemas between then and now, I have to say that looking back… Twilight is a pretty good film and, for the most part, a pretty good series.

Now, such a bold statement could never have been made in that period during the heyday of the series, where the popularity of the series was slowly souring and people began openly rejecting the series as trash. But I feel that rejection was just part of an obnoxious cycle I’ve seen a lot in recent years, where anything remotely popular with audiences (such as Frozen) becomes hated at the peak of its popularity, seemingly because of the sole fact that it is popular and not really due to anything having to do with the actual overall quality.

See, here’s the thing: despite the series having a reputation for being poorly written tripe, it really is a lot better than anyone gives it credit for. Now, I’m not going to say the writing is on par with other young adult fantasy series of the time, like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson, because that is just patently untrue. What the Twilight Saga was, and what it always seemed to aim for, was the level of quality of a tacky airport romance novel you pick up while waiting for your flight to kill time. It’s nothing but wish-fulfillment fantasy in which an unhappy young woman becomes the reason for living for several unfathomably hot supernatural men, a sentiment that quite frankly resonates with the modern atmosphere towards supernatural romance and the prominence of self-proclaimed “Monsterfuckers.” Bella’s situation is pretty much a dream come true, is it not? Among tacky supernatural romance novels, Twilight and its sequels are easily the queens of the genre.

Here’s the thing that really sets the Twilight Saga apart, though: there is actually a serious amount of thought and care put into nearly all aspects of the romance’s universe save for the actual romance. Every single member of the Cullen family has a fascinating backstory: Carlisle was a vampire hunter turned vampire who proceeded to venture across the world in the ensuing hundreds of years building up a family and practicing a different way of living; Alice was committed to an asylum and has a past shrouded in mystery; Jasper was a soldier in the Confederate army who was turned into a vampire and tasked with raising a vampire army; Rosalie’s backstory is Kill Bill, BUT WITH VAMPIRES!; and Emmet, while easily the least impressive of them all, still died apparently fighting a bear, and considering how he is one can only imagine what on earth he was doing. Esme is the only Cullen without a deeply fascinating backstory, but even what little we do get is a bit tragic: she lost her child and so committed suicide, or attempted it anyway. There’s absolutely no need for all of these rich, complex backstories for characters in a throwaway romance novel, and yet here they are. And that’s not all.

The rest of the world and overall vampire society is presented in a very interesting way. The Volturi in particular are a fascinating idea, a secret cabal of vampires who rule over all other vampires with an iron fist, but one that is, while a bit tyrannical and unforgiving, seemingly necessary to preserve the existence of vampire society. Hell, their rules don’t really seem TOO harsh, and they only really spring to action when there are vampires fragrantly and blatantly exposing themselves to human society. They wish to keep the vampire world hidden in the shadows, where they can feed in peace away from prying eyes. Their position is understandable in a lot of ways. They also have a very interesting history to them, having apparently wrestled power over vampirekind away from a sect of Romanian vampires. Now, I did say they are a fascinating IDEA; in execution, they always tended to be a bit… useless. Their appearances in New Moon and Breaking Dawn are ultimately wastes of time, as they are never really opposed in any sort of meaningful way and get away in the end with the status quo wholly unchanged. No impact is ever made on vampirekind when they’re involved, which almost makes me wish that they were kept in the shadows and used far more sparingly. Their influence over events in Eclipse, where they only send out their powerful agents, showcases that Stephanie Meyers could use them very effectively when she wanted to.

The werewolves are a bit less effective. While they do have an intriguing backstory, there is something a bit… problematic about shoehorning a bunch of fictional elements onto the real Quileute tribe. On the other hand though, a positive and heroic portrayal of Native Americans in fiction is never a bad thing, and Jacob Black is easily one of the more sympathetic characters until halfway through Breaking Dawn. It’s a very tricky, mixed bag. I kind of wish that the issue with the handling of Native American folklore was the biggest controversy with the series, but there’s actually one far worse and even stupider.

The Twilight Saga has come under fire for being a negative influence on young women, for romanticizing abusive relationships and stalking, and for being some sort of massive insult to feminism. Now, these arguments aren’t wholly without merit, but the issue is that they are being filtered through human understanding and imposed on fictional creatures in a fictional universe. If a real-life human acted as clingy, impulsive, over-protective, and obsessed as Edward is towards Bella, yes, it would be absolutely terrifying. Here’s where I let you in on a little secret, though: Edward Cullen is, in fact, not a human. He is part of a race of ageless semi-undead beings who live off of blood and glitter in the sunlight. He immediately sees his soulmate in Bella and goes out of his way to ensure they end up together, acting on the instincts granted to members of his kind. Trying to fit all of his actions into a human narrative is as fruitless as if an ant tried to explain humanity to his colleagues filtered through his ant experiences. The fact is, Edward operates on a far different moral code than humans. This is not uncommon for vampires in any fiction; Marceline of Adventure Time fame is a vampire who is certainly not above doing some rather sketchy stuff, for example. While Edward’s actions can come off as bizarre and creepy to humans, for a vampire, Edward is actually downright romantic and even benevolent. One also needs to take into account that Edward is a kissless virgin who has spent a hundred years doing nothing but reading romance novels and listening to classical music, which would go a long way to explain his awkward and sometimes offputting ways of trying to replicate human courtship rituals with Bella.

