#they were doing this even before dnf was mainstream

[transxfiles]

For the book ask, number 3, 13, and 24 ?

3. What were your top five books of the year?

it was a difficult time narrowing these down, but probably:

1) It Came From The Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror edited by Joe Vallese 2) Sir Gawain & The Green Knight translated by Burton Raffel 3) An Unauthorized Fan Treatise by Lauren James 4) The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle 5) Pinky & Pepper Forever by Eddy Atoms

margaret atwood's oryx and crake, tom stoppard's rosencrantz & guildenstern are dead, and sarah ruhl's the clean house are all runners-up. and there are lots more tbh,,, this was a good reading year for me!! (in terms of enjoyment at the very least)

13. What were your least favorite books of the year?

this one's also kind of hard to narrow down, because i disliked various books for various different reasons. the luminous dead by caitlin starling was a pretty low point because i spent YEARS tracking down a copy of this book, paid for it FULL PRICE, had heard so many good things about it - and then it was a massive let down. mid plot mid romance awful worldbuilding (in my opinion) and very poor storytelling/writing. like, from a craft standpoint, just not very good. it was a massive letdown and it's a situation where i can't believe i spent my own money on it, yknow?

a more recent let-down was crazy food truck by rokurou ogaki, i had some free time before exams one day so i just sat down in a corner of my local bookstore and started reading this one. i heard about it either at the very end of 2022 or the very beginning of this year and put in for an ARC on netgalley but didn't get it (probably for the better tbh?) and the one-sentence description sounds really fun - grizzled man runs a food truck in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. but the way the author portrayed his only female character was so awful i just couldn't do it.

there are definitely others, but these are the first two that come to mind.

24. Did you DNF anything? Why?

YES i used to be a completionist but 2023 was the year i started embracing the power of a good DNF. had to stop reading the troop by nick cutter bc even though it was really interesting horror from a conceptual standpoint, the graphic violence against animals and children was really starting to fuck me up, and i got to a certain point in the book where it was clear it would only get worse and i just had to put it down. thought i'd be able to get over it in a day or two (normally horror books just don't bother me?) but i didn't and i ended up selling the book to a local secondhand bookstore two days after that.

i also DNF'd something to talk about by meryl wilsner after trying to read it for like a year and a half. i picked it up a while ago at a thrift store and i was SO excited bc i never see lesbian romances at thrift stores and something to talk about specifically was a big deal bc it was the first lesbian romance novel published by a mainstream romance publisher iirc. but it's SO. SOOOOO. SOOOOOOOO fucking boring. it's not even a slow burn that shit is glacial and listen i don't mind a lesbian romance that moves at a snail's pace but the book WAS the romance. or at least was supposed to be. and the non-romance subplots simply were not strong enough to support the rest of the story. AND the two leads had negative chemistry, just like, nothing going on there in my opinion. and most of the characters had the same voice </3 so frustrating bc i wanted to enjoy this book so bad which is why i stuck with it for so long, but after a while i just said "nope i can't do this anymore" and donated it.

[dream-critical]

About the "Is rpf Dream's fault?" thing. He didn't invent it BUT. I was in fandoms centered around content creators (not characters played by ccs like how dsmp character fics and Hermitcraft character fics tend to be, but like the real irl guys how DNF is) as recently as 2019 and the idea of the ccs being shipped was like. The majority of the tag was anti-[ship name] posts. People were as a default ready to block the rpf posters. Bit characters who clearly WEREN'T the real guys were free game but the actual dudes were off limits and that seemed to be the general tone pre Dream repopularizing YouTuber RPF in the sort of? Fandom mainstream I guess? He didn't invent it but he sure as SHIT sets a precedent and the one he chose set us back literal years.

Even if HE is cool with it and GEORGE is cool with it, that doesn't mean every less popular cc or cc who gets big in the next few years will be or has to be yk? He sets the example for "what mcyters can get away with and what fans can do" and between this and the phone number thing from early 2021, he's setting a lot of people up for a lot of fucking problems, fans and creators alike.

The normalisation and spread of nsfw content and RPF within the dsmp fandom is wild especially since he knows the majority of his fans are minors.

