Thorns

Bullying & Goodreads I found this interesting because it's such a blatant example of people using "bullying" (aka criticism) as an excuse to be actual bullies.

On being considered a Fake Geek Girl I like this in particular (as opposed to various other similar essays by geekier women, which make different but equally valid points) because she really ISN'T a "real" geek by some definitions, but that doesn't mean she's fake. She's just who she is, with the interests she has (which are kind of geeky and kind of not), and she can't help it if people insist on a false Geek/Mundane dichotomy and then complain when she doesn't fit.

In general I've been thinking about "real fans". And as much as part of me kicks and screams that they are Not Real Fans and Don't Love Canon Like It Deserves, I think I have to accept that people who are only into (a)Jane Austen through the adaptations or (b)That Popular Thing I Love (Homestuck, for example) for the generic slash are totally justified in their tastes. Especially since there are plenty of books I'm only into from the adaptations, and canons where I vastly prefer the OOC schmoopy fanfic (sometimes even the juggernaut slash pairing! I find fanon John/Rodney way more entertaining than Stargate Atlantis the actual show, for example. YES, I KNOW, I AM PART OF THE PROBLEM) How the different forms of fannishness can coexist without stomping all over each other quite so much I am less sure.

The golden age Interesting take on how to head towards a truly equal society. I think that even if we ignore global warming and other similar practical hurdles, it glosses over how and why public attitudes have changed worldwide, it's not ALL The Capitalist Conspiracy brainwashing us with Fox News etc, and also seems focused on the abstract instead of looking at various approaches to social democracy worldwide (OUTSIDE EUROPE/THE US EVEN OMG). He does update with, for example, an acknowledgement that childcare is work too, but I think a more thorough analysis of disability theory etc would greatly benefit the analysis. One thing I've heard is that a more heterogeneous society erodes public support for egalitarianism, because people think "I'm ok supporting people like me, but not people like them" Not sure how to combat that, beyond trying to fight racism etc (which are obviously good goals regardless :)) Still, becoming disabled has really made me notice and question the emphasis on "being productive".

or "One reason my Pride and Prejudice femslash fizzled out". This is for The 3rd Annual Femslash Mini Meta Fest in response to the prompt "What's your approach to writing femslash in times and places that are notoriously unfriendly for f/f relationships, especially historical settings?"
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No Disability at the Final Frontier: Science Fiction, Cures, and Eliminationism reminds me that I've been meaning to make a post about disability in "perfect" disability-free societies for a while, waiting until I can write the Perfect Post, but I think it's time to admit that's not going to happen and just ramble for a while, with the option to return to the topic later it later.

I'm not really addressing s.e.smith's point but riffing off a different aspect of the same broader topic of depictions of disability in scifi. I also covered some of this in Disability in Speculative Fiction: Monsters, mutants and muggles.
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Jon Stewart and the Burden of History A flawed but still interesting critique of John Stewart. This came up on my dash shortly after a discussion of how not-that-feminist Jane Austen was, and I think in both cases there's that ambiguity between satire for it's own sake and political statement. Critiquing hypocrisy and ridiculousness does not always extend to critiquing the system that allows such hypocrisy and ridiculousness to flourish, or those who are sensible and honest but harmful.

Mass Effect: Conviction Comic about the new crew member James Vega. And oh look, after the recent DLC where you had no choice but to destroy a planet of unfriendly aliens(*) we have yet another scene of a privileged guy berating thuggish aliens for being so belligerent about his complicity in the mass murder of their people. YAY.

A nice collection of links about this #yesgayya thing.

Also, I have no link to hand, but Australia now allows for a third gender on passports, and has removed the surgery requirement for trans people, huzzah!

(*)Making this the fourth time the player has to decide if (or in what way) they want to be complicit in genocide/mass murder. I would like a new moral dilemma please.