The criticisms leveled at Bella are rather unfair as well; while she often finds herself a damsel in distress, it rarely is something she doesn’t want. When Bella is in danger, it’s because she wanted to be there and put herself there. Yes, she does get into trouble, but that’s mostly due to her being a stupid horny teenage girl with zero impulse control. Recall New Moon, where she constantly did dangerous stunts so she could have hallucinations of Edward chastise her. Bella is, quite frankly, an adrenaline junkie, and I feel she’d rather resent being called a damsel. Even the times when she is in danger, it is no real fault of her own, but rather the fact she is a normal human out of her depth in a supernatural world. Bella is not Blade, she is not Van Helsing, she is not Alucard; she is Bella Swan, normal teenage girl, and she tends to be as effective as your average teenage girl in situations where superpowered monsters are hunting her. Imagine if we applied these sorts of criticisms to other characters in fiction… “John Conner in Terminator 2 is such a worthless damsel in distress character, why does he not just fight off the T-1000?” or how about “Why do the kids in The Goonies not take the Fratellis head-on? Why do they constantly flee from them when they cross paths? And Chunk, getting captured by them, what a pathetic damsel moment.” People not being successful in areas where they are out of their element is not some horribly evil thing. I also resent the idea the series is some horrible, anti-feminist work, particularly because the entire series revolves around Bella’s choice, and when she is not given agency she goes out of her way to take that agency. For all the flaws of Breaking Dawn, and there are many, I will give it this: presenting Bella as being in the right for wanting her choices respected is a good thing. With that in mind, I think the entire series is a lot more feminist than many are willing to admit.

And look, I’m not saying this book is a flawless masterpiece or anything like that. I have mentioned this is definitely a book more impressive for the world it creates than for the actual romance it centers around. But I do feel that, generally speaking, the books never descended to the point many who criticized the books say they did. I say “for the most part” because I cannot even muster up enough good will to say a single good thing about Breaking Dawn. But generally, the writing quality is decent. Even some of the twists on vampire lore are interesting and refreshing.

For instance… the sparkling. This is one of the most infamous additions to the lore of vampires in Meyers stories. When in the sunlight, rather than bursting into flames as vampires tend to do in fiction, their skin sparkles and glitters as if it was encrusted with diamonds. It does sound silly, and it really is, especially when they show it off in the movies… and yet, it is actually far more accurate than just about every depiction of vampires in nearly 100 years. You see, the idea vampires are killed by sunlight is actually a relatively new addition to vampire lore, being created for the famous silent masterpiece Nosferatu because they couldn’t come up with any other way to kill the vampire. In the original novel of Dracula, for instance, the titular count strut about during the day with no ill effect. So, by accident or perhaps by some better understanding of the creatures than most writers, Meyers was more accurate than nearly all contemporary portrayals of the characters. Also interesting – but not nearly so to the point I feel the need to dedicate a whole new paragraph to it – the idea of vampires having a sort of “love at first sight” thing that allows them to discern their soulmate was copied by Hotel Transylvania, so I feel like that addition to vampire lore has its merit as well.

The film adaptations tend to not truly fix the flaws with the storytelling, but instead to paint over them with some truly inspired silliness. The utter apathy Robert Pattinson exudes for his role as Edward Cullen is palpable in how he acts, and it tends to make Edward’s creepier actions actually less threatening than the were in the books – and I’d argue there he wasn’t particularly threathening, despite his angsting. Taylor Lautner’s oft-shirtless portrayal of Jacob Black seems a lot more genuinely, but equally cheesy; his and Pattinson’s onscreen chemistry really gives them the feel of two romantic rivals, which makes it easy to see exactly why there was such a devoted following rooting for one or the other back in the day. Then we get to Bella.

As usual, Bella is a horribly misunderstood character here. It’s easy to blame the books for how one-note Bella appears in the movies – as a romance protagonist, Bella has enough personality for you to care while still being enough of a blank slate that you can put yourself in her position so that you can fantasize about the outcomes – but I almost feel like her portrayal was a deliberate choice. Kristen Stewart is actually a very good actor when in the right role, and I feel like even in the past I’ve been too hard on her portrayal of Bella. I think I might go so far as to say her version of Bella is better than the book, because Stewart actually does inject some vapid, awkward teenage girlishness to the role. That’s something wonderful, especially about the films – the teenagers, more than a lot of other series, tend to feel like real people. They say the dumbest stuff imaginable, but really, is that not what being a teenager is? Everyone was a stupid, vapid idiot as a teenager, it’s just how teens are. So all t hat combined with everything else that has been said, does any part of Bella’s characterization truly feel THAT abnormal for an otherwise normal, brooding teen thrust headfirst into the world of the supernatural? I personally don’t think so; Bella is actually one of the most real characters of the series, an anchor to humanity in a sea of supernatural strangeness, a character that is absolutely perfect in her dull, flawed, overly-romantic personality. She may not be the strongest, or most interesting, or even the most pleasant character in all of fiction… but she has an air of realness to her few other characters can hope to achieve. Perhaps this is why a lot of people rejected and mocked her; it’s so much easier to dismiss and belittle something than accept that it is something real, warts and all. No one wanted to accept the less pleasant parts of Bella, and so she was rejected by all except the fans of the book; meanwhile, seemingly disinterested goth girls would be fought over by two equally strange men for her affection, all while she talks in a sort of half-awake near-monotone.

