problematicya

[problematicya]

Hi. Do you mind if I use some of your posts as sources for a document of problematic authors?

Yes, you can. Sorry for this late ass response. LOL

[problematicya]

The 2017 College Grad Who Got Attacked by a Horde of YA Authors Had No Idea What She Was Getting Into

She spent the weekend deleting her social media accounts because of all the harassment.

For the past 10 years, Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota, has assigned all of its first-year students the same book to read. The Common Read program, funded by local donors, then invites the author or a related speaker to discuss the book on campus. A recent short feature story in the Aberdeen News marking the program’s 10th anniversary quoted a 2017 graduate on why she decided to volunteer for the selection committee during her junior year: to prevent a book by YA author Sarah Dessen from being chosen for the program. “She’s fine for teen girls,” English graduate Brooke Nelson said. “But definitely not up to the level of Common Read. So I became involved simply so I could stop them from ever choosing Sarah Dessen.”

The quote was punchy, even intemperate. But the backlash it inspired online was exponentially more so. The saga that ensued would be worthy of a dystopian YA novel if it weren’t for the fact that 100 percent of the characters are technically adults.

Dessen is an extremely popular YA author who has written more than a dozen novels. Her teen romance The Rest of the Story debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times’ YA bestseller list this summer, soon after Netflix announced that it had optioned three other novels for adaptation. The fracas this week began when Dessen herself somehow found the South Dakota story and mournfully tweeted a screenshot to her 268,000 followers. “Authors are real people,” she wrote. “I’m having a really hard time right now and this is just mean and cruel. I hope it made you feel good.” [Update, Nov. 15, 2019, at 4:02 p.m.: Sarah Dessen posted an apology for her initial tweet on Friday afternoon. “I want to apologize to the person who was quoted,” she wrote, adding that hearing from people who don’t like her work is “part of the job.” “With a platform and a following, I have a responsibility to be aware of what I put out there,” she wrote. “I am truly sorry. Moving forward, I’ll do better.”]

Dessen scratched out Nelson’s name in her screenshot, but the story was easy to find, and Dessen’s many influential fans and followers quickly piled on their sympathy—and rage. Roxane Gay tweeted that Dessen now has a “nemesis” and suggested that Nelson had an “inflated idea” of her own “taste level.” (Gay has since apologized for these tweets.) In a since-deleted tweet, YA author Siobhan Vivian replied, “Fuck that fucking bitch.” (“I love you,” Dessen replied.) Fellow YA writer Dhonielle Clayton chimed in: “Can I add a few more choice words for Siobhan’s brilliance … fuck that RAGGEDY ASS fucking bitch.” Vivian replied with the clapping, cigarette, and nail-painting emoji. (Dessen, Vivian, and Clayton have since deleted their tweets. A request for comment sent through a website associated with Dessen did not receive a reply. Clayton did not reply to a request for comment, but Vivian expressed regret by email: “I tweeted something I should have DMed. I was hurt because my friend was hurt and now I’ve hurt someone else. I’m truly sorry for my part.”)

Author Jennifer Weiner, who has made a career of defending so-called chick lit from misogynist criticism, elaborated. “When we tell teenage girls that their stories matter less—or not at all—there are real-world consequences,” she tweeted. She added the hashtag #MeToo and linked to a Vox story about why it took so long for the teenage victims of gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar to be heard. Incredibly, the implication seemed to be that there was a connection between sexual assault and the literary taste of one committee member of a small college’s common reading program.

Nelson, for her part, emailed me on Thursday night: “In 2017, I was a college junior who joined a committee because I wanted to have a voice in what text was selected for a college reading program. I was only one vote on a large committee of college students, faculty, staff, and community members.” After spending the week deactivating her social media accounts in response to harassment, she had agonized over whether to make any statement at all. She was worried the episode could “torpedo” her career—she’s in graduate school—and she was too skittish to talk to a journalist by phone after her last experience doing so.

continue reading at Slate

[problematicya]

JSYK, journalfen is down, so if you link to fandom_wank or the bad_penny archive of CC's plagiarism, use the waybackmarchine or website versions. :)

Thank you for letting me know! 

[problematicya]

5-star reviews of “For Such a Time”

[tw: Nazis, the Holocaust, ableism]

Okay so you may or may not be aware that a Christian Inspirational romance about a Jewish woman and a Nazi concentration camp commandant [link goes to the Smart Bitches review, NOT Amazon, because DON’T BUY IT] was a finalist in two RITA categories this year. (The RITAs are like, the romance version of the Oscars, basically.)

The BFF bravely waded through the MANY 5-star Goodreads reviews for this book and compiled some highlights for me which I want to share with you. I tried to keep the commentary to a minimum but sometimes I couldn’t help myself.

“Due to the fact that Stella has suffered so long in a camp she has to wear a wig of red hair to hide the baldness of her head from being shaved, she is impossibly thin and gaunt and the author painted a perfect picture of that aspect. And it was interesting to watch her transformation from starving survivor to a beautiful woman, wanted and adored. I liked Aric, I enjoyed the inner struggle of everything, he wasn’t exactly a nazi he was a german completing orders he hated because that is what he was trained to do…I firmly believe that even though all the evil that was going on there were still good germans who fought for Germany and not for Hitler.”

this is literally what a Nazi is

(the BFF’s commentary: “it’s so tragic to them that these upstanding clean cut nice blond boys were THROUGH NO FAULT OF THEIR OWN EVER brought into this tragic situation. let me shed a tear for these poor nazi officers. they didn’t want their life to be like this.”)

[blargh I ended up writing a big paragraph here about the banality of evil, but in the end I deleted it because look YOU KNOW PROBABLY. And I think these reviews speak for themselves.]

Aric is an Austrian who has had a difficult life. Stella is a Jew who is living a difficult life. Together they find that barriers between the Nazis and Jews can be torn down and they can coexist, after all, they are both human. 

It then develops that Aric is Not Your Average Nazi because he…is nice to disabled people.

What she knows for sure is that Colonel Schmidt defies categorization. He’s a Nazi Kommandant, yet the people he chooses to gather around him are all cast-offs on one way or another. And he takes care of them. 

Joseph… the one-eared houseboy. Precocious and sweet, Joseph retains his innocence and faith. He is the first thing Stella allows herself to love in the Kommandant’s house, and for Stella he symbolizes the fate of all the children. 

Helen, the mute cook whose silent presence helps guide this household. She and Aric understand each other instinctively, and there is a strong loyalty between them. (Aric says that scent of Helen’s apfelstrudel could lead men into battle.) 

Sgt. Rand Grossman, Aric’s best friend and brother-in-arms. Rand is trusted implicitly, and he deserves that trust. He lost a hand in the war, but he never lost his honor or his heart. 

*******

Every time I read a book about this time period, I feel sickened that one person could convince people to commit genocide.

