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mermaidsirennikita · 10 months ago

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ARC REVIEW: A Fate Inked in Blood by Danielle L. Jensen

4.5/5. Releases 2/27/24.

Heat Index: 6.5/10.

Vibes: vIKINGS!!!!, slutty guy/serious girl, "oops I'm married to your dad", and legitimately intense battle and magic stuff that actually works and puts people in those heartrending situations where it's all "STAY ALIVE!!!!! I WILL FIND YOU!!!!!!!!!" as it should in a FANTASY ROMANCE

Married to a man she hates and hiding the fact that she's the child of a minor goddess (children of gods are a Thing in this world) Freya lives a life of drudgery. Until, that is, her secret is revealed to all and Jarl Snorri declares that she's a prophesied shieldmaiden, meant to clinch him the kingdom he's always wanted. As such, she must marry him--kind of an issue, as she is very, very attracted to Snorri's son Bjorn. Another issue: Bjorn has been bound to Freya as her protector. On top of everything, Freya's goddess-given abilities are obscure but dangerous, leading her to wonder if her fate is less that of a protector than that of a monster...

OOOOH WE'VE GOT SOMETHING HERE. I've read Danielle L. Jensen before, way back in the day with her Malediction books--but those were YA (albeit, pretty hot YA) and I really don't read YA anymore. However, I do like Viking Shit, and I especially liked the idea of a romance between a Viking lady and her husband's SON, which was something I always wanted to happen on Vikings. So I picked it up.

And dude. It sucked me right in. I am, as I will get into more below, kind of a hard sell on fantasy romance--when it works, I am HOOKED but when it doesn't I am quickly turned off. This is the former. I was so drawn to Freya, a heroine who does have Chosen One aspects, but is also very human and just trying to make it work, one battle at a time. (Also? She's not instantly gREAT at fighting, how refreshing.) And I absolutely fell head over heels dumb girl for our hero Bjorn, who I expected to be a stoic silent warrior type. NO. He's so much better. He's like, an amazing warrior--but is also so funny and super slutty and just a BRO. I love him. Protect him.

The fantasy plot is compelling and doesn't get so in love with itself that it's impossible to follow. It's really good! I'm excited by this! Can't wait for the next! (What a relief, God.)

Quick Takes:

Here's my issue with fantasy romance (or romantasy, though I'll point out that this series is billed as "fantasy romance" on Netgalley, and that is so HOT to me): often, though the name implies that it's a subgenre of romance with a heavy fantasy bent... It's basically fantasy (well-done or not) with a romance subplot tucked in. The character work is shoddy, the tension is nil, and you can tell that the author is just trying to horn in on the romance audience. Not so, here.

First off, I think Jensen was really smart to create a fantasy world that is very "Vikings But Fantasy". It's not poorly drawn. You can tell that she's really into the Norse vibe, and I will say that I am biased because as someone who has somehow been watching the Vikings franchise since its inception (pray for me) I'm fairly familiar with it on that level. But the way she weaves the fantasy elements, most distinctly the idea of these empowered children of gods (who are basically made when their mortal parents HAVE THREESOMES WITH GODS??? Amazing. Just imagine having these superpowers and knowing that it's because your parents took some dude home from the bar one night and he turned out to be Thor.) into the story is really natural.

Secondly... There is a really compelling plot, yes. I am really into the duality of Freya, don't get me wrong. I really like the royal intrigue. All the WIFE DRAMA. It's My Brand. But the real heart of this story, very openly and honestly and presented without any self-consciousness, is Freya and Bjorn. And I think Jensen just lays it all out there the moment she introduces the brilliant plot device of "Bjorn's Dad, Who Freya Is Technically Married To, Wants Bjorn To Follow Freya Around And Make Sure She Doesn't Get Into Danger". Oh, so he's supposed to protect her as she hurtles into adventure and fights Viking zombies and shit? HOW CONVENIENT. Throughout the story, their immediate physical attraction melts into this emotional slow burn... and I am also a hard sell on a slow burn, so thank you for doing it right, Danielle. The book is single POV (Freya's, though I wouldn't mind Bjorn's in a future installment) but you can just tell that Bjorn is so mad that he's this into a woman who is technically his stepmother. Like, he can have anyone! But he wants HER. But he can't have her!

Picture me gobbling this up like a raccoon in a trash can.

--Speaking of! If you're all "ew, I hate that Freya is married to his dad"--no spoilers, but this is dealt with in a way that I think both avoids the ick that some readers (to be clear: not me, I am very resistant to ick) may feel over that setup, and avoids a copout.

At the same time... First off, Bjorn doesn't fully know that the ick has been avoided, and to be frank, I don't think Bjorn really cares about a little ick. But he does have like, you know, the "WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME" vibe for a while, and it is delicious. All very illicitaffairs.mp3.

--I also really loved that there is no mistake about Freya being a GROWN WOMAN. I strongly, strongly object to shelving this as New Adult, because regardless of her age, Freya (and honestly Bjorn as well) has been through a lot. She's literally married when we open this novel. She gets a second husband. She is not a virgin; her marriage was not chaste; it sucked. (To be clear: you don't get a lot of insight into Freya's first marriage beyond "it sucked" because it's dealt with pretty quickly. You don't see any sexual assault on the page in this book, and I don't know that Freya would see it that way? It's alluded to as "lie back and think of England" bad, gross sex, which I think suggests assault, but there is not any explicit violence, sexual or otherwise, depicted in either of her marriages.) She is JADED. She has never had a man like, take care of her.

And then she gets linked up with local dude who's snarking at her horrible husband about how he must not go down on her enough, and she's all "WHAT'S THAT MEAN :/". I really, really enjoy a pairing that involves a tough woman who's never been properly taken care of and a man who's like "I am DESPERATE to take care of you". Freya deserves!

--Another good choice: often, in fantasy romance (or at least in fantasy romance of yore; I feel like there has been a recent push to correct this, at least somewhat) the heroine is hypercompetent. She's smart, she's a good fighter, she's a femme fatale, she's the seventeen-year-old master assassin...

Freya is... a person. She does want to fight, and she is--not surprisingly, as she does come from a culture in which women do fight--not incapable of holding her own. Somewhat. But as soon as she's up against a master warrior like Bjorn, she's kind of not great, Bob, and even with the benefit of her goddess-given abilities, she still has a lot to learn. It's giving "Book One Aang", and I'm good with that. I'm actually much happier with her giving Book One Aang as a twenty-something woman because like? Give us hope, Freya.

She also doesn't have all the answers. Frankly, Freya doesn't have 80% of the answers, and she shouldn't, because she's new to this. She's new to the magic stuff (though she knew she had it, which I did like--she's not an Alina Starkov-level "WHAAAT" about it) and she's new to the court intrigue, and frankly she's new to Hot Dudes. Speaking of, she does spend a decent amount of brain time going "STOP! STOP, SELF! DO NOT LOOK! DO NOT TOUCH!" Which, frankly, I loved. I feel like that's the kind of behavior people are going to be annoying about because people are dying, but like. This woman just spent years surrounded by Village 2's and suddenly she's being swung around and guarded by a very flirtatious Royal 12. Give her a break. I would be much worse.

And she doesn't know what the hell she's doing with this man. She knows the mechanics, but she doesn't know the FINESSE. Speaking of...

The Sex:

The reason why I'm between a 6 and a 7 on this (and that's not quality, that's literally just how hot the book is re: sex acts) is that the story is a slow burn. Everything sexy happens in the back half, and you don't get to the full shebang until pretty late in the game. It's ABOUT THE YEARNING.

However, I think this was a good choice, and when we do get those scenes they are super hot (and explicit, though not like Sierra Simone explicit to be clear) and passionate and you definitely get the sense that it's this giant deal for these two. I was quite touched. I was like "awww" but also "oh" which is where I want to be when a story builds to two people hooking up for that long.

And Jensen fully takes advantage of the "Vikings" component and does have some "under the sleeping furs with 76 people sleeping in the near vicinity but we just need to get this done" action here. Which. Brava.

I'll be honest--I was worried about this, as I feel like I've been let down by a great fantasy romance in the past. I, much like several people in this novel, have been burned before. Not so here. I'm fully on board. I loved where we left off, and I cannot wait to see where those two crazy kids go next. Hopefully, like. To Vikings divorce court. So she can end that marriage to his dad.

Thanks to Netgalley and Del Rey for providing me with a copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Preorder:

Amazon

B&N

Bookshop.org

#romance novel blogging #romance novels #arc reviews #netgalley #book reviews #book recs #books

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mitigatedchaos · 7 months ago

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"Writing? In 2024?"

Monday, April 29, 2024

(~2,400 words, 12 minutes)

@northshorewave Re: this publishing post:

I've read through the post that was linked, and an earlier related post by the same author that preceded it.

Her position is that the traditional publishing industry is essentially buying books as lottery tickets, paying for most of them using the few big winners they can't predict.

NorthShoreWave - The personal qualities of NSW specifically.

LLMs - Is AI a threat right now? Mostly as spam.

How Many Readers? - One famous book had 3,000 readers on an email list before its Amazon e-book debut, and went on to traditional publishing.

Funding Options - Many authors and artists are currently using subscription services. Some reasoning and numbers are provided.

Illustrations - Should you use illustrations? This lengthy section does a bit of fundamentals analysis of posting to suggest that maybe, you should.

Interaction - Reader replies are one method by which a post will spread.

Search - The people who want to read your story can't read it if they don't know about it. Writing a good book is essential, but only half the battle.

Some thoughts for you:

1 - NorthShoreWave

You implicitly asked if we had discussed your story in detail before, but the answer is that we hadn't. I have a sense of what you're trying to accomplish based on what I've observed of your character. While you think of yourself as seething, I think you're actually wise, compassionate, self-aware, and able to view things from multiple perspectives. A significant number of people are much worse at practicing at least one of these virtues. On its own, that's not enough to write a best-seller, but I think it does provide you with an advantage.

2 - LLMs

Based on my experiments (see @mitigatedai for some logs), I wouldn't worry about competition from AI. For you, the chief issue caused by AI will be spam. AI moves sideways (different text) and downwards (less meaning). I may tell LLMs to "combine Inspector Gadget and Death Note," but...

Do I actually use the information provided? No.

3 - How many readers do you need?

From one of those publishing posts, to get a sense of the number of readers you need...

Andy Weir first published The Martian as a serial for his own blog, then as a self-published novel on Amazon, then as a traditionally published novel with Random House. “I had an email list with about 3,000 people on it, so, initially, the audience was roughly that much,” he tells me. “When I first posted it to Amazon, I didn’t do anything to market or publicize it. All I did was tell my readers it was available there.” The book was on Amazon for five months, at a price point of 99 cents, and he sold 35,000 copies before Random House bought the rights in February of 2014.

Note that being a provocative firebrand doesn't necessarily mean you'll sell copies. Some politicians with tremendous name recognition failed to move copies of their books.

4 - Funding Options

I don't recommend using a Kickstarter to publish your book at this time or in the near future. You just don't have the name recognition, but also, Slashdotter Caimlas (who I don't know, so I don't know how trustworthy he is) wrote:

I'm personal friends with a number of authors who publish books in one of several subgenres. Mostly, they rely on Amazon's Kindle Unlimited: some of them are prolific enough that their book sales account for most of their income, simply based on peoples' reading of their works. Mostly, unless people want a piece of history or something they can reference, folks seem to hate having clutter. Fiction that sells isn't usually, primarily sold as a hardcopy book anymore, I don't believe - short of the kinds of books that end up at the end of the grocery store isle or in an airport novelty store.

A lot of publishing is done online these days, often through subscription services such as Substack (for essays) or Patreon. (Kindle Unlimited is also a subscription service, costing $12/mo.) As an example, the webcomic Spinnerette has a Patreon (bringing down $3.3k/mo), and then runs Kickstarter campaigns for print runs (volume 8 raised $27k).

To give you an estimate, Spinnerette's Patreon has only 536 subscribers, and pulls down $3.3k/mo, but you probably haven't heard of it. El Goonish Shive, which I'm confident you have heard of, brings in $3.6k/mo on 2.4k subscribers. The famous Kill Six Billion Demons has ~5.4k subscribers, bringing down ~$8.4k.

In Patreon terms, a good foothold to try for might be 100 subscribers at $3/mo each, with an initial focus on getting to 50.

5 - Illustrations

You've posted some drawings. They have some character, showing that you have the basic aptitude to develop the skill if you applied yourself to regular practice. However, the proportions are too far off to attract much attention (except as a stylistic choice, which, I can tell, it is not).

This blog tends to break things down into their abstract fundamentals for analysis. I promised myself I wasn't going to do that here, but eh, we'll do just a bit.

To quote one of the publishing articles...

“People tend to buy the books that are already really popular,” Deahl says. “They look at the bestseller list to see what they want to buy and that reinforces this tiny amount of books at the top. It’s a very top-heavy system. The tricky thing in publishing is success begets success. But it’s really hard to create that spark.”

Let's stop to think about this.

a. Banter - Fame

There is one layer to this that you can't do much of anything about, which is that people will watch the same shows their friends watch in order to have something to talk about with their friends.

b. Investment - Background

However, there is another layer over which you have more influence. It's very easy to make a quick judgment of a movie based on its visuals, or a short trailer. It's also relatively easy to judge short songs, since they're only a few minutes long (but I don't find myself doing this often).

In order to judge a book, you have to read the text and process it. You can't make a snap judgment off a single picture, because you have to read the text first to produce the mental picture.

