bluebyrd-bookreviews

[bluebyrd-bookreviews]

Bsky post by libro.fm: Tomorrow, a certain online mega-retailer launches a book sale, just days before Indie Bookstore Day on 4/26. This is no coincidence; Bookstore Day is one of the largest revenue drivers for indies.

Indies need our support to thrive & build community spaces for all...mega-retailers do not.

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Fuck Amazon. Go to bookshop.org or better yet, take a little time on Saturday to visit your local indie bookstore.

[bluebyrd-bookreviews]

"During the writing process, he was in his living room excitedly explaining the T-1000 to his friend and collaborator Stan Winston when Winston raised a concern. "I don't know who the bad guy is," Winston said. "I need a specific character, a specific image." To Winston, what Cameron was describing sounded like a blob of goo, not an iconic evildoer. "From a story standpoint, I thought it was a problem," Winston later recalled in an interview for the picture-book history of his story, "The Winston Effect." Cameron respected Winston's instincts for creating memorable characters, and he started reconsidering how he would shape this one. Later that same night, the effects artist got a phone call from his friend. "I've got it!" Cameron said. "He's a cop!" The form the T-1000 would take for most of the movie was a Los Angeles police officer. This solved the storytelling dilemma Winston had raised and also gave Cameron an opportunity to underline a central theme in both of the Terminator movies - how people, especially those in violent jobs, like soldiers and cops, can become barbarized. "The Terminator films are not really about the human race getting killed of by future machines. They're about us losing touch with our own humanity and becoming machines, which allows us to kill and brutalize each other," he says. "Cops think all non-cops as less than they are, stupid, weak, and evil. They dehumanize the people they are sworn to protect and desensitize themselves in order to do that job.""

Source: https://www.amazon.com/Futurist-Life-Films-James-Cameron-ebook/dp/B0034184U0

[bluebyrd-bookreviews]

there’s a big difference between “i’m sad because a character i was emotionally invested in was killed off” and “this character’s death served no purpose, was used for shock value, and is the product of bad writing and i’m upset about that”

[bluebyrd-bookreviews]

People who are allowed to name mental disordered based off of figures in classical literature need to be shot bc wtf

"Oedipus complex" ah yeah, the guy who intentionally left his home to try to avoid fulfilling the prophecy only to unintentionally trigger said prophecy and cutting out his eyes from shame and guilt over actions. This so reflects an inherent desire to sleep with one's mother and a fear of being castrated by your father, definitely. That's what that story is about

Or "Othello syndrome" because when I read Othello, and watched how Iago intentionally manipulated everyone throughout the plot out of a racism and jealousy and went as far as to get duplicates of Desdemona's personal affects manufactured just to create the narrative that she is cheating with his second in command, I definitely was like "that Othello is so delusional in a clinical sense for being convinced that his wife is cheating on him"

We need to put naming things after people and fictional characters up on the shelf

[bluebyrd-bookreviews]

this is the worst fucking day of my life, and yet i am not surprised in the slightest.

toph is an icon for disabled people. she’s one of so few blind characters who is a hero and whose disability is not her weakness or fatal flaw. while it does make her life harder, as any disability does, it also gives her strength. she is the greatest earthbender of her generation. she invented a whole new subsection of bending. the people behind the live action production had a chance to make history just by doing the bare minimum: casting a blind actress to play a blind character. they couldn’t even do that.

not only that, but they’re making her “slightly more feminine” to “humanize” her. as if there weren’t so many young girls out there who looked up to toph because she was weird and didn’t fit the mold. in “tales of ba sing se” she tells katara, “i don’t care what i look like. i’m not looking for anyone’s approval. i know who i am.” to have a female character who doesn’t conform to beauty standards is so important especially right now with the prevalent beauty influencer culture.

while the original cartoon’s representation of women wasn’t perfect, it was diverse. katara and ty lee were both feminine. they liked to dress up and look pretty. toph is not feminine. she grew up forced to dress in formal clothes and style herself a certain way and decided to liberate herself from that. all three of these women are incredibly strong and incredibly talented at what they do, and none of that is impacted by their appearance or gender presentation.

every day, my hatred for the netflix version of avatar grows.

[bluebyrd-bookreviews]

"the best way to screw jkr over is by making her characters queer!" actually. The best way to screw jkr over is to stop engaging with the property she still profits off of and read a different fucking book

[bluebyrd-bookreviews]

I love movies where the plot takes place in less than a day. It’s like. What if these people were experiencing the worst 8 hours of the entire lives and you got to see the highlight reel?

[bluebyrd-bookreviews]

You can fight AI in indie publishing by leaving reviews.

Seriously.

Ai-generated garbage is flooding the self-publishing market. It works as a numbers game- put out ENOUGH fake crap and eventually someone’s aunt will buy them the ebook as an unwanted gift, and you’ll have made two dollars. This tactic works at SCALE, which means real independent titles are now a needle amongst a haystack of slop.

If you have read a book this year that has less than 5 reviews, your rating is an algorithmic spotlight on that needle.

