Critical Thoughts - Tumblr Posts
I've said this before and I'll say it again: it's more important to know and understand fully why something is harmful than it is to drop everything deemed problematic. It's performative and does nothing. People wonder why nobody has critical thinking skills and this is part of it because no one knows how to simousltansly critique and consume media. You need to use discernment.
You know, “canon is fake” and “reducing every vaguely sympathetic character in every piece of media to one of the same three generic archetypes for ease of shipping is a poor foundation for critical engagement” can both be true at the same time.
One depressing consequence of everything being owned by the Disney Corporation is that it seems to have convinced a great many people that the Disney formula is how stories are *supposed* to be structured; and so you have people complaining when the morality is anything other than a simplistic good/evil duality, when the villains are sympathetic, when the heroes are unsympathetic, when the themes are not spoonfed to them from a pre-approved list that will not alienate mainstream commercial audiences, when defeats are anything other than temporary setbacks for the heros, or when endings are anything other than happy.
yall will be like “there are no good models for healthy, nurturing cishet relationships 😔” and only consume trashy YA fiction and mainstream white tv shows
points to a sign that says “sometimes two people from the same marginalized community will want/need two very different things from their representation in fiction and they should both be allowed to find and make that representation to suit their own needs and neither should be criticized for not making the representation that the other wants”
y’all really recommend books like: title, there are gay characters, enemies to lovers, young adult, written by poc
not once do i ever see a summary
Actors of color often get typecast. Two photographers asked them to depict their dream roles instead.
How Hollywood Sees Me … And How I Want to Be Seen
Fantasy books written by women are often assumed to be young adult, even when those books are written for adults, marketed to adults, and published by adult SFF imprints. And this happens even more frequently to women of color.
This topic’s an ongoing conversation on book Twitter, and I thought it might be worth sharing with Tumblr. And by “ongoing,” I mean that people have been talking about this for years. Last year, there was a big blow up when the author R.F. Kuang said publicly that her book The Poppy War isn’t young adult and that she wished people would stop calling it such. If you’ve read The Poppy War, then you’ll know it’s grimdark fantasy along lines of Game of Thrones… and yet people constantly refer to The Poppy War as young adult – which is one of its popular shelves on Goodreads. To be fair, more people have shelved it as “adult,” but why is anyone shelving it as “young adult” in the first place? Game of Thrones is not at all treated this way…
Rebecca Roanhorse’s book Trail of Lightning, an urban fantasy with a Dinétah (Navajo) protagonist has “young adult” as its fifth most popular Goodreads shelf. The novel is adult and published by Saga, an adult SFF imprint.
S.A. Chakraborty’s adult fantasy novel City of Brass has “young adult” as its fourth most popular Goodreads shelf.
Tasha Suri’s Empire of Sand, an adult fantasy in a world based on Mughal India, has about equal numbers of people shelving it as “adult” or “young adult.”
Book Riot wrote an article on this, although they didn’t address how the problem intersects with race. I also did a Twitter thread a while back where I cited these examples and some more as well.
The topic of diversity in adult SFF is important to me, partly because we need to stop mislabeling the women of color who write it, and also because there’s a lot there that isn’t acknowledged! Besides, sometimes it’s good to see that your stories don’t just end the moment you leave high school and that adults can still have vibrant and interesting futures worth reading about. I feel like this is especially important with queer rep, for a number of reasons.
Other books and authors in the tweets I screenshot include:
Witchmark by C.L. Polk
A Ruin of Shadows by L.D. Lewis
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
The Day Before by Liana Brooks
A Phoenix First Must Burn edited by Patrice Caldwell
Shri, a book blogger at Sun and Chai
Vanessa, a writer and blogger at The Wolf and Books
TLDR: Women who write adult fantasy, especially women of color, are presumed to be writing young adult, which is problematic in that it internalizes diversity, dismisses the need and presence of diversity in adult fantasy, and plays into sexist assumptions of women writers.
i do not know how to explain to people that documentary filmmaking does not like automatically equate to unvarnished truth
You can always tell when a gay character was written by a gay person because the stereotypes used are the accurate ones
maybe instead of making another post about hugo or tolstoy or whoever who went off on “unrelated tangents” in their books instead of focusing only on charaters and plot development… why dont we take a step back? maybe dont believe the book editors on twitter who are trying to persuade you that books need to start a certain way (in medias res -_-), that you must cut out 90% of your adverbs, that you need to cut out every scene that doesnt ‘fit’ your narrative perfectly etc since all these people are only saying this because theyre paid to discover new hunger games or w/e.
novels are genuinely so much more than snappy YA books you can read in a single afternoon… why are you so afraid to just. indulge. engage. why do you mind reading the war scenes in a book called. war and peace. why do you mind victor hugo taking you on a trip through paris history. why do you expect every book to hold your hand and walk you through a Sharp and Well-Defined Plot with no side quests? live a little, babe!!