This website does have viral text posts, but they're like...

You seem to have fundamentally misunderstood me, Anon. Go read all 5,640 posts again.

Some of these posts can get a bit long, but it's usually a back-and-forth where each individual post is short. Often, they'll mix in images, or memes.

People supposedly read at 200 words per minute. Based on that estimate, this blog's most viral post of all time can be read in 5 seconds. That's about the same amount of time someone would spend looking at a jpeg.

That doesn't mean people don't enjoy effortposts. They will follow a blog upon encountering a good effortpost! They just don't like or reblog them.

I think you already know this part, but for "acceptable" length for reblogging, it's usually best to keep it under one "Tumblr page," meaning around one screen length on desktop, or around 200-300 words. I've talked about this part before, but if the reader can see the end of the post, it feels like less of an investment to read the post, and reblogging it won't fill up a friend's Tumblr dash.

Obviously that's tough for long-form fiction, because it has to load more context about the characters in order to establish the stakes. (Unless it's fan fiction, where the audience already knows the characters.)

c. Investment - Strategy

As you know, this blog will sometimes post political cartoons and other illustrations as part of its general stream of content.

The obvious strategy is just to have some nice-looking character images or images of scenes from the story. It can be "read" faster, so it's more shareable.

I think that strategy suffers from a weakness in that it's easy to just look at the image and disregard the text. This would reduce your fiction blog to an art blog - and it is not an art blog.

Therefore, I would like to gently suggest - and keep in mind, I do not have any published novels - a different potential approach. This proposal is speculative, and this technique is not widely used.

Do you know that famous Rockwell painting, Breaking Home Ties? Rockwell is a master of telling a story with just a single still-frame painting.

Rockwell has to tell the whole story in one picture, because that's the medium he's got to work with. This limits how much story he can tell. As an author, you don't have to limit yourself to what can be told in just one image, because you have the text.

This strategy would involve a two-step maneuver.

First, the image at the top of the post communicates the essentials that the reader needs to know about the characters through the composition of the scene (so that they don't need to read background material), as well as various subtle details, while raising questions, also through the use of details/etc, to increase the viewer's curiosity.

Fortunately for the viewer, second, the questions raised by the image are answered in the text right below it.

The post would form an entry point into a network of related posts; tags for particular characters could be linked at the bottom, or links to other posts in the sequence.

Secondary characters would be ideal for this, because you can manipulate their scenarios/context/character to fit the short format, while your overall project will focus on the main characters and thus have a greater, long-term narrative investment for appropriately larger payoff.

As I wrote in my post on 'text wall memes,' people will read text in an image, and they'll even reblog it, but it's contextual. So again, this is speculative, but it should be feasible. It's a matter of creating the appropriate context.

d. Investment - AI Art

I don't think you should use AI-generated art. Yes, people will be able to tell, but the even bigger problem...

Compare this AI knockoff to Norman Rockwell's original Girl with Black Eye.

The expression is wrong. The pose is different. This is a completely different story from the one Rockwell was telling! The prompteur 'borrows' the right 25% of the image from Norman's original because he can't reproduce it. And what is that random white cloth on the left side of the image?

There is a significant reduction in the amount of intention in the image. Putting it back in involves working over the image, repeatedly, usually with inpainting, and often working against what's in the AI's training data, forcing it to pull from more and more improbable parts of the distribution (until eventually, there's no matching data in the training at all; you have to get out and draw it yourself).

I'm going to borrow a post of my own here from 2019.

This isn't oriented towards the strategy I've described, and it only got 21 notes, but note the teacup with steam and tea bag tag, the obscured flag in the background, and the Youtube-style video tracker on the bottom. The combination of the special effect, text that looks like a subtitle, and video tracker imply that the image is a screenshot from a streaming anime.

The character is casually (as indicated by the cup of tea) sitting at a computer desk (as indicated by the faintly sketched keyboard and hand position for a mouse). What's that flag in the background? It certainly doesn't belong to any extant country. (In fact, as the artist, I'll tell you - it's based on an O'Neill Cylinder.)

Obviously this art is very much just a sketch in quality terms. An AI rendering usually looks much fancier. However, an AI would not put that detail in.

e. Investment - Technical Skills

However, I will suggest the use of software if you go this route. (Or the hiring of an artist, but that could get expensive.)

Your issue is with proportions. Lots of people have trouble with proportions. (You also have trouble with hands. Lots of people have trouble with hands.)

One way to deal with this is to just train. You'd be surprised at how fast you improve if you draw from realistic sources such as photographs an hour a day for a year, even if it's just a quick sketch. You probably aren't willing to do so. You have other things to worry about, including writing.

However, you could use posing software. You could save the proportions of several characters and position them throughout the scene, as well as having a grid for the ground and potentially other props to help with positioning of items like lamp posts or the edges of buildings. (I've experimented with posing software a bit myself.)

Dan Shive (of El Goonish Shive) does not use posing software as far as I know, but he has used 3D software. Although his style is cartoonish, one thing people like about him is that he does put effort in at improvement, and the quality of his work has improved substantially. (That was actually the inspiration for the second part of the "in 2028, Hollywood runs out of ideas and adapts El Goonish Shive" post.)

6 - Interaction

Though shorter posts tend to go more viral, I find that posts which someone can reblog and share their opinion tend to show up a lot in my top posts (as long as they're only about one tumblr page long). The MOON PRISON poll is a good example of something that's approachable and neutral, but fits heavily with the themes of my blog, but other posts may take a political position that invites disagreement, resulting in discourse, and get reblogged that way. (You may also remember the silly Swift Pill poll.)

I don't recommend courting disagreement on purpose. Not only is this bad for the social environment, but it tends to make people go crazy.

7 - Search

I think you've probably noticed some of this already and are working with it (posting short excerpts, initial art). Most of this is, again, speculative. This is all just information for your consideration.

Writing a good book is the first problem. Getting the readers who would enjoy the book to find it in such a noisy environment is the second problem. I think you can do it, but if your trajectory isn't currently looking as good as you want (e.g. # followers on your story's sideblog), I would recommend expanding your strategy so that you're in a good position when the book itself is ready to launch.

#northshorewave #writing_tag #media_tag #weekly post

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anhed-nia · 9 months ago

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I finally finished reading The Phantom of the Opera, which is a total mess and often mind-numbing, but one of its main crimes involves this device I often see in pulp fiction that's sort of curious. Gaston Leroux has a lot of trouble figuring out what you can just summarize versus what you need to describe in detail, and when you should do those things. For instance:

The Phantom's main demand is that the opera's resident diva should make way for Christine. He also wants a dedicated box, and an allowance of $20,000. The managers are skeptical of the widely-believed rumor that the Phantom is a real ghost (because why would a ghost need money?), and assume someone is scamming them. They ignore the Phantom's demands, which incurs an act of violence--and that's the whole narrative purpose of these guys, to provoke the Phantom one time so we can tell he means business. And the main thing is Christine, who is the center of the entire plot; the money part is so inconsequential that it doesn't even make it into most adaptations. It's not as if the Phantom specifically needs money For Something, and also the managers aren't in danger of bankruptcy or whatever. When you take the money out of the story, it continues to function in exactly the same way, this is really not a load-bearing issue.

However, what happens is that in the third act when Christine is mysteriously kidnapped out of the middle of a performance and you feel like FINALLY something exciting is going to happen, suddenly we're forced to rewind an hour or two so we can spend time with the managers who are having a complicated conversation about the Phantom's allowance and also still debating whether the Phantom is real. At this point I know the Phantom is real, Christine knows, her stupid not-boyfriend Raoul knows, and the only thing that really matters is saving Christine and hopefully having some kind of thrilling final showdown (which doesn't happen btw)...but we're stuck with these two pointless characters who spend literally around 20 pages arguing about how it is that the Phantom's allowance is conveyed to him. Like what's the method of administration there. It's incredibly uninteresting and doesn't serve the plot really at all. And at the very end of the book the Phantom gives back all the money, so it turns out that we didn't even need to spend time on this idea in the first place.

BUT we are not done with this topic. During the epilogue the narrator, who has been aggregating all this testimony about the Phantom debacle, goes back to one of the survivors and asks him how the money moves around, and there's this extremely dull description of exactly how the Phantom was able to creep around everywhere--something we already take for granted about him by now--and then there is even further discussion of how the Phantom gave all the money back, which affects nothing. Also in the epilogue is a brief summary of the Phantom's actually-interesting backstory of being a carnival freak and an ingenious polymath who learned the art of villainy from a sadistic sultan's daughter--like oh my god, why is this not in the main story where the 20 pages of money talk is just taking up space and slowing everything down?? But that's the kind of thing that Gaston Leroux thinks is not that cool and he can just casually shove it up the ass end of the story to check a box.

What this made me think about, besides how bad the book is despite the story's enduring popularity, is that there's kind of a thing in pulp writing where MONEY just becomes involved for its own sake. And let me be more specific, because I realize that money is a common motivator of many kinds of genre plots: Heists are a whole subgenre, terrorists in action movies usually want money, money is essential to any mob-related story, and actually there was a whole rash of "recession horror" movies in the last 10-15 years (think KNIVES OUT). But often when you're reading a horror novel, or something like that where the main plot is not finance-related, it happens that the hero experiences a huge windfall or discovers a major stash, and it can be a convenience to explain how they get from Point A to Point B, but it often feels like it's just there for the thrill of it. When we think about the exploitation elements of genre storytelling, we usually think about scenes of "gratuitous" sex and violence that mainly exist to provide titillation and catharsis, but I think there is a kind of pornography of money that sometimes enters the picture for the same reasons. In the (awful) Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series, Lisbeth's ability to steal is indulged with great interest, but it isn't just about the thrill of the caper or its effects on the bad guys; there are quite long (and strangely sort of good) stretches that just involve Lisbeth alone administrating her hoard, shopping, looking at apartments, taking little trips, etc. They're just languorous descriptions of what it would be like to have money, designed to inspire a sense of desire and pleasure in the reader that isn't much related to the story. Knowing that author Stieg Larsson had been a broke journalist who ate nothing but McDonald's all the time seems to explain this to some degree. I'm sure there are also examples of this in the work of Stephen King, who grew up without indoor plumbing for a time. Not that you need to have been dirt poor to understand the pornography of money, but I'm sure it helps. I wish I could think of more concrete examples, I just know it's very familiar. If you read any amount of genre fiction, you've probably thought of some yourself.

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heyits-mars-x · 10 months ago

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From Scene Queens to E-Kids: How the Internet Shaped the Alternative Music Scene

The following essay is an edited version of a paper I wrote for a class in one of my college classes, which I think would really inform a lot of people about the history and evolution of the “emo” genre and style as a whole. It was written last year, so it isn’t TOTALLY up to date, so please don’t fuss over that. I mostly focused on how developing technology and shifting political climates influenced the genre. If you’ve been on the scene for a while, I’d love to hear your take, and if I’m missing anything! I’d also love to hear about your experiences on the scene, as a burgeoning emo young adult on the scene, I am fully aware I’ve missed out on a lot… Regardless, I hope you enjoy this, or take something from it! If you feel so inclined, I’d appreciate if you shared it!

Note: all my sources will be cited at the end!

Introduction

The musical genre dubbed as “alternative” is vastly broad, encompassing the near-thousands of subgenres (and consequently, those subgenres are broken into even smaller groups). This genre includes musical styles such as rock and roll, metal, punk, grunge, and emo, all styles of music that are identified through emotionally-charged lyrics paired with musical composition that is heavier and more aggressive than the typical mainstream, upbeat pop music heard on the radio. Alternative music has continuously provided a group for those who feel like outcasts from the mainstream population, and with it comes its own culture and sense of community. This community as a whole is typically referred to as the alternative scene, or simply “the scene” for short. While the music can be traced all the way back to the 1940s with bands that sound much softer in comparison to today’s musical groups on the scene, it has evolved throughout the decades to the many subgenres that exist today.

Even more fascinating is how alternative music has evolved with time and the rise of the technology and the internet age. The alternative scene has responded to global events of yesterday and today through their music. The scene has been a place of rebellion, fast-changes, and expressing frustrations with the world. Home for angsty teens, today the scene finds itself grappling with issues of diversity, gatekeeping, social media, blurring the lines of genre, and even its own past of sexual misconduct. Since the turn of the century, the internet has shaped the alternative scene, leaving almost no trace of the early days of rock and roll. The alternative music scene has been able to survive through the internet, which has also made the scene more accepting to people of color, women, queer folk, transgender folk, and even gender non-conforming individuals as facilitated by the advances of the internet, and has raised the standard in sound quality while blending genres to evolve their sound.

Pre-Internet History

Alternative music’s beginnings are all thanks to people of color, which is ironic considering later times in the alternative scene often excluded minorities. In the 1940s, many artists of color began blending the previously existing sounds of the blues with rhythm music, thus creating rock and roll (Goldmine Staff). Artists of that time included Dinah Washington and The Ravens (Goldmine Staff). Rock and roll continued to do its own thing for quite some time, but instead of remaining the affluent genre created by many African-American artists, white people took interest in the music, began producing their own rock and roll, and unsurprisingly, received almost all of the credit in creating rock and roll music. People of color would continuously be pushed out of the alternative scene as it continued through their early years, and this is an issue that would not begin to see improvements until decades later when a new generation finally pushes for social justice. Until then, the scene was largely white-washed and often dismissed the early rock n’ roll founders, who were African-American.

Dinah Washington performing at the Randall Island Jazz Festival, 1960. Taken by Henri Dauman.

