Sidetracks - December 3, 2015

[helloladies]

Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag.

Clare

➝ TGIF/F is a new multifandom femslash convention that will be holding its first con this Febuary in Los Angeles! This sounds amazing.

➝ I can't stop listening to David O’Doherty’s "Text Song." I think it’s the bit that goes "felt simultaneously more alive and yet more dead than I’d ever felt before."

➝ Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are hosting the Christmas episode of Saturday Night Live! May feminist shenanigans reign.

➝ How To Be Single is billed as a romantic comedy, but it kind of just looks like a delightfully rude and rowdy comedy featuring two ladies—Dakota Johnson adorably befuddled at single life and Rebel Wilson as her Bad Idea Friend. They look like they’re having so much fun and their friend chemistry is amazing! I hope this bodes well for Johnson’s career: she seems very funny in this.

➝ Now that the EU is non-canonical, here’s our first look at Leia wielding a lightsaber. So very great, although I feel like Han is going to slice off something wielding one of his own. Don’t you need to be Force sensitive to use a lightsaber, so you don’t do that?

➝ Oh no, there are retro Star Wars: The Force Awakens posters, so I’ll have to buy all of them. Sigh.

Renay

➝ Dreamwidth is doing its regular Holiday Bonus Points event!

➝ If you're into the Hugo Awards, some friends and I have been compiling things we like all year. The spreadsheet just went live to public edits, so anyone can add things now. There's also a wiki project by didic doing the same thing in a different format, so if spreadsheets are too overwhelming, the wiki is available. :D There's so much awesome stuff, so even if petulant people decide to attempt last year's nonsense, the recs season itself is shaping up to be super rad. :D

The area I really fell down in this year is fanartist. If you know any great fanartists who did excellent work in 2015, please add them! ♥

➝ Super: The Gayest 'Stucky' Moments in the 'Captain America: Civil War' Trailer. Perfect.

➝ "Jessica Jones": Marvel's newest show makes surviving trauma a superpower is one of my favorite reviews of the show. I'm so happy to see critics watching this show and taking it seriously. Instead of going "oh, it failed here, here, and here, it's not worth it, pass." I'm seeing critics noting the flaws they found but still discussing the other work the narrative is doing, really considering the issues the show is raising, and it's amazing. This is a show about women and women's experiences and people are taking it seriously both as entertainment and cultural critique. Whether people like the show or not (and it's okay to not like it), this is a notable thing that's happening. So happy. ;__;

Book Acquisitions

Added TBR: Once Broken Faith by October Daye, The Only Ones by Carola Dibbell, Wildflower by Drew Barrymore, Venus of Dreams by Pamela Sargent, Wake of Vultures by Lila Bowen

Susan

➝ To Trip the Space Fantastic: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Unrealistic Science Fiction — Catherynne M. Valente talks about writing about the pressure to write hard SF.

Science fiction gets a larger share of literary respect than fantasy because of its utility—it isn’t about the real, honest world now, but it is about the real honest world as it might be soon, and therefore the kinds of people who are very concerned with policing the imagination will, grudgingly, allow science fiction a seat at the literary table with the big kids (albeit one with a missing leg and gum stuck underneath). The more grounded in reality, the better. What could be the utility of going backward, into that pulp paradise, to find my Venus among the many that were once thought possible?

(Part of me thinks that this is a good companion read for Renay's Weight of History post from earlier in the year. Both of them talk about pressures to enjoy certain types of scifi, especially if you want to be taken seriously, and as someone who struggles with classic scifi and doesn't care about the explanations that come with hard scifi, these speak to me.)

➝ Once upon a time, I was shelving children's books at work, and found a The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit and Other Stories, a collection of children's stories by Sylvia Plath, on my shelving trolley. What I wish everyone knew about Sylvia Plath gives me that same sense of shock as when I found that book. What I knew about Sylvia Plath was that she wrote The Bell Jar and she died, because that was the only narrative I ever heard, and this post does a pretty good job of saying "No, that is wrong and unfair." (Does anyone else hear the echo of Joanna Russ? She wrote it, but...)

➝ Trash Ships: A Lament for Every Unconfirmed Queer Character gets me right where I live, especially as I've come to realise that I'm so used to the game of capture-the-flag hints that the author mentions that I no longer trust actual representation to be anything other than me reading too much into it. Analysis of queer-baiting in video games as a marketing tool, yay!