#how many recent sff novels have done the same?

[gideonisms]

I just finished some desperate glory the other day and I'm literally wondering the same thing. on the one hand there was that one offhand line about kyr thinking about yiso in the context of, like, finding people attractive--but then also didn't yiso say in a different part that they were possibly twelve or fifteen or twenty bc they didn't know how to do the math for another solar system?? like... if they are the love interest it is Weird to sprinkle in the possibility that they could be twelve, yk? also, unrelated, I kind of feel like the ending would've been more satisfying if they'd both actually died. it was such whiplash in the last couple of pages and the resolution felt cheap to me. the audiobook narrator was great though.

See I took that to mean they were 12 in their own years but 15 or 20 in Kyr's. Kyr is 18 at the beginning and the weird hand kissing doesn't happen until they've both aged by several years. To me based on the rest of the novel it's also pretty clear yiso is not intended to be a young child. But that whole character relationship did confuse me and the awkward wording in some instances did not help!

anyway you're probably right about the ending but tbh? by the middle I'd already decided it was better to turn my brain off and hope the plot twists kept me entertained and in that respect the ending fully lived up to my expectations

[olderthannetfic]

Hey, sorry to ask this, but a few days ago I saw a post/discussion about the history of original work on ao3 (i.e. how and when it was allowed). I thought it was in my likes, but it's not, and I thought you had reblogged it recently, but I didn't find it. I was wondering if you have seen this discussion around? Or where I can find more about it? This specific post talked abt how who defended original work on ao3 were not the BNFs, if that helps.

That was me running my mouth in the reblogs of something or other. It’s just the one comment.

But what’s that you say? Some tl;dr about a pet topic? Don’t mind if I do! ;) (To be honest, most of this debate happened years ago, and a lot of the long meta was by me back then too, so…)

Okay, so, the situation with Original Works is actually super interesting and a microcosm of early years OTW wank.

This is going to be even more tl;dr than my usual. To try to summarize very briefly:

There were two big cultural factions. One thought “original” was the opposite of “fan”. That one was in charge of OTW. It was hard to get voices from the other side into the debate because they already felt excluded from OTW.

This divide broke down more or less into Ye Olde Slash Fandom on the “it’s the opposite” side and anime fandom on the “WTF?” side. Americans on one side and a lot of non-US, non-English language fandom on the other.

I. Media Fandom, Anime Fandom, and Early OTW

I went to that first fundraising party that astolat threw in New York City back in… god… 2007? 2008? I wasn’t on the Board or any official position until the committees got started later, but I was around right from the very beginning.

Whether you’re looking at volunteers or at people who commented on astolat’s original post, there were always a variety of fans from a variety of fannish backgrounds. People aren’t absolutely in one camp or another, and fannish interests change over time. If you go dig through Dreamwidth posts to find who was actually participating in this debate at the time, half of them are probably in the other camp now.

If you think like that sounds like a preamble to me making a bunch of offensively sweeping generalizations and divvying fans up into little groups, you’d be right! Haha.

I.a. Ye Olde Media Fandom

There are a lot of camps of people who like fanfic. One of the biggest divisions has been Ye Olde Media Fandom vs. anime fandom. Astolat’s social circle–my LJ social circle–was filled with people with decades of fannish experience and a deep knowledge of the Media Fandom side of things.

Those fandom history treatises that start with K/S zines in Star Trek fandom in the 70s and move on through the mainstream buddy cops like Starsky & Hutch to the more niche, sff buddy cops like Fraser and Ray or Jim and Blair are talking about Media Fandom. I try to always capitalize it because the name is lulzy and bizarre to me unless it’s a proper noun for a specific historical thing. It was coined as a rude term for “mass media” fandom aka dumb people who like, ughhhh, Star Trek, ughhh, instead of books. This is a very ancient slapfight from the type of fandom you find at Worldcon, often called “SF fandom” or plain “fandom”.

(Yes, this leads to mega confusion on the part of some old dudes when they find Fanlore and fail to understand that “fandom” there refers to what these people would call “Media Fandom”. They think only they get the unmarked form. But I digress…)

Media Fandom is a specific flavor of fandom. It’s where the slash zines were. It’s where the fans of live action US TV shows were. It’s the history that acafans have laid out well and that tends to get used to defend the idea of a female subculture writing transgressive and transformative fanfic. On the video side, Media Fandom is where Kandy Fong invented vidding by making Star Trek slideshows.

(Kandy’s still around, BTW. She’s usually at Escapade in L.A. Ask her to tell you about the dancing penises sketch in person. She’s hilarious.)

Astolat and friends had been going to slash cons for years. They founded Vividcon. And Yuletide. That meant that when astolat said “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” we all jumped to help. This is a lady who gets things done.

From a Worldcon perspective, or even from an older Media Fandom perspective, this group was comparatively young, hip, and welcoming. Their fandom interests were comparatively broad. Just look at Yuletide!

In fact, yes, let us look at Yuletide… [ominous music]

I.b. Yuletide sucks at anime

From the very first year (2003), Yuletide mods have asked for help with anime fandoms, been confused about anime fandoms, or made bad judgment calls about anime fandoms. They’ve fucked up on Superhero comics and plenty of other things over the years, but anime has been the most consistent (well, and JRPGs, but there’s so much overlap in those fic fandoms).

There was already bad feeling about this. There were years of bad feeling about this.

I.c. Where are the historians?

Academic study of fanficcy things pretty much got started with Textual Poachers and Enterprising Women. Other acafans who are well known to LJ and later Tumblr are people like Francesca Coppa who wrote a very nice summary of the history of Media Fandom. These are not the only academics who exist, these academics themselves have written about many other things, and by now, OTW’s own journal has covered a lot of other territory, but to this day I see complaints on Tumblr that “acafans” only care about K/S and oldschool slash fandom.

There were years of bad feeling about this as well.

I.d. What kind of fan was I?

Now, by the time OTW got started, I’d moseyed over to not only a lot of live action US TV but a lot of old-as-fuck US TV that is squarely in the Media Fandom camp. But once upon a time, I was a weeaboo hanging out with my weeaboo friends in college. I learned Japanese (sort of). I moved to Japan. Livin’ the weeaboo dream!