I was in that situation myself. It’s all real teenage bullshit.

I feel like this more than anything explains why the Twilight Saga ended up being violently rejected by so many people: too many people saw through the supernatural elements and into the real life teenage angst and did not like what they saw, as it reflected their own experiences. It’s so bizarre to say, but Stephanie Meyers may have been too real for her own good, and her portrayal of angst-ridden teen love triangles may have been just too close to home for a lot of people. I’m sure a lot of older people had negative experiences in high school as I did, so anything that reminds them of those stupid, painful years is not going to seem pleasant. With other stories that feature realistic elements with supernatural settings, such as Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and so on, they never really faced this kind of scrutiny and rejection as while they also are grounded with realistic portrayals of their teenagers, they also take place in overtly supernatural settings; there is no place where an experience could be like that of Hogwarts or Camp Half-Blood. But there’s probably of plenty of places like the dismal, dreary town of Forks, Washington, a perpetually cloudy town out in the sticks where nothing ever seems to happen. Reading about teen angst in such an agonizingly depressing setting will not go over well with anyone who has had negative experiences in regards to the elements portrayed, supernatural dressing or no.

Looking back at the Twilight Saga, after years of imitators of varying quality and numerous attempts by mediocre young adult franchises to capture this saga’s lightning in a bottle, the stories sans Breaking Dawn seem to have aged quite well, and hold up a lot better. Removed from the rabid fandom, overwhelming hype, ad constant mockery, the series stands as a solid and kind of cheesy young adult romance series, one with superb worldbuilding that I have yet to see any young adult series after it match and an absolutely fantastic ensemble cast that is just rife with fanfiction potential. I find that even the lead trio, be it in the films and in the movie, have a lot more layer and depth to them than initially thought, with Bella in particular a character I feel deserves some serious reevaluation. And while I’d never call the series a masterpiece to rival Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, or Lord of the Rings, I do think that the series is good enough to unironically be enjoyed. While there is of course plenty to snark at here – it’s a story featuring a rather honest depiction of teenagers, after all, and teenagers are idiots – I think there is a lot more to like than the insane hatedom of the book ever gave it credit for.

And even if you can’t bring yourself to admit the series is genuinely good (albeit cheesy), there’s no denying that it had a pretty good impact on popular culture. Aside from being the basis for Vampire Sucks, which has the honor of being the only genuinely good Seltzer and Friedberg film, it put supernatural romance stories back into the mainstream again. The biggest example of a supernatural romance film that I can see got a lot of mainstream recognition was 1990’s Ghost, which is held up as a romantic classic; while there were plenty of supernatural romance films between then and Twilight, none of them seem to be recalled fondly or even at all, and none of them can even come close to saying they had the sort of cultural impact Ghost did. Twilight, though… it had a huge impact. Without Twilight, we probably wouldn’t have gotten Warm Bodies, we probably wouldn’t have gotten Horns, and honestly? We probably wouldn’t have gotten The Shape of Water, or more realistically, the movie would not nearly be as accepted. Twilight for better or worse conditioned us to see the humanity in supernatural entities and find attraction in them (not exactly a new idea as far as vampires go, I know, but it definitely put it in the minds of young adults). I can easily see the genesis of the modern crowd of people lusting after the Asset, Pennywise, Godzilla, and Venom being the Twilight Saga; it was a gateway drug that put in the minds of youths “Hey, monsters can be really sexy. Like, REALLY sexy.”

The Twilight Saga is truly a fascinating work, for better and for worse. There is a lot in it that I really admire, and there’s plenty in it that I resent, but even at its worst I can never say that the series was boring. For all the flack I give Breaking Dawn, it is still far more readable than any of the garbage Cormac McCarthy has ever shat out, and nothing in the series was as overtly misogynistic as some of the dialogue in Ready Player One. As cheesy as the film series got, the first was a surprisingly effective indie supernatural romance and the third was a gloriously Gothic cheesy delight, with the second being the awkward but still enjoyable middle film and Breaking Dawn: Part 1 being the only genuinely awful film in the series; nothing positive could be said for the slew of imitators that crawled in this film’s wake, such as Beastly, Red Riding Hood, and even some of the would-be successors to this franchise such as the cinematic adaptations of Percy Jackson, Divergent, and The Hunger Games among others, which despite them being based off of books of far greater critical acclaim had absolutely no respect for their source material the way the Twilight Saga films did. As silly as some of the acting in the movies was – and it got very silly, considering the lead three all seemed to actively despise their roles – none of their acting was as painfully bad to sit through as Jennifer Lawrence’s attempts at acting in the first Hunger Games film, or the entire cast of the Percy Jackson movies. I would never say that Twilight is the absolute pinnacle of young adult literature, but I think a lot of us had our judgment clouded back in the day, and with the benefit of hindsight I think it’s safe to say the franchise was a lot of fun; I’d even go as far to say that it is an underrated work of genius in many aspects.

Removed from the climate that created it and put into a world it helped shape, I think the tale of Bella Swan and her romance of the angsty immortal Edward Cullen resonates quite a bit better. So thank you to Stephanie Meyers and everyone involved with the film series, because without your work, the world we live in would probably be a much less interesting place, with far fewer people horny for monsters. I really don’t think I would want to live in that world.