Maybe not the biggest culprit behind the Radioactive Bad Takes on this website, but the one that’s bugging me the most lately: Please, I am begging you, learn what genre conventions are and read the text accordingly.
Fiction is not reality and pretty much every genre of fiction has certain standard ways in which it deviates from reality. And I’m not just talking about how we shouldn’t nitpick the physics of how Superman is able to fly. There will be ways in which the characters’ behavior and relationships will be informed by the genre as well and it makes just as little sense to judge them by realistic standards as it does to complain about something in Star Wars being scientifically implausible.
For example, “Adults are Useless” is a well-recognized trope in children’s literature. But that’s not because children’s authors are all going around writing adult characters who are terrible parents or teachers. It’s because the protagonist of a story written for children is almost always going to be a child, and the protagonist of the story has to get into trouble and solve problems themselves for the story to be any good. Yes, in real life, teenagers shouldn’t be fighting in a war. But if the grown-ups stepped in and stopped the teenage protagonist of your action-adventure series from fighting, there would be no story.
Does that mean the grown-up characters in that series are evil people who use child soldiers? No, because we accept a child being in these kinds of situations as a conceit of the genre of children’s fiction, and we interpret the characters and their choices accordingly. We don’t apply a realistic standard because the very premise is unrealistic to start with.
Another example: An adult hitting a child in real life is horrible. But if the child is a superhero, and the adult is a super villain, and they are in a cartoon, then we can’t read it the same way. All cartoons with any kind of action or fighting in them use violence unrealistically, and if the child and adult characters are presented as equally matched adversaries then that’s how any violence between them has to be understood. The villain might be a real bad dude, since he’s, you know, a villain, but hitting a child superhero in the context of a super-fight does not make him a child abuser, specifically.
I’m focusing on children’s books and cartoons here because I think that’s where tumblr fandoms have the biggest trouble with this but it applies to everything. Characters in a romantic comedy won’t behave realistically, characters in fairy tales won’t behave realistically, characters in police procedurals won’t behave realistically, all of them will behave as characters within their specific genre have to in order to make that genre work. The second you start trying to scrutinize every single action a character takes by realistic standards, you miss the point.
Repeat to yourself: “It’s just a show, I should really just relax.”
fictional character discourse would be more fun if we all internalized the fact that characters are narrative tools, not people. once we have that basic fact down, we can start talking about what story the author is trying to tell using these characters, whether they’re successful, whether the story itself is successful and by what means we are measuring success—which are all really fun and interesting things to discuss! but we simply cannot get to that point unless we first accept that fictional characters simply do not have thoughts, feelings, opinions, or any agency on their own. a fictional character has more in common with the fictional chair theyre sitting on than with a real person
Remember when Ursula K. Le Guin called JK Rowling a nasty basic bitch back in like, 2004? We should have listened
I've been thinking about the way women's anger is portrayed in media, especially in comparison to men's anger. Men's anger, at least more so than women's anger, is usually presented by the narrative as justified or a reasonable response to his situation. Even when it's not, for example in the case of a man being an antagonist, his anger if it's not justified is at least portrayed as powerful, as serious, as something to be reckoned with.
Most of the portrayals of female anger we see in media though is just women being shrill nagging killjoys, something that's obnoxious and annoying for the other characters but not to be taken seriously, only for the (typically male but sometimes other female) characters to put her back in her place as a solution to her being a shrill nagging killjoy. Think about it, the shrill nagging housewife, the shushing librarian, the bossy but whiny sister, the uptight prim and proper fuddy duddy matronly figure like a nanny or school teacher.
And it goes without saying there's an extra layer to this for WoC, the angry ghetto Black woman, the spicy and feisty Latina, the dragon lady. And even though there's obviously racism in the way MoC's anger is portrayed, when you compare MoC's anger portrayals in media alongside WoC's you'll see that MoC more than WoC get to have their anger portrayed as serious and justifiable while WoC are just portrayed as being obnoxious, hysterical, and irrational in their anger.
Or an extra layer of homophobia if you're a lesbian, think of the "angry man hating lesbian" stereotype, and this is often weaponized against lesbians who try to speak out against homophobia and misogyny.
Whether or not it has the extra layer of racism and/or homophobia added on women's anger is generally portrayed as silly, hysterical, obnoxious but more annoying to deal with than powerful or serious or justified. And again, most importantly, women's anger is presented as something for the other characters, generally but not always male characters, to dismiss then put her back into her place. The shrill nagging housewife here to ruin your fun needs to be shut up so you as her husband or child