HAHAHAHA. Here is where I always bring up that only one or two ppl in my family made it to the camps because they were all murdered by their neighbors. Who’d been pogroming them regularly before that. So yeah the Holocaust was definitely the work of one man.

THEN it turned out THERE IS A FICTIONAL HAPPY ENDING where the hero leads everyone to safety?????

She portrays the horrors of the Holocaust without delving into the terrible details which are often hard to bare. Having taught and attended many workshops on the Holocaust, I was familiar with the farce of the Red Cross inspection of Therensienstadt. I made me sad that the realty could not have been the way the story portrayed it. 

Honestly, I wish that the events in this novel were true, instead of fiction. I don’t want to give away the end of the story, but I wish there had been an Aric von Schmidt leading a transit camp.

Unfortunately, the story is fictional. The great escape never occurred. The author shares the facts in the Afterword, making the story all the more tragic….My favorite part of the book is the verses that Stella finds in her mysteriously appearing Bible….[H]er memories of best friend Marta sharing the gospel will encourage the reader in his/her own encounters with those who need to know God’s love.

The takeaway is that you should DEFINITELY try to convert Jews I guess, in case your people ever attempts genocide against them it will really buoy them up in their time of need.

Did I mention it is apparently heavily implied that Stella/Hadassah will convert after the end of the book?

If you love Esther’s story in the Bible, if you love historical fiction, if you love romance, if you are intrigued by WWII, by the suffering the Jewish people endured, then you will LOVE this book…I love Stella’s struggle with Christianity, and her friends who have shared Jesus with her in the past. Jesus is stirring in her even when she wants to deny Him.

I liked how Stella began to read the Bible, even the New Testament, and then how she discovered the truth of love, forgiveness, and faith in God.

Also, you may not be able to understand this at the beginning of the book, but I loved Aric. I really did. Like, a lot. I have officially put him on my mental ‘favourite book guys’ that I would love to marry. ;)[…]I was glad that Hadassah/Stella opened up to the New Testament, and had that hope, as I know that most Jewish people did not read the NT. 

*********

With her blonde hair and blue eyes, she was told she would be safe because those physical characteristics were rare in the Jewish people, but she knew beauty could be a dangerous liability.

and in another review:

Stella was told her beauty would save her, her blonde hair and blue eyes being rare to her people

blonde hair and blue eyes=beauty, folks

********

I’ve never considered the parallels between the treatment of Jewish people in the Bible book of Esther and their treatment during the Holocaust until I heard about this book.

…

(the BFF: “yes… jews being killed IS like jews being killed what a parallel wait until you find out about… all of history?”)

Lately some of the WWII-era books I’ve been reading have had likeable German characters, including this story. It’s not like I believed that Germans during WWII were all bad–I realize a country, even in wartime, has diversity. But many books paint Germans as one dimensional Nazis, perhaps because of how Nazis and by extension, Germans, have been written about in history. So I appreciate seeing the change in Aric throughout the course of the novel, and find it really interesting to consider. I have no idea how many German officers/soldiers helped Jews or other marginalized people during WWII but now I’m interested to research that.

So it was no stretch for me to immerse myself in a novel where God prompts a disillusioned Nazi to protect a beautiful woman prisoner and through her, changes that man’s heart. I’m sure in real life, God gave many such men a chance to repent and turn to Him. And what better way to touch the humanity within them than through the noble lives of the people they were oppressing?

[problematicya]

things that are fucked up about ‘For Such a Time’ besides the book itself

the summary uses the word jewess. that’s not your word to use. you asshole goyim. 

it has a 4.6 rating on amazon.

it is simultaneously listed as jewish and christian fiction. nope. not interchangeable, folks. it might star some christian fantasy of what a Good Jewish Woman is (apparently so full of the love of Christ that she can forgive a nazi), but that does not make it jewish. 

i am now aware of the amount of gentiles (apparently christian gentiles) who are really into WW2 romances. i don’t know who you guys are, but i hate you

[problematicya]

Letter to the RWA Board regarding For Such a Time by Kate Breslin

For Such a Time by Kate Breslin is an inspirational historical romance between a Nazi concentration camp commander and a Jewish prisoner. It was nominated by the Romance Writers of America for Best First Book and Best Inspirational Romance in 2014. It won neither category, but the book’s presence as a nominee has upset a growing number of people. 

At Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, we undertake a community review project to try to give every RITA_nominated book a review before the awards are announced. The review for this book was written by a guest reviewer named Rachel, and it is extraordinarily good in my opinion.

Rose Lerner and her BFF have compiled a collection of the 5-star reviews for this book, as well.

After the RITA awards, which were held on July 25, 2014, I wrote a letter to the Board of Directors of Romance Writers of America to explain (or try to explain) why this book’s nominations were so offensive and upsetting. I sent this letter via email and received a response from the president of RWA. But in the conversations I’ve had online over the last few weeks, I’ve suggested people let the board know about their feelings as well. 

So if it helps anyone who wants to clarify why this book’s nomination (and its publication at all) are so upsetting and offensive, here is the text of my letter: 

July 27, 2015 Dear RWA Board of Directors:

This is one of the most difficult letters I’ve had to write, because each time I try to explain why I’m upset, and why I’m writing, I become more angry. But I’m deeply disturbed and distressed that For Such a Time by Kate Breslin was nominated for a RITA as Best First Book and Best Inspirational Romance.

If you’re not familiar with this book, the heroine, described by the publisher’s cover copy as a “blonde and blue-eyed Jewess,” is a prisoner in Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp where over over 140,000 Jews were held. A quarter of the inmates there died of starvation and disease, and more than 90,000 were deported to Auschwitz and other extermination camps, where they were killed. By the end of World War II, a little over 17,000 people had survived Theresienstadt.

The hero of For Such a Time is an SS commandant who saves the heroine from being killed at Dachau, believing that she is not Jewish despite being raised in a Jewish family. He brings her to Theresienstadt to work as his personal secretary. So this is a romance between a Jewish prisoner and a Nazi officer who was in charge of a concentration camp.

To put it mildly, I don’t see this setup as an imbalance of power that could possibly be redeemed in a romance narrative, nor do I think the setting and characterization is remotely romantic. But I think this issue is much larger than my individual opinion.

The book is a retelling of the book of Esther set during the Holocaust, an ambitious undertaking to be sure. But in addition to the attempt at redeeming a hero who is a Nazi commander, at the end of the book, the heroine converts to Christianity, a narrative decision that also insensitive and offensive. Christianity is what redeems the heroine and the hero, and again, I’m at a loss for words to fully explain how and why this is so objectionable. But I will try.