#CineMike #essay #my writing #Twilight #The Twilight Saga #Eclipse #New Moon #Breaking Dawn #Edward Cullen #Bella Swan #Jacob Black #Robert Pattinson #Kristen Stewart #Taylor Lautner

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aroworlds · 6 years

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Could you talk a bit about amatonormativity and how it related to you? I know the 101 (aka the definition), but I have trouble identifying it in real life, discussing how it permeates in fiction, etc. and this is kinda weird but I think an informed discussion about it would help? IDK feel free to ignore it if you don't have the spoons for it, but if you want to it would be a huge help!

Anon, I told you this was going to be long, but … well, it’s long!

The problem is that amatonormativity is a wall I keep hurling myself against, as an aro and as an aro creative, and there isn’t much conversational space where I am permitted to go all out in talking about it. I fear discussing this with too much vehemence, to go beyond the hand-holding 101 conversations about being aro, in case I alienate the alloromantic folks who do support me. Alloromantic people aren’t interested in conversations that undermine their sense of the world, and aro-spec spaces are small; both things together result in silence.

Because of this, I think it’s reasonable that this is something hard to grasp, for aro-spec and alloromantic folks alike: the educative conversations are hard to find or don’t exist. When you add to the fact that for the last two years a-spec people have been fighting targeted hate, that our conversations have fallen back to claws-out defence or the shield of validation, how the hell are we supposed to understand our own experiences, especially something as-yet-unquestioned as the practical impact of amatonormativity?

I hope you don’t mind, but because this is so long, I’m going to concentrate on amatonormativity in media and its impact on me as a creative.

In terms of fictional media, I think amatonormativity shows itself most obviously in the concept of a happy ending–that two people in a romantic relationship is by far the most common variant. No, not all stories end witha romantic happy ending, but so many do, even if it’s only a romantically-happy-for-now ending. Think Disney films; think action films shoving in an unnecessary romantic side-plot because the hero gets the girl once the explosions are over; think every story where the guy got the girl for reasons we the audience are expected to accept without question.

Likewise, a film with a tragic or unhappy ending is often shown by a protagonist not falling in romantic love or the dissolution of a romantic relationship. While there are other forms of indicating tragedy, the lack of a romantic paring for a character expected to be in one is common. There’s a reason Romeo and Juliet has long been framed as a tragic romance even though the tragedy, I’d argue, lies more in the impact of feuding families on the next generation, not the death of two young people in a “star-crossed” romance.

Even genres that aren’t romantic in the sense that romance isn’t the focus of the plot will still include sexual and romantic tension between characters: many of the crime and thriller novels I’ve read, supposedly less romantic because they target a cishet male audience, devote a great many pages to depicting romantic relationships nonetheless. The majority of YA novels depict the development of romantic relationships (which is why I kept reading middle-grade books even when I was too old for them) and even low-romance adult fiction still has the protagonists having had or desiring a romantic relationship at some point. So many literary works deal with the breakdown of romantic relationships, affairs, being single, unrequited love, or the way dangerous or alien environments, or the tyranny of distance, places stresses on romantic partnerships. These often won’t have purely happy endings–often tragic or complicated–because they’re Literary, but they’re just as obsessed with romantic love as any romance novel. In constantly going on about romance’s failure without ever making the point that someone can be happy and self-fulfilled without it, literary works are as amatonormative as anything else.

Romantic love and relationships don’t have to be successful: we just have to show a character desiring these or struggling with these, just so the audience knows that the protagonist is human. Characters who are shown as disdaining romance, or being uninterested in it, are usually antagonistic characters who are beyond redemption, are aliens or robots, or are coded as robotic–characters who are literally inhuman or portrayed as such. There’s a reason that The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper becomes a kinder, more “normal”, less-autistic-coded man the more he falls in romantic love with Amy, despite being introduced as extremely aroace-coded, and it’s called amatonormativity.

This is the point in the post where we aro-specs are giving the world that long, pained stare, and for good reason.

Romantic love as a marker of human worth is the most succinct way I can describe the impact of amatonormativity. It’s not a flawless summary, but so often romance is treated as a universal concept, relevant to all, because Western society uses the possession of or desire for romantic love as an indicator of a person’s humanity. Romantic love makes us human, and so romantic love is everywhere, unquestioned and unassailable.

Elements of a more expanded sense of amatonormativity include:

- The idea that romantic attraction, love and relationships are universal to the human experience (predominantly a relationship encompassing, exclusively, one perisex heterosexual-and-heteromantic cis man and one perisex heterosexual-and-heteromanticcis woman).

- The idea that romantic love is the primary form of love and all other forms, once one gains a certain level of socially-acceptable maturity or adulthood, are naturally secondary.

- The idea that romantic love and relationships are relatable to and attainable by all, and any failure to relate to it or attain it is a personal or moral failing.

- The idea that people who do not experience, attain or desire a romantic partnership are, after a certain age, childish or childlike, immature, robotic, alien, inhuman.

- The idea that sex (especially non-heterosexual or non-vanilla sex) is only acceptable, for a person of high moral character, when it comes paired with romantic love. (Characters who have sex without romantic love are often coded as grasping, hateful, calculating, predatory.)

- The idea that the attainment of romantic love and relationships is a marker of character development, growth, adulthood or redemption.

- The idea that because romantic love and relationships are universal, to not depict them in media is to render one’s work childish or uninteresting. (Every aro-spec creator of narrative media knows the impact of this one.)

- The idea that the lack of romantic love or relationships, or the desire for these, is an indicator of a person of low moral character.