Like fucking. 12 year olds essentially growing up in a fandom where sexualizing a cc is normal and even encouraged, where RPF is seen as ok, that shits gonna mess those kids up so bad.

And you can say dream didn't mean for it to happen but that still doesn't change the fact that he did cause it to happen and that he still actively encouraging and enables this behaviour. He doesn't condone this type of shit either.

Again it's not the first time something like this happens in fandoms but he sure as fuck is enabling it in a way no one else did before

[cupidlakes]

Thinking about it heatwaves could genuinely be a prophecy, thousands and hundreds of thousands of people have read it in light of wanting dream and george to establish whatever they have between them in the story and now we're seeing moments you'd see in the story or moments you'd probably read in fanfics unfold in irl.

So im essentially saying that we manifested this..whether we are aware of it or not.

heat waves popularised dnf to an insane degree and (imo) had a lot to do with it becoming more mainstream/acceptable to ship, although they've of course always given their explicit permission to! i don't think people understand how… hostile the environment was at one point? it would straight up only be talked abt in a joking manner and even then people got harassed for joking about it (regardless of if you were a shipper) artists also felt like they had to tack on that they lost a bet if they wanted to draw fanart etc. so yeah, i wouldn’t call it “manifested” but i personally think there actually is a lot to be said abt the existence of the fic normalising a lot of behaviour from within the fandom and in turn also emboldening the subjects in question, even potentially opening their eyes in a few ways due to the fact that they’re /hyperaware/ of the existence of the ship and their actions in a way they’ve never had to deal with before but those are thoughts for another day !

[bionicallywriting]

The Three Phases of Dramione

When I read these works, I feel like the fanon itself is evolving. The very early works, in the 2006-2011 range were mostly comprised of very young writers. As someone noted, there was a dearth of material after Goblet of Fire, which spawned fanfic like crazy. Most were unfinished.

The ones that were finished seemed to be mostly comprised of angst and most depicted a vulnerable, weak Hermione set against a ruthless, even cruel Draco. Most speculated about the coming war, so were endlessly tragic. A classic example is The Fallout, which, though well-written, could have done with some major editing to cut out perhaps five hundred pages of the everyday descriptions that failed to add to the plot. Hermione, in this version, is cut out from the Golden Trio to fight and she fails miserably at this. Even though this technically has a “happy ending,” it feels like ash because it. Is. So. Tragic.*

*Don't get me wrong. This writer is very talented, but this work was needlessly verbose. I say this from the standpoint of someone who regularly DNFs books, so the fact that I even skipped to the end to find out what happened already means something.

The second period is 2011-2016, give or take a year or two. This is the period after all the canon came out and happy endings started to fill the fandom. Draco saw a revival of his snarkiness. Hermione often got one over on him. Draco is often depicted as having been in love with Hermione all along. The biggest indicator of this high point of fanon is the depiction of Ron Weasley in their relationship--he is almost always a cheater and seen as an emasculated and sore loser.

(Since fanfics take a few years to finish, when I note the years, this is supposed to be when the fic is started.) The most classic example is one that falls before this time period, but the writing style most depicts this period--the Politician's Wife. Now, this work is really ahead of its time, because it was written in 2006, before the series ended, but the author guessed correctly on a majority of points--so close to the actual ending that you really have to give her major kudos. Key points of this fic that reflect the period--first person narrative, written by an author who's clearly older, plot takes place post-Hogwarts, Ron is a cheater, snarky Draco + humorous tone, and very realistic depictions of relationships, although this one does slightly reside on the greyish morality boundary. Whereas the Draco of the earliest period would have cheated on Hermione purposefully just because he could, in this one, he's slightly more vulnerable.

This period makes me sad because when I go back to see the roster of authors, so many are gone from the fandom. They graduated college or graduate school and started working and moved on. You know these writers as well as I do: worksofstone, riptey, drcjsnider, to name but a few. If they haven't left, they've joined a few fests and lurk a bit but are no longer working on long fics. Very sad.

Alright. The third period. The current period of 2017+. How exciting. The biggest, biggest trend I see for this period is the gradual demonization of Dumbledore (or has this been happening for a while?) and the backlash of the emasculated Ron. In recent years, Ron has regained some much needed favor and is no longer Wizarding Britain's most hated individual.