It was in the 70s and 80s when rock and roll began spilling over and creating new subgenres. Nearly simultaneously in both the United States and the United Kingdom, young rock and rollers that made music in their garage began doling out gritty and unpolished tracks thick in political criticism. This new group of angry garage bands were the beginnings of punk music, and they came about in a time of an unstable and harsh political climate. In the US, President Ronald Reagan was elected into office at the beginning of the 80s, replacing a much more liberal president (McMahon). Reagan’s conservative ideologies were the opposite of those belonging to punks, and bands such as The Dead Kennedys were the loudest in their screams of disapproval (Moore 33-36). Along with the conservative leader came events such as the AIDS epidemic and racial injustices that made the world seem more unstable, and during this time of instability, punk music was the outlet. At the same time in the UK, punks like the Sex Pistols critiqued the English monarchy with songs like “God Save The Queen,” a song that mocked the British anthem:

The Sex Pistols playing live in Copenhagen, 1977. Getty Images 1977.

“God save the Queen

The fascist regime

They made you a moron

A potential H bomb.” (Sex Pistols).

As with the majority of punk music at the time, the lyrics of “God Save the Queen” was unflinching in its critique of the government. The heavy instrumental that lacked a clear melody was also a trademark of punk music. Punk artists also upset the style of rock and roll, adopting skinny leather pants and spiky hair with dark eye makeup as their go-to basics (“What is Punk Music?”). The scene was primarily underground, but still existed in most major metropolitan areas. However, while punk music and shows were originally a place for those in mutual hatred for government and contemporary society to get together, its more violent nature took over (McMahon). Neo Nazi punks, also called skinheads, took over concert venues and instigated violence, most commonly against women and minorities within the scene. Police raids of shows were also increasing. It was glaringly obvious that if the violence continued, the scene would soon die out (McMahon). Then, it was the same rebellious spirit that birthed punk also birthed its own band of misfits.

In Washington DC’s hardcore scene, the same violence ran rampant as it were with other cities. It was then that Amy Pickering, who worked at a small record label called Dischord, decided that she was going to instigate change (McMahon). In 1985, Pickering began spreading notes to raise support for “Revolution Summer,” a call against violence and discrimination in the DC scene (McMahon). Quickly after the “Revolution Summer” movement caught on in DC, the same record label that Pickering worked at, Dischord, recorded Rites Of Spring’s debut album (McMahon). Contrary to their predecessors, Rites Of Spring was self-loathing instead of being loathsome of the world (McMahon). Their emotional lyrics paired with their roots in aggressive instrumentals earned them the name “emocore,” or “emo” for short (McMahon). From there on out, other underground hardcore scenes followed suit. Emocore music continued to progress underground as the technically-grunge Nirvana topped charts, even beating out Michael Jackson, which left major record labels scrambling to find their own alternative superstars and thus senselessly signing amateur musicians lacking the authenticity alternative music was known for (Moore 114-155). Inevitably, the attempts of these record labels to find their own Nirvana were futile. The alternative scene fell into a lull from the public eye, while brewing in underground urban music were new bands who were simply waiting to be discovered. The key to the success of hardcore music was soon to arrive; in the form of economic unrest, terrorist attacks, social reckonings, and most importantly, the Internet.

The Peak of Emo

At the turn of the century, the internet truly started cropping up in many middle-class households. Teenagers grappling with coming of age in a new era of technology flocked to websites like MySpace, which connected users through status updates, friends lists, and music sharing. They used the forums to express their style and emotions. MySpace became home to the iconic “emo” and “scene” styles we know today. Large bloggers that showcased the fishnets, band tees, sneakers, and brightly-dyed hair covering the eyes were popular amongst “emos” and even hosted meetups in shopping malls and public spaces. Despite these kids wearing eyeliner and skinny jeans being prevalent on the Internet, they were much less popular in the world outside of the computer screen. Being “emo” was an insult, and the public opinion was that emo music was corrupting teens, making them suicidal and homosexual (Britton, NPR, Rawstorne). Emo and alternative teens were often subject to bullying and violence from peers, the outside world, and even the media. April 2007 in Lancashire, young couple Sophie Lancaster and Robert Maltby - who were known to dress in a gothic fashion - were jumped (McMahon, S.O.P.H.I.E.). The perpetrators attacked Maltby first, but continued kicking Lancaster after she intervened and cradled her boyfriend’s head in protection (McMahon, S.O.P.H.I.E.) Robert survived the attack, but Sophie died after being on medical support for thirteen days at the age of 20 (McMahon, S.O.P.H.I.E.). In Mexico on March 7th, 2008, an angry mob formed through online forums carried out a planned attack on people who dressed “emo,” intending to kill them for “‘being privileged, as well as being gay,’”(NPR). Those who protested those attacks were subjected to violence themselves (NPR). Then in May 2008, the Daily Mail published their infamous article “Why no child is safe from the sinister cult of emo,” which warned parents that listening to alternative music and wearing dark clothing caused depression and suicide amongst their teens (Rawstorne). While the internet and social media were responsible for spreading hatred for groups of teenagers who appeared “emo,” they also facilitated the necessary means for these bullied and targeted kids to meet each other. That is why the alternative music scene was always known to be a home to those without a home; when the world rejects you, you can always find acceptance within a community on the new and exciting World Wide Web. The scene became a safe haven, but unfortunately, there was still exclusion within the scene. The style of hair, makeup, and dress that is attached to alternative music places special emphasis on pale skin - something that racist individuals within the scene used to exclude people of color who had a darker skin tone.

Traumatic events that shook the modern 21st century continued to create an unstable political, economic, and societal climate, and when people needed somewhere to turn for comfort, they looked to music that they could relate to and was unflinching in emotional outpour. The music itself came into the spotlight shortly after the September 11th terrorist attacks when Jimmy Eat World released their fourth album weeks after its initial and unsuccessful release date (McMahon). Their album dominated the charts and went platinum, and other boy bands claiming the emo style became popular, particularly with teenage girls (McMahon). Bands like Dashboard Confessional, Jimmy Eat World, and Taking Back Sunday were featured in teen magazines and their emotional music telling stories about struggling with heartbreak and depression (McMahon, Britton). When looking at the events, it seems almost obvious that this confessional style of music became popular. The world had just reeled from a major terrorist attack and suddenly the future was uncertain. People were left to grapple with life and death, political upheaval, and the possibility of war was looming over the shoulders of many Americans - specifically young men who feared being drafted. In a time of panic, people turned to the music as an outlet. My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way even admitted that witnessing the September 11th terrorist attacks led him to found one of the most renowned bands in the emocore genre (McMahon). It was in 2006 when My Chemical Romance began breaking into the emocore scene with bands Fall Out Boy and Panic! At the Disco, at first greeted with hatred, but soon praised by thousands and selling out concert venues regularly (McMahon). The genre was popular amongst teenagers on MySpace, looking for an outlet for their emotions, who were coming of age in a time of unrest between the United States and the Middle East. Add onto that the 2008 Stock Market crash leading into a crippled economy, and you get the secret to how emocore music and style skyrocketed in popularity. The singers were pouring their hearts out for a world who related to their lyrics of sadness, heartbreak, and anger about the world around them. While still not accepted by the mainstream, people everywhere found comfort in hearing music that spoke to their struggles.

“Death” of Emo

Emocore music began to fall as the decade came to a turn. In 2009, Facebook surpassed MySpace in popularity, to which MySpace never recovered and was soon forgotten. The emo scene was pronounced dead by many on March 22nd, 2013 when My Chemical Romance updated their website with the announcement of their disbandment. March 22nd would continue to be a day of mourning for all who identified as “emo” through internet memes for years to come. After that, most say that emo was done and over with, primarily because My Chemical Romance was the poster-child for emo. However, the other popular bands continued to make music and tour throughout the following years. New bands continued to gain traction within the scene as well, such as Pierce the Veil, Black Veil Brides, Falling In Reverse, and Asking Alexandria to name a few. The style still was not popular amongst the general public, especially in the Middle East, where, while experiencing unwanted Westernization, also witnessed their own teens subscribing to “emo” styles of dress and music (Fathalla, Rasheed). The people of Iraq who felt threatened by this darker style of fashion and music began forming militias which actually took action by stoning “emo” appearing teenagers to death in 2012 (Fathalla, Rasheed). According to Reuters, as many as 14 teenagers were killed within three weeks, with some estimates going as high as 80, and leaders only denounced the murdering of these teens, still stating “‘they are a plague on Muslim society, and those responsible should eliminate them through legal means,’” (Rasheed). Meanwhile, a new blogging site called Tumblr slowly began attracting troves of fanbases to its pages. As the last of the Millennials and the first Generation Z’ers began entering their teenage years, those invested in niche interests began connecting with other misfits on Tumblr, and once again, the internet connected fans of alternative music. The genre lived underground, often a key piece in the idealized “grunge aesthetic” that was popular on Tumblr (K. et. al). Grunge aesthetic was a more modern iteration of the previous internet style of emo, which kept the brightly colored hair, dark clothing, and fishnets, but added technological advancements like smartphones (K. et. al). Artists popular amongst followers of the grunge aesthetic included older alternative influences like Nirvana and Fall Out Boy, along with newer groups on the scene such as Twenty One Pilots, Melanie Martinez, The 1975, Arctic Monkeys, and many more (K. et. al). Further, content creators who fell under the “alternative” category and made content about “alternative” subjects garnered audiences who related to the creators (K. et. al). Though largely out of the public eye, the community of those who listened to alternative music congregated and mingled online.

Joining Tumblr as a social media site fostering the underground alternative community is SoundCloud. SoundCloud is a social media platform designed for small, independent artists and podcasts to upload and share their work, and was launched in 2015 (Holcombe et al.). While SoundCloud was a platform for all genres and projects, it soon became a place for young independent rappers to get their start (Holcombe et al.). Gone were the days of mixtapes, now the young rappers of the world share their music with others through the internet, and they are able to garner a following much easier than ever before (Shah). SoundCloud was at its peak in 2017, with many users and even artists who began on the platform reaching success and going on global tours (Holcombe et al.). These bigger SoundCloud artists included the likes of Lil’ Peep and his group of collaborators in GothBoiClique, Ghostmane, Suicideboys, Juice WRLD, and XXXTENTACION (Britton, Holcombe et al., McMahon, Shah). These artists began a crossover genre called “emo rap” or “sad boy rap,” that mixed influences of lyricism and emotional outpour of emocore music with the musical style of synth tones, lo-fi, and rhythmic lyrical delivery to create their own music (Holcombe et al., McMahon, Shah). The artists, like Lil’ Peep and his peers, were all born in the late 90s and even into the 2000s, meaning they grew up in the same turbulent times that many who loved emo music also came of age. They blended the influences from their favorite artists, mixing from both Kanye West and My Chemical Romance. In fact, many artists would pull sound clips from their favorite emo songs, such as Lil’ Peep, who sampled Pierce the Veil’s “Today I Saw The Whole World” at the end of his song “I Crash You Crash” (Holcombe et al.). Lil’ Peep’s song “The Brightside” tells the story of heartbreak, similarly to the popular subject of many angsty emo bands;

“I guess she wasn't the one, right?

This isn't what love's like, that's for sure

Help me find a way to pass the time (pass the time)

Everybody tellin' me life's short, but I wanna die (I wanna die)

Help me find a way to make you mine (make you mine)

Everybody tellin' me not to, but I'm gonna try

Now I'm gettin' high again tonight” (Lil’ Peep).

This song is a perfect example of the sort of subject matter that emo rap is known to cover. Firstly, the song is obviously about a woman who is no longer in Lil’ Peep’s life, and he’s feeling heartbroken. Not only that, it also discusses suicidal ideation, another topic that emo rap does not shy away from. Finally, the last line, “[n]ow I’m getting high again tonight” adds a quick blip about drug usage, a part of the culture that emo rap had created that often romanticizes heavy drug usage. Many criticized the genre for such glamorization; however, heavy drug usage was also a key part of the rock n’ roll and hair metal scene of the 80s (Holcombe et al.). Emo rap was the subject of blame for a rise in opioid usage and drug abuse, but it is impossible to not look at this scapegoating and compare it to the previous subgenres of alternative music; emocore blamed for suicide and self harm, school shootings blamed on nu metal, and rock n’ roll taking the brunt of accusations of satan-worshipping (Holcombe et al.). Emo rap showed great potential to take the world by storm, and they were on the road to doing so when the genre met its unfortunate end. In a sad turn of events, the drug usage flaunted in the emo rap music ended up being the artists’ downfall as well. Shortly after Pitchfork named Lil’ Peep “the future of emo” in 2017, he was found dead on his tour bus of a fentanyl-overdose at the age of 21 (McMahon, Holcombe et al.). Shortly after came the deaths of Juice WRLD and XXXTENTACION, and the genre fell largely out of the public eye as fans mourned (Holcombe et al.). The other artists within the genre continue to make music, but without the trailblazers, emo rap lacks a lot of the driving force it once had. Unfortunately, the world will never be able to see where the young rappers would have taken the genre, but their influence was major. Emo rap serves as the missing link between 2000s MySpace emocore music and what is currently happening - an emo revival that has much more freedom than the emo music the world knew before.