- The unquestioned idea that romance sells, accompanied with the assumption that the inclusion of romance in a work (or the story-arc of a protagonist) is a necessary part of making that work (or character) appealing to all audiences.

- No comprehension that romantic attraction can be felt and experienced in a diversity of ways and strengths, particularly with regards to fluctuation, intensity and circumstance.

- Very little comprehension of the difference between romantic attraction and romantic behaviours.

- An assumption that there is a certain set of behaviours that are only or best experienced with romantic attraction. (Engaging in these behaviours without romantic attraction is also often coded as predatory.)

Please note that all these discussions of romance are based on an alloromantic model: romance in and of itself is not inherently amatonormative. Aro-spec people’s experiences of romantic love and relationships do not fit the above because they do not and cannot assume that everyone fits this assumption of romantic attraction being a universal, unquestioned human. If your depiction of romance doesn’t assume that romance makes us a worthy human and everyone experiences it, it’s probably not amatonormative.

There’s heavy overlap with ableism, misogyny, heterosexism, whoremisia, etc, and this must be acknowledged. Amatonormativity hits hard on its own, but it seldom hits alone. More often it’s paired up with another form of oppression, which means people who better fit its norms can deny its existence by claiming the problem is due only to amatonormativity’s current partner.

Additionally, most mainstream amatonormative works are going to be about cishet romances (the romantic relationship between a cis heterosexual man and a cis heterosexual woman, presumed to be perisex and both alloromantic and allosexual). Women are far more subject to the need to be shown in romantic relationships than men; men are more often allowed to travel through the narrative without being subject to a romance, although most are shown as at least desiring it. Each experience of marginalisation is going to shape in different ways how amatonormativity impacts us, and this needs to be discussed (especially because if we don’t, antagonists deny the existence of amatonormativity altogether).

(I will say that amatonormativity and misogyny have a strange relationship in that excessive romance is treated as feminine and emotional, and denigrated because of it. We all know how literature is valued and respected over fanworks and genre romance. Cishet men, meanwhile, have a long history of treating the having of a romantic partner as a trap–phrases like “ball and chain” with regards to a wife, for example. Despite this, there’s still an unquestioned social expectation that men experience romance attraction and have, will have or want a romantic partner.)

I’ll use my experience as a trans aro to give an example of this kind of overlap.

Amatonormativity in LGBTQIA+ media is coloured by the fact that LGBTQIA+ folks have been denied romantically-happy-endings until recently; the rise of fandom and LGBTQIA+ genre media has done much to change this. Yet both are, predominantly, romance narratives, to the extent that there is little space for anything else. This history leaves me in an awkward position. The need for love stories featuring trans characters and trans bodies as worthy of romantic interest and desire is profound. In a world where romantic love is seen as the only kind of love worth talking about, powerful and primary, it’s natural many trans/NB stories are about just that.

I feel like I’m walking on thin ice if I talk about how depicting romance as the only acceptable trans happy ending defines my experience of gender by romantic experiences--and yet that is exactly what I feel. Furthermore, this is a narrative many alloromantic trans people need and deserve. In trying to tell stories about me, an aro trans person, who isn’t a target of romantic love, my stories are seen by alloromantic trans folks as mirroring the narratives that have long harmed trans people, treating us as unlovable. My work cannot provide the validation–that they are desired and loved romantically–alloromantic trans folks are looking for.

The amatonormativity isn’t in the existence of trans romance stories, but the fact there are fewer publishing options, and smaller audiences, for non-romantic/aromantic/gen stories about trans love and identity. The amatonormativity lies in the fact that romantic love for trans characters is the love on which trans genre media centres.

As a reader, I need stories that talk about different kinds of love, love for myself and my own body, a radical self-acceptance that isn’t tied to someone else’s romantic interest in me. Instead, I get stories telling me that I am accepted, as a trans person, if my identity is tied up in experiences I don’t have and don’t desire.

The intersection of amatonormativity and cissexism results in its own peculiar oppression for me as a trans aro, one that I find impossible to navigate in a world where it isn’t understood that romance doesn’t have to be the primary form of expressing love and acceptance for trans characters and even trans bodies. I’ve seen so many posts on my dash about people proclaiming a want for trans storytelling while getting no benefit from this movement because I’m writing about aro trans characters. That’s more than a little disheartening.

This kind of intersection does a lot of damage to aro-spec creators who are otherwise marginalised (so many marginalised experiences come with a heavy dose of we are lovable, our love is important, we deserve the right for our love to be accepted and protected and acknowledged, much of this conversation centred on romantic love) but just being an aro-spec creator who creates aro-spec narrative media comes with an inherent disadvantage that is difficult to surmount.

I’ve got some numbers for this disadvantage, actually. My latest work, The Wind and the Stars, has had fifty downloads in its first month, and I’m actually excited by that, because everything else I’ve posted with the tag “aromantic” has gotten approximately twenty downloads in their first months. A couple of works didn’t break the fifty mark until three or four months in! By contrast, with the same amount of promotion but published under a brand new name with no back catalogue to help (unlike my other works), my explicitly queer paranormal romance story got three hundred downloads in its first month. How am I supposed to provide representation for my community when I don’t have enough interest in my work to justify the work of its production?

