#genre: fiction

[bajoop-sheeb]

PLEASE for the love of the universe read anti-colonial science fiction and fantasy written from marginalized perspectives. Y’all (you know who you are) are killing me. To see people praise books about empire written exclusively by white women and then turn around and say you don’t know who Octavia Butler is or that you haven’t read any NK Jemisin just kills me! I’m not saying you HAVE to enjoy specific books but there is such an obvious pattern here

Some of y’all love marginalized stories but you don’t give a fuck about marginalized creators and characters, and it shows. Like damn

[prokopetz]

The real difference between fantasy and science fiction is that if you have too many belts, you're fantasy, and if you have too many zippers, you're science fiction. If you have too many of both, you split the difference and land in a contemporary technothriller where everybody is secretly a vampire.

[detectivejay]

Time for a new poll! I'm curious to see the spread of answers on this one (and hear any other series not on the list.) Tried to go for a range of older and newer series on here, more on the older end of the spectrum, but I can't cover everything with the limited poll options here, so I hope you'll share your answers! :)

Please reblog for a larger sample size, thank you!

[collgeruledzebra]

the thing about trying to recommend fiction podcasts to someone who isn't familiar with them is that not only are so so many genres represented but also the level of production can fall anywhere from "basically an audiobook" to "major motion picture minus the pictures"

[langernameohnebedeutung]

ngl, I'm beginning to take issue with how in conversations about anti-intellectualism almost automatically, the face of girls and women will be slapped on the problem.

[jazzyslibrary]

warriors: the new prophecy #4: starlight

date started: 05/02/2023 | date finished: 26/02/2023

i love how mothwing is basically still an apprentice because she hadn’t finished her training before mudfur died, but also she’s riverclan’s only medicine cat. she’s stuck in-between being an apprentice and an experienced medicine cat. the other medicine cats can’t really argue with her decisions, like to swim across the lake to go to the gathering island. she seems so lively and fun and kinda childish but no one can question her. i like it a lot.

they have hinted at the idea that tallstar would appoint onewhisker to succeed him when he dies by having him tend to tallstar all the time and mudclaw be argumentative with thunderclan which is contradictory to the behaviour of the rest of windclan. i do like that tallstar values friendship over uhh “strong leadership”, although i am not sure if strong leadership is exactly what mudclaw has but whatever. i’m glad that tallstar appointed onewhisker, and i also like that onewhisker is close to tallstar.

i just bought tallstar’s revenge today (17/02/2023) and i know that onewhisker will be in that book so i’ll have to read that soon!

firestar is once again being told by a good friend of his, while dying, who he should appoint as deputy. and why are they always so wrong about the choices? tallstar and whitestorm are both smart kitties.

i didn’t like that tallstar commented on brambleclaw being a good potential deputy. i just think brackenfur makes more sense. graystripe already offloaded his responsibilities as deputy onto brackenfur earlier in this series (which is kinda sad because he also neglected his responsibilities as brackenfur’s mentor in the first arc). just because brambleclaw is the main character in this arc doesn’t mean he needs to be deputy! not that i remembered this, but i saw a post yesterday discussing how brambleclaw was appointed as firestar’s deputy right after he hesitated to stop hawkfrost from murdering firestar. like how does that make sense. firestar is like “well you almost let me be killed, but you didn’t. and for that, i will reward you by giving you responsibility for our clan!”. we will have to see how much that frustrates me in the next two books.

ugh and further along brambleclaw is literally saying to himself that he deserves to be deputy! i don’t think that’s ever been how it works. like you don’t become deputy after filling out your good boy points. i mean, he hasn’t even had an apprentice yet, which is one of the rules about becoming deputy. why is he so entitled! and i think that we are supposed to interpret firestar as being unreasonable. i mean, maybe he should appoint a new deputy. but it certainly shouldn’t be brambleclaw. ridiculous!!

and the next chapter, brambleclaw loses his temper at mousefur and brackenfur diffuses the situation and brambleclaw even says to himself that brackenfur deserves to be deputy over him, and other warriors too! but he blames it on his heritage rather than the fact that he’s inexperienced and entitled. firestar obviously trusts him if he gave him his warrior name, let him lead the way to their new territory, has him next to him and onewhisker while their mutual friend speaks his last words. grrr gimme back leafpaw and squirrelflight povs please!!