2018 and Beyond

The alternative music scene continued on thanks to the incoming generation, Generation Z, who were the key piece in the perfect storm that kept the genre alive. Following the Millennials, Generation Z grew up in an age of rapid technological advancements and drastic change in modern society (Pandit). Generation Z’ers were born between the turn of the century and the mid 2000s, and entered a world experiencing the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks - their lives were uncertain the moment they began (Pandit). Soon after the generation could walk and talk, they watched their families struggle through economic ruin after the Stock Market crash in 2008 (Pandit). Gen Z weren’t even out of elementary school when their parents showed them how to use the computer (Pandit). They watched the first African-American President of the United States enter office, a sign that equality may be possible, and they watched it on their own smartphones, too (Pandit). Then in 2016, they discussed a polarizing election-year in their social studies classes and then the events that followed when Donald Trump, a president much more conservative than the previous, entered office. To sum up Generation Z, they have seen progress in social change and technology their whole lives, so they simply do not harbor animosity towards another person’s identity. In fact, many of them spearhead their own internal bigotry and hold their peers accountable. On the flip side, Generation Z has seen many social injustices; police brutality, climate change crisis, politically polarizing events, and most recently, a global pandemic in a crippled economy. They cannot hide from any of these events; Generation Z sees the state of the world around them, and they use their technological assets to advocate for change. It is no surprise that this Generation who is entering adulthood has made such a massive impact on the alternative music scene, which has a history of bigotry despite its roots in being a community for those who have nowhere else to go.

The revival of alternative music had its soft beginning in 2016 to 2017 when Donald Trump, a notoriously conservative candidate, entered office of the United States. Previously, Barack Obama, the first African American president of the United States, had made large strides in America, and many thought the country was nearing a more liberal world. That was until the controversial 2016 election, the results of which made many people of minority groups feel threatened by a conservative president. Artists such as Green Day and Rage Against the Machine, who are big names in alternative music, did not support Donald Trump’s presidency and expressed that dislike in their music. Green Day is notorious for their hatred for Trump’s presidency after their performance at the American Music Awards when frontman Billie Joe Armstrong chanted “no Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA,” a spin on Million of Dead Cops’ lyric “no war, no KKK, no fascist USA,” from “Born to Die,” a song the band wrote after being confronted with racists at punk shows (Grow). Many artists aligned themselves on either side of the political spectrum, leading to a harsh divide in the alternative community, with the conservative side slowly beginning to dwindle and fall out of style and popularity. In 2019, soon after, the #MeToo movement truly began picking up traction, and it had the alternative music scene in a chokehold. As it turned out, the mass groups of teenage girls that flocked to alternative music were often taken advantage of by their favorite band members, and this abuse was brought to light when the #MeToo movement encouraged victims of sexual violence to come forward about their experiences (Badia-Aylin, Holcombe et al., McMahon). Some of the largest groups in alternative music came under fire; members of Simple Plan, Cage the Elephant, and quite a few former members of Panic! At the Disco (u/[deleted]). This was not just the artists coming under fire, creators of other content pertaining to alternative music such as fashion, hair, and lifestyle blogging were also exposed for sketchy behavior; such as Bryan Stars, a formerly popular interviewer who faced accusations for abusing members of his vlogging (video blog) group, My Digital Escape (Holcombe et al., u/[deleted]). Austin Jones, a Youtube creator who made covers of alternative songs not only faced accusations of soliciting nudes from minors and even statutory rape and pedophilia, but was sentenced and is now serving time in prison (Holcombe et al, u/[deleted]). The accusations were flying, and while some were debunked, many bands thus fell out of popularity. Even the iconic Vans Warped Tour, an alternative music festival that toured the United States every summer, was indefinitely canceled due to the allegations of artists who toured with Warped Tour (Holcombe et al., McMahon). It became glaringly obvious that fans of alternative music were not going to support artists who are known to have committed acts of sexual violence, nor were they going to accept a president who they saw as an oppressive danger to their rights. While it tainted many musical groups that were largely influential in the alternative music scene, the allegations cleansed the scene of those who were dangerous and took away their platform, while also making room for new artists.

At the end of the 2010s, the alternative music scene was left in shambles after the accusations tore apart many bands and fans alike. However, the fans were hopeful. A social media platform called Musically, where users would share videos synced to music, underwent a rebranding and was renamed TikTok. Slowly, the new and improved site began picking up users, and at the turn of the decade, almost all of Generation Z and a portion of older generations flocked to the platform. TikTok is known to have different “sides,” meaning there are different communities of people on TikTok that have similar interests due to the hyper-specific algorithm that continuously feeds users content similar to the content that they have positively interacted with. A sense of nostalgia for their childhood spread through the app like wildfire, and this nostalgia was especially popular amongst those who enjoyed alternative music, whether it was them who listened to the music or even their parents (Holcombe et al.). All of the buildup of nostalgia was fully released when, against all odds, My Chemical Romance announced a reunion show on October 31st, 2019 (McMahon, Riot Fest). Self-proclaimed emos everywhere rejoiced, and the show sold out almost instantaneously, with a tour announced shortly after for 2020. Fans all around the world celebrated and spread the word of what they called “the rawr-ing 20s,” a play on words of a popular slang of emocore fans in the MySpace era. On TikTok, alternative music and style was booming, with the tag “emo” hitting 4.8 billion views, and continuing to rise (Holcombe et al.). Emo music was already trending on the internet when suddenly, the COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone indoors and onto the internet during a global quarantine. The pandemic effectively put a halt to large events, killing the live shows where members of the alternative music community would gather. One would think that a lack of gatherings would break up the alternative community, but there was already an online, plugged-in community. In an article entitled “Cycles of revival: the return of pop-punk,” Genevieve Badia-Aylin quite brilliantly writes “ But it is lockdown that has been propelling the pop-punk scene forward . . . a whole new generation of bored kids is exploding into the limelight, spurred on by economic uncertainty, chronic doomscrolling, and the mind-numbing boredom of having to spend the ‘best years of your life’ inside your bedroom. What better time to hate your hometown, when you literally cannot leave it behind?” (Badia-Aylin). Millions of young teenagers immersed themselves in alternative music during the COVID-19 lockdown, bringing it back to popularity. Generation Z, who expects their media to be genuine and values advocacy for minority groups, held the artists of the alternative community accountable for their actions, continuing the work from the #MeToo movement to debunk misogyny in the alternative scene. It was the Black Lives Matter movement, which came to a climax in 2020 after George Floyd was killed by a cop who kneeled on his neck. The world itself was awash in protests against police brutality, with authorities and governments responding harshly. The social reckoning of Black Lives Matter set another standard of what behaviors were acceptable and what behaviors were not, which led to more creators being “canceled,” meaning after allegations of improper behavior, the person loses their fanbase and is expected to take responsibility for their actions. More artists and creators lost their platforms, and to replace them, the new wave of alternative music fans uplifted and supported more diverse groups. Bands such as Meet Me @ the Altar, Nova Twins, Wargasm (UK), Pinkshift, Holding Absence, and many more prominently featured people of color, women, gender non-binary individuals, and people who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community (Holcombe et al., Raza-Sheikh). This representation of many different kinds of people has made many finally feel welcome within the community, which has a history of racism, misogyny, and many other kinds of bigotry.

The new standards for alternative music have not been accepted by everyone. There are still the usual neo-Nazi skinhead punks who spread racist rhetoric, and the alternative scene is still struggling with allegations of sexual violence and bigotry. While sites like Tumblr and TikTok have facilitated the growth and spread of a new alternative, users on sites such as 4chan and Reddit are not as welcoming, deeming that anything dubbed “emo” after the turn of the century is not what users who take pride in being music snobs consider “real emo” (Fathalla). New artists who began experimenting with the alternative style of music faced hot and cold reactions, such as Olivia Rodrigo, who is hailed by some to be a young woman breaking into pop punk, and vehemently rejected by others (Badia-Aylin, Zoladz). It is important to note that those who do not agree are slowly going out of style. Literally. They are aging and are losing control of their influence on the music industry. While the gatekeepers and music elitists in underground forums strictly enforce genre lines with a sort of insufferable pretentiousness, it is increasingly obvious that the current audience cares less about differentiating emo from punk from pop punk from punk rock from hardcore from - I’d continue but there truly is no need. Generation Z has also demanded equal representation across the board for their music, and they have much more sway than the older generations. Record labels are testing the waters with Generation Z listeners, seeing if they will bite the bait they are waving in front of their faces. Ensnaring the appreciation of Generation Z is necessary because they consume content and promote the content they enjoy - it is free advertising. It is not as easy to attain Generation Z fans than it is to attain fans of older generations. Mainstream record labels are having difficulty spoon-feeding Generation Z because they are much more adept at calling out “industry plants” (Badia-Aylin, Holcombe et al.). Industry plants are artists who a record label takes on and then gives them a makeover to fit a certain genre’s look and sound, then heavily promotes the group. Generation Z can usually see right past the makeup and fishnets, one example of such being Tramp Stamps, an industry plant that was called out for the lack of authenticity to the alternative music scene (not to mention the song they were promoting, “I’d Rather Die” was facing backlash) (Badia-Aylin, Holcombe et al.). Gatekeepers within the alternative scene may be adamantly against the new sound and look of alternative music, but the voices of support are much louder. Generation Z has revived the alternative music scene and truly made it the space that it has always described itself to be: a home for the rejected.

What’s Next?

The alternative music scene has experienced waves of popularity, which is influenced by similar circumstances each round. In the early 80s it was the Reagan Presidency which outraged left-leaning punks, followed by Revolution Summer to cleanse the punk scene of Nazis and racists which made room for the “classic” 2000s MySpace era emocore. Emocore was spread through the internet and thrived through moments of uncertainty, such as the September 11th terrorist attacks and 2008 Stock Market Crash. This is similar to the modern iteration of emo music, which flared up during the Trump Presidency and soon faced a reckoning via the #MeToo movement, which cleansed the genre of artists using their platform to take advantage of young women who appreciated their work. Alternative music was spread much faster through the internet than before, and social media sites such as Tumblr, Soundcloud, and TikTok were the facilitators of this sharing of alternative music. Now, the alternative music scene is experiencing another revolution, and this time the alternative community is demanding equal representation of all races, ethnicities, nationalities, genders, and sexualities. This revolution is playing out in real time, and the world watches as modern, more diverse bands begin to taste success. Heck, even My Chemical Romance is back with plans to go on tour! The scene is alive and well, but the mystery is where it will go next. The world should expect diversity to be the norm, along with experimentation of sounds and lyrics. Since alternative music has been known to tackle taboo subjects such as mental health, sexual assault, and bullying, it is likely that the current iteration continues this theme. One thing is for certain, the future of alternative music is just as bright as a jar of Manic Panic hair dye.

Works Cited

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Britton, Luke Morgan. “Emo Never Dies: How the Genre Influenced an Entire New Generation.” BBC, BBC, 30 May 2018, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1tM7yZdRsNn2qZth0WMCRBs/emo-never-dies-how-the-genre-influenced-an-entire-new-generation.

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Grow, Kory. “'No Trump! No KKK! No Fascist USA!': The Punk History.” Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone, 21 Nov. 2016, www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/no-trump-no-kkk-no-fascist-usa-the-punk-history-123861/.

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Nova Twins. “Devil’s Face.” Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/track/3DAmEvrVMtu73MjmKErOrt?si=d8fc8f78b00d4b37.

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Rasheed, Ahmed, and Mohammed Ameer. “Iraq Militia Stone Youths to Death for ‘Emo’ Style.” Reuters, Thomson Reuters, 10 Mar. 2012, www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-emo-killings/iraq-militia-stone-youths-to-death-for-emo-style-idUSBRE8290CY20120310.

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Shah, Neil. “Hip-Hop's Generation Gap: 'Emo' vs. 'Dad' Rap.” The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company, 16 Jan. 2018, 3:45pm, www.wsj.com/articles/hip-hops-generation-gap-emo-vs-dad-rap-1516118193.

The Sophie Lancaster Foundation, 3 June 2021, www.sophielancasterfoundation.com/.

Trapp, Philip. “Paramore + Olivia Rodrigo Were in Talks before 'Good 4 u' Emerged.” Loudwire, Loudwire, 2 Sept. 2021, loudwire.com/paramore-olivia-rodrigo-good-4-u-writing-credits-hayley-williams-before-release/.

u/[deleted]. “Google Doc Summarizing Sexual Assault Allegations Against Bands in the Scene.” Reddit. 25 July 2020, https://www.reddit.com/r/poppunkers/comments/hxi69g/google_doc_summarizing_sexual_assault_allegations/.

“What Is Punk Music? Meaning, Artists, Culture & History.” Pro Musician Hub, 22 July 2021, promusicianhub.com/what-is-punk-music/. Accessed 2 Sept 2021.

Zoladz, Lindsay. “On 'Sour,' Olivia Rodrigo Is A Lowercase Girl With Caps-Lock Feelings.” NPR, NPR, 21 May 2021, www.npr.org/2021/05/21/998842657/olivia-rodrigo-sour-drivers-license-debut-album-review.

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nerdby · 1 year ago

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This might be wishful thinking, but since Reddit is failing I'm really hoping to see some of the people from the books and book suggestions forums come to Tumblr. I remember when I used to be on Reddit there was one forum where people would ask for recommendations for the most fucked up books ever at least once a week. And those recommendations did not disappoint.

They weren't all just horror novels, either. People recommended all kinds of controversial romance and nonfiction novels that were tragic or downright disturbing or both. In some cases, I would look the books up on Goodreads and just get this overwhelming feeling that like I'm not supposed know that the book exists. Like it's just a piece of history or whatever that everyone wants swept under the rug.