I don't know if it seems that the smut has been increasingly on the rise as well. Where some earlier works could gain favor just by being finished or by being there, now there's an increasing demand for smut-based Dramione. Now, I don't think I'm a prude, but just as someone who's been reading romance novels since the second grade (yeah I was wandering in the wrong section at the library), I've just read too much literary porn to be invested in just another sex scene. I think porn scenes are less well-written than when they first came into popularity in the mainstream fiction world (circa 80s) when they were then still seen as very, very risque. Because they were seen that way, the sex scenes of books of that era seem to be better than any of the ones now, and I mean just in published books. I read a Harlequin Presents book the other day by a writer who's been going at it for maybe thirty years now, and her recent stuff is filled to the brim with really unnecessary pwp. In fact, in an unprecedented move, a Harlequin Presents romance was split into two books, where one would have sufficed, since the second book was only 150 pages (most HPs clock in at 195) and had three bedroom scenes, each of which lasted some fifteen pages. Basically, the two books could have been condensed into one by cutting out completely unmemorable sex scenes.

I guess what I'm saying is just that the porn content seems to be on the rise. That or, over time, the ones containing smut garnered more readership than those without, so by comparison, it seems as if those rated M+ are more popular. The term lemon has even been replaced with smut, just because, I guess. If you like that sort of thing, it's cool. I mean, it's at least a bit educational, isn't it? I mean, that's really how you went about learning of such things before there was internet.

Only, just as a long-time reader, I can maybe detail like three scenes I've remembered in the course of my entire life of reading romance just because the dynamics and character development leading up to the first scene was so well done, either between the two people or the tension between them. What I mean is, sure, there are readers combing content for smut. But can you honestly tell me that every single smut scene you've read have been essential for the characters? Have they been so meaningful that you remember that scene as essential to their development?

That, to me, is what defines a good sex scene. Not just the requisite action movie bedroom kiss/take off shirt in the dark scene that's so generic that I can't help but roll my eyes EVERY time I see it.

I would probably say this to directors as well as writers: make your sex scenes count. If done well, even a handshake can feel just as earthshattering. I think you all know what I mean.

[eviedrae]

Sensitivity Readers: Why You Should Never Skip This Step

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again… if I can’t give a book a good review, I’d prefer not to give it one at all. As a writer, I’m fully aware that not everything is for everyone, and tearing down my fellow authors is the exact opposite direction I want to go with my life. My reviews are there to tell people all about the awesome books I’ve read that I can genuinely recommend… not to gripe and moan about things that didn’t float my personal boat.

 However, sometimes there are reasons beyond individual taste that make me add books to my Did Not Finish (DNF) pile. Things that fall into the offensive, hateful, or morally corrupt department. Things like…

 Unnecessary bigotry, racism, or sexism

Especially when it's performed by a main character and/or it's present without a driving plot-based purpose. Unfortunately, these things are part of our modern society, so leaving them completely out of your book would only serve to create an unrealistic rendering of the world we live within. But having these present, as a conflict point or obstacle your character(s) must overcome, is an entirely different beast than having them there for no other reason than to spew hate.

 And, please… for the love of all things good, don’t have your main characters—people we, as readers, are supposed to root for and love—be cruel and bigoted unless you intend it to be part of a redemption arc.

 Murder, rape, or incest performed by a lead in a romance novel

I know anti-heroes are a thing, and I adore Dexter, but I don’t want that in my romance. It’s really hard to root for a love interest when they’re a murderer or rapist, whether it be in their past, present, or future. Yes, there are certain circumstances that can be forgiven or overlooked (i.e. a cop who kills in the line of duty) but these are always forgivable because they don’t truly fall into any of these categories.

 Incest is a thing all its own. I’m aware there is a subset of readers out there who find this to be a fetish of sorts, and kudos to them… but it ain’t my kink, and I highly advise anyone looking to make their book mainstream in any way, shape, or form to avoid this. And, no, I’m not referring to step-kink (that’s a bit more socially and morally acceptable, so a tad safer). I mean the real deal: blood on blood. No thanks.