firestar asked brambleclaw to do an “apprentice task”, which was collecting moss for bedding. i don’t really like that tasks that help the clan have some sort of respectability tier list to them. like caring for the elders shouldn’t be a shameful task given to naughty apprentices. but brambleclaw is very upset that he’s given such a task, because he’s suuuuuch a respectable warrioooor. meanwhile we swap to leafpaw’s perspective and she mentally praises him for taking on that responsibility because she thinks he’s doing it to be helpful. if brambleclaw really cared about helping the clan, he wouldn’t care that he has to do tasks he doesn’t like. i don’t think brackenfur would be such a sourpuss about it, i think he would take on any responsibility. maybe that makes him boring with no personality, but i don’t mind a background character having no controversial thoughts. hating on brambleclaw can be fun!

i know brambleclaw has been hated on a lot from the fandom, but mostly after omen of the stars, and because he is a terrible partner to squirrelflight. i honestly think he was nice enough in the first three books of the new prophecy! i didn’t care too much for the development of his relationship with squirrelflight, but it was okay! i mean to be honest, so far, none of the romances i have read about have been interesting at all. maybe it’s because they’re cats? but i doubt it, i think that a lot of the characters just are underdeveloped. so the characters i care about are ones that i have nostalgia for and also ones that are discussed on tumblr and people have headcannons that make me think of the characters in a different way.

anyway i hate spottedleaf blah blah blah. i can’t wait for her to tell leafpool to be with crowfeather because starclan needs “the three” to be born and then shame leafpool for doing the very thing she told her to do!! i hate how much leafpool idolises spottedleaf, like i hate her for the whole firestar creeping thing, but u know, honestly that’s not as bad as how awful she’s going to be to leafpool. i wish yellowfang could have been her starclan “mentor” or “guide”. but then again, they did make yellowfang say the most foolish thing ever while she was in starclan (the thing about ashfur’s only fault being that he loved too much) so maybe it’s better that she isn’t in leafpool’s dreams too much. but yellowfang broke the same rule that leafpool did, so maybe (if someone who actually cares would write it) she would have been sympathetic to leafpool rather than shame her. spottedleaf just has no actual connection to leafpool apart from the fact that she creeps on firestar, which makes it so weird that she comes to leafpool in her dreams. if it was yellowfang, it would be because she saw firestar as a second son, and she cares about cinderpelt’s apprentice because she also took on a motherly role with cinderpelt. i just!!! wish that was the case.

if i was a writer, maybe i would do a rewrite of the new prophecy and just kick stupid spottedleaf out of the story. it would probably seem that i have a bias for certain characters though. i would want bluestar and yellowfang to have more uhh “screen time”. although that would probably make it less exciting when they do finally appear. maybe just yellowfang then. although i would also like to hear from cats like whitestorm, lionheart, redtail, stonefur. if i recall, lionheart and redtail have only appeared for firestar’s leader ceremony. and stonefur, i don’t know if he ever has interactions in starclan with his mother and mosskit. i’d like to think that when mistystar finally died they had a family reunion with crookedstar, silverstream, feathertail.

back to leafpool, and the actual contents of the book. i’m happy she finally got her full name! it’s kinda weird when siblings don’t get their names at the same time. plus leafpool has been a great medicine cat even before the big journey to the lake territory. and i love how mothwing was so proud of her. actually i just quite like the medicine cat relationships. they’re all cool and i like seeing it from their perspectives, having interactions with cats from different clans without hostility is nice.

i am wondering how hawkfrost managed to get cats from shadowclan to help him, is it because he is tigerstar’s son and there is still cats in shadowclan that would follow tigerstar were he alive? but why do they care about helping mudclaw? like hawkfrost has some motivation if mudclaw told him he would make him deputy if onewhisker is overthrown. it all seems so silly, and kinda rushed too. like if we compare it to tigerstar trying to overthrow thunderclan and taking control of shadowclan and riverclan, that happened over the course of several books. perhaps hawkfrost and mudclaw overthrowing windclan could have been interesting if it wasn’t squeezed into a couple chapters.