So, the politics of fanworks panel at Swancon got me thinking. I left a comment on cupidsbow's post on the subject with some further thoughts, and one of the things I noticed while writing that comment is that despite most of my fanworks being fanart I was having real trouble thinking of transformative fanart with an overt political message that weren't race/gender/etc swaps. (Not that's anything wrong with such swaps, but surely there had to be more variety I was missing)
( And then I thought about it some more… )

I've often linked to stuff where people in fandoms I'm in have made me really annoyed by being thoughtlessly racist/sexist/ablist etc. Thus I feel it's only fair to acknowledge having the opposite experience: I've been reading a lot of meta about the character Fenris from Dragon Age 2 and other fans have been consistently better at noticing and articulating problematic stuff in the text etc than I have. (I mean, not all the other fans. But often at least one or two per conversation)

No spoilers in this post, and I've tried to explain the context.
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I just read this post: Oops, she's dead". Once more with no feeling:

I'm fed up with stories (and Buffy S8 isn't the worst example of it out there, I can also point to Torchwood, many superhero comics, and, quite overwhelmingly, Heroes) with central characters who treat protecting other people's lives as self-expression, who make no attempt to practice and improve their skills or to truly form a team that works like a well-oiled system, who demand that they be given the respect due to those who protect society but who fuck up and fuck up and have hecatombs happen on their watch and then expect us to sympathise with them afterwards because it was just so horrible for them, even tough they're usually still alive and walking at the end of it, unlike hundreds of others who weren't in the opening credits.

...and was reminded that I had a locked brainstormy post about class in speculative fiction I never got around to tidying up. Thus, a summary of the main ideas and some links since I have a follow on post I'd like to make (eventually)
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So, last week I played Mass Effect and loved it, modulo a few niggles (see these posts). I've been playing Mass Effect 2, and while in a lot of ways it's a better game it's gone for Darker and Edgier and has taken some of the problematic aspects of the old game and crossed the line into creepy badness. I'm still definitely going to finish it, but there's that element of "Why can't I quit you/how long until you upset me again" fear that is, for example, familiar to many fans of Supernatural.

Warning: contains sexual assault triggers (though very vague ones) and also spoilers (though the first section isn't spoilery, and the spoilery section is marked)

EDIT: I played it some more and the next few hours of gameplay were pretty much solid awesome. Stupid Bioware.
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Watching On the Prowl and reading the comments got me thinking about how vidding fandom (which is mostly female) portrays violence against women. Because while I agree with the people saying that the vid would be much more disturbing if it was all female characters, I do also like a lot of vids with violence against women in them.

So I went through my vids (mostly live action, with a few AMVs) and looked at those that featured significant violence against women, and I ended up with a couple of different categories for the ways it's portrayed. This is only a cross section of the vids I have seen and liked, and may not be representative (especially of people who don't like femslash), if your experience or opinion is different I'd be curious to hear about it.
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First: I finished the Dragon Age story I asked people about (in a locked post), here it is at AO3 and at Fanfic.net for anyone who doesn't read alias_sqbr and is curious to see how it ends. Further criticism entirely welcome. I don't know that I'm up to editing the story any further but if necessary can add a note or something.

Anyway: While I can intellectually understand the appeal of modern AUs of non-modern stories they tend to leave me a bit cold(*), but I have encountered quite a few Avatar ones here and there on my travels and found some enjoyable enough.

The thing that bugs me, though, and I was wondering if anyone who seeks the genre out knows of any counterexamples, is that they all seem to be set in the modern U.S.

Specifically, none are set in Asia, nor do they have Asian protagonists. Apart from the issues of race and representation etc I just think this is a missed opportunity for potentially interesting stories. That and I find myself wanting to write an AU where they're all Asian Australians or something (and then I remember I suck at AUs) I've often had the idea for drawing them as modern day teenagers from the respective cultures that served as inspiration for the different nations or the adventures of Mai, Tai Lee and Azula as Shoujo schoolgirls but I don't feel up to getting it right. Still. I realise the show itself is from the US, but that just goes to show that writing beyond what you know can be done.

EDIT: I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with any given individual modern U.S. AU. But it just seems a pity that that's all anyone ever seems to write/draw. And for example I get the impression that a moderate number of Merlin AUs (not the ones where they're actually the same characters in the future) written by US writers are set in England because they see the characters as Inherently British. Or maybe there's just more British fans of Merlin than Avatar, idk.

Since I tend to skim over them vaguely I'm not sure if the characters are always white (apart from maybe Sokka and Katara). Zuko does get to keep his scar most of the time at least.

It bugs me a little with Dragon Age as well, but it's not like a modern British AU would be all that different to a modern US one, and it's not subject to the same subtext of cultural and ethnic erasure. And I do understand the "write what you know" thing: when I did my own Dragon Age modern AU I imagined them as Australians just because why not. Maybe I just need to get into more culturally diverse fandoms...

(*)Unless they're movies, for some reason.