Sidetracks - January 13, 2014

[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.

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Hey, so I spent the last few weeks collecting links. If I added commentary to all of them we'd be here until March, and I've got Destroyer of Genre meetings to attend, Hugo Award nomination orders recommendations to give, 6,000 episodes of fall TV to catch up on, and a Supernatural rewatch to survive: I'm swamped. Anyway, everyone loves a good list!

• Hugo Eligible Art(ists)
• Silent Technical Privilege
• Compulsory Monogamy In The Hunger Games
• Big Huge List of Some Amazing Women Artists!
• I'm Bisexual, But Sometimes I Don't Even Believe In Me
• The imagined life of Joan Green
• Hunger Games and the Limits of White Imagination
• hey, anyone noticed that television is kind of weird about gay men? (spoilers for Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries, and Scandal)
• The Ethics of Mob Justice
• I'm Not Okay With Lily Allen's Racist New Video: When Satire Crosses The Line
• The Hunger Games: Catching Fire: What Marvel, DC and Hollywood Can Learn

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Totally borrowing Renay's strategy for this week — tl;dr commentary will resume next time:

• Battle of the Sexists (aka Let The Self-Promotion Roll, Ladies)
• On cynicism, calling out, and creating movements that don’t leave our people behind
• Laurie Penny: The 20 best online pieces of 2013
• Not Here to Make Friends: On the importance of unlikable female protagonists
• Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn's Women, and Alison Hendrix
• Locked Twitter accounts – what’s the problem?

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➝ Your yearly reminder that Boris Johnson, the current Mayor of London, is not the cuddly teddy bear of the people he is sometimes painted as.

➝ Amy linked to "Writing for Girls", a fantastic post by Courtney Summers. I have got to get on her books (she says for the second year running).

➝ This commentary about lesbian and gay stories was reblogged by cleolinda (I think it's a comment that was left on one of her "Dracula" re-caps): 'the girls are never supposed to end up together'. It's posts like this that make me want to believe in my fiction writing abilities again because the stories it's talking about, the missing ones, are the kind of stories I would love to tell. And they're the kind of stories I'd love to read more of - as always the comments are open for recommendations.

➝ Litlove talks about the problems of publishing in "Publishing, A Writer's Biggest Headache". She puts a perfectly beautiful paragraph about literary criticism out into the world and I just have to share it:

'So why did I take it upon myself to add to the trillions of words? It clearly wasn’t for fame or fortune. I didn’t do it ‘for myself’, whatever that really means. When the boxes of advance copies arrived I felt pleased for about two minutes, and then I found the immediate issues of the day more pressing. No, I did it because it was, for me, the root of my work as a literary critic. Everything grew out of that quiet moment when I thought about a book and shaped those thoughts into words. That was the beating heart of my discipline. How could I teach students about essay writing if I weren’t engaged with that process myself? How could I put good lectures together unless I had thought long and hard about the books I was discussing? I had to write about the book to get to the bottom of my reaction to it. And once I had written down to my satisfaction an interpretation of a book, I wanted to share it with my community, to contribute to the ongoing discussion and because (rightly or wrongly) I felt I had something to say.'

➝ I had some things to say about parts of "Thor: The Dark World" that I wasn't especially keen on. There are definitely spoilers over there.

➝ Oh, did this part of the film ever get me right in the feels though.

➝ When did I become the kind of person who would link torturous Hannibal/Eurythmics gifs? I should probably take myself aside and have a quiet word. "You haven't even finished the first series self. You're clearly not even that into it." (Trust me I am deep into it).

➝ Ending with this Dr Who portrait, because Tennant is my Dr if I really have to choose, but Eccleston's Dr was a special, brief burning flame.

Comments

[theliteraryomnivore.wordpress.com]

Jodie, "the girls are never supposed to get together" is so heartbreaking and so true. And ugh, Loki and Freya feels. That film introduced such an interesting angle on their relationship, with her as his magical mentor. It's very unfortunate that she's gone, but this is always going to be such a huge source of pain for Loki, that his daddy issues ended up hurting her and he never had an opportunity to make it better. What I would give for flashbacks about this!

(I also want the Enchantress to show up and punch Loki squarely in this emotional bruise, but that's less because of this specific incident and more because I want the Enchantress to show up and punch Loki squarely in any emotional bruise she can find.)

[theliteraryomnivore.wordpress.com]

And I can't edit my comment, but Freya is meant to read Frigga, because that's actually her name. I can't believe I did that!

[bookgazing]

So many feels. Have you seen the gender swapped cartoon where Loki is a girl and she is his mentor? Bash in the heart.

And that article - I find it impossible to unsee how often this is true in narrative. So many stories where people are cheering about there being women in love are structured this way. I think my new chant that's going to sit alongside "All the Stories" in 2014 is "It's not nothing, but it's not everything.".

[theliteraryomnivore.wordpress.com]

WHAT? Do you have a link? I would love to see that!

"All the stories" is now on my list of things to embroider onto throw pillows for the Floating Domicile.