The tag aromantic helps guide aro-spec readers, but it actively discourages most alloromantic readers (who exist in far greater number) from reading, and most of them won’t have any comprehension of why. They just see romance as normal and interesting, and anything that subverts this, be it specifically aromantic or just gen, undermines this worldview. It happens so subconsciously it’s near impossible to challenge.

In a way, one of the most damaging aspects of amatonormativity is its lack of recognition. Most people have some understanding, now, on what misogyny is and what harm it might cause, even if one disagrees with it or has a 101 understanding at best. There’s a social model for beginning to understand this. Amatonormativity, on the other hand, has no such basis. It’s so unquestioned that few people who aren’t aro-spec recognise it or need to, and it’s often seen as a lesser problem. As someone who is struggling as a creator because of amatonormativity, to the extent that I don’t know how I can possibly survive as a writer, it angers me to see this treated as less important than other forms of normativity. No, nobody will beat me up on the street as an aro, but if I can’t keep a roof over my head because only a small number of people are reading my free books and I have no belief they’ll buy my next book, how does this distinction matter?

Amatonormativity silences, erases and oppresses aro-spec people. It substantially disadvantages us in how we are seen by others and how we interact with the world around us. And almost nobody outside aro-spec spaces wants to acknowledge it.

Sorry for the rant at the end there, anon. Does this give you some idea on how amatonormativity is demonstrated through media and how it impacts aro-spec creatives?

#anon #ask #text #amatonormativity #amatonormativity in creativity #I will essay at you #long post #very long post #extremely long post #mod k.a.#romance mention #discussion post #romance discussion #creativity discussion posts #aromanticism and intersectionality #not media #support our aro spec creatives if you can

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justforbooks · 7 years

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My Life as a Writer

The following is an interview Philip Roth gave to Daniel Sandstrom, the cultural editor at Svenska Dagbladet, for publication in Swedish translation in that newspaper and in its original English in the Book Review.

“Sabbath’s Theater” is now being translated into Swedish, almost 20 years after its original release. How would you describe this book to readers who have not yet read it or heard of it, and how would you describe the main character, the unforgettable Mickey Sabbath?

“Sabbath’s Theater” takes as its epigraph a line of the aged Prospero’s in Act 5 of “The Tempest.” “Every third thought,” says Prospero, “shall be my grave.” I could have called the book “Death and the Art of Dying.” It is a book in which breakdown is rampant, suicide is rampant, hatred is rampant, lust is rampant. Where disobedience is rampant. Where death is rampant.

Mickey Sabbath doesn’t live with his back turned to death the way normal people like us do. No one could have concurred more heartily with the judgment of Franz Kafka than would Sabbath, when Kafka wrote, “The meaning of life is that it stops.”

His book is death-haunted — there is Sabbath’s great grief about the death of others and a great gaiety about his own. There is leaping with delight, there is also leaping with despair. Sabbath learns to mistrust life when his adored older brother is killed in World War II. It is Morty’s death that determines how Sabbath will live. The death of Morty sets the gold standard for grief. Loss governs Sabbath’s world.

Sabbath is anything but the perfect external man. His is, rather, the instinctual turbulence of the man beneath the man. His repellent way of living — he is a kiln of antagonism, unable and unwilling to hide anything and, with his raging, satirizing nature, mocking everything, living beyond the limits of discretion and taste and blaspheming against the decent — this repellent way of living is his uniquely Sabbathian response to a place where nothing keeps its promise and everything is perishable. His repellent way of living, a life of unalterable contention, is the best preparation he knows of for death. In his mischief he finds his truth.

Lastly, this Sabbath is a jokester like Hamlet, who winks at the genre of tragedy by cracking jokes as Sabbath winks at the genre of comedy by planning suicide. There is loss, death, dying, decay, grief — and laughter, ungovernable laughter. Pursued by death, Sabbath is followed everywhere by laughter.

I know that you have reread all of your books recently. What was your verdict? And what was your opinion of “Sabbath’s Theater” while reading it again?

When I decided to stop writing about five years ago I did, as you say, sit down to reread the 31 books I’d published between 1959 and 2010. I wanted to see whether I’d wasted my time. You never can be sure, you know.

My conclusion, after I’d finished, echoes the words spoken by an American boxing hero of mine, Joe Louis. He was world heavyweight champion from the time I was 4 until I was 16. He had been born in the Deep South, an impoverished black kid with no education to speak of, and even during the glory of the undefeated 12 years, when he defended his championship an astonishing 26 times, he stood aloof from language. So when he was asked upon his retirement about his long career, Joe sweetly summed it up in just 10 words. “I did the best I could with what I had.”

In some quarters it is almost a cliché to mention the word “misogyny” in relation to your books. What, do you think, prompted this reaction initially, and what is your response to those who still try to label your work in that way?

Misogyny, a hatred of women, provides my work with neither a structure, a meaning, a motive, a message, a conviction, a perspective, or a guiding principle. This is contrary, say, to how another noxious form of psychopathic abhorrence — and misogyny’s equivalent in the sweeping inclusiveness of its pervasive malice — anti-Semitism, a hatred of Jews, provides all those essentials to “Mein Kampf.” My traducers propound my alleged malefaction as though I have spewed venom on women for half a century. But only a madman would go to the trouble of writing 31 books in order to affirm his hatred.

It is my comic fate to be the writer these traducers have decided I am not. They practice a rather commonplace form of social control: You are not what you think you are. You are what we think you are. You are what we choose for you to be.