I kinda feel like a lot of people on Tumblr don't read contemporary fiction or horror or nonfiction. Which isn't a bad thing. It just makes it impossible for me to find reading suggestions sometimes. Unless it's romance but that tends to be pretty hit or miss because for some reason really unrealistic romance that's just pure wish fulfillment seems to be trending and that kind of thing just bores me. I can't read something if there's no conflict or if the "conflict" is resolved within like fifty pages by some fairy Godmother type character.

That just feels very anticlimactic and unrealistic to me. Like I get that people use reading for escapism, but I like to learn from the books I read. How can I learn from something that's not realistic? That's also why I like the genres I do because with horror, especially, the authors touch on subjects that other authors would generally avoid. They write about subjects that are considered taboos and it's not just horror authors who do this, but I feel like they tend to do it the most often.

Like right now I'm reading this social horror novel called Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang. Social horror is an up-and-coming subgenre in horror that emphasizes the atrocities that we allow to take place in the world just because those things are considered normal or because they're our jobs or part of our cultural heritage or whatever. And the book is about a former piano prodigy who takes a job at this big name beauty and wellness store, and without giving away too many spoilers......Like the general attitude of the characters in the book seems to be along the lines of,

"Feeling bad? Take these pills. They'll make you Caucasian."

That's only one of several fucked up aspects of this story, but I'm glad it's fucked up cause I feel like if Natural Beauty hadn't been a horror novel the subject would have been glossed over and prettied up, ya know? But because it's horror you can get away with being a lot more straightforward. And I'm glad cause, frankly, with some of my mental health issues sometimes these messages can go over my head and I end up even more ignorant than I started out because I misinterpreted it. That's not what I want -- I want to learn something, so that I can try to be a better person.

So it makes me really glad that authors like Ling Ling Huang exist and that they took the time to write this, and that people like the ones from Reddit are always asking for fucked up book recs. Cause I learn from those recommendations.

#random thoughts #ramblings #books #reading #books and reading #current reads #social media #reddit #fucked up books

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darlingofdots · 1 year ago

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That comment seems kind of reductive about both fanfiction and popular romance, in my opinion. Fanfic and romance are really close cousins, and people who study them academically often use resources and theory from both fields (including me!) because the overlap is that big. @ibex-ascendant is absolutely correct and I (and many romance scholars) would even argue that Regency Romance as it exists today is a form of fanfiction that evolved from Georgette Heyer's romances in the 1920s and Jane Austen, and it functions basically the same as, like, soulmate AUs or omegaverse: there's no official manual that tells you how to play in this space and every author will do something slightly different with it, but through the process of lots of people reading and writing stories inspired by each other, we have established a general understanding and expectation of what to expect when we see a fic or pic up a book with this tag. A lot of romance is also just kind of fanfiction, anyway, considering how much of it is retellings/re-imaginings of pre-existing stories like fairytales or mythology. For some really meta shit, check out Maya Rodale's "Keeping Up With The Cavendishes" series--they're all Regency Romance adaptations of classic romcoms, including one that's a Regency adaptation of Bridget Jones' Diary, which is a modern adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, which is basically the blueprint for all of Regency Romance.

When I pick up a new Regency Romance, which is the subgenre I'm most familiar with so I'll keep using it as an example, I'm not expecting and don't really want an in-depth explanation of how the ton works and why the protagonists can't be caught alone together. I already know! I want to get to the fun bits, I want to see how this author writes certain tropes (which are often the exact same as in fanfiction! Seriously, if you read a lot of fanfic, I can almost guarantee that there is a romance author out there who writes the exact stuff you're into. Yes, even if you're into gay stuff. Romance really isn't just white cishets, people just don't bother looking past their own preconceived notions about this genre. But I digress.) or explores certain dynamics. Romance novels have a specific structure--not necessarily a formula! Think of it like a hero's journey but for two people falling in love--that a lot of shippy fanfiction also follows, because humans like stories to work a certain way and we've figured out that this is how we enjoy our love stories with happy endings. Look up Pamela Regis' Natural History of the Romance Novel or, for more of a writing advice perspective, Gwen Hayes' Romancing the Beat. Obviously there is a lot of variation in how that structure plays out and different authors can be good or bad at it, but to say that 'fanfic has different story beats than traditional fiction' is just a really inaccurate statement, unless you don't consider romance novels to be traditional fiction, in which case you should work on your biases.

I'd also argue that there is like, absolutely nothing wrong with fanfic-turned-published-romance. I kind of love picking up a book and reading the summary and going 'oh this used to be fanfiction' but usually that's because I have a pretty decent awareness of fanfiction and can usually figure out what pairing it used to be, but your average non-fanfic reader probably won't even notice. Yes, a lot of the time fanfiction only works as fanfiction because the character dynamics etc. are so specific to the source material that you can't really file off the serial numbers without destroying the whole thing, but the kind of fic that gets published usually is already an AU! A good writer, working with a good editor, can absolutely turn a decent fanfiction into a decent published romance novel.

I'd argue that the issue with fanfic-turned-published-romance has nothing to do with either of those forms or genres. There's probably way more of those around than anyone realises. But the ones you hear about are the outliers that have a lot of hype around them and like, I'm sorry to say this, but those aren't necessarily going to be the ones that are good, you know? You see this in fandom too, the most popular fics are not necessarily the ones with the highest quality of writing or the most complex and meaningful themes, the most popular fics are the ones that appeal to the broadest audience. That's just how it works, in any form of entertainment. So if you have specific tastes or high standards for what you want in a book, yeah sure you probably won't enjoy the One Direction fanfiction that was such a massive hit on WattPad that it got a publishing deal. Publishing deals don't go to the best, most nuanced, richest texts out there, they go to stories that people in charge of making money think will make them the most money. Simple as that. The company paying to print that One Direction WattPad novel is going to put in the absolute minimum amount of effort to make sure they're not going to get sued and then they are going to print it and enjoy the payoff. At the same time I guarantee you that there are a lot of fanfiction writers out there who look at the 80,000 word AU they're crafting and realise, huh, this is pretty good, and then they put in a bunch of effort on their own and shop it around as if it were any other manuscript and if they're lucky they'll get a publishing deal, and I might pick it up and go 'oh lol this used to be fanfic' and then I'll read it and have a good time because they're a talented writer of romance stories, which is what fanfiction often is.

TL;DR: stop making sweeping statements about entire genres based on non-representative samples especially if you don't know enough about those genres to back up your argument.

this comment on that vulture article about the "fanfic-to-romance novel pipeline" is very interesting and not something i've seen articulated...much to think about...

#dottie rambles #romance on main #also please do not underestimate fanfic writers' ability to do EXQUISITE worldbuilding thank you #like not me lol i can't do that for shit #but that's beside the point you don't need to be good at worldbuilding to write successful fic OR romance

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flavia8 · 8 days ago

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Long Live Evil, a very Typical Villainess Isekai (Part 1)

It must be said, that Otome Isekai is one of my FAVORITE Genres. I absolutely adore it. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I have read over 200 works in that specific genre. Haven’t finished THAT many as of them as some of them were dropped, and some of them are ongoing, but I have read a metric fuckton of Otome Isekai. My favorite subgenre of that is Otome Villainess Isekai, so a significant portion of the Otome Isekai I’ve read is OVI. That may sound false, but I assure you that it is true, and there’s an even higher number of just isekai stories that I have read. Generally, otome villainess isekai is mainly found in Asian media: Mangas, Manhuas, Manhwas, and Light Novels. Dramas as well but I dont personally watch a lot of TV tbh. One might say that I am...Genre Savvy.

So, I was truly intrigued and excited to see Long Live Evil, an otome villainess isekai novel, written by an Irish Author. The reason I mention how many I’ve read is because I truly think that my familiarity with the genre worked to this book’s detriment, for two reasons: the fact that I clocked every single twist of the story, and the fact that I’ve read other stories that did those aspects better. Perhaps if this had been the first OVI I had ever read, I might have liked it more, but TBH I doubt it because this book has issues.

Would I say this book is bad? No. It made me laugh genuinely sometimes and I cared about a few of the characters. I absolutely love the concept. But is it good? Honestly, also no. But I really really want to talk about it because I think its worth talking about, because it's fascinating.

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Otome Villainess Isekai

Let’s talk Genre Conventions!! Yay!

Otome Villainess isekai is specifically isekai where the main character (Most often someone in dire straits in some way) reincarnates in the body of a Villain of some sort of media. (Usually with isekai, it's the hero, or just themselves being in another world, no reincarnation.) It can be a book, it can be a game, it can be a movie, a webcomic, a webovel, hell anything with a story is possible, but those things I listed are the most common. Sometimes they die of overwork, sometimes chronic illness, sometimes they’re murdered. Very often, the god of the world they’re going into shows up and asks if they want the opportunity, or just says “Yo. I’m forcing you to do this for me. Peace!” and shoves them into the world of the story. As they are in a villainess’s body, they take their role in the story, and often are put in an untenable situation where they’ll be killed as the original story progresses. Things go from there, with the main character interacting with the original characters and trying to accomplish their goal. Common goals being return to their own world, or just to survive, observe their favorite story and characters up close, or various other things.

Through the Villainess interacting with the characters, including the Original Heroine, the Original Love Interests, any other Villains, they change the story of the world, and reveal information that wasn’t in the original story. It’s extremely common for them to claim to be prophets or oracles, to pretend having visions ect to explain why they have knowledge they should not have.

The original heroine, portrayed in the story as sweet and innocent, actually is conniving and manipulative, and can either be an enemy or ally. Main Characters, heroes before, turn out to be antagonists or villains. Side characters become important, ect ect. The point is, things shift around. Sometimes there’s even other isekaied characters, and romance with the characters in the story is a key part of a majority of these stories, and generally the Main character doesn't go back to their own world. (There are exceptions, however.)

Its an EXTREMELY fun setup to explore absolutely delicious themes. Agency and Self-determination/establishment, Feminism, Escapism, Identity, Revenge, the Madonna/whore complex, what makes something good? What makes something wicked? How far are you willing to go for your goals? It’s such a versatile genre despite the rather rigid setup of specifically isekai-ing into a villainess, and there are many stories that subvert these tropes.

Long Live Evil subverts nothing. It truly is a bog standard Otome Villainess Isekai, and while that's not a bad thing in and of itself, I'm personally really disappointed. Being able to call some of the twists is fun, being able to call all of them? Not as fun. It didn't even feel like the author put her personal touch on the established tropes. Allow me to demonstrate how typical of a plot this is:

Rae is dying of cancer (Dire Straits) when a mysterious woman shows up (Other world’s deity) and offers her an opportunity to save her own life by taking the Villainess’s (Rahela’s) place in her favorite book series. She does, on the night before Rahela is set to be executed, (untenable situation) and she must save herself and work for her goal (getting back to her own world) She does this by using her knowledge of the book series to establish herself as a prophet, and then starts affecting the story. The original heroine, Lia, portrayed as innocent, kind, and angelic to Rahela's wicked, curvaceous, seductive harlot is revealed to be conniving and becomes an ally to Rae. The love interest for Rae is her favorite character, who also happens to be the main character. Rae teams up with another character who was isekaied.

Plot twists? Spoilers:

Lia not being sweet and innocent and being conniving instead? Called it. Page 144.

Key being the most important? Suspected when he showed up, and throughout, confirmed when he "died". Main notes - Page 22, 338, 358

Rae giving the flower to Hortensia to heal her? Called it. Page 300

Octavian (the king) being the one trying to kill Rahela? Yeah. Page 282.

My point is that this book follows a default template for Otome Villainess Isekai. That's not a bad thing, as the "default template" can be done extremely well! I love the concept of Otome Villainess Isekai for a reason. But I found it reminiscent of other books too, and lot of the humor is just pop culture references. Honestly, the writing style and humor really reminded me of Ali Hazelwood books, and Assistant to the Villain. Sometimes it did genuinely make me laugh! I *mostly* enjoyed the writing style in this book. It managed to be rich, descriptive and fun, except for the places it was try-hard, trite and/or nonsensical. Importantly, following the default template for Otome Villainess Isekai is completely fine! The writing style is fun, and the humor is somewhat actually humorous! But, like I said, I wouldn't say that its a good book, and the reason for that lies in how the themes were explored and the story was executed. As I was reading, the refrain in my mind was: [Title of other Series] Did it Better. For almost everything this book tried to do.

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A/N: I will list the series I think did it better more thoroughly (What's similar, why one is better, ect) but for now:

Kill the Villainess

Roxanna

Concubine Walkthrough

Villains are Destined to Die

Isn't being a Wicked Woman much Better?

(There are more, but these are the ones I think are the best and most "comparable" off the top of my head)

Sorry this was so long! There will be more.

#eta #otome villainess isekai #long live evil #books #reading #booklr #books and reading #book review #manga #manhwa #manhua #light novels

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mumblingsage · 5 months ago

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Multiples of 3 for the WIP ask game

Ohh, lots to work with here, thank you!

3. Who's your favorite character for this chapter/fic?

I also answered this one yesterday, but at the same time, since every character takes turns being my favorite: I've developed a soft spot for Maerlis, Konstantin's sister who runs the barony while remaining disappointingly submissive to their father; she is a bundle of contradictions in a way I think is very realistic and too often under-explored in female characters. I'm also fond of Elise Crayl and Adam Tynae, who I first wrote about years ago and now get to show up in an adjacent story (and an adjacent subgenre of romance - at some point i may have wanted this to be a kinky erotic romance novella, but then plot and feelings took over, and frankly a lot of those feelings needed to be processed before anything like 'kink' could be approached).