our only hints that this could happen are that squirrelflight, leafpool, and mistyfoot are distrustful of hawkfrost. but only because he is too “ambitious”. and then the rest was mistyfoot straight up telling thunderclan what was happening. i think it could have been interesting for thunderclan and windclan to not be sort of in an alliance for once. i like that they are friendly with each other, but maybe it would have been cool to see the friendship between firestar and onewhisker tested a bit?

i was watching sunnyfall’s trip through time video about this particular book (as i have been doing after each warriors book i’ve been reading) and she brought up that this books main plot points revolve around windclan and the leader/deputy drama. i agree that we should have had some chapters written from his point of view. why does brambleclaw need to be there for tallstar’s death? we could have been seeing it from crowfeather’s point of view. there’s so many interactions with windclan that it really would have benefitted from seeing it in their perspective.

the scene with leafpool and crowfeather at the end of the book was … strange. like those two shadowclan cats, why were they running to thunderclan anyway? and they’re just mysterious unnamed cats, because the writers don’t feel like fleshing out the rest of the clans with real characters. oh and of course they brutally die by snapping their necks, which is supposed to make me feel like, oh my gosh that could have been leafpool if crowfeather didn’t help her! and the confessions of “love” like, all of the intentional romance in these books is so bad. you guys are infatuated with each other you are not in love come on now. it’s very silly.

and i guess squirrelflight and brambleclaw are officially broken up for now because he continues to trust hawkfrost. like even if mudclaw is lying about hawkfrost’s motivations to help him, how does that change the fact that he helped a cat from another clan try to overthrow their leader? what is going on inside brambleclaw’s mind here? squirrelflight is so right for giving up on him at this point. he’s being wilfully ignorant. i mean that’s not what the erins intended him to be, he apparently just trusts his brother after all this? and despite denouncing the actions of his father every chance he has had previously, he didn’t seem to have a problem chatting to him in a dream? i know he doesn’t seem awfully evil when he’s chatting away with his sons, but he also didn’t seem awfully evil, or at all to all of thunderclan when he had literally killed redtail, attempted to kill bluestar, etc. i still remember when fireheart was filling in for bluestar at a gathering and tigerstar was there as shadowclan’s leader, and fireheart decided not to warn the other clans about his actions because “maybe he has changed!”. it’s kinda annoying for characters to be uncharacteristically stupid for the sake of the plot. it takes you out of it and makes you question the authors rather than wonder the motives of the characters.

mudclaw dying to a falling tree made me wonder, how many cats have died to trees throughout the series? off the top of my head i thought of mudclaw, firestar, and longtail. luckily the wiki is extensive enough to have a complete list, which includes micah (i didn’t know of micah because i haven’t read moth flight’s vision yet), mudclaw, firestar, rainwhisker, and longtail. and briarlight was paralysed.

[incognitopolls]

Anon is autistic and thought the genre being called "young adult" meant it was for 18–25, but they saw a tiktok saying YA was for 12–18. This confused them and they want to see whether this is a common confusion or if they misinterpreted it due to being autistic.

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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[prahacat]

when the horrors catch up and you take an evening off to batch-process

[boombox-fuckboy]

Last-minute podcast Halloween costume ideas (very scary):

Wet mouth sounds (extended cut)

"Content Warning: Mature Themes." [Do not elaborate]

The episode that is twice as long as any before it

The 80 decibel difference in volume between podcast and advertisement

Sound of distant emergency sirens

"This Episode is No Longer Available"

Live action adaptation

[writerinturmoil]

[talesfromthecrypts]

Complaining that horror has “too wide of a range in tone” so they “don’t know what to expect” is so funny. Wait until I tell you about fantasy: a genre that ranges from picture books for children about talking dogs to 80s sword and sorcery grimdark rape films

[prokopetz]

My take on genre demarcation pedantry re: "science fiction" is that, yes, I agree that good science fiction ought to have at least some speculative element. However, the "what if?" in question need not be deep: a lot of excellent science fiction merely asks "hey, if this happened, would that be fucked up or what?"

[junglejim4322]

Some people online have the same puritanical view of media consumption as the steven universe bluey types they’re constantly making fun of but they have no self awareness so they have no idea and it’s kind of incredible to watch people who think they’re the edgiest people in the world shit and piss themselves when somebody likes a movie that violates their very specific metric of acceptability in content shown. Horror is great until it doesn’t look like the inside of a spirit Halloween store apparently