More importantly, I used to be a member of a lot of anime mailing lists back in the Yahoo Groups days. I didn’t realize what a cultural gap that would cause until the original works issue came up on AO3.

I.e. Anime Fandom, German-language Fandom, Original M/M

Once upon a time–namely in that Yahoo Groups era–there was an archive called Boys in Chains. It was where you found The Good Stuff™. Heavy kink and power exchange galore! It was extremely well known in the parts of fandom I was in, even if you weren’t on the associated mailing list. It contained lots of fic, but it also had lots of original work.

Around that same era, I was on a critique list called Crimson Ink, which was mixed fic and original. The “original slash” and “original yaoi” crowds mixed freely and were in fanfic spaces. Remember, this is like 2003. You’re never going to get your gay fantasy novel published in English in the US. A couple of fangirl presses started around then, but they died an ignominious death after their first print run.

Fanfiction.net used to allow original work before it spun that off into FictionPress. We forget this today, but if you were an early FFN person, the separation wasn’t so great either.

Meanwhile, German-language fandom was hanging out on sites like Animexx.de, a big-ass fic archive that prominently mentions also including original work. I have the impression that Spanish-language fandom was similar too.

Shousetsu Bang*Bang was founded in 2005. It was a webzine for original m/m, but it was entirely populated by fanfic fandom types.

In all of those kinds of spaces, there was a lot of “original” work that was kind of slash or BL-ish and seen as fannish if it was posted in the fannish space. These weren’t anime-only spaces. They were multifandom spaces where it was seen as obvious and normal that a couple of huge fandoms like Harry Potter would dominate but that everything else big would naturally be anime.

While fans from every background are everywhere, I found that the concentration of EFL fans living in Continental Europe, South America, and Asia was much higher in this kind of space, even the exclusively English language part of it, than in my US TV fandoms.

II. AO3 Early Adopters

AO3 went into closed beta in 2009. In 2010, it was open to the general public (albeit with the invitation queue it still has). But not everyone was interested yet. Just like fandom is loath to leave the dying, shambling mess of Tumblr, fandom was loath to leave dwindling LJ/DW circles or was happy enough on Fanfiction.net. I used to see a lot of posts like “Why are you guys trying to STEAL fanfic from the original! FFN is enough!”

I literally could not give away the invitations I had. No one wanted them.

So who was on AO3? Obviously enough, it was all of us who built it and our friends. So that means a bunch of oldschool Livejournal slashers coming from fandoms like Due South or Stargate Atlantis.

The queue was open. Anyone could make an account. Everyone was welcome. In theory…

But more and more, there started to be these posts about how “AO3 Hates Anime Fandom” and “FFN is for anime. AO3 is for Western fandoms.” and “If you guys actually wanted anime fandom on there, you’d invite us better and make us more welcome.”

At the time, I found these posts obnoxious. People aren’t purely in one sort of fandom or the other. No one was stopping anime fandom from making accounts. No one was banning anime fandom. If there wasn’t much from old fandoms, that was because old fandoms seldom move.

Things began to change. Trolls on FFN forced the Twilight porn writers out, creating enough fuss and brouhaha to mobilize people who would rather have stayed put. AO3 got big enough that randos found it by accident. Original work started to pop up, posted by people who’d never looked at the rules and had no idea it was not allowed.

III. History of AO3’s Policy

I had argued for allowing “original work” during the initial discussions about the ToS. On one side of this issue was me. On the other, everyone else on the committee.

I was overruled.

Open Door started importing old archives to save them. Boys in Chains was hugely important to fandom history from my point of view. It was slated to be imported… maybe. Except that Boys in Chains is half original. AO3 was happy to grandfather in those stories, but the final archive owner felt, quite rightly, that it would be unfair to tell half of the authors they were welcome in the new space while spitting on the other half.

I was pissed. I had been pissed since being overruled the first time. To me, the fact that it should be allowed was so blatantly obvious that it was hard to even explain why.

(To be honest, this difficulty in explaining why and the even greater difficulty in figuring out the source of that difficulty is what held the discussion back for so long. When every assumption on either side is completely opposite, it’s hard to communicate.)

I felt betrayed. It would be like if you helped build something, and everyone was suddenly like “Well, obviously, we can’t allow m/m. It’s not normal fanfic.”

So we discussed it again and, again, it was me vs. literally everyone else. And still the “AO3 is only for Western slash fandom” bitching rose in volume and more and more people complained of feeling excluded from the new fandom hub. Finally, the committee agreed to open the issue up for public comment and get some more input. I was a fool and neither wrote nor proofread the post. It went out phrasing the question as allowing “non fannish” work or something of that sort.

I was furious. The entire point of the whole debate was that I saw some original work, the original work that belongs on AO3, as inherently fannish. And now this had been presented to the AO3 audience as something completely different. Think pieces were popping up in the journals of everyone I knew about diluting AO3’s mission and how we needed to save AO3 from encroachment. Public opinion was very negative. That’s both because of how the post was phrased and because OTW die hards at the time were mostly from the same fannish background. This tidal wave of negativity meant that there was virtually no chance of changing this poisonous rule. And if the rule didn’t change, the people who wanted the rule change were never going to show up to explain why it mattered.

If you’ve been reading my tumblr, I think you can guess what happened next.

I posted a long post to my Dreamwidth. It was a masterwork of passive aggression. In it, I wrung my hands about how simply tragic it would be if AO3 had to delete all of the original work… like anthropomorfic.

Now, I think anthropomorfic counts as fanfic as much as anything else, but I also knew that it fails most rigorous “based on a canon” type definitions of fic and, more importantly, it’s a favorite Yuletide fandom of many of the people on the side that wanted to ban original work.

That’s a nice fandom of yours. It would be a pity if something happened to it. 

Yup. Passive aggressive blackmail. Go me. Suddenly, there was a lot of awkward backtracking and confused running in circles in various journals. The committee agreed to table the idea for a while but not rule out the idea of allowing original works in the future. We agreed to halt all deletions of original work. If a fan posted it, the Abuse Committee (which I was also head of at the time) would not delete that work even though it was technically against the rules.