Well, welcome to the subjective human race. The imposition of a cause’s idea of reality on the writer’s idea of reality can only mistakenly be called “reading.” And in the case at hand, it is not necessarily a harmless amusement. In some quarters, “misogynist” is now a word used almost as laxly as was “Communist” by the McCarthyite right in the 1950s — and for very like the same purpose.

Yet every writer learns over a lifetime to be tolerant of the stupid inferences that are drawn from literature and the fantasies implausibly imposed upon it. As for the kind of writer I am? I am who I don’t pretend to be.

The men in your books are often misinterpreted. Some reviewers make the, I believe, misleading assumption that your male characters are some kind of heroes or role models; if you look at the male characters in your books, what traits do they share — what is their condition?

As I see it, my focus has never been on masculine power rampant and triumphant but rather on the antithesis: masculine power impaired. I have hardly been singing a paean to male superiority but rather representing manhood stumbling, constricted, humbled, devastated and brought down. I am not a utopian moralist. My intention is to present my fictional men not as they should be but vexed as men are.

The drama issues from the assailability of vital, tenacious men with their share of peculiarities who are neither mired in weakness nor made of stone and who, almost inevitably, are bowed by blurred moral vision, real and imaginary culpability, conflicting allegiances, urgent desires, uncontrollable longings, unworkable love, the culprit passion, the erotic trance, rage, self-division, betrayal, drastic loss, vestiges of innocence, fits of bitterness, lunatic entanglements, consequential misjudgment, understanding overwhelmed, protracted pain, false accusation, unremitting strife, illness, exhaustion, estrangement, derangement, aging, dying and, repeatedly, inescapable harm, the rude touch of the terrible surprise — unshrinking men stunned by the life one is defenseless against, including especially history: the unforeseen that is constantly recurring as the current moment.

It is the social struggle of the current moment on which a number of these men find themselves impaled. It isn’t sufficient, of course, to speak of “rage” or “betrayal” — rage and betrayal have a history, like everything else. The novel maps the ordeal of that history and, if it succeeds, by doing so probes the conscience of the society it depicts.

“The struggle with writing is over” is a recent quote. Could you describe that struggle, and also, tell us something about your life now when you are not writing?

Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life. It was also my good luck that happiness didn’t matter to me and I had no compassion for myself.

Though why such a task should have fallen to me I have no idea. Maybe writing protected me against even worse menace.

Now? Now I am a bird sprung from a cage instead of (to reverse Kafka’s famous conundrum) a bird in search of a cage. The horror of being caged has lost its thrill. It is now truly a great relief, something close to a sublime experience, to have nothing more to worry about than death.

You belong to an exceptional generation of postwar writers, who defined American literature for almost half a century: Bellow, Styron, Updike, Doctorow, DeLillo. What made this golden age happen and what made it great? Did you feel, in your active years, that these writers were competition or did you feel kinship — or both? And why were there so few female writers with equal success in that same period? Finally: What is your opinion of the state of contemporary American fiction now?

I agree that it’s been a good time for the novel in America, but I can’t say I know what accounts for it. Maybe it is the absence of certain things that somewhat accounts for it. The American novelist’s indifference to, if not contempt for, “critical” theory. Aesthetic freedom unhampered by all the high-and-mighty isms and their humorlessness. (Can you think of an ideology capable of corrective self-satire, let alone one that wouldn’t want to sink its teeth into an imagination on the loose?) Writing that is uncontaminated by political propaganda — or even political responsibility. The absence of any “school” of writing. In a place so vast, no single geographic center from which the writing originates. Anything but a homogeneous population, no basic national unity, no single national character, social calm utterly unknown, even the general obtuseness about literature, the inability of many citizens to read any of it with even minimal comprehension, confers a certain freedom. And surely the fact that writers really don’t mean a goddamn thing to nine-tenths of the population doesn’t hurt. It’s inebriating.

Very little truthfulness anywhere, antagonism everywhere, so much calculated to disgust, the gigantic hypocrisies, no holding fierce passions at bay, the ordinary viciousness you can see just by pressing the remote, explosive weapons in the hands of creeps, the gloomy tabulation of unspeakable violent events, the unceasing despoliation of the biosphere for profit, surveillance overkill that will come back to haunt us, great concentrations of wealth financing the most undemocratic malevolents around, science illiterates still fighting the Scopes trial 89 years on, economic inequities the size of the Ritz, indebtedness on everyone’s tail, families not knowing how bad things can get, money being squeezed out of every last thing — that frenzy — and (by no means new) government hardly by the people through representative democracy but rather by the great financial interests, the old American plutocracy worse than ever.

You have 300 million people on a continent 3,000 miles wide doing the best they can with their inexhaustible troubles. We are witnessing a new and benign admixture of races on a scale unknown since the malignancy of slavery. I could go on and on. It’s hard not to feel close to existence here. This is not some quiet little corner of the world.

Do you feel that there is a preoccupation in Europe with American popular culture? And, if so, that this preoccupation has clouded the reception of serious American literary fiction in Europe?

The power in any society is with those who get to impose the fantasy. It is no longer, as it was for centuries throughout Europe, the church that imposes its fantasy on the populace, nor is it the totalitarian superstate that imposes the fantasy, as it did for 12 years in Nazi Germany and for 69 years in the Soviet Union. Now the fantasy that prevails is the all-consuming, voraciously consumed popular culture, seemingly spawned by, of all things, freedom. The young especially live according to beliefs that are thought up for them by the society’s most unthinking people and by the businesses least impeded by innocent ends.