In the Holocaust, over 6 million Jews, and more than 17 million people in total were killed by the Nazis. In For Such a Time, the hero is redeemed and forgiven for his role in a genocide. The stereotypes, the language, and the attempt at redeeming an SS officer as a hero belittle and demean the atrocities of the Holocaust. The heroine’s conversion at the end underscores the idea that the correct path is Christianity, erases her Jewish identity, and echoes the forced conversions of many Jews before, during, and after the Holocaust.

I am addressing each step in the process of this book by writing to the author, the editor, the head of the publishing house, and of course you, the board of the RWA. I know many of you personally and have a great deal of respect for the responsibilities you carry. I know that you don’t each personally oversee the RITA nominations, nor do you personally judge each book.

But the fact that this book was nominated in two categories is deeply hurtful, and I believe creates an environment where writers of faiths other than Christianity, not just Jewish writers, feel unwelcome. It certainly had that effect on me, because I don’t understand exactly how so many judges agreed that a book so offensive and insensitive was worthy of the RWA’s highest honor. But clearly enough did so, and the result for me as an RWA member is a feeling of distrust and pain, and concern that my reaction and feelings may not be heard.

I know that books like For Such a Time by Kate Breslin do not happen in a vacuum. More than one person had to agree that this story was worth writing, worth editing, worth publishing, and then worth nominating for the RITA as Best First Book and Best Inspirational Romance. I question the judgment of those who evaluated this book in the first round, and am, to be honest, very thankful that it did not win.

I have watched RWA enact some terrific programs and amend rules to reflect how the genre has changed for the better. I think this year’s conference was one of the best, especially given the difficult and complicated topics addressed in various sessions. I know each of you wants to advance the reputation and the professional community of romance and the women who write it. The nomination of this book does neither of those things. 

I hope that in the future, there is a way to ensure that a book so deeply offensive and insensitive is not among those honored as the best in romance.

Sincerely,

Sarah Wendell RWA Member

[problematicya]

Roundup of Posts on For Such a Time by Kate Breslin

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books Review pointing out the problems ahead of its two RITA nominations: http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/for-such-a-time-by-kate-breslin/

Rose Lerner’s roundup of the 5 star reviews and their problems: http://roselerner.tumblr.com/post/125853628248/5-star-reviews-of-for-such-a-time

Sarah Wendell’s Letter to RWA Board: http://sarahwendell.tumblr.com/post/125859299894/letter-to-the-rwa-board-regarding-for-such-a-time

RDHero’s list of things wrong with FSaT that we didn’t mention elsewhere: http://rdhero.com/post/125905624666/things-that-are-fucked-up-about-for-such-a-time

RT featured it as a Top Pick: http://www.rtbookreviews.com/book-review/such-time-0

Library Journal gave it a Starred Review: http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2014/04/books/genre-fiction/christian-fiction/a-thriller-from-blackstock-wwii-drama-from-breslin-bridge-to-haven-by-rivers-more-christian-fiction-reviews/

My post here: http://bibliogato.tumblr.com/post/125928615686/on-for-such-a-time-by-kate-breslin-and-writing-the

[problematicya]

On For Such a Time by Kate Breslin and Writing the Holocaust

You might not be aware but a few weeks ago, a book called For Such a Time by Kate Breslin was up for a RITA from the Romance Writers of America. It’s an Emmy or an Oscar of romance writing. The book was published in 2014 and I had personally never heard of it prior to reading the Smart Bitches review of it. That is what I’ve linked to as I’d rather not link to its Amazon or Goodreads profiles.

In short, the book is a retelling of the Book of Esther (a Jewish story about a strong Jewish woman, who saves her people, and keeps her faith, and is not a romance) in which a Nazi camp commander saves a Jewish woman from Dachau and takes her to Theresienstadt in then-Czechoslovakia. There, they fall in love, and through a magically appearing Bible, find Jesus, and save Jews. At the end, the woman converts to Christianity because that’s her redemption arc.

There are multiple factors at play here. First, the author, Kate Breslin, co-opted the horrific, unimaginable tragedy that happened within living memory to other people to promote her own agenda (evangelical/inspirational Christianity). Second, her agent, her publisher, and multiple RWA judges, not to mention the HUNDREDS of reviews on retail sies and Goodreads, did not think this was problematic. Third, the way we, across religions, have begun to approach the Holocaust is problematic and dangerous.

I could tell you about the microaggressions I experience as a Jewish woman regarding the Holocaust. I can tell you that people told me so often that I was “lucky” to have blonde hair blue eyed (like the heroine of Breslin’s book) because I “would have probably survived the Holocaust.” I began to adopt it as my own line, a way of deflecting the comment before it came. I can tell you that people have told me to “stop playing the Holocaust card.” And I can tell you that while I wish the Jewish national identity did not have to cling so tightly to its tragedies, it is a privilege the rest of you experience that you do not.

Over at Smart Bitches, the review is absolutely on point. Here, Rose Lerner goes through the problematic five star reviews of the book. Here, Smart Bitches’ Sarah Wendell wrote a brave and important open letter.

And I, KK Hendin, India Valentin, Dahlia Adler and others have been on Twitter. I’m adding my long form response here in hopes that Breslin, her publisher, RWA, the judges, and the readers and reviewers consider Jewish voices that they co-opted, stole from, offended, undermined and erased through the publication and award of this book.

In the book, the commander is the head of Theresienstadt. For those who don’t know, Theresienstadt was the ‘model camp’ used to show the Red Cross that things weren’t “so bad”. In reality, 140,000 people were interned there and just over 17,000 people survived it and the deportations to Auschwitz. The commander of that camp made people stand out in freezing temperatures until they literally dropped dead. He killed thousands of children. He oversaw the deportations to Auschwitz where a small percentage survived. He watched tens of thousands of people die of disease and starvation in his ‘model camp’. And Breslin, her publishers, her readers, and RWA judges found that person worthy of redemption. Not only worthy of, but exceptional. Romantic.

If that’s your definition of a romantic hero…I have no words for you. I didn’t realize that genocide turned so many people on, but there you go.

Part of this is the glorification of forgiveness and the idea that every person is redeemable. There was a good conversation I had on Twitter about this and I understand these are religious and fundamental differences between people. I don’t think mass genocide is a forgivable thing. Kate Breslin, her publishers, her readers, and RWA does.

Part of this is evangelical Christianity’s relationship with Jewish people (not with Judaism, let’s be clear) and Israel. Let’s be clear: we are people. We are not anyone’s tickets into heaven. We are not your Chosen people.

Part of this is that anti-Semitism in America wears many masks, and one of them is silence. It is as violent as the others. Silence is not neutrality. Silence allows, if not fosters, oppression, aggression, and erasure. If you are silent on this book, please take a moment to examine why you are silent.

In Kate Breslin’s book, there is an unequal power dynamic. There is no consent. What you are celebrating is rape, and it happened to many women during the Holocaust. He has all the power. She has none of it. Her life is in danger. She cannot consent in this case. That is rape. What happened is rape and rape is not romantic. And it’s certainly not inspirational.