 Unresearched, harmful portrayals of lifestyles and communities

This falls back a bit on the idea of racism, bigotry, and even sexism, but it goes a bit deeper. Far too many people blindly write about things they know nothing about and wind up grossly misrepresenting the subject. To the point, in many cases, of causing very real harm.

 No, I’m not talking about delving into the world of, say, dental hygienists. I’m talking about communities—especially those already marginalized and misunderstood—where an inaccurate depiction can further support terrible prejudices and stereotypes… and can even create new ones.

  When I find things like this in a book, there’s a very good (okay, pretty much 100%) chance I’m going to stop reading. Yes, I’m only one reader, and not everyone is offended by the same things… but the fact of the matter is, if you aren’t writing #ownvoices but there is diversity in your story or characters, you need to approach the subject with knowledge, compassion, and careful thought.

 I’ve already touted the importance of beta readers—and I truly hope each and every one of you utilize these invaluable resources—but the purpose of this blog is to discuss a very specific beta reader niche: sensitivity readers.

 What is a sensitivity reader, you ask? Quite simple. They’re a beta reader who belongs to the community or lifestyle you’ve chosen to write about that falls outside your #ownvoices sphere of expertise. Sometimes they treat the read as a true beta and provide general and sensitivity feedback, but often they're simply a reader who can provide honest, reliable criticism and advice on the topics and subjects close to their heart.

 I believe this is an imperative step that should never be skipped. I applaud every single author who chooses to tackle diverse subject matter and characters. However, I’ve seen so many painful examples of writers setting out to support diversity and winding up with a product that only serves to hurt rather than bolster these ideals.

 Looking at my list of things guaranteeing a DNF on my end, it’s clear not all specifically require a sensitivity reader to avoid. (Like, okay, your characters either rape, murder, and boink their relatives or they don’t, am I right?) But the rest of my complaints could be mostly avoided with a sensitivity read and a mind open to change.

  For example, if you’re a Caucasian, as I am, who includes characters of other races within your story, get a reader who identifies as the same race as your character(s). Give them carte blanche to be one hundred percent honest with you about how that character is portrayed. Are you inadvertently describing their skin tone in an offensive manner? Do you skip or include cultural practices that are important or stereotypical in nature, respectively? Do your characters interact in appropriate ways that don’t encourage prejudice or inequality? Are you using insulting terminology or depicting the character in an unnecessarily racially charged fashion?

 These readers are a vital part of the pre-pub process. The knowledge they can provide to assist you, as a writer, in depicting other cultures and communities both accurately and appropriately is invaluable. I’ve read so many books where it’s clear they were sent to press without taking this step, and the book as a whole suffered. So, unfortunately, did the community it misrepresented.

 One final thing I’d like to point out is all communities and lifestyles falling outside a writer’s realm of personal experience and complete understanding should be given this same courtesy. Again, I’m not saying you must have a dental hygienist read your book if you’ve decided to give your MC that career path and it’s one you’ve had no experience with… but what I am saying is, use your head (and your heart). Is there a chance something you’ve written might not be one hundred percent accurate because you’ve based it off research rather than experience? Could the people within that world be judged based off your inaccuracies?

 If so, get a sensitivity reader. Find someone who can speak from genuine experience. Someone who can guide you down the right path. One who will strengthen your story because it'll be based on truth rather than poorly researched lies.

  An area I’ve found where this is often overlooked is the BDSM community. More and more, stories about consensual domination and submission are finding their way into mainstream media as it grows in prominence and popularity. However, far too many of these stories are being written by people not actively in the lifestyle. Authors who simply get off on the idea of BDSM, but who've never truly experienced it, are writing tales filled with gross misrepresentations that shed an unflattering light on the community and support harmful stereotypes.

 So, in the end, I hope this blog helps you, as a writer, to think a little more critically about the story you’re writing. I'm in no way trying to discourage anyone from writing about things and people outside their realm of experience—exactly opposite, actually. I simply want you to do your research and depict them as accurately as possible. And that includes having someone within that group critique your portrayal to be sure it is as honest and true as possible.

 Until next time,

E 💕