Time passed. The people on the negative side got tired. I wanted off that committee and had wanted off for ages, but I was damned if I was going to leave before ramming through this piece of policy. Grudgematch till I die! (Look, I never said I wasn’t a wanker.)

After a while, some other fans came forward with more types of “original work” as evidence that it should be allowed. These were from parts of fandom none of us on the committee knew a damn thing about.

This new evidence combined with the gradual accretion of original stuff on AO3 without the sky falling eventually led us to quietly rule Original Work a valid fandom. There was never even a big announcement post. I slipped a word to the Boys in Chains mod myself.

IV. What Were They So Afraid Of Anyway?

So why were people so resistant? Seems like a dick move, right?

Not exactly.

I mean, I was enraged and waged a one-woman war to change the rules, but the other side wasn’t nuts. The objections were usually the following:

I just don’t get why it would be allowed. It never was in my fannish spaces.

Most of our members don’t want this.

Most of the examples of things that ought to be included are m/m. We are privileging m/m if we allow it, and AO3 already has a m/m-centric reputation that can feel exclusionary to some fans.

AO3 is a young, shaky platform that can barely handle the load and content we already have. If we open to original work, we’ll be opening the floodgates. The volume of posting will be so high, it will drown out the fic we’re actually here to protect.

Protecting stuff that doesn’t need protection because it’s not an IP issue would dilute OTW’s mission.

If we allow it, idiots will try to turn AO3 into advertising space, posting only the first chapter and a link to where you can pay to read the rest.

If we add another category of text before we add fan art, that’s a slap in the face of the fan artists we are already failing.

These arguments all make perfect sense in context.

Obvously, the issue with the first two is that different fannish communities have different norms. I knew that a very large community disagreed with the then current AO3 policy, but since so few of them were around to comment, it seemed like a tiny fringe minority.

The m/m thing is… complex. M/M content with zero IP issues is at risk. It is always at risk in a way that even f/f is not (though f/f is also always at risk). Asking for m/m to be exactly equivalent to f/f or m/f in numbers, tropes, whatever is ignoring the historical realities. In our current moment of queer activism in the West, we treat all types of queerness as part of one community with one set of goals, but once you get to culture and art or even more specific activism, this forced homogenization is neither useful nor healthy.

OTOH, AO3 really did have PR problems related to the perception that we gave m/m fandom the kid glove treatment. That objection wasn’t coming from nowhere.

AO3 was shaky. It was tiny when I first brought up this argument. Hell, it wasn’t even in closed beta the first time we discussed this. Part of what made the quiet rules change possible was AO3 organically getting much bigger and OTW having to buy many more servers for unrelated reasons.

The “floodgates” thing was put to rest by tacitly allowing original work before the rules change. We had a period to study how fans actually behaved, and as I predicted, only a small amount of original work got posted. It was indeed mostly things like original BL-ish stories or original work that had been part of a mixed original/fic fest, exchange, zine, etc. Currently, the “Original Work” fandom on AO3 only has 76,348 works. That’s pretty big compared to individual fandoms but tiny compared to AO3’s current size.

The commercial argument was spurious because commercial spam had been against the rules from the very beginning. OH THE IRONY that nowadays AO3 has all these idiots trying to post the first chapter of their fanfic and then direct you to where you can buy the rest.

AO3 has plenty of fanfic of public domain works. One of the problems with gatekeeping original work is that any way you try to distinguish it (not based on a specific canon, not an IP issue, etc.) will apply to some set of obviously allowable fandoms.

As for fan art… OTW has failed fan artists. They needed protection as much as or even more than fic writers. Just look at Tumblr! If we had succeeded at making DeviantArt but allowing boners, fan art fandom could have been safe all these years. Or when Tumblr inevitably shat the bed, we could have scooped up all those people instead of them scattering to twitter and god knows where.

OTW has failed vidders too, at least in terms of preservation. I know I’m not the only one who thinks this. Other major people from like the first Board and shit have discussed this with me offline. Doing some kind of vidding project, possibly outside of OTW is on a lot of our to-do lists. But at least one of OTW’s biggest victories has been that copyright exemption. OTW has demonstrably done really positive things for vidders that other organizations and sites have not. As a vidder, I never expected to see good hosting for the actual video files, and I’m quite content.

But fan artists… yeah. That argument makes sense at least from a place of frustration.

BTW, for the love of god, if you’re a n00b to OTW stuff, please do not reblog this post excitedly telling me that hosting fan art is on OTW’s road map, so yay, good news. Someone always does that, and it’s so irritating. I haven’t been involved in OTW in years, but I used to be, and I know what is on the roadmap. The couple of you who do heavy lifting on sysadmin and coding and policy things are welcome to weigh in as usual. I know none of us like that we can’t host fan art. It’s not what we intended.

Nonetheless, I found this argument to be the perfect being the enemy of the good. If we can save more text now without losing much of anything, we should do it. The fact that we’re fucking up on the fan art front is not a reason to spread the misery around.

V. Is “Original” the Opposite of “Fanfic”?

Okay, so that tl;dr above is why “BNFs” were on one side and “nobodies” were on the other. BNFs from one cultural background founded OTW. BNFs from the other cultural background weren’t even aware that the debate was going on.

But what was the underlying philosophical problem in even having the conversation?

It took me a long time, but I finally worked it out: We had two completely different ways of categorizing writing, and they were so baked into how we phrased questions that everything ended up being unanswerable to the other side. Here is what I came up with:

Schema 1

Fanfic - based on someone else’s IP

Original Work - the opposite

Schema 2

Non-Fannish Work - School essays, stories you are writing to try to sell to a mainstream publisher

Fannish Work Type 1 - based on other people’s characters directly (i.e. fanfic) Type 2 - based on tropes or whatever (“original slash” and the like)

Now, in the current moment when half of Tumblr just got into Chinese webnovels and the m/m ebook industry is thriving in English, original, tropey, BL-ish work is no longer different from “things I am trying to sell”. But this is how the divide was circa 2005 on fannish websites, and it’s the divide that was driving this internal OTW debate.