6. Does this fic/chapter have any twists that you're proud of?

It's hard to say because, well, I plot-outlined the thing, nothing in it startles me, but there were some fun bits of unexpected dialogue where it was like...oh...we can go somewhere here. Originally I expected Konstantin and Elise to hit it off pretty easily - she's a powerful ally offering a favor to him - but given his tragic backstory, of course he won't trust favors from powerful people, so he reacts with suspicion. Leading to this--

That also serves to answer question 9, What is your favorite dialogue you’ve written so far?

(There are other lines I like a lot, but we can't be here all day and some of them depend on further context.)

12. What emotions do you expect your reader to feel?

A lot of cathartic sadness/sympathy/frustration and the joy of resolution when it comes. The urge to hug these characters or have them hug each other. Feral crawling-up-walls while shouting about parallels and resonances. Also, for a certain subset of the target audience,

For another subset of the audience, a sense of recognition, having our own personal issues blown to larger-than-life size and played out in a way that's both compelling and safe in fiction. A nonzero amount of "I'd like to incorporate that into my sex life" or maybe "I'm glad I've already incorporated that into my sex life."

There's also some comedic relief, but leaning on the dry side (see "I've just made a fucking fool of myself" above). This is definitely more romantic drama than romantic comedy.

15. In as vague of terms as possible (to avoid spoiling), how do you anticipate this chapter/fic to end?

Happily.

While still avoiding major spoilers, with the introduction to this kingdom of feminism and a rather crude but palpable form of participatory democracy. As Konstantin's asshole dad puts it,

For my 3 central characters, I'd also say it ends domestically. (It begins and middles rather domestically, too, to be fair.)

And it ends with use of a central metaphor (or motif? symbol? it ends with characters playing a game that's played, for good or ill, many times throughout the story) that was deeply obvious in hindsight.

18. Share the scene you just wrote, written from another character’s POV.

Not sure how to do this one because I don't want to inflict an entire 3,000-word chapter rewrite on my dashboard (or on myself). Instead I'm going to go back one question and do 17. Share the previous 5 sentences.

The opening five sentences, since I'm currently revising this draft from the first chapter on: Catilyn closed her eyes and tried to trick her body into believing she still sat before the south-facing windows, bent over the gaming board with her sisters-in-law. Then next to her Helene took a step, old wood creaking beneath it, and Cat’s reverie blew off like dust in a cool drift of wind. Not that there was any wind. Rare weather for the middle of spring, not only blue and dry but so still she heard the river flowing around the piers of the bridge to the northeast. Did she hear hoofbeats, too, clattering over the stone arches?

21. Share 3 songs that would belong on a playlist for this chapter/fic.

Genuinely hard to narrow down, but here are 3 fun ones from the playlist I've listened to while drafting:

Kiki Rockwell's "Burn Your Village"

Hozier's "Dinner and Diatribes"

And something from The Amazing Devil, of course: I'm torn between "The Rockrose and the Thistle" and, on a more aesthetic-vibes level (the music video!), "King".

#if Joey Batey wants to run through the woods with a bloody mouth some more he can play Konstantin anytime #the WIP #long post

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alteredphoenix · 9 months ago

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Notes on The Mountain Wakes: A Brief Rundown on Technology and Its Influences

It's been quite a while since I last updated The Mountain Wakes, but I always remember how I looked at games such as Dark Souls 2, Morrowind, and They Are Billions (ironic, because I'm not really into zombie apocalypse media anymore like I used to be over a decade ago, and my PC at the time could barely run it) for inspiration to form the basis of the Bad Ending AU the fic takes place in. (You can clearly tell I'm a Morrowind fangirl because Autozam, Chizeta, and Fahren move in on Cephiro and put their stakes down the moment the Paths open without any conflict from Zagato and Emeraude whatsoever - not because it happens out of conquest, but because they're so immersed in their love for each other they ignore the problems going on Cephiro a'la fuck the world we don't care what happens to it so long as we have each other, it's not our problem anymore).

I would say the technological advancements, in the three year span that takes place after Chapter 1, would be much more developed than the steampunk Tesla Tech aesthetics seen in They Are Billions. With the arrival of the three realms, Cephiro goes from a very pastoral fantasy world with hints of old magitech (via the Saturn game) to a hard, cyberpunk theme that's part of an industrial revolution that's very much enforced.

Of the three Fahren very much leans into said cyberpunk aesthetic but is more or less inspired by the Japanese subgenre with Chinese/Asian influences and the splash of tech noir and that retro 1980s vibe that's often idealized (i.e. Chapter 2's first scene takes place as a train station terminal with payphone booths, something that IRL - at least in the States - barely in use anymore with the rise of mobile phones).

Autozam takes this a step further by being postmodern as well as nanopunk/biopunk (or trying to going in that direction in a bid to co-opt Fahren technology and repurpose it to eliminate Autozam's pollution and ecological disasters). It's about as futuristic as you can get, with their mechs and architectural approaches, so in comparison to Cephiro it's going to stick out a lot.

Chizeta would be something akin to solarpunk (to relieve the issue of overpopulation) while recognizing they are very much in the camp of technofantasy (because they don't explain their magic by applying science to it). However, there is an undercurrent of Cold War/cloak and dagger element going on that undermines Tarta and Tatra's attempts at establishing a colony for their people (read: hold onto control via authoritarian means that affect the population not in line with their cause/beliefs).

I had plans for Debonair and Nova to show up (albeit under different circumstances), but as I didn't get very far in the brainstorming phase at the time they currently don't amount to much in the plot beyond Nova being a boss fight for Umi to overcome. I like to think they'd be their own faction and sowing chaos in the background because everyone re: the three realms is too busy trying to get their upper hand over each other in the attempt to be the one to overthrow Zagato and Emeraude to become the Pillar and the people of Cephiro are too doompilled to fight back (and if they are fighting, it's against each other). They would be in the camp of pure magic and taking advantage of all the technology lying around for their own purposes while manipulating people's emotions a'la the Will of Cephiro to focus on perpetuating all the in-fighting.

#it is very much a dark fantasy au #but there is a Earn Your Happy Ending in this fic #it kind of reminds me of the days when i used to go to my local library and seeing all the old sci-fi/fantasy books from the 70s and 80s #which...it technically *wasn't* the vibe i was going for at the beginning #but it certainly does give it off now lol #after all MKR is a 90s manga w/ 80s-90s aesthetics #so the fic is inevitably going to reflect that #esp. based off the premise of 'what if the magic knights lost against zagato'#b/c teenage girls in over their heads against someone being Crazy Prepared in anticipation of the magic knights #and what the aftermath would look like if we take mkr2 into account under that vein #and if umi and fuu were also as emotionally affected by the pillar situation as hikaru was in mkr2 #mywriting #fanfiction #the mountain wakes #notes on the mountain wakes

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higuchisora · 1 year ago

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Speaking as someone who watches anime, there are so many animes that don't even slightly indicate they'll have fanservice and boom, suddenly a half-naked teenage girl is in your face. Not saying "sex bad!!" But like. Time and place. Especially because, surprise surprise, not everyone wants to see someone's underwear out of nowhere!!! I've quite literally come across horror anime that's gone out of its way to jiggle a girl's tiddies AS SHE'S DYING. Not ecchi, not horror with ecchi subgenre, just completely advertised as some horror/thriller anime.

It doesn't make them a "prude", it's like not wanting gore in your romance book. The irony of people applauding Japan for this too, knowing the rampant sexual harassment and, ironically, very conservative values they carry IRL is hilarious. And before you come for me for criticizing another country/culture: I AM JAPANESE. Not in the "weeb" way either, in the "my mother is Japanese, it's my first language, I have a fucking Japanese citizenship" kind of way.

Just saying, it's genuinely difficult sometimes to find anime with premises I find entertaining AND doesn't include some random panty flashes, especially since its rarely advertised unless its straight up the plot (ex: ecchi or harem anime). Plus, its so prevalent that i almost feel like those who dont mind genuinely don't notice sometimes?

Which, with the (again) rampant sexual harassment issues in Japan (the panty stuff isn't as big of a deal anymore, but it was indeed a massive issue for a while and just took on different forms), just kinda leaves a bad taste in my mouth, if anything. Yeah yeah, fantasy vs reality or whatever, but reality often informs one's fantasies. Sexist guys often have sexist sexual fantasies- its not the fantasy that makes them sexist (you can have the same one and not be sexist), its the sexism that gives them the fantasy. There's a limit to separating art from artist. There's a reason the anime industry is not only mostly male dominated, but the fans are as well (in Japan).

The only genres they don't really bother with are explicitly geared towards women, which are often strictly shojo/romance (cute but not my cup of tea), slice of life (still sometimes has it, and isn't my taste) or some kind of empty fluff-only show (again cute, but eventually boring). This isn't to trash on anime with fanservice, nor am i trying to make an attack, but to act as if this is some bold move on Japan's part to put a half naked (often teenage) girl in a shounen Boys Club anime is kinda odd, tbh. It's about as revolutionary in my eyes as action movie #473049 having yet another Hot Girl clinging to the main man the entire time and contributing nothing. Again, like what you like, but dunking on others for expressing their frustration at something that ISN'T part of the genre expectation is... also kinda odd. I'd even call it a little lame, at the risk of getting someone up in arms about it.

Also at the risk of my opinion being absolutely discarded and invalidated, I'd like to say I'm asexual. NOT sex-repulsed, but either way I don't think I'd have to be any kind of aspec to just not be into constant fanservice? Or are allosexuals really just this consistently horny? Again, that's not an attack, I'm genuinely mystified at how something so banal can take up so much brainspace. I also think it's really hypocritical to tell people they shouldn't slut-shame/judge people because of sexual interests/etc. But then make fun of people and call them "prudes" for not being interested. It's like being pro-choice but trying to force someone into an abortion they don't want... and that's also as someone who's pro-choice. The point is the CHOICE. If anime did this, but with gore or violence instead of fanservice, I feel like the conversation would be a bit less... well, rude. I know I wouldn't appreciate random gore or other such content in my slice of life or lighthearted comedy anime, and it shouldn't be that different with sex, sexual content, or nudity either.

Anyway, this is escaping me. I have a tendency to forget myself and pick up unrelated points when I rant. Essentially, this isn't meant to be a call-out post, I don't want to hurt or fight anyone, but I wanted to get this off my chest because I've seen so many times people attacking others or making fun of them just for not liking sex or being interested in nudity/expressing frustration when they weren't warned ahead of time that it would include this content. I used this post above simply because it was the most recent one I've come across, I don't think this one's the worst or anything.

Have a good day, y'all.

non-weebs be like, “i don’t like all the boobs and ass in anime,” but then weebs be like, “okay but like which anime did you watch?” and non-weebs be like, “i can’t believe Big Titty Cherry Blossom Swimsuit Club had so many titties!”

#anime rant #gore ment tw #fanservice rant #opinion #is this a hot take? i dont think so but im beginning to wonder #no fighting please #i feel like i'll get hate for this #feel free to disagree #but i wont change my mind #insults will be blocked #im not angry but i am annoyed and i had a 2 spare minutes at work so #rant post #abortion mention #tell me if i need to tag anything

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mermaidsirennikita · 4 months ago

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ARC REVIEW: Played by Naima Simone

4/5. 9/3/24.

Vibes: widower hero, hockey romance, "it's just a warm body", love after loss

Heat Index: 7/10

Still grieving the loss of her professional and personal partner, firefighter Adina can't resist opening the journal she finds after a fire at a hockey facility. The journal details the kind of loss she understands deeply--but when she brings it back to the owner, widower and star player Solomon, he's furious that she got a glimpse at his innermost feelings. But as he realizes that Adina understands where he's coming from better than anyone else, enmity gives way to bonding, which gives way to a fierce physical attraction... The question is, can either one risk falling in love again?

Oof. Played is a unique take on the hockey romance subgenre (and not only because Solomon is the only Black hockey hero I've read thus far, and the book doesn't shy away from how white the sport is). While the hockey is a part of it, the firefighting is no less so. It's about two people who genuinely love their jobs, but have also let themselves lose who they are in it because they can't face the reality of their new lives. It's about falling in love out of understanding and pretending that it's just physical. And it's about the inevitable messiness that comes with falling for someone after losing another.

This makes it sound super heavy--and I wouldn't say it totally is? Like, there's definitely some heavy stuff here, but overall the book is fun and sexy and dramatic. It just also takes the time to think deeply about its plot, and I appreciate that quite a bit.

Quick Takes:

--The thing I really enjoy about this book is that Adina and Solomon actually get each other from the jump, arguably before they even meet. However, they--especially Solomon--really fight that, which kind of makes it easier to pass it off as something physical. They don't act on the physical too quickly (though I wouldn't call this a slow burn either) but there's this conscious effort by both of them to sort of focus on that because the other option is... what? Being in love? Perish the thought!

--This is a single parent romance! Solomon is not only a widower, but the father of a young son. I'm very vocal about my iffiness re: kids in romance novels, but this one was done well in my opinion. First off, he actually reads like a child. Second, he's definitely a big part of Solomon's life, but a part of what the novel confronts is that Solomon has been leaning on his in-laws as coparents since his wife died (which is a super real thing, right?). This not only provides us with good plot and character stuff... it also ensures that we don't have too much of the kid on the page. I know, I'm mercenary, but it's smart writing!