What happened here is that Kate Breslin stole a tragedy that wasn’t hers to promote her own personal agenda. And in doing so, she contributed to the erasure of both victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Her book is anti-Semitic, violent, and dangerous. It glorifies and redeems a Nazi, while removing all of the Jewish woman’s agency and forcing her to convert to Christianity in order for her arc to be considered redemption. It is, in fact, exactly what has been done to the Jewish people throughout history. For longer than Christianity has been a religion, Jews across the world have been forced to convert or to hide their Judaism to save their lives. That is violence. That is erasure. Kate Breslin’s book is violence and erasure.

And as a Jewish woman who writes romance, I feel betrayed. Betrayed by my fellow romance readers. Betrayed by the people who published this. Betrayed by the judges who allowed it to get past the first round much less onto the ballot. Betrayed by the organization whose silence was support. Betrayed by everyone who has remained silent on this, who hasn’t called it out.

It is not easy to be Jewish in America. Many think it is because of stereotypes, but when push comes to shove, especially online, we turn toward our own and huddle close. It’s a collective memory safety measure. We have only ever been safest in communities made entirely of Jews. There are places in America where I am safer to say I am queer than I am Jewish. I talk more about queerness than Jewishness because of the backlash I’ve received for my Judaism. When discussions of diversity and racism come up, we are excluded.

But, as Justina Ireland and I were saying on Twitter yesterday, the Venn Diagram of racists and anti-Semites is a circle.

The discussion last night on Twitter was draining and exhausting. It is hard to shout about this for weeks. I admire Sarah so much for that open letter and my fellow Jewish writers and readers who were speaking up. I’m grateful for our allies who signal boosted.

I asked during the discussion when non-Jewish people learned about the Holocaust as I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know about it.

The responses were illuminating. Most people learned in late elementary school, some as late as high school and into college. Some learned in units during history or social science classes. But most learned because they read books like Devil’s Arithmetic, Night, The Diary of Anne Frank, Number the Stars in English/Language Arts classes. I worry that by teaching nonfiction right next to fiction, we’re subconsciously distancing the Holocaust from real life. From ‘truth’. That it’s being filed away in minds as fiction.

I know that the Holocaust is hard to wrap our heads around. 6 million Jews, and roughly 5-6 million other victims, including Roma, disabled people, gay people, political prisoners, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. That’s more people than any of us have ever seen standing in one place. That’s more people than live in New York City. That’s an incomprehensible number of lives and stories that went up in smoke. And there are more victims than we will ever know: there are mass graves and bodies all over the forests of Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, France. Not everyone made it to camps. I know this is hard to comprehend and I know that books and movies are increasingly our only access point for information about the Holocaust as survivors pass away.

But it’s alarming to me the number of people who learned late in life. Or who considered late elementary school to be early. For Jews, the Holocaust is something we carry with us everywhere. It is always with us. It informs our identity, our way of moving through the world, our holidays, our grandparents’ experiences, how we interact with food and triggers. My father won’t buy German cars. I won’t drink Fanta. There are ways the Holocaust lingers because it fundamentally changed Jewish identity, even in the wake of previous genocides and ethnic cleansings.

I am the granddaughter of a camp liberator. I am the great-granddaughter of pogrom survivors. I have stood on the edge of Babi Yar and wondered if the dirt beneath my feet was made from the bones of my relatives who died there.

The Holocaust is more than a single story. It is more than a book read in a classroom or Schnidler’s List. It is millions and millions and millions of stories extinguished. That we will never know. That’s what the Holocaust is. Not was, but is. History is present tense for some things.

Writing about the Holocaust is not something to do lightly.

As a white American, I wouldn’t touch a romance involving an African-American slave because there is no way—none��that I could handle that properly. Because you can research so many things, but you can’t research collective memory and the way that affects you personally. You can’t. I can’t access that certain empathy, that certain feeling, that way of being and feeling in a world that isn’t your own that I would need to in order to tell that story.

Just because you have the idea of a story doesn’t mean that you should, or have the right to, write it.

And if you decide to write about the Holocaust, and you are not Jewish, I recommend going to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Go slowly. Listen. Watch. Read. And when you get to the shoes, stand there until you realize that’s a fraction, maybe a 1/1000th, of the volume, from one camp. Just one camp.

When you write about another group’s tragedy, your goal should be First, do no harm. Kate Breslin, Bethany House publishers, her agent, the readers, the judges, and in allowing this to be nominated, Romance Writers of America, failed that critical first step.

Please, for the generations that come next who will have no survivors to speak to them, no survivors who saw evil walking around in leather boots and not in the pages of their books as romantic hero, do not do what Breslin and her people did. Do no harm.

[problematicya]

the “lolita” covers

here’s a question: if vladimir nabokov’s “lolita” is truly the psychological portrait of a messed up dude and not the girl – let alone a sexualized little girl, as all of the sexualization happens inside humbert humbert’s head – then why do all the covers focus on a girl, and usually a sexy aspect of a girl, usually quite young, and none of them feature a portrait of humbert humbert?

here are nabokov’s original instructions for the book cover:

I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls. … Who would be capable of creating a romantic, delicately drawn, non-Freudian and non-juvenile, picture for LOLITA (a dissolving remoteness, a soft American landscape, a nostalgic highway—that sort of thing)? There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.

and yet, the representations of the sexy little girl abound.

i became driven by curiousity. why did this happen? why is this happening?

i am not alone – there’s a book about this, with several essays and artists’ conceptions about the politics and problems of representation surrounding the covers of “lolita.” this new yorker article gives a summary of the book and its ideas, and interviews one of the editors:

Many of the covers guilty of misrepresenting Lolita as a teen seductress feature images from Hollywood movie adaptations of the book— Kubrick’s 1962 version, starring Sue Lyon, and Adrian Lyne’s 1997 one. Are those films primarily to blame for the sexualization of Lolita? As is argued in several of the book’s essays, the promotional image of Sue Lyon in the heart-shaped sunglasses, taken by photographer Bert Stern, is easily the most significant culprit in this regard, much more so than the Kubrick film itself (significantly, neither the sunglasses nor the lollipop ever appears in the film), or the later film by Adrian Lyne. Once this image became associated with “Lolita”—and it’s important to remember that, in the film, Lolita is sixteen years old, not twelve—it really didn’t matter that it was a terribly inaccurate portrait. It became the image of Lolita, and it was ubiquitous. There are other factors that have contributed to the incorrect reading, from the book’s initial publication in Olympia Press’s Traveller’s Series (essentially, a collection of dirty books), to Kubrick’s startlingly unfaithful adaptation. At the heart of all of this seems to be the desire to make the sexual aspect of the novel more palatable.