VI. Let’s Summarize the Camps One More Time

So, again, the debate makes perfect sense if you understand who was involved.

On the mainstream “But that’s not fanfic? I’m confused?” side:

Big US TV fandoms in English

Fandom historians of K/S–>buddy cop slash–>SGA, etc.

Americans

On the other side:

Anime fandom

“Original slash” fandom that had already been chased off of everywhere

People upset that AO3 wasn’t farther on translating the interface and supporting non-English language fandom.

People upset about US-centrism in fandom

Yes, I am very white, very American, and by now very into old buddy cop shows, but this was basically how the breakdown worked. It meant that something that looked like a minor quibble to one side was really, really not.

[the-everqueen]

why i disliked “the traitor baru cormorant”

so...recently i read Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant. i bought it thinking, Cool, an insightful fantasy series for me to get into while i wait to hear whether i passed my qualifying exams! i have some time before the semester starts! 

and then i absolutely hated it and spent every minute cataloguing what i thought Dickinson got wrong.

...uh, if you want to get the tl;dr of the liveblog i gave the gf, here’s the top three reasons i disliked this book:

1) not a fan of the “strong female character” trope

yes, Baru doesn’t sling around a sword or shoot arrows better than Anyone In The Whole World. but Dickinson IMMEDIATELY tells us (not shows, tells) that she’s good at math, she’s clever at picking apart strategic scenarios, she’s a savant. (tbh, i don’t love how he shows this, either, with the standard child-prodigy-who-catches-the-attention-of-a-powerful-adult trope.) in Dickinson’s crafted world, her math skills aren’t entirely unusual: women (for...some reason?) are stereotyped as being good at calculations, despite also being aligned with hysteria and too many emotions. this bothers me more than it’s probably supposed to, because the sexism in this novel doesn’t really seem to follow an internal logic. i guess it’s so we can have a woman as the protagonist? also...hoo boy...her “savant” characterization bothers me because...she’s heavily coded as South East Asian (...maaaybe Philippines or Native Hawaii, but as i’ll get to later, Dickinson doesn’t make a huge distinction). uh...model minority stereotypes anyone? yes, within the text, plenty of people associated with the Empire comment that it’s impressive someone of her background got into a position of power so young. at the same time, i’m sure that sounds familiar to so many Asian-identified people! the constant tightrope of being expected to perform to a certain (white, Western) standard while also being Othered. mostly this bothers me because Baru is also characterized as...a sellout for the Empire. sure, her stated goal is to undo the Empire from within, but [MAJOR SPOILERS] in the end it appears that her actual goal was to attain enough power that the Empire would let her be a benevolent dictator over her home island? and it’s only after a major PERSONAL betrayal that she revises this plan? [END SPOILERS] Baru also assimilates without much pain or sacrifice. she hardly ever thinks about her parents or her childhood home. she willingly strips herself of cultural signifiers and adapts to Empire norms (apart from being a closeted lesbian, which...yeah, i’ll get to that, too). and it’s not that Dickinson doesn’t TRY to make her a nuanced character, but...to me, it feels so painfully obvious that this is not his experience. it feels almost...voyeuristic. 

...much like his descriptions of wlw desire!

2) we get it, you read Foucault

the categories of sexual deviance are based entirely on a Western Victorian-era medical discourse around non-heterosexual forms of desire, but Dickinson ignores the network of sociocultural, religious, and historical contexts that contributed to that specific kind of discourse. he uses the terms “tribadism” and “sodomy” but those ideas CANNOT EXIST outside a Euro-American Christian context. yes, a huge part of the 19th century involved the pathologization of sexual and romantic desire (or lack thereof). but that in turn goes back to a history of medicine that relied on the “scientific method” as a means of studying and dissecting the human body--and that method in itself is a product of Enlightenment thinking. Theorist Sylvia Wynter (whomst everyone should read, imho) discusses how the Enlightenment attempted to make the Human (represented by a cisgender, heteronormative, white man) an agent of the State economy. every categorization of so-called deviance goes back to white supremacist attempts to define themselves as ‘human’ against a nonwhite, non-Christian Other. and IN TURN that was ultimately founded on anti-Black, anti-Indigenous racism. at this point it’s a meme in academic circles to mention Foucault, because so many scholars don’t go any further in engaging with his ideas or acknowledge their limits. but SERIOUSLY. Dickinson crafts the Masquerade as this psuedo-scientific empire that’s furthering erasure of native cultures, but...where did these ideas come from? who created them? what was the justification that gave them power? [MINOR SPOILER] blaming the Empire’s ideology on a handful of people behind the Mask who crafted this entire system makes me...uncomfortable, to say the least. part of what gives imperialism its power is that a lot of ordinary people buy in to its ideas, because it aligns with dominant belief systems or gives them some sense of advantage. 

also speaking of cultural erasure...

3) culture is more than set dressing

again, to reiterate: Baru does NOT think back to her childhood home for longer than a couple passing sentences at various points in the narrative. but even though the early chapters literally take place on her home island, i don’t get a sense of...lived experience. this is true of ALL of the fantasy analogues Dickinson has created in his Empire. i felt uncomfortably aware of the real world counterparts that Dickinson was drawing inspiration from. at the same time...there are basically no details to really breathe life into these various fantasy cultures. i HATE the trope of “fantasy Asia” or “fantasy Africa” or “fantasy Middle East” that’s rampant among white male sff writers. Dickinson does not get points from me for basically just expanding that to “fantasy South East Asia,” “fantasy Mongolia,” “fantasy South America,” and... “fantasy Africa,” plus some European cultures crammed in there. he’s VERY OBVIOUSLY drawing on those languages for names, but otherwise there’s no real sense of their religious practices, the nuances of their cultures, the differences between those cultures (besides physiological, which...oh god). part of that is probably supposed to be justified by “well, the Empire just erased it!!!” but that’s not an excuse imho. 

also...in making the Empire the ultimate signifier of the evils of imperialism...Dickinson kind of leans into the “noble savage” stereotype. Baru’s home island is portrayed as this idyllic environment where no one is shamed for who they love and gender doesn’t determine destiny and there are no major conflicts. (there is a minor nod to some infighting, but this is mostly a “weakness” that the Masquerade uses as an excuse to obliterate a whole tribe.) Dickinson justifies young Baru’s immediate assimilation as her attempt to figure out the Masquerade’s power from within, but given that the Masquerade presumably killed one of her dads and her mom maybe advocates a guerilla resistance...it’s weird that Baru basically abandons her family without a second thought. yeah, i get that she’s a kid when the Masquerade takes over the island, but...that’s still a hugely traumatic experience! the layers of trauma and conditioning and violence that go into this level of colonization are almost entirely externalized. 