Ingeniously as their parents and teachers may attempt to protect the young from being drawn, to their detriment, into the moronic amusement park that is now universal, the preponderance of the power is not with them.

I cannot see what any of this has to do with serious American literary fiction, even if, as you suggest, “this preoccupation has [or may have] clouded the reception of serious American fiction in Europe.” You know, in Eastern Europe, the dissident writers used to say that “socialist realism,” the reigning Soviet aesthetic, consisted of praising the Party so that even they understood it. There is no such aesthetic for serious literary writers to conform to in America, certainly not the aesthetic of popular culture.

What has the aesthetic of popular culture to do with formidable postwar writers of such enormous variety as Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, William Styron, Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, James Baldwin, Wallace Stegner, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Penn Warren, John Updike, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, Robert Stone, Evan Connell, Louis Auchincloss, Walker Percy, Cormac McCarthy, Russell Banks, William Kennedy, John Barth, Louis Begley, William Gaddis, Norman Rush, John Edgar Wideman, David Plante, Richard Ford, William Gass, Joseph Heller, Raymond Carver, Edmund White, Oscar Hijuelos, Peter Matthiessen, Paul Theroux, John Irving, Norman Mailer, Reynolds Price, James Salter, Denis Johnson, J. F. Powers, Paul Auster, William Vollmann, Richard Stern, Alison Lurie, Flannery O’Connor, Paula Fox, Marilynne Robinson, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, Hortense Calisher, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler, Jamaica Kincaid, Cynthia Ozick, Ann Beattie, Grace Paley, Lorrie Moore, Mary Gordon, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Eudora Welty (and I have by no means exhausted the list) or with serious younger writers as wonderfully gifted as Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, Nicole Krauss, Maile Meloy, Jonathan Lethem, Nathan Englander, Claire Messud, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer (to name but a handful)?

You have been awarded almost every literary prize, except one. And it is no secret that your name is always mentioned when there is talk of the Nobel Prize in Literature — how does it feel to be an eternal candidate? Does it bother you, or do you laugh about it?

I wonder if I had called “Portnoy’s Complaint” “The Orgasm Under Rapacious Capitalism,” if I would thereby have earned the favor of the Swedish Academy.

In Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “Roth Unbound,” there is an interesting chapter on your clandestine work with persecuted writers in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. If a young author — a Philip Roth born in, say, 1983 — were to engage in the global conflicts of 2014, which ones would he pick?

I don’t know how to answer that. I for one didn’t go to Prague with a mission. I wasn’t looking to “pick” a trouble spot. I was on a vacation and had gone to Prague looking for Kafka.

But the morning after I arrived, I happened to drop by my publishing house to introduce myself. I was led into a conference room to share a glass of slivovitz with the editorial staff. Afterwards one of the editors asked me to lunch. At the restaurant, where her boss happened to be dining too, she told me quietly that all the people in that conference room were “swine,” beginning with the boss — party hacks hired to replace those editors who, four years earlier, had been fired because of their support for the reforms of the Prague Spring. I asked her about my translators, a husband-and-wife team, and that evening I had dinner with them. They too were now prevented from working, for the same reasons, and were living in political disgrace.

When I returned home, I found in New York a small group of Czech intellectuals who had fled Prague when the Russian tanks rolled in to put down the Prague Spring. By the time I returned to Russian-occupied Prague the following spring, I wasn’t vacationing. I was carrying with me a long list of people to see, the most endangered members of an enslaved nation, the proscribed writers for whom sadism, not socialism, was the state religion. The rest developed from that.

Yes, character is destiny, and yet everything is chance.

If you would interview yourself at this point in your life — there must be a question that you haven’t been asked, that would be obvious and important, but has been ignored by the journalists? What would that be?

Perversely enough, when you ask about a question that has been ignored by journalists, I think immediately of the question that any number of them cannot seem to ignore. The question goes something like this: “Do you still think such-and-such? Do you still believe so-and-so?” and then they quote something spoken not by me but by a character in a book of mine. If you won’t mind, may I use the occasion of your final question to say what is probably already clear to the readers of the literary pages of Svenska Dagbladet, if not to the ghosts of the journalists I am summoning up?

Whoever looks for the writer’s thinking in the words and thoughts of his characters is looking in the wrong direction. Seeking out a writer’s “thoughts” violates the richness of the mixture that is the very hallmark of the novel. The thought of the novelist that matters most is the thought that makes him a novelist.

The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters, in the juxtaposition of those characters and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make — their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized.

The thought of the writer lies in his choice of an aspect of reality previously unexamined in the way that he conducts an examination. The thought of the writer is embedded everywhere in the course of the novel’s action. The thought of the writer is figured invisibly in the elaborate pattern — in the newly emerging constellation of imagined things — that is the architecture of the book: what Aristotle called simply “the arrangement of the parts,” the “matter of size and order.” The thought of the novel is embodied in the moral focus of the novel. The tool with which the novelist thinks is the scrupulosity of his style. Here, in all this, lies whatever magnitude his thought may have.

The novel, then, is in itself his mental world. A novelist is not a tiny cog in the great wheel of human thought. He is a tiny cog in the great wheel of imaginative literature.

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