Still, Solomon being this really loving but imperfect father so worked for me (and Adina). I loved the way he was presented as totally affectionate and vocally loving towards his son. So many books focus on like, this daddy's girl thing with single father heroes, and... I don't know. We need more depictions of fathers who kiss and cuddle and dote on their little boys, right?

--This novel actually tackles some hard stuff alongside the romance I'll give readers a heads up and say that while it doesn't venture into sexual assault territory, Adina does have to deal with some pretty serious sexual harassment at work. At points, I did think there was a LOT packed in here, but one thing I did appreciate was that there wasn't this pretty "tied with a bow" resolution to everything. There are some very human issues confronted here, and the resolutions felt like... very humanly in progress.

That said, I did kind of feel like the ending was a bit rushed (and I have my quibble with one aspect) and some trimming of those other aspects might have left us with more time for a smoother resolution.

--One of the things I appreciate about this book is how honest it is about falling in love after losing someone. Often, I think romance can be rather cruel to the dead spouse, as it were, and diminishes the relationship... which cheapens the central romance to me. Here, you see exactly how much both Solomon and Adina loved their lost partners. They didn't get to choose to end the relationships. They were cut off. Who knows what would have happened if their partners had lived, but that's the reality we're living with, right? And it doesn't lessen their love for their new partners at all.

The Sex:

Ooooh, it's good. There aren't too many full-length sex scenes in the novel, but those that you do get are very long, preceded by a lot of tension, and INTENSE. Solomon is super growly and aggressive, and Adina kind of gets to let her own naturally dominant side take a bit of a backseat when he's tossing her around. We love to see it.

Approaching tough topics with grace, Played is a hot, emotional book that remains a good time throughout, even when it gets deep. (And the book isn't the only one that gets deep heeeeey--.) Definitely a "hockey romance for people who don't like hockey romances... and also those that do" kind of novel.

Thanks to NetGalley and Montlake for providing me with a copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

#romance novel blogging #netgalley #arc reviews #book recs #book reviews #romance novels #books

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zoobus · 2 years ago

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your post on female-targeted isekai subgenres listed as one subgenre: "I woke up in a porn game/novel and I refuse to fuck"

how do i find those 🥺

Why would you want to >:(

I can't think of any off the top of my head besides I Fell Into A Reverse Harem Game,

which is a comic I regret not talking about on here as I read it because I liked it sooo much and I *think* it was heading towards a rather subversive conflict that would punish the heroine for refusing to fuck her harem (you have no idea how common introducing a harem just to reject them is, it drives me up the wall)

Additionally it felt like there might be consequences for imposing her 21st century values on this vaguely historical european world without considering the greater context or how "kindly" actions from a malevolent being might be perceived, and that's a premise I've been starving for since the beginning. I wanted to see someone isekai into a woman who's not just a villainess, but an actual colonizer, a war criminal that the world is correct to despise, and I wanted to see someone try the "I'll just be nice to everyone from now on" school of fixing things only for that to be the worst option.

There's a moment I can only describe as like, imagine Hillary Clinton telling a small child who lost their parents and became a victim of trafficking in the aftermath of the Honduran coup that she's super sorry, to make it up to you she's enrolling you in the finest private schools so you can one day become her personal assistant, maybe even secretary and the face that kid made was so perfect lmaooo. praying this comic ends in it all blowing up in her face. Also it's femdom fr. Before and after the isekaing.

Oh and while writing the following paragraph I remembered Protecting the Female Lead's Brother/Roxana

which I highly recommend if you like problematic girlbosses, good fucked up stories, femdom stockholm type relationships, and a little bit guro! I forgot about this one because while it's still pretty horny, they open it like this

but the actual vibes are more like this

But in general I can't think of many other examples because the otome isekai prompt "I'm suddenly in a +18 dating sim game" is almost always written by someone writing rated-G material. It's pretty annoying. A good percentage of them have so little to do with the original porn story, it's unclear why that was even the premise, like there are teen rated dating games? Why make it about a porn game other than to underline how innocent and pure the main character is. Even the two I'm praising aren't actual porn. It's often a sign that I won't like the book.

Now, I've read a couple actual porn stories using the theme but tbqh they're not good and I'm not posting them. Recurring issue where you realize the mc was brought into a real, existing story that this author hated and said author will interrupt their own story to remind you how much they hate the first author for being such a trash ass hack fraud. Mid-coitus.

#roxana #i fell into a reverse harem game #the way to protect the female lead's older brother #protecting the female Lead's order brother #god i hate how many alternative titles there are for each story #otome isekai #regret not talking about Roxana even more what an unexpected gem #lmao let's read this cringe bs and laugh->HOLY SHIT LET'S GOOOO FUCKED UP TOXIC WOMEN STAY WINNING #if you're taking this from the tags dio or dex or w/e his name was is a dork and if you like him you have projected a cool yandere persona #that is not supported by himself #recommendations

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olderthannetfic · 3 years ago

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Fandom scholarship

Instead of going to bed, I ended up writing a long-ass comment on some fan scholarship. I’m c&ping it here so I don’t lose it:

I just re-found your video while cleaning up some computer files and looked at it again. Interesting work, but I'm curious why you didn't compare to total AO3 numbers at all. One of the distinctive things about AO3 as opposed to, say, Wattpad is that you can just click on the MCU tag and instantly see a breakdown of how many works are each category. For that matter, you can click on m/m, which is also a tag. Right now, there are 191,999 m/m MCU works compared to 144,178 f/m MCU ones. The real question is why your _sample_ looks how it does, not why MCU does. I tried looking at various time ranges in 2021, and while m/m was still more common in each case, if I look only at August or only at the summer, het is pretty close behind, so I can see how you could have gotten a sample of 500 where it managed to just pass m/m in the new postings. At a guess, you sampled just when that Loki TV show had come out and everybody was shipping het for that.

You're also conflating "fanfiction" with "AO3", which is wildly misleading. Part of why AO3 looks how it does is that it's a reaction to other fanfic sites, and the audience it attracts is often preferentially choosing it over other fic sites. That factor has a massive influence on what AO3 fic looks like. It may be fair to call AO3 fic a "genre", but it's not fair to only look at AO3 in defining fanfic or to not consider how AO3's context shapes that genre. That's very shoddy work.

While AO3's greater freedom of labeling may more accurately reflect how fic writers prefer to categorize fic, it's also possible that people who liked the FFN way gravitate there, while people who like the AO3 way come to AO3. FFN's categorization system is most definitely of the 'fantasy', 'action/adventure' variety. AO3 finally surpassed FFN in total stories some time during the pandemic, but for much of AO3's history, FFN has been the larger site. The question about the _word_ 'smut' has a similar issue. Yes, there's something to investigate with the higher rating on BTS fic, but the use of the word itself should be pointing you to a completely different question: Who tags redundantly on AO3 and who likes that _word_ specifically? Since 'explicit' and 'smut' serve to express much the same thing, who is culturally likely to want to add extra tags like that? My off-the-cuff guess is that it's younger Wattpadders who redundantly tag and that they're the ones who tend to use the tag 'smut'. This is just based on experience, not data. I'd bet it tracks with what fandom spaces writers are coming out of, and that may track with specific fandom. If you wanted to delve into the 'smut' question responsibly, you'd need to be looking at cultural factors like who is using the 'Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot' tag a.k.a. "PWP", who is using 'Porn', etc. You might not find anything interesting, but to not consider that factor or go looking in the first place makes for a weak argument. I remember a case where a fandom I was looking at had plenty of m/m explicit works, but only the big het ship was often tagged 'smut': it was clearly a cultural thing.

This is a nitpick, but the Multi category on AO3 is described in the help popup as "More than one kind of relationship, or a relationship with multiple partners" rather than exclusively being for poly.

I think this statement is also questionable: "People are searching more emotional genre markers more than they are for theme/setting markers." That _may_ be true, but it's not really an accurate description of what your data show. It's true that "Tags are the user-generated subgenre markers on works in Archive of Our Own." but unless you were looking primarily at bookmarks, the users in question are _authors_. People aren't _searching_ for these tags: they're _labeling_ with them. I also think that while tone-indicating tags probably are more popular overall (just based on experience), major emotional tones in stories aren't that varied. Happy, sad, sad but then happy later, etc. Plot-related tags _as a group_ might be very popular without any one given tag being popular. There are 54k BTS fics on AO3 with some variant of the AU tag. There are only 32k using the tag 'smut'. AU is easy to look at because it has an elaborate metatag structure that gathers all those disparate tags into one. Other plot-related tags don't have that. You haven't considered this type of factor at all. To really get a sense of this, you'd need to grab a big sample, then hand-categorize tags into plotty vs. emotional or something. (Or knowing AO3, emotional tone vs. kink vs. plot trope.)

If your next step is to look at BTS, parasocial relationships, and desire, then you really cannot afford to ignore Wattpad. xReaders are on the rise on AO3, but they're still pretty minor compared to fic shipping group members together, both for BTS and for RPF in general, but on Wattpad, it's Jungkook/(presumed female) self as far as the eye can see. There's nothing wrong with preferring AO3 as a fan kicking back with some fanfic, but if you want to do good academic work, you need to either define what you're looking at more narrowly or explain to your audience how extremely non-representative AO3 is of other fanfic spaces.

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onestowatch · 3 years ago

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19 LGBTQIA+ Artists You Need to Listen to This PRIDE

PRIDE is all about self-empowerment and self-determination. It’s about not just being comfortable with who you are but showing the world that there is pride to be found in being unapologetically you. And that’s why, this PRIDE, we wanted to shine a light on a small handful of our favorite LGBTQIA+ artists. Ranging from rapturous hyperpop, revelatory bossa nova meditations, romantic rave music, and everywhere in between, these are 19 LGBTQIA+ artists who deserve a spot on your PRIDE playlist and every playlist for that matter.

girl in red

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In her debut single, “i wanna be your girlfriend,” a teenage girl in red unapologetically sings of young queer love over a mesh of lofi production and jangly instrumentation that would come to define much of the bedroom pop genre. It is a standout moment of unrelenting honesty, and a serenely simple three-minute confession that would go on to strike a chord with millions who were afraid of what it meant to be something more than friends. Now, a few years later and following the release of her critically-acclaimed debut album, if i could make it go quiet, Ulven still writes with that same emotional honesty, putting forth every ounce of herself for the world to see.

Meet Me @ The Altar

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“the little lonely black alt girl i was in the 00s is living rn, she never even dared to hope she might see this 💖💖,” reads the top comment on Meet Me @ The Altar’s music video for their single “Garden.” It is a sentiment shared by much of the rising band’s fanbase, who are used to the mainstream alternative scene championing cis white males. Existing in the space between pop-punk and hardcore, Meet Me @ The Altar exists to challenge the notion that queer women of color don’t have a place in punk. And after penning a record deal with Fueled By Ramen, home to the likes of Paramore, Panic! at the Disco, and nearly every pop-punk band that made up your middle school playlist, chances are this is just the beginning for our new favorite punks.

THE BLOSSOM

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For Lily Lizotte, better known as THE BLOSSOM, music exists as the synthesis and subsequent recontextualization of a host of past experiences. From the sound of their dad belting away in his home studio to stumbling upon niche Internet subgenres, THE BLOSSOM transforms all this and more into a sound that is instantly recognizable but impossible to perfectly place. The culmination of this host of influences takes sweeping sonic form on their debut EP, ‘97 BLOSSOM, a perfectly imperfect introduction to one of the most fascinating rising artists of recent memory.

BIMINI

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You may recognize BIMINI as Bimini Bon-Boulash, the runner-up on the second season of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK. And now you should familiarize yourself with Bimini, brit-pop extraordinaire. Releasing their debut single “God Save This Queen” earlier this June, Bimini deftly channels late ‘90s brit-pop and punk to deliver a single that has us absolutely living for the ensuing chaos. Serving up multiple looks throughout its eye-catching music video, “God Save This Queen” is not just a non-binary anthem but a veritable 2021 lookbook.

Hope Tala

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With a sound that falls somewhere between turn-of-the-century R&B and bossa nova, Hope Tala’s music is expectedly a dream given sonic form. Perhaps that’s why much of the UK singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist’s music is able to so deftly weave imagery of love, heartache, and teenage fistfights into tightknit tracks that feel simultaneously transcendental and deeply personal. And with the release of her 2020 EP, Girl Eats the Sun, Hope Tala poses one all-important question, “Why have a life if you’re not going to do something crazy and make a difference in the world?”

chloe moriondo

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For much of chloe moriondo’s avid fanbase, watching her transform from budding ukulele sensation to pop-punk phenom very much meant watching her grow up. Getting her start on YouTube, moriondo's fanbase witnessed her evolve as both an artist and person. Coming out in the aptly titled “a ramble about self identity, growth, and being a lesbian,” to be a fan of the artist often feels like trading secrets with a close personal friend. It is a sentiment that rings all the more true upon delving into her debut album, Blood Bunny. Grappling with coming-of-age at the axis of empathic pop and euphoric pop-punk, Blood Bunny sees moriondo taking yet another impressive step forward.

Godford

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Little is known about Godford beyond what can be garnered from a handful of interviews online and his succinct Spotify bio, and chances are he’s happier that way. The anonymous DJ and producer aims to make non-binary music that exists outside of the confines of genres, overly-simplified classifications, and even himself. What is important are the emotions his music hold and what his listeners take away. Fusing romanticism and rave in his debut album, Godford: Non Binary Place, the anonymous artist does just that. He provides a space that exists simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, like an ephemeral night spent out on the dancefloor with a stranger or close friend.