(later it’s implied that Baru might qualify as a psychopath, and tbh that feels like an excuse for why we haven’t gotten any sense of her inner world, not to mention kind of offensive.) 

this isn’t exhaustive but...

it’s not that i don’t think white people shouldn’t ever address POC experiences in their books. just...if your entire trilogy is going to revolve around IMPERIALISM IS BAD, ACTUALLY, maybe you should contribute to the discourse that Black, Brown, and Indigenous authors have already done. reading this book made me so, so angry. i did not feel represented! i felt like i was being talked down to, both on a critical theory level AND on a craft level. there are SO MANY books by actual BIPOC and minority authors that have done this better. N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy and her current Cities series. Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy. Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House remains one of the more powerful novels i’ve read on how The System Is Out To Destroy You, That Is The Point. (Bardugo is non-practicing Spanish and Moroccan Jewish on one side of her family, and her character Alex is mixed and comes from a Jewish background!) 

...

there’s not really a point to this. i get a lot of people have raved about this book. good for them. if that’s you, no judgment. i’m not trying to argue IF YOU LIKED THIS YOU ARE PROBLEMATIC. i’m just kind of enraged that a white dude wrote about a Brown lesbian under a colonial empire and that THIS Brown lesbian under a colonial empire couldn’t even get behind the representation. also kind of annoyed that it’s the Empire of Masks and Dickinson either hasn’t read Fanon or didn’t see fit to slip in a Fanon reference, which like. missed opportunity. 

[gellavonhamster]

(1)Oh, Mina-The-Reincarnated-Wife trope is just the worst! You already said about how poorly Mina was treated (every!single!!time!!!) whenever this trope was at play, but the funniest thing is that Dracula doesn't come off all that better. Like. None of adaptations I've seen had the hope, desperation, grief one would expect if someone who was dear for you died, got reincarnated, became whole different person now. This trope could work if it was about acceptance and letting go, and was in a way

(2)This trope could work if it was about acceptance and letting go, and was in a way more of a ghost story than your typical vampire story - though vampires in their roots are restless dead. We could have had a story where Dracula chooses the afterlife himself; where he comes to his sences in a way. Abraham says in the book that he was very remarkable man when he was alive - maybe he could regain his humanity for a moment, and choose less animalistic form of existence? Realize how he hurt so

(3)Realize how he hurt so many brave noble people and reincarnation of his wife, and his people he once so fiercely protected? We also could have Johnathan's compassion towards him safe the day and one Quincy Morris instead of If-U-Were-Married-In-Past-Life-U-Are-SFF trope (soulmates for forever). Dracula could dissolve and move on to afterlife/get reincarnated. Mina not choosing her previous life over life-right-now but maybe also embracing this part of herself would also be great.

(4)Mina not choosing her previous life over life-right-now but maybe also embracing this part of herself would also be great. The reason why it should be Johanathan's compassion is because Mina has Dracula at gunpoint or smt like that. I'm sorry for my mad ramblings - I read about Vlad Tepes right after the novel and never looked back. And idea about reincarnated Radu is great! And will haunt me now. He had three brothers though...

You’re so right, anon. Like, if we absolutely have to deal with this trope (why though? It’s not in the book, it’s just that at some point some adaptation introduced it, and everyone else thought it a great idea for some reason), there are ways to do it differently from what was done before, with more respect towards the characters and the source material, but I guess just repeating the same old cliche over and over again is easier.

It’s difficult for me to see Jonathan as the one whose compassion helps Dracula, as he was so set on destroying the Count after what happened to Mina, but then again, Mina asks her men to have more compassion for Dracula because one day she, if she becomes a full-blown vampire, may need it too, so I guess it’s possible to approach it from this angle. Regarding Quincey, I’ve recently read a wonderful fic that sort of touches upon that - in it, Quincey is a werewolf, and has some understanding for the Count the way one “creature of the night” would.

[ink-logging]

Some American Comics, 3/27/19

Jesusfreak, Joe Casey, Benjamin Marra, Brad Simpson, Rus Wooton, Sonia Harris: Or, ‘The First Temptation of Christ’. This was recently controversial on Fox News and among those certain greater media outlets keen on tracking culture war stuff, but it’s really just a hard PG-13 adventure story that does what Asian comics have done with epic books like “Journey to the West” for decades, i.e. slap the clay of the source material into the shape of more recent popular entertainments. In fact, and moreso than the ‘action comix version of the New Testament’ angle, what’s notable about “Jesusfreak” is that it adds an extra layer of artifice by employing an idiom reminiscent of Bronze Age U.S. comic books, like Marvel’s “Master of Kung Fu” under Doug Moench & Paul Gulacy, or dawn-of-the-direct-market indie genre fare like Gulacy’s and Don McGregor’s “Sabre” - comics marked by a keen interest in popular media outside of comics (SFF novels, genre movies, commercial illustration) and an often very earnest, purplish narrative approach. This isn’t guesswork; there’s an essay in the back of the book that pretty much spells this out, positioning the mid-’70s as the last time the classic American comic book was both genuinely a player in mass media, and artistically adventurous. I personally don’t feel much attachment to comics of this period, though I have read a bunch of them; in terms of English-language work, I prefer the British stuff of the same period, from magazines like “Action” or early “2000 AD”, which interfaced with outside media by seizing their concepts wholesale and presenting them in as screaming-loud a manner as imaginable. U.S. comics of the time feel very cautious compared to those, unless we’re including the counter-mainstream of late-period b&w horror magazines, which mostly consisted of Spanish artists drawing charcoal swirls around glamour models while the writers and/or editors vamped out 467-word text captions about the hopelessness of life. That was also good. Doug Moench wrote some of those too.     

