Sidetracks: November 20, 2013
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ladybusinessSidetracks 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.
➝ If You Can’t Say Anything Nice, Come Sit By Me by Olivia Waite:
But I’m not part of your sisterhood. I’m going to be over here, reading those snarky tweets and gleefully agreeing with them. Not because I’m jealous of success and need to see big names cast down — but rather because I don’t believe negative reactions automatically have negative effects. Because I believe the culture of positivity is often suffocating and silencing, and I have been silent longer than I’d like.
➝ Ender's Game has come and gone, and there were a lot of interesting perspectives/stories I liked about the event and OSC's position to a lot of people who used to be fans, and the future of any sequels:
- Me, Authorship, and ENDER'S GAME
- Random Tuesday: Vaguely Thinky Thoughts About Ender's Game Movie Sequels
- Orson Scott Card: Mentor, Friend, Bigot
➝ SFF in Conversation: Rachel Bach on Upsetting the Default
This assumption that male is the default bugs me to no end both as a woman and an author, because when one type of protagonist is seen as “normal,” even implicitly, everything different becomes abnormal by comparison. Suddenly, my book–which is chock full of spaceships and aliens and badasses having mortal combat in sleek suits of powered armor for End of the Universe stakes–isn’t Science Fiction, it’s Women’s Science Fiction.
➝ [Rant] In Defense of Bad Writing by
thefourthvineCrap is a sign of life. New bad stories are a sign that this genre — fan fiction, the genre I adore the most - is alive and well. Bad stories mean new people are trying to write in it, and people are trying to do new things with it, and maybe new people are joining the audience, too. When only the best and most popular are writing in a genre, it's on its deathbed. (See: Westerns and Louis L'Amour.) I want this genre to be here forever, because I want to read it forever. So I'm happy that teenagers are posting Mary Sue stories to the Archive of Our Own.
➝ I have no clue if the writing order of her books that N.K. Jemisin discusses impacted my reading of The Killing Moon after my failed attempt to read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but it's an interesting question. Because even though I still had to work hard and take pages and pages of notes for The Killing Moon, I didn't find it as inaccessible as I did The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which felt way more like advanced fantasy to me. I haven't read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms yet (still pretty intimidated after bouncing out), but now I'm going to pay more attention when I try again.
➝ Liz invited me to do a roundtable discussion of her Sleeps With Monsters column, Sleeps With Monsters: Reading, Writing, Radicalisation, along with Stefan (who I picked on earlier this year, proof that I can make friends with people I initially disagree with as long as I put away the rocket launcher!). It's live at Sleeps With Monsters: Thinking About Reading and Radicalisation. I forgot what I had said originally, and it's funny now to read myself using the word "dominate" in relation to YA when that term only really applies within the community itself. Outside the community, it's something altogether different.
My job has eaten me alive and so I have read practically nothing in the last month unless it was reblogged on Tumblr. If you have links you think I'd be interested in please drop recs in the comments :)
➝ One thing I have read, is cleolinda's re-cap of the first "Dracula" episode. I feel like I have been waiting for this forever.
➝ cleolinda's re-cap alerted me to the Lucy Westenra Tumblr. It's largely filled with pictures of Katie McGrath in stunning costumes and gifs that ship Mina/Lucy to high heaven. Two episodes in and the show already has a gay character (Dracula's reaction to discovering this cements him as a liberal villain in my mind) and all the gifs for episode three (yet to air in the UK) give me the feeling Lucy may be the show's first canon bi-sexual character. Please, please don't kill Lucy show.
➝ I feel like "The Importance of Magical Girls" ties in with a lot of things I've been talking about with Clare re:witches and stepmothers.
➝ Lady Business got a Pintrest account about five years after Pintrest became hip. We are down.
Right now we just have the one board, and it contains supplementary materials related to Kameron Hurley's essay "We Have Always Fought". We have big plans for it though (I really want to start a board related to "Ladies, You Are Awesome (Just Admit It, Quit Fronting"). Hope you'll follow along.
➝ Foz Meadows breaks down some places where Joss Whedon jumped the shark in a recent speech. I kind of thought this was obvious but as it turns out it's not — men, if you ever tell women what to call their movement for gender equality you're being a huge, huge jerk. Foz also talks briefly about how the term womanism emerged due to faults within feminism, and shows how smart commentary about feminism's problems can be put out there.
➝ Reading the End has a review of "Saga". "Wow, yes "Saga" sounds interesting, I must definitely get that," I thought for the fiftieth time, only to remember (for the fiftieth time) a little later that I bought the damn thing ages ago! I am so terrible at keeping track of digital acquisitions.
➝ A very smart rabbit reminds us that if you can't go round it and you can't go under it you're gonna have to go through it. Let's bear that incredibly sage rabbit advice in mind for the week ahead - sometimes things just need barrelling through.
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Date: 2013-11-20 12:07 pm (UTC)I looooved that piece about Joss Whedon, and I couldn't agree with it more. What she says about the "Ethiop" moment in Much Ado about Nothing is particularly good: When it got to that point in the movie, I remember being surprised to see a black person in the audience (because Joss Whedon is so terrible around race), and then the Ethiop line happened and I thought, Oh. That's why. It made me angry. I wish Joss Whedon, ugh I so much wish that Joss Whedon would see how awful he is around race and do something about it.
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Date: 2013-11-23 05:54 am (UTC)"The Importance of Magical Girls" is… gah, what a fantastic essay. It also ties into my entire femme philosophy. Perhaps those late nineties Sailor Moon airings influenced me more than I thought…
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