A one sentence review helps. Really. A star rating helps if you really can’t think of anything to say, but if you can muster up even “I laughed at the part about the tabby cat” you are doing indie authors a favor like you cannot believe.

(Also if you left a review on one of my books this year I am kissing you so softly on your forehead and I adore you)

[bluebyrd-bookreviews]

Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde looked at the source material and said "what if instead of Hyde being a weird little guy, she served absolute cunt"

And they were so real for that. Because she served so much cunt the whole time and it slayed

[bluebyrd-bookreviews]

Sherlock Holmes having a universal ace experience -- expressing disinterest and immediately getting called an inhuman robot.

[bluebyrd-bookreviews]

Talking about the literacy crisis among men with other men is like eating a bowl of thumbtacks. Oh, so you recognize that the problem is that men don't like to read fiction anymore because it's seen as feminine and gay, and you think the solution is for publishers to stop meeting the demand currently being driven by women (the people reading fiction the most) rather than tell your sons and nephews that reading fiction isn't, in fact, gay.

[bluebyrd-bookreviews]

eleven year olds need book series filled to the brim with violence and crime. it's like enrichment for them

[bluebyrd-bookreviews]

hello fellow non-Black tumblr users. welcome to my saw trap. if you'd like to leave, please name one (1) Black woman author who is not Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, or N.K. Jemisin. bonus points if she's published a book in the last five years.

[bluebyrd-bookreviews]

> sees complaints that a female character looks "too masculine" or "like an ugly lesbian"

> ask if we got an actual butch character or if shes just a normal looking woman that isnt wearing make up and a dress

> person is visibly confused, i start explaining the difference between actual butch presentation and dress and a woman simply dressing comfortably to avoid indecent exposure

> person laughs and says "she straight up looks like a guy, i can barely tell her apart from the actual men"

> google the character

> shes just a normal looking woman that isnt wearing make up and a dress

[bluebyrd-bookreviews]

[bluebyrd-bookreviews]

This is in direct reference to Pet (2016) which people actually liked because the girl who was kidnapped ended up being a psychopath and manipulating the guy bc she "fell in love with him in her own fucked up way" and it just sucks. You could say that she was just "playing the game to escape" but that's not how it's played off in the film. He starts getting freaked out by how crazy and freaky she is literally saying "no, no, this is totally fucked" like he wasn't the one who drugged and kidnapped her and put everyone in this situation in the first place. But she wants to get off sexually and suddenly she's crazy and deranged and how couldche have found himself in this situation and look at how cruel and evil she is as a manipulator while she is literally trapped in a cage that he special built to hold her

And also Miller's Girl where a middle aged high school teacher (who also writes erotica under his real name, which isn't relevant but also doesn't matter that much) falls in love with one of his students and she also falls in love with him but when he says "actually, we need to have a professional relationship and I don't want to lose my job" he becomes the victim of her manipulations as she lies as says that he was a predator and sexually harassed her even though we as the audience know that he didn't and then suddenly he's the poor victim at his big age of a literal high school student who he did lead on intentionally for a while

And also The Idol by the weekend where literally the whole fucking show is about the main character being the victim of basically every person around her because she was raised in an industry that fundamentally disrespects her autonomy in favor of profits and then at the end she lies about being sexually assaulted and reveals that she has been lying about all of the abuse from her mother and uses all of this to manipulate and control the guy who had been creepy and controlling and setting up a fucking cult in her house

And none of these are really revenge stories, they are really supposed to just be clever twists but they just come off really gross in my opinion

Like, I don't really like anyone will look at any of these films and then look at a real victim of sexual assault and say "but what if you are lying just like [insert character here]" but it does perpetuate disgusting narratives and reveal a general belief that victims of sexual assault are actually liers and manipulators

I don't need every single victim in every single depiction to be a perfect victim. That would suck, actually. They should be human with human emotions and human flaws

But I absolutely hate when a character is undeniably a victim in a situation but then *plot twist* they were actually the master manipulator the whole time (especially in stories of sexual assault)

Characters can be in mutually toxic relationships. They can be the main abuser and then in this particular case be the victim or vice versa. These are all things that happen in real relationships and make for interesting power dynamics

But these stories aren't interested in telling a messy story, they are primarily focused on shifting the victim from being the victim of assault to the perpetrator, to discredit them as victims of sexual assault. It's not fun or sexy. She's not secretly in control. It just sucks

[bluebyrd-bookreviews]

I don't need every single victim in every single depiction to be a perfect victim. That would suck, actually. They should be human with human emotions and human flaws

But I absolutely hate when a character is undeniably a victim in a situation but then *plot twist* they were actually the master manipulator the whole time (especially in stories of sexual assault)

Characters can be in mutually toxic relationships. They can be the main abuser and then in this particular case be the victim or vice versa. These are all things that happen in real relationships and make for interesting power dynamics

But these stories aren't interested in telling a messy story, they are primarily focused on shifting the victim from being the victim of assault to the perpetrator, to discredit them as victims of sexual assault. It's not fun or sexy. She's not secretly in control. It just sucks