Joy Oladokun

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Joy Oladokun is at the core of her music. It may at first glance appear to be a painfully obvious statement, but as her sincere songwriting seeps into every corner of your soul, it is a notion that becomes undeniable. In her major label debut, in defense of my own happiness, Oladokun writes with an unabashed authenticity, never turning a blind eye to the world around her. These shared reflections and recollections of life are often heartbreaking and uplifting in the same breath, but in their candidness, we can begin to piece together what it means to be human, imperfections and all.

Allison Ponthier

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Allison Ponthier may only have a handful of singles to her name, but her unmatched potential is clear as day. Raised in the outskirts of Dallas, Texas, Ponthier’s moving songwriting and emphatic vocal prowess speak to her country roots. Pair that country sensibility with some of the most pristine pop songwriting we have heard in quite some time, and you begin to understand just how exciting Ponthier is as a rising artist. With only two singles to date, there’s not much else we can say beyond do yourself a favor and play “Cowboy” on repeat.

Rina Sawayama

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It feels like no hyperbole to call Rina Sawayama an inevitable pop icon. First garnering critical acclaim with singles like “Cherry” and her 2017 debut EP RINA, the Japanese-British singer-songwriter staked her name on her immaculate ability to capture all the glamour and larger-than-life appeal of early ‘00s pop. Building on what was a nostalgic yet forward-thinking vision, Sawayama returned with her 2020 eponymous full-length debut. From nu-metal, club beats, to veritable pop anthems, SAWAYAMA emerged as a genre-defying showcase of an avant-garde pop star.

Arlo Parks

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Listening to Arlo Parks’ music is akin to sipping on a hot cup of chamomile tea as you watch the world slowly pass by your living room window. It is a testament to the British poet and singer-songwriter’s subtle yet beautiful way with words, the way in which each lyric serves as a glance into a tightly-held memory or passing observation. These poetic musings come to life in her debut album, Collapsed In Sunbeams, which layers lyrical revelations over some of the most tender R&B of recent memory. Parks’ is more than a must-listen; she feels like the birth of a new wave.

Claud

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Claud has spent the past few years making a name for themselves in the indie pop world, and the culmination of it all arrives in their debut album, Super Monster. The acclaimed album sees Claud reckoning with coming-of-age and love with an irresistible charm. Pair that with a penchant for grounded, affective songwriting and infectious, dreamlike melodies and you have one of the best debuts of recent memory. In case you somehow need any further convincing that Claud is one to watch, Super Monster marks the debut release from Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records.

UMI

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Equally as inspired by R&B and neo-soul as she is by her generation’s penchant for blurring genre lines, UMI and her music exist as a form of spiritual healing. Half-Black and half-Japanese, her work explores everything from identity to self-introspection, such as on the aptly-titled Introspection. It is a fondness for self-exploration that UMI delves headfirst into on her 2019 EP Love Language, a sublime blend of identity struggles, love, and anime that tackles the issue of always feeling like an other, never Black or Japanese enough.

Joesef

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Sad boy summer. It’s the simplest way to being explaining Joesef’s serene albeit somber sound. Emerging out of Glasgow, the quickly rising star often wears his still bleeding heart on his sleeve, even when the underlying sonics seem to be moving onto greener pastures. It is an exquisite balancing act that comes to life on his 2020 EP, Does It Make You Feel Good?. Blending elements of soft-spoken R&B, jazz, and ethereal pop, Joesef sets himself apart as an artist whose influences and appeal know no bounds.

Serena Isioma

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At the top of the year, we named Serena Isioma one of our top artists to watch in the year to come, and for good reason. The self-proclaimed “nonbinary rock star” experienced a breakout moment with “Sensitive,” a track that is difficult to perfectly encapsulate but think along the lines of fusing modern-day R&B and woozy indie-pop with reckless abandon, and you’ll be about halfway there. It was an impressive standout track that was only buoyed by a pair of EPs, Sensitive and The Leo Sun Sets, in 2020, officially cementing Isioma as an artist like no other.

Khai Dreams

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Khai Dreams’ music is effortlessly easygoing. With its straightforward guitar lines and understated production, every track from the Pacific Northwest singer-songwriter flows out as naturally as breathing. Maybe it’s that laid-back approach that begins to explains Khai Dreams’ universal appeal and millions of monthly listeners, despite releasing most of his music independently. A hallmark of the DIY generation and its massive homebrewed potential, it would be a crying shame if you didn’t let Khai Dream’s serene meditations transport you somewhere far from here.

Frances Forever

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Like much of their Gen Z cohorts, Frances Forever’s exponential rise was not the result of a well-executed marketing plan but by the pure chance of a single song finding a home online. The song in question, “Space Girl,” was originally part of NPR’s Tiny Desk Content before soon blowing up on TikTok, and it’s not hard to see why. Short, sweet, and to the point, “Space Girl” is a saccharine love letter to that bubbly feeling of floating on cloud nine. Now signed to Mom+Pop and with their debut EP, Paranoia Party, due out later this year, this is the perfect time to get familiar with Frances Forever.

Dorian Electra

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Unapologetically playing with gender norms and stereotypes while seeing just how far they can push the limits of pop, Dorian Electra has long maintained a cult following in the world of experimental, highly addictive hyperpop. And it’s not hard to see why. Having collaborated with the likes of Charli XCX, 100 gecs, Village People, Pussy Riot, Rebecca Black, and more, Electra’s music ranges from off-the-rails hyperpop to introspective pop slow burns. All of this and more reaches a fever pitch in their 2020 album My Agenda, a devious showcasing of one of pop’s most explosive figures.

MAY-A

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Maya Cumming, professionally known as MAY-A, is no stranger to the hustle it takes to make it in the music industry. The Australian artist got her start entering numerous singing competitions in her hometown of Byron Bay and started busking on the streets at the tender age of 11. Now, she has a breakout single under her belt in the form of “Apricots,” an anthemic indie-pop ode to queer love. And since that breakout moment, MAY-A has continued to release impressive single after single—the latest being the collaborative “American Dream.”

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clintbeifong · 2 years ago

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A Rather Spiral-Shaped Essay on Genre and Worldbuilding in The West Wing

I’ve been having a lot of thoughts about The West Wing recently. I just finished the show for the first time and I am both continually wowed but it’s excellence and left with this strange longing for it. I’ve been obsessed with many a show in my day, but I can’t think of one that’s left me with such an aching sense of nostalgia, and especially not so soon after watching it. Maybe a piece of that is political, that there is a longing for the show’s pervasive sense of both hope and competency.

But I’m not here to talk politics, I’m here to talk narrative.

So much about The West Wing is excellent. The dialogue. The acting. The characterization. The humor, drama, costumes, set design, music, editing, direction, on and on. Literally everything. Except for Mandy, who was just okay.

But in trying to figure out what makes the show feel so unique, so itself, what I keep coming back to is the story world—both the environment the narrative plays out in and the way the show handles and constructs that world.

To my mind, The West Wing is perched at the intersection of three different genres (or subgenres of TV drama, really). One is a classic workplace drama. Offices. Meetings. Suits. Memos. Another is a high stakes, more action-packed drama where the characters’ actions can literally affect the world. This is more common in sci-fi and fantasy, and in historical drama where we already know the characters’ choices affect the world going forward. It’s not a secret or an accident that Lin-Manuel Miranda is a huge fan of TWW. And the third is a fast-paced procedural drama where characters’ minute-to-minute actions have life or death consequences, usually on a more personal scale. This is your classic doctor/lawyer/detective show.

And some fascinating tonal alchemy happened when Sorkin and the gang wove them all together. From the world-stakes drama the show gets it’s macro tensions—the episode or arc-long questions like, Can the president prevent war? Will he assist refugees and asylum seekers? Avert nuclear disaster?

These give the show an instant weight to it that underpins everything else, but I’d argue that they aren’t what makes the show feel like itself. For all of it’s global, life-defining stakes, The West Wing feels small compared to a lot of other entries in this genre. And by small I mean intimate. Lacking in a lot of action, stunts and effects, gore, or other fanfare that makes a lot of other shows in the world-stakes genre feel bombastic in comparison.

For that feeling we have to turn to the other two genres, the workplace drama and the high-stakes procedural. From the procedural we get the basic happenings of a given episode of TWW. The characters start out with a stated goal, like to pass a piece of legislation, and must navigate the system in which they work to accomplish it. Granted, the procedure is less standard here. Unlike an episode of your favorite detective show, which probably goes body → clues → red herring → aha moment → case brake with some regularity, The West Wing’s procedures are less clear-cut, and they’re aren’t the centerpiece of every episode, but they are there. They’re particularly prevalent in Josh’s storylines because it’s his job to wrangle votes and such, but the same could be said for CJ and the press, the President and the Joint Chiefs, Leo and pretty much everybody, Toby and the issue of the week, etc. A general outline might be: identify opposition → confront opposing parties → negotiate → assess feasibility of giving opponent what they want → try alternative channels → aha moment → attempt renegotiation and/or hail mary → success or failure.

This is the business that keeps the characters busy, and to great effect. The characters of The West Wing are always on their feet, always pivoting at a moment’s notice, and that’s impressive because the more standard examples in this category often have literal action happening on screen to accompany the mental activities of trying to solve the case of the week (be it a medical, forensic, or legal one). In TWW, much of the action happens off screen (everything military, for example.)

But what gives the show it’s texture, both its look and its feel, is the workplace trapping that are sitting neatly on top of everything else. It’s the reason that, despite their wildly different stakes and scope, the show I’m continually tempted to compare The West Wing to is The Office. Both have this incredibly comfortable sense of mundanity to them. No matter how absurd Michael Scott’s antics get or how high-stakes the President’s crisis of the day becomes, it’s all wrapped up in this sense that you know these people, you’ve been them and worked with them. Both shows—to me anyway—have this sense that people are trying their best to live their everyday lives in a world the was not build for that and does not care if they succeed—and in many instances is pretty much designed to ensure their failure.

And yet they care if they succeed.

And we care if they succeed.

Something really beautiful blooms in those gaps.

They’re also both genius-tier, once-in-a-generation titans of their particular genres and I’m sure that has something to do with this shared feeling too, but go with me, I’d doing a thing.

Once upon a time I took a high school theater class and I remember the teacher breaking the way you move your body on stage down into three categories: business, movement, and gesture.

Business was the actions the keep your character occupied, the tasks. Washing dishes is business. Dialing the phone is business.

Movement was the physical moving from one place to another, across a room, to a new place, etc.

Gesture was the little things that give your character personality. The way they fidget with their hair or greet someone with both hands.

Using that as a framework and applying it to the narrative at hand, The West Wing excels in all categories. The high-stakes political setting give the show its movement, its major actions, its broad strokes. The procedural aspect give the show it’s business, the tasks that keep its character frenetically occupied. And the office drama provides the gesture, what I like to call the texture of a story. These are the little things that make the characters their own. This is what it looks and feels like to exist in the world of The West Wing.

And without going too far down that rabbit hole at this moment, I think this might be a useful framework to examine other stories through too. After all, all functional stories have these things (though my guess is most don’t have three levels that echo three different genres and seamlessly blend them together.)

Traditionally narratives are talked about as existing on two major levels: plot and character; the what and the why. But I don’t know, I’m kinda liking this three-tier thing. At least with the TWW, I think it captures something about the show that would be missing otherwise.

Idk, it’s a texture thing.

Oh wait, I said I was going to talk about the way the show manages its world too. Damn. Okay, real quick:

Well, the shortest version is just me saying, “en media res + trusting your audience = *chefs kiss*” but the thing I actually want to articulate about The West Wing’s use of worldbuilding is this: they basically got to cheat.

They got to cheat at something that is very hard to accomplish is sci-fi and fantasy--that’s where worldbuilding is most often talked about as such, but all stories have it. The West Wing exists in unique situation where it occupies a rich and complex world of nuance and protocols and procedures and you the audience are already expected to know about them.

The American Presidency has a unique kind of modern mythology around it, one that an American audience—and probably a good chunk of an international one, let’s be honest (sorry about that)—knows through cultural osmosis even if they don’t follow politics and have dumped every moment of high school civics class from their memories.

The show gets to exploit that by trusting that you either know it already or you’ll figure it out. It doesn’t have to explain what a state dinner is, or what the State of the Union is and why it’s important. It doesn’t have to explain the White House or Air Force One or the Situation Room because you’ve heard of them already. Sure, if there’s something particularly technical that’s necessary to understand a plot point they’ll bury the exposition so they know everyone’s following, but for a lot of major elements of the show they get to skip that step.

This leads to an incredibly immersive experience that lives on the line between fiction and reality. Since you know all the elements at the core of this show are real, it lends TWW both a gravitas and a groundedness that are incredibly hard to come by, whether you’re building your world from scratch or not. I mean, name another real-world scenario that functions that way? One outside of law, medicine, and law enforcement, aka the holy trinity of procedural drama? Name a real-world world that you can be dropped into that convincingly with so little exposition.

Part of this is just exceptional storytelling on Sorkin’s part—technically you can do this in any story world but damn is it difficult—but there’s something unique about both the setting of The West Wing and the way it capitalizes on the audience’s guaranteed prior knowledge of that setting that really helps The West Wing sing. Plus it helps that both the writers and the audience can look up any part of this world they want to understand better. *Cries in fantasy writer*

So anyway, those are my thoughts on The West Wing.

Take them as you will.

#the west wing #essay #meta #i made a thing #and now I proofread it too ;P

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