here’s a couple of kubrick inspired covers:

which very well could have, after tremendous sales, have influenced the following covers:

…straying so far from the intention of nabokov that the phenomenon begins to look more like the symptom of something larger, something sicker.

after a lot of researching covers, it was here, in this sampling of concept covers for the book about the lolita covers, that i found an image that best represents the story to me:

[art by linn olofsdotter – and again, this is not an official cover]

but why aren’t all the covers like that? even the ones published by “legitimate” publishing companies, with full academic credentials, with no intended connection to the film; surely they must have read nabokov’s instructions for the cover. and yet, look at the top row of lolita covers: all legitimate publishing companies, not prone to smut. and yet.

my conclusion is that the lolita complex existed before “lolita” (and of course it did) – a patriarchal society is essentially operating with the same delusions of humbert humbert. nabokov did not produce the sexy girl covers of lolita, and kubrick had only the smallest hand in it. it was what people desired, requested and bought. the image of the sexy girl sells; intrigues; gets the hands on the books.

as elizabeth janeway said in her review in the new york review of books: “Humbert is every man who is driven by desire, wanting his Lolita so badly that it never occurs to him to consider her as a human being, or as anything but a dream-figment made flesh.”

isn’t that our media as a whole? our culture as a whole?

the whole lot of them/us – seeing the world through humbert-tinted glasses, seeing all others as Other and Object, as solipsistic dream-reality. as i scroll through the “lolita” covers i wonder: where’s the humanity in our humanity?

[problematicya]

does anyone remember when Cassandra Clare and her sock puppet were pretty much bullying one of her fans on twitter and I made this post documenting it?

well here comes part 2, folks

Cassandra Clare is a Dick to Her Fans, The Sequel

Keep reading

[problematicya]

YOU GUYS PLEASE READ THIS

A REALLY FUCKED UP SITUATION IS GOING ON AND I’M JUST A THIRD PARTY OBSERVER BUT PLEASE YOU GUYS SERIOUSLY

this girl on twitter tweeted an article to Cassandra Clare about her plagiarism, and her and another girl were talking about it

I’ve read the article and it honestly wasn’t even “hate”. it was well thought out and mature, and stated some truths without being an asshole.  

this is it here: http://bellumina.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/049-why-i-have-a-problem-with-cassandra-clare-why-you-should-too/

but Cassandra Clare’s stans, particularly the girl who started shit with me on here, started ATTACKING this girl. the other girl involved already deleted her account because of it.

then Cassandra Clare passive aggressively started retweeting things, saying it made her cry.

after that the girl felt horrible and was saying she deserves anons hating her because she sucks for making Cassie cry, and was apologizing nonstop 

I’m sorry but what kind of fucking egotistical bitch SHAMES her fan for sharing a link? you’re really going to sit there and let your fans attack another because of that? 

if Xoseroja is true in saying she’s been “watching this for ten years”, which means she was around when Cassie was first accused of plagiarism, then she must be a grown ass woman.

so why the fuck is a grown ass woman going after a young girl on twitter over a fucking AUTHOR? please explain this to me, and explain why this has happened before involving Cassie. explain why SOMEHOW, FOR SOME REASON, this ALWAYS happens with this woman.

oh no, the link made Cassandra cry.

I’m sorry but if you are old enough to plagiarize pages and pages of text from novels and lift countless amount of dialogues from television shows and then throw a bitch fit when you’re caught, and if you’re old enough to tell somebody their parents should have aborted them and to maliciously frame them for a crime with the intent of getting them kicked out of university to ruin their life, then MAYBE and I’m just suggesting that MAYBE, it is time to grow the fuck up and start accepting some fucking responsibility for your actions and to accept criticism like a grown ass woman and a professional author ought to, instead of treating your fans like shit because you can’t stand the thought of somebody not stroking your ego like you think they should. 

this poor girl was sitting there saying SHE DESERVES HATE. just for questioning Cassie. and I have no doubt Cassie saw it, b/c she saw everything else.

“u made me cry!!!”

in my opinion, good.

  Manda made screencaps of it all because some of the tweets are deleted

http://i.imgur.com/zJA5xhj.png

http://i.imgur.com/wF8W6EQ.png

http://i.imgur.com/cBu72Ua.png

http://i.imgur.com/IYwyxdk.png

here’s all of Xoseroja/theptleader’s insane fucking tweets (spoiler alert, everything she says is false) 

http://i.imgur.com/IFNNiCv.png

also, to the anon who messaged me earlier - she totally IS the bitch from witchisnotneutral! I CALLED THAT SHIT. I CALLED IT.

[problematicya]

Hello, everyone.

I used to be known as “Gossip Girl” on nastyclare and clarewitchproject, and after Cassie had us deleted for copyright infringement, I was considering not starting up another blog. I thought, you know, whatever. People will always be people. Let her do what she wants. It’s over.

But then she made a post about us.

I’m just making this post to address Cassie’s post, which she implies is solely about us, though she doesn’t mention us by name. She says,

When someone first told me there was a tumblr hate blog about me I didn’t think much of it.

By her saying a hate blog, in singular form, one would assume everything she talks about in the post is us. We’re the most popular “hate blog” on this site, as far as I can see,

First of all, Cassie claims we talked about her appearance. I’d just like to say that we never have, and specifically requested people don’t, because it’s tacky and rude.

Cassie has given everyone the impression that our blog was deleted because we’re cyber bullies, and we were anti-Semitic and sexist and bashed her for her appearance, and posted her personal information.

This is partially a message to her and a message to anyone who read her post and believes everything she said was us, or that the things that were about us were entirely true.

To quote Cassie’s post,

The first was posting my legal name along with a method of finding my address.

We only ever posted your real name once, after somebody submitted it to us from an already public page.

Someone asked for your real name, and I replied saying I was pretty sure Cassandra Clare was your actual name, and they said I was wrong, and sent us the link to this: http://www.listal.com/cassandra-clare

Someone else messaged us confirming that’s your real name because they saw it on your blog before, and on wikipedia and multiple other places and that it was already public knowledge.

That was all we made of it.

We never posted a method to finding your address. We don’t even know a method to finding your address, and if we did we would refrain from doing anything with it because that’s just creepy and to be quite honest we don’t care that much.

“The second was the sentence “Cassandra Clare acts like she can say anything because she’s Jewish””

You’re trying to paint us as anti-Semitic, but one of us is Jewish, and neither of us knew you were Jewish - until someone submitted an offensive Jewish joke to us from one of your books. We remarked on how we think it’s offensive, then someone else messaged us saying it’s okay for you to make that joke, because you yourself are Jewish.

Then another person messaged us, and to paraphrase them, said “it’s not okay for Cassie to make jokes about Jewish people just because she’s Jewish.” I’m assuming that’s where you got that sentence from, but you took it out of context.