 As a result, “Jesusfreak” can readily be compared to works by Michel Fiffe, or Tom Scioli, or Ed Piskor, all of whom take inspiration from ‘70s or ‘80s American comic books, and put that inspiration to different ends. The writer here is Joe Casey, who’s been around for a long time, though I most readily associate him with certain off-center mainstream comics from the ‘00s; his is a more chameleonic style, and as a result the book reads like more a straightforward pastiche than those of the artists above. A dark-skinned Jesus grimaces from the pain of visions, working construction on properties rules over by fair-skinned Romans: houses where he can never live. Abusive soldiers attack religious worshippers, and Jesus fights back with lethal karate power! Older comics would boldface their social relevance in pulpy terms like this, and so it goes as Jesus confronts an Edenic snake-with-legs Satan in a Bruce Lee/Chuck Norris “Way of the Dragon”-type colosseum martial arts duel, which the devil intends as a premonition of all the violence to be done in the Christ’s name in later history. It’s a little cleverer than it looks, but when I see the drawings of Benjamin Marra — blown out under a permanent desert haze via colorist Brad Simpson — I recall the finale of his solo book “Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T.”, which takes the absurd macho combat fantasy devices of its own earlier chapters and keys them to specific alpha male behaviors in the lives of the types of men who need these fantasies: ideals that invariably leave them unhappy and maladjusted. Marra, I think, is underestimated in his ambivilance toward what he depicts, and those struggles are more vivid to me than poppy provocations such as this.

*

Go-Bots #3 (of 5), Tom Scioli: Speaking of which - I am now two full issues behind on Scioli’s new robot hallucination, but I’m getting there! This issue has what the anime fans call a timeskip - a leap forward many years, to a place where rogue transforming vehicles are now the dominant species. I love how Scioli draws the humans in this issue: tiny, scampering things, speaking in a uniform, childlike voice, all soft and squishy inside the cold steel combatants. Our toys are now a security apparatus, but we still look like we’re playing.

-Jog

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Michael Whelan, Sea Horror, Solar Pons, World of Tanks

Tolkien (Sacnoth’s Scriptorium): The Next Tolkien Book: THE NATURE OF MIDDLE-EARTH. So, news is now out that there’s a new book of J.R.R.T. material due out next year (May 27th 2021).  Edited by Tolkien linguist Carl Hostetter, it’s called THE NATURE OF MIDDLE-EARTH, and its four hundred pages gather together many of the short essays Tolkien wrote about his legendarium in the post-LotR period.

  Gaming (Jon Mollison): For those of you interested in the hobbyist portion of this blog, allow me to point you to the thing that has been keeping me too busy to throw write-ups on gaming thoughts onto this page:  The Joy Of Wargaming.  With new videos up every other day, it’s been gathering steam every since it first went live back and the end of May.  The example video is a quick unboxing showing a small piece of a larger table of Egyptian terrain, but I’ve got a lot of actual-plays, painting sessions, and game reviews up already with more scheduled through most of July, including some hex-and-counter style wargaming for the diehard grognards.

Art (DMR Books): Michael Whelan, a colossus in the realm of SFF art,  turns a venerable seventy years old today. In honor of the occasion, I considered covering Michael’s incredible run of Barsoomian covers or perhaps picking a “greatest hits” from his forty-five year relationship with DAW Books or maybe even going through the surprising number of Howardian artworks that Whelan has painted over the years. However, I finally settled on a retrospective looking at Michael’s unparalleled body of work devoted to Elric of Melnibone.

D&D (Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog): The previous session introduced developments that completely destabilized what passes for a status quo in this campaign. How to prepare for this? Well, Gygax has numerous examples of this sort of thing scattered about the AD&D rules. Imagine the situation. Determine the odds for each particular occurrence. Roll percentile dice and keep moving! As far as prep goes, that was about all that could be done, though I couldn’t help ponder what is just around the corner in the various dungeons I’ve introduced.

Classic Science Fiction (Adventures Fantastic): So the next few Retro Hugo posts are going to be focusing on the short stories that I haven’t already looked at.  I covered “Far Centaurus” for A. E. van Vogt’s birthday, and a scheduling slip-up resulting in my post on “The Wedge” by Isaac Asimov going live before I finished the novelettes.

  Art (Goodman Games): TSR artist Jim Holloway recently passed away. He will be missed.  Why do you play D&D? Because it’s a social experience that brings smiles, laughs, and camaraderie built around the spirit of adventure. While the wargames that preceded Chainmail and D&D were strategic and serious, D&D has drifted steadily into the realm of “social entertainment.” Now in the year 2020, we’ve fully accepted D&D as entertainment. Heck, you can even watch D&D be played by professional actors on Twitch who are just there to make you laugh. In 2020, we know this. Way back in 1981, there was an artist who figured it out before the rest of us. That artist was Jim Holloway.

Games (Table Top Gaming News): World of Tanks Tabletop Gaming Coming in September.  Many of you have hopped into your Panzer or Tiger or Patton and headed across virtual landscapes, looking to take out enemy tanks. Well, soon, you’ll be able to do the same on your tabletops. Gale Force 9 has announced that they’re coming out with a World of Tanks tabletop game this September.

Weird Westerns (Dark Worlds Quarterly): The creation of the new sub-genre of Weird Westerns is not a recent thing. The first Western is considered to be Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902). The Horror story dates back to the caves and prehistoric man, so we will begin at the turn of the 20th Century. Novel publishers and the weekly magazines produced countless Western stories with authors like Zane Grey, Max Brand and Clarence Mulford being top-rate authors.

Advice (Amatopia): Ten Easy Life Hacks to Not Be a Total Creep! (Sci-fi Author edition).     Hi there, sci-fi and fantasy writers and fans! Are you tired of being accused of inappropriate conduct towards women? Are you sick of constant allegations of being a “creep”? Lucky for you, I’m here with ten life hacks to help keep you from being metooed like Myke Cole, Sam Sykes, Warren Ellis, and Paul Krueger, among others. There’s also Elizabeth Bear and her husband Scott Lynch who are accused of all sorts of horrible stuff.

Fiction (Adventure’s Fantastic): So, why on Bierce’s birthday am I going to talk as much about Robert E. Howard as the birthday boy? Simple: Ambrose Bierce had a big influence on some of Howard’s weird western stories. Bierce was one of Robert E. Howard’s most favorite writers. Howard even has Bierce appear in three of his humorous sketches, and a name check in a fourth that Howard wrote in his letters to Howard’s best friend, Clyde Smith

Life (Wasteland & Sky): Friends are not merely allies. They can be allies in causes, and they can even be support during the darkest times, but friends do not exist to be tools to achieve a common goal. They are not to be thrown away when they lose usefulness, or when they disagree with a certain belief you have that they do not. The only people who believe in such a thing as weaponizing friendship are those who have no idea what friendship is.

Appendix N (Swords and Stitchery): Colours Of a Darker Appendix N – Robert W. Chambers, H.P. Lovecraft, & Jack London. “The Mask” is introduced by an excerpt from Act 1, Scene 2d:

Camilla: “You, sir, should unmask.”

Stranger: “Indeed?”

Cassilda: “Indeed it’s time. We have all laid aside disguise but you.”

Stranger: “I wear no mask.”

Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) “No mask? No mask!”

It is also stated, in “The Repairer of Reputations”, that the final moment of the first act involves the character of Cassilda on the streets, screaming in a horrified fashion, “Not upon us, oh, king! Not upon us!”

SFWA (Cirsova): SFWA is a terrorist organization. For several years, we have remained agnostic on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. While we have had a few friends who have had “beef” with SFWA, we have also had a number of authors and friends who have been members of the SFWA.

H. P. Lovecraft (Tentaculii): Derie’s comment on Lovecraft “approving as he did of Nazi Germany’s ultranationalism” could be be misunderstood, though. Firstly one has to know that “ultranationalism” has a specific political-historical meaning: ‘the arrogant belief in the complete superiority of one’s nation over others, and the placing of its interests above all other nations at all times’. In the cases of Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia etc this was accompanied by variations on the ‘cult-of-the-Emperor’. Ultranationalism has also spawned an equally perverse leftist flipside, which despises any pride in the nation and seeks to constantly denigrate it at every opportunity.

Fiction (Rough Edges): I meant to get back to this series of historical action/adventure novels set in ancient Rome sooner, but other books got in the way. However, I’ve now read BLOOD ON THE SAND, the fourth novel in the Gladiator series (originally published in England under the series title The Eagles). The author behind the Andrew Quiller house-name this time is the prolific Laurence James, who also wrote the first book in the series, HILL OF THE DEAD.

Sherlock Holmes (Digital Bibliophilia): I’ve seen a lot of articles over the years regarding the character of Solar Pons. Most recently my involvement in Kickstarting some of the MX Sherlock Holmes books by Belanger Books meant I was included in the notification that they were also looking to republish the complete Solar Pons series as originally authored by August Derleth. At the time I didn’t join in on the project, I’d already committed to a number of other products, and thought that these were a little out of my interest range.

Horror (DMR Books): Since the beginning of time the sea has inspired fear. It covers most of the earth and what lies beneath it we may never truly know. Anything can reside beneath the waves. Men have gone forth on it and discovered new lands, but these journeys are often costly in human lives. Horrors and dangers of the sea have made the way into mythology and legend. Creatures like the Norse Kraken and the Japanese Umibozu were said to attack ships.

RPG (Goodman Games): Skull & Crossbones Classics is the new zine from the one-and-only Bob Brinkman. Bob is not only one of the main forces behind the Sanctum Secorum podcast, but he’s a frequent contributor to many of our lines. You’ll find Bob’s name on products for Mutant Crawl Classics, DCC Lankhmar, Fifth Edition Fantasy, and much more. Now Bob has turned his eyes to the high seas and the golden age of pirates. And Bob is no stranger to the pirate genre, as anyone who has met him knows well. So we know this ship is in good hands!

Sensor Sweep: Michael Whelan, Sea Horror, Solar Pons, World of Tanks published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Battle Tech, Manly Wade Wellman, Savage Heroes, Space Force

Science Fiction (Tor.com): Anyone who has played Traveller (or even just played with online character generation sites like this one) might have noticed that a surprising number of the characters one can generate are skilled with blades. This may see as an odd choice for a game like Traveller that is set in the 57th century CE, or indeed for any game in which swords and starships co-exist. Why do game authors make these choices?  Just as games mix swords and starships, so do SFF novels. The trope goes way back, to the planetary romance novels of the Golden Age. Here are five examples.

Fiction Review (Legends of Men): Savage Heroes is a sword & sorcery anthology that’s pretty rare in the U.S. That’s because it’s a U.K. publication. The first S&S anthology I reviewed was Swords Against Darkness. It’s a great anthology that came highly recommended by an expert scholar in the field. Savage Heroes is better though. It captures very well the combination of historical adventure, lost world fiction, and cosmic horror that makes Sword and Sorcery unique.

Fiction (Wasteland & Sky): Hard-boiled noir is an interesting subgenre. It’s mostly remembered in the mainstream, if at all, for cheesy parodies that family sitcoms and cartoon used to do back in the 1990s. What it is remembered for is as a genre about hapless detectives in black and white 1930s settings having to find a killer among a cast of twelve or so shifty character archetypes. Plenty of fun is poked, but they hardly take the genre seriously.

Science Fiction (Scifi Scribe): We’ve all seen the memes, right? The minute the world started talking about the mere idea of a United States Space Force, we were all instantly greeted by “LOL, Space National Guard/Space Force Reserves!” All joking aside, the irreverent interservice banter and, shall we say, “robust,” back-and-forth on social media reflects the very real, and very important, national-level discussions about creating a new military service branch.

Cinema (Jon Mollison): The birth of Dungeons and Dragons is a strange and fascinating story of how creatives can draw forth order from the froth of chaos. I went into this film expecting a lot of defensive snark about how Gary Gygax was a Johnny-come-lately who yoinked the idea of RPGs out from under Dave Arneson’s nose.  A fraudulent Edison to Arneson’s Tesla, if you will.  And there are hints of that within this film, but only hints.

Art (Mutual Art): Theron Kabrich quietly gazes at Roger Dean’s watercolor, The Gates of Delirium. He has been Dean’s friend and representative at the San Francisco Art Exchange for thirty years, selling his paintings, drawings, and prints to an international audience of collectors. Millions of copies of the image have been made. If Tolkien’s timeless classic inspired Dean’s enduring fascination with pathways at the beginning of his career, it is Robert McFarlane’s writing about wandering journeys along the ancient tracks twisting through the British landscape that have his attention in the present.

Art (DMR Books): Stephen  Fabian, as I’ve pointed out before, is a living legend in the fantasy art community. His output from the 1970s to the 2000s—both in quality and quantity—can only be called astounding. I covered some of that in my three-part series on his Robert E. Howard-related art. However, a friend of mine recently brought Fabian’s artwork for In Lovecraft’s Shadow to my attention. That book, in some respects, may be Stephen’s greatest sustained work. In Lovecraft’s Shadow was a collection of August Derleth’s Lovecraftian fiction published in 1998 through a joint venture by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box and Mycroft & Moran.

Review (Tea at Trianon): I remember as a twenty-two-year-old being excited when I saw a new book called the The Mists of Avalon by an author called Marion Zimmer Bradley. Mists was presented as the retelling of the Arthurian legend from the point of view of the women of Camelot, which I thought was a thrilling idea. However, I found the book heavy on paganism and morbid, explicit sex scenes, but light on romance, heroism, chivalry, mystery, faith and all the qualities I had come to love in the Camelot stories. This brings us to Moira Greyland’s recent book, The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon.

Fiction (Adventures Fantastic): I’m going to look at three of his stories that feature the same  character, Sergeant Jaeger. First is “Fearful Rock”.  Originally published in the February 1939 issue of Weird Tales, the central character of this novella is Lt. Lanark. He and Jaeger are leading a cavalry patrol in Missouri during the Civil War, looking for Quantrill. What they find is a young woman being sacrificed by her step-father to the Nameless One in an abandoned house under the shadow of a formation known as Fearful Rock.

Fiction (DMR Books): Tanith Lee was a force to be reckoned with in the ’70s, ’80s and on into the ’90s. She exploded onto the SFF scene with her debut novel for DAW Books, The Birthgrave. That book was labeled at the time as being “sword-and-sorcery”. I would probably call it heroic fantasy, but it remains a minor classic regardless of specific sub-category. During her forty-plus-year career, Tanith published ninety novels and a myriad of short stories. Her prolificity was on display right away. She quickly followed up The Birthgrave with more notable books like The Storm Lord and Volkhavaar, along with short stories like “Odds Against the Gods” published in Swords Against Darkness II.

Science Fiction (Men of the West): The book. Not the movie. If you can even call Verhoeven’s bastardization “Starship Troopers” at all. Robert A. Heinlein is an increasingly controversial figure in recent years, moreso than he was in his lifetime. This, of course, is due to his dubious content in his later career. But he was nothing if not influential on the genre, and his early works, such as his juvenile novels (of which this was the last), remain worth a read. We may go into Heinlein’s other works later, but the focus is not so much on the man as on the book.

D&D (Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog): I think Gygax is pretty clear about how initiative works in the DMG. (His surprise rules do make a bit of static, though.) Here’s my take on it: 1) DM decides what the monsters will do. Check reaction and/or morale if need be. 2) Players declare their actions. If they want to win at rpgs, they will advise a high t caller who will then speak for group.

Cthulhu Mythos (Marzaat): “Bells of Horror”, Henry Kuttner, 1939. This is a fairly good bit of Lovecraftian fiction from Kuttner. He uses a typical Lovecraft structure. Our narrator opens by mentioning a weird event then gives the back story of what led up to it and concludes with a not all surprising event. (Sometimes Lovecraft managed to surprise with his last lines, sometimes not.)

Authors (Goodman Games): While all of Wellman’s oeuvre is worth reading, it is his Silver John stories that most impacted the world of fantasy role-playing. Wellman is one of the names on Gygax’s Appendix N roster of influential authors. Although no specific title is listed alongside his name, it’s been suggested that the character of Silver John influenced the bard class in D&D—a wandering troubadour who uses song, magic, and knowledge to defeat supernatural menaces. Stripped of the pseudo-medieval trappings of D&D, the bard and Silver John become almost indistinguishable from one another.

Pulp Art (Dark Worlds Quarterly): It shouldn’t be any surprise that the artists that illustrated Short Stories would appear in Weird Tales and vice versa, though to a lesser degree. Fred Humiston is a good example. For many years, he illustrated half of each issue of Short Stories along with Edgar Wittmack.

Cinema (Film School Rejects): Most movie fans associate Martin Campbell with the Bond franchise and other blockbusters. However, before he became one of Hollywood’s A-list directors, he helmed Cast a Deadly Spell, a genre-bending TV movie that originally aired on HBO back in 1991. It isn’t the most known movie in his oeuvre, but it’s easily one of his most entertaining and rewatchable efforts.

Tolkien (Monsters and Manuals): I have no idea what Tolkien had in mind for the geography of Rhun and the peoples within it. But it seems to me that, while one shouldn’t think of Middle Earth as being too closely paralleled with the real world, there is a case to be made that its character is roughly akin to the Eurasian steppe this side of the Urals – more specifically the Pontic Steppe north of the Black Sea (with the Sea of Rhun here being a bit like the Black Sea).

Gaming ( Walker’s Retreat): The other day I posted a new BattleTech lore video. I mentioned that the channel posting that video did more to promote BattleTech than anything that the current owners of the property–Catalyst Game Labs–have done. All of the other lore channels and battle report channels contribute to this effort, and it helps that Harebrained’s adaptation is very close (but not identical, which it should have been) to the tabletop game, but there’s sweet fuck-all for marketing from the company itself.

Sensor Sweep: Battle Tech, Manly Wade Wellman, Savage Heroes, Space Force published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/