(Once this post is up, the hate bloggers will say that I am upset because they think my books are bad. Believe me, I would be thrilled if it was a blog about how my books are bad…I don’t mind being called racist/sexist, either: I am sure that I am, in the sense that we are all products of our conditioning, and we are conditioned by a racist/sexist society that works on us from the day we’re born. I try to be aware, and fight that conditioning, to remember my privilege, to tell fair and truthful stories but that doesn’t mean I’m not a work in progress myself, that I’m not going to screw up.)

Are you sure, Cassie? Because you had our posts and eventually our entire blog deleted because we were talking about how your books were bad.

The tumblr guidelines say, “Don’t actively promote violence or extreme hatred against individuals or groups, on the basis of race, ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation. While we firmly believe that the best response to hateful speech is not censorship but more speech, we will take down malicious bigotry, as defined here.”

And also,

“Privacy Violations. Don’t use Tumblr to deceptively obtain personal information. Don’t post content that violates anyone’s privacy, including personally identifying or confidential information like credit card numbers, social security numbers, unlisted contact information, or private photos of your ex’s junk (no matter how attractive).”

But if we were so anti-Semitic and sexist,  if we actually posted your address and personal info, why were we reported solely for copyright infringement?

This was the message from tumblr we received when they took down one of our posts after you reported it for copyright infringement. The post contained a short passage from City of Bones, where Clary is slut shaming a girl in her class for wearing a thong. We were talking about how sexist it was, which you claim you don’t mind being called.

This was another message from tumblr telling us you reported us for copyright infringement, when we were talking about a rape joke Jace makes in City of Ashes, and how insensitive it is.

This was a time you reported me for copyright violation when I answered an ask with evidence of your fanfiction plagiarism, I don’t understand how you did that, considering you have no copyright claim on Harry Potter or any of the Buffy quotes you stole, but whatever.

So if you don’t mind people talking badly about your books, if you don’t mind being called sexist, then why did you have us reported for copyright infringement? You allow people to write fanfiction, you allow your fans to use quotes and passages on their blogs. We properly cited your work.

If we were so anti-Semitic and posted your personal information, why were we not reported for that, then? Why weren’t we deleted for that? As I’ve shown from the tumblr guidelines, we easily could have been, if we had said anything that qualified as it.

And maybe fans are reading this and thinking, oh, but you probably were reported for that, but just aren’t showing it.

Except, look at this message.

“you previously held an account that was terminated for repeat copyright infringement (with no counter-notifications), nastyclare.tumblr.com”

theclarewitchproject was deleted solely because they found out we were nastyclare. nastyclare was deleted solely for copyright infringement. If it was for harassment or racism or anything, tumblr support would specify that in the message. But they only say copyright infringement, which Cassandra Clare herself reported to them as the copyright holder, on posts where we were talking badly about her books, which Cassie claims she’d be “thrilled about.”

It’s understandable if you don’t want people talking badly about your books and calling you sexist and saying you perpetuate rape culture.

But don’t have us deleted for doing that, then turn around and tell your fans it was because we were posting personal information and making anti-Semitic remarks.

Also, the entire bullying post seems to be solely about us, from the wording “hate bloggers” and how we’re directly quoted.

Yet here you’re talking about someone else entirely.

The Cafepress store where they sell merchandise based on their hate (yes, really) suggests you should buy their merchandise to “save your friends from rape.” Leaving aside the unbelievably tasteless attempt to literally capitalize on rape, the implication would seem to be — that I am a rapist?

At first we had no idea what the hell you were talking about here, because we’ve never done anything of the sort. We don’t even think we’re old enough to run a cafepress store, as we’re only 17, and neither of us has the time or money to do that, nor would we want to.

We looked into it and we found the store in question. It was Kayla/dontfallinthesarchasm’s store, where she apparently sold a magnet that said “friends don’t let friends read Cassandra Clare.” Below it, it said “Save your friends from rape, incest, sexual abuse and generally poor writing by warning the world with this Sarchasm shirt.”

While I don’t agree with the message, she means save your friends from having to read about rape and incest and sexual abuse, as it’s in your books.

I just think it’s a bit rich that you’re accusing her of capitalizing on rape for putting that there, when you literally use rape as a plot device in every single one of your books, which is why she said what she did in the first place. But I won’t get into that right now.

As for Kayla, we’ve seen in the tags that people have been talking about her blog and saying that it’s us. It’s not. We’re not dontfallinthesarchasm, and we weren’t responsible for her casssandraclare blog that parodied Cassie’s either.

She was a part of nastyclare for about a week in the spring after TMI fans were sending her death threats because she questioned Cassie on all the incest in her books, but left and started her own blog after that. She was never a part of theclarewitchproject.

Just for the record, there are two of us, and we go by GG and L. Another friend, known as Stansfield, sometimes helps.

We’ve had no other blogs on any website besides theclarewitchproject and nastyclare, and we’ve had no online shops or youtube videos or fake accounts in which we sent hate to Cassie, or sent fake fan mail.  If anyone is doing anything against Cassie currently, it isn’t us. If anyone did anything in the past and it wasn’t on nastyclare or theclarewitchproject and wasn’t signed as Gossip Girl or L, it wasn’t us.

We’ve never messaged her at all, on this blog or on any other blog, anonymously or not. We’ve never contacted her.

But back to Cassie’s post.

I get a huge amount of email from young girls and women, who make up the bulk of my readership, who are the target of a very specific kind of online cyberbullying. It is a bullying that crops up in the form of girls receiving messages, usually anonymous or pseudonymous, that tell them that they are ugly, that they are fat, that they are stupid, and that the things they like are stupid, that they are sluts, and that they should hurt or kill themselves.  And the hate bloggers use a lot of the hateful gendered attack language that I see so often terrorizing my readers, and I worried that my readers would see me not reacting to it, or seeming to not care, and think that there was something wrong with them for caring, for being hurt — that the fact that this language gets under their skin makes them, as the hate bloggers call me, “whiny little bitches.”

We hate cyber bullies too, as ironic as you all may find this. We’ve been cyber bullied. I personally have been cyber bullied since I was 9, before “cyber bullying” was an actual term.

Part of the motivation of this blog was because we know for a fact that you were a cyber bully in the Harry Potter fandom. You say that we’re making this up - but why would we? Do you think we got out of bed one morning and said “you know what I should do today? Make up a bunch of stories about Cassandra Clare and get the rest of the internet in on it?”

We aren’t the only people on the internet who talk about the things you’ve done. Many livejournal communities still talk about it all the time. Most people on that site still remember. Fanlore and fanhistory have documented a lot of it.

You may not even see that you were a cyber bully. But I personally know people who you have cyber bullied, and I’ve witnessed it, and have seen posts from you on fictionalley and livejournal bashing Tom Felton, bashing his fans, bashing Bonnie Wright, and posted screencaps of these posts on the old blog.

You made fun of people whose fanfiction wasn’t as popular as yours, which we’ve screencapped and posted. You turned on your friend Aja because you thought she was copying you, and let your followers gang up on her and run her out of the fandom. You tried to get your other friend kicked out of college. All of this was on public accounts where you, presumably, had thousands of fans reading it all.

You talk about gendered language like “bitch”, but I recall Clary calling Isabelle a bitch in your books multiple times, and hating her for being beautiful, and Isabelle hating Clary for being beautiful. It’s the kind of girl on girl hate you accuse us of.

But we’ve never called you a whiny little bitch.

And I used to go on your livejournal, and a lot of your former-fans and former-friends have as well, and we’ve found a lot of instances where you used the word slut. In regular posts, in fanfiction, to other people. I’ve posted screencaps on occasion, not as an attack on you, but to protest against slut shaming in general.

I particularly recall a fanfic of yours where Ginny was dating everyone in school, and Draco called her a skank and a slut, and was afraid she was going to sleep with Ron because she couldn’t control herself. You wrote it like it was supposed to be funny, and not like it was something horrible.

I just want you to know — and I say this, knowing how thrilled it will make the hate bloggers to hear this, but I am saying it anyway because you need to know it — of course, this stuff hurts me too.

We’re not thrilled to know words hurt you, or anyone.

the hate bloggers’s example of proof that I am ungrateful regarding my fans and readers is that they have a video of me getting on a stage for an event holding a drink, and drinking from it while I was being introduced. That’s true! I did do that! I was on tour, and had been traveling all day: I had not eaten, and I had a wracking cough in the car on the way over. I was a little dizzy, and this — the few moments while I was being introduced — was my only chance to 1) consume anything and 2) hopefully be able to stop coughing before I had to talk for several hours.

I know the video you’re talking about, but we’ve never posted it or even mentioned it. You keep attributing everything people have ever said and done to you to us, knowing that people will assume it’s about us, because we’re the only “haters” your fans on this site know about.

I see that video posted in the comments of ONTD articles about you, but the problem most people have a problem with isn’t the fact that you’re eating or drinking, it’s the fact that you’re laughing and whispering with Holly Black when the woman is speaking, which is rude. Tony Stark wasn’t eating a burger when someone else was talking. He was eating a burger when he was talking.

But that’s a matter separate from us, because we’ve never made mention of that video.

And I have to wonder, Cassie, why you chose yesterday to make this post, and the day before to go on hiatus. Our blog was deleted two weeks ago. If we’re terrible cyber bullies, why would you make a post about us after we’re gone?

You might be wondering if we’re going to keep this blog up and continue where we left off before. We don’t know yet. Before you had our blog deleted, we were hardly active. We barely have time for it and don’t generally feel like it.

But I just felt the need to set the record straight, for everyone who believes we’re anti-Semitic stalkers who sell hate merch and fake fan mail and all of these other things.

Make of this what you will.

[problematicya]

In case you haven’t read it, Cassandra Clare has come out of her hiatus once again. This time to post about me and my friends. You can read it here.

I’ve decided that it’s only right for me to respond. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, I think these are worth more.

[problematicya]

Anti-bullying YA queen Cassandra Clare is a massive bully. Water also wet.

Regarding Cassandra Claire (or Clare, whatever she uses)

When I first heard that she wrote an über long post on cyberbullying (after all October is Anti-Bullying month), I went and read it. 

Several things that came from it-

1) Apparently she forgot she did the worst of the cyberbullying in her days of the Harry Potter fandom- stalking her critics. If you don’t believe me, go to her Wikipedia page regarding her plagiarism, her (former) friend, Heidi the lawyer, comes at her defense and gets Wiki to delete any mentions of plagiarism (that’s why her entry is locked from changes). Another incident of her friend Heidi coming in is the writer’s university message board. Every SINGLE time CC is criticized for plagiarism, she got her lawyer friend to threaten people into deleting any mention of CC and plagiarism.

2) Not only that, she had a LiveJournal (epicyclical) and she used to get people who used to bother her, she would find out the user’s IP number and got a phone number from the ISP the person was using and would call these people to tell them to knock it off. I’ve known at least two people who got this- 1) This one she bragged about in the HPFGU chatroom, she called the parents of a 13-year-old girl to tell her to stop posting on her livejournal. (This I’m not sure if it’s true or not, she really asserted that she CAN do that to ANYONE that bothered her) 2) When I was kicked out, my friends in the fandom and outside the fandom defended my character, one of my friends who lived on the Cape got a call from the police (THE POLICE) about her posting on Cassie’s LJ. She was shit-scared afterwards and stopped posting (and she didn’t even remotely threaten CC), fortunately the policeman sided with my friend because he felt CC was wasting his time.

3) This will be in two parts- somewhat of a story about how I got kicked out of the HP Fandom. I feel better about telling the truth about it, unlike CC. Here’s a little timeline-

October 2001- my boyfriend (now my husband) asked me a series of strange questions about a user, and a friend of mine, called John W. What his favourite restaurant was, what color he likes, etc. I’m not sure about the rest of the questions but I immediately told him what John’s favourite restaurant was (a dim-sum restaurant in NYC) and then afterwards, asked him why he asked all these questions about John. He admitted that he got into John’s Yahoo! Profile to look at the moderator message boards, I told him to give it back immediately and we didn’t talk about it for a while. 

February 2002- the guilt was getting to me, I told my boyfriend that I wanted him to write an anonymous apology letter to one of the mods (Neil W.) and I helped him write it as Mafalda Hopkirk. I sent it to Neil without hiding my IP number (I didn’t know how the process worked) and he figured it out quickly that it was me through my IP number but didn’t tell the rest and told me to leave fandom quietly. 

I got an IM from a male (another HP mod whose name escapes me), whose wife was Stacey, and we talked about the fandom, but never about the hacking. Then EVERYONE in the HP fandom stopped talking to me (I IMed AngieJ, siriusgeologist, Alicia/Sue (Boots527 in IM) and NO one talked to me until one of the Teenage Witches told me what was going on and that she had messages from Cassie and Simon. Both messages were very upsetting.

My IRL friends and my HP-fandom friends, who still sided with me, defended me on Livejournal and the HP messageboards. Cassie basically said to one, “Tell her that her parents should have aborted her.” I snuck into chat as Vivienne Stellaluna to see what they’re talking about and they completely PILED on me once they figured that the silent lurker was me. It was the worst kind of internet bullying I’ve experienced until….

4) I was doing fine (I finally left the fandom because *&(@ them), working on my university coursework and planning my course trip to Oxford. Then I got a call from my university police department at the end of April 2002 and a week before my exams (2 months after I got kicked out and nary a peep from those people between the first week of February-end of April). I went in and he said have you heard about HP4GU? I said yes, and started to tear up, is this about the hacking because I didn’t do it. and He said yes. I was sobbing uncontrollably and had to be walked home because I didn’t think THEY would stoop this low, trying to get me kicked out of my university and they planned on doing it around the time of my exams just to shake me.

I immediately got the best tech lawyer in Boston and saw all the documents the HP4GU people sent to BU- AngieJ/Cassandra Claire/the male mod sending them chat transcripts of me admitting to the hacking and I honestly said that I had talked to AngieJ and the Male Mod as recently as February but I’ve never admitted to hacking (several of my friends said that it wasn’t my ordinary chat behavior, including my mom) and frankly, I hadn’t talked to Cassie in PM for several months prior to February.

I brought ALL my documents- Cassie’s Livejournal entries condemning me (her behavior towards me, at the time, was atrocious and uncalled for) and other documentation, etc. And, ironically, it was these exact documents which completely cleared me of hacking because she basically wrote her intent in the comments section to get me kicked out of university as payback. 

After I got cleared, I walked with my mom and my lawyer and stopped outside Pizzeria Uno in Kenmore Square. He said, “Before I go, you have a real case to sue this Claire person and HPFGU for harrassment.” I said, “I just want to be done with that.” I wanted to get on with my life, go to Oxford University, think about my degree, and think about where I wanted to go after university (my boyfriend and I were talking about moving in together once I finished and we talked about the pros and cons of living in the US versus the UK).

————————————————————————————-

Fast-forward to 2012, living in the UK for over six years, and as I like fantasy/sci-fi books I often see CC’s books about. I just want to pull my hair out every single goddamn time I see her books, that’s how much HP4GU and her bullying has affected me.

I don’t like internet bullying but I did follow NastyClare/TheClareWitchProject until their existence ceased to be. I read ONTD posts about Cassie all the time (because I’m interested in how her books are doing, how much media attention the movie is making). Also, the riveting “Cassandra Claire Plagiarism Debacle” posts and FandomWank posts. ALL of those blogs were ON point about CC’s behavior in the early days of the HP fandom.Everyone in the HP fandom in 2000-2002 knew what her real name was and what she looked like, including me and my husband, it was a MAJOR OPEN SECRET in the HP Fandom. Even back then, she complained of people trying to find out who she is even though she gave out what she did (entertainment reporter for Hollywood Life, her name, multiple photos of herself, where she lived in CA, where she moved to in NYC). For someone who claims she’s secretive about herself, she was pretty freer about who she was in the chatrooms/message boards.

To end a long post, simply put, she has amnesia about her OWN bullying in the HP fandom. She’s a hypocrite, a plagiarist and, above all, a major, early, cyberbully. Her woe-is-me post rings hollow for people like me, people she bullied. Her friends that now side with her weren’t her HPFGU/HP fandom friends because if she left that fandom, it’s probably EVERYONE in that fandom hate her because of her appalling behavior at the time. She hasn’t come to terms about how she became famous and what she did to go down the path of being famous. She can go %(&* herself and if her parents knew what she did in the past, they’d be deeply ashamed of her.

All of that said, I know where I’d stick her “cyberbully” post.

Source.  The hailed anti-bullying post by Clare that got her so much acclaim is here.  The people behind the anti-Clare blogs she had shut down claiming they were anti-semitic bullies offer their rebuttal here. And, of course, the usual links (thanks 

tryxkittie) Cassandra Claire and Plagiarism The Abridged Fan History of Cassandra Claire Memorable Wank from the Cassandra Claire/CC MiniBoss Squad Days Cassandra Clare Fandom Wank Wiki The Ms Scribe Story: Full and Abridged Read more at ONTD: http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/73559683.html#ixzz38cPNkoNu

[problematicya]

Talking about the depictions of fatness in YA matters because these messages do indeed reach readers. For teenagers, these messages are already hurled at them through every waking moment. Our culture thrives upon insecurities, and fatness is an easy one to target. “Health” and the “obesity epidemic” sound like good and nice reasons to “care” about fat people, except they’re excuses to continue being careless. Fat people know they’re fat. You don’t have to tell them. But you should damn well let them see themselves in ways where their bodies aren’t commodified, aren’t a source of daily hell, or render them as worthless beings who have no future unless they can “overcome” their state of fat. Because more often than not, these are the messages fat people, including myself, contend with daily.

from Combating Fat Phobia in YA Lit  (via catagator)

Reblogging this for the weekend crowd. 

[problematicya]

cassandra clare and things you probably don't know but should

Okay, everyone, gather around. It’s time for some schooling on the Harry Potter Fandom and some of the greatest fandom wank in its history (and considering that this is the HP fandom, that’s saying something). With the release of the City of Bones trailer, there’s been a whole lot of The Mortal Instruments on my dash, and consequently, Cassandra Clare. Now a bit of a disclaimer, I’m not trying to change anyone’s opinion on Clare’s work. If you like TMI or any of her other series, then that’s perfectly fine, and it in no way makes you a bad person or wrong. But with the recent deletion of a lot of the Cassandra Claire fandom wank pages, I feel like before people give her another dime, they need to be informed or refreshed on all the crap she has pulled as a BNF in the HP fandom.

Keep reading

[problematicya]

When a rape survivor confronted E.L. James on Twitter, this was how the author responded:

Screen shot added in case she tries to delete her bullshit.

The link she sent?

Because clearly the best way to respond to someone who has experience violence is by sending them a .gif of violence.

E.L. James is the pinnacle of the Badly Behaving Author. Was the original tweet scolding in tone? Yes. Was her response warranted? Hell. No. When someone comes at you about your book, you know what you do? NOTHING BECAUSE THAT’S HOW IT WORKS. This shouldn’t be news to a “professional.”

I don’t care if you like it. I don’t care if Anne Rice likes it. You just ignore and move on. I’m sorry that your piece of rape and abuse apologist, plagiarized trash isn’t as universally loved as you believe it should be. I really am. It must suck for an author who’s been spoiled by her faithful legion of fawning idiot sycophants to hear an outside opinion that doesn’t directly kiss your ass. I bet that’s really hard for you. But you’re the person who tried to write a love story and turned it into a horror story. You’re the “author” who can’t write well enough to make your “LOVE story” (as she has aggressively asserted in her bio) come across as romantic to millions of abuse and rape survivors. That’s your fault. Nobody is interrogating this text from the wrong perspective.

So let me say once again:

50 Shades of Grey promotes abuse and rape through the actions of its “romantic” hero.

50 Shades of Grey was ripped off from Twilight, the author of which is too classy to run over to E.L. James’s house, take her earrings off, and throw down the way she is totally entitled to.

E.L. James is now and forever shall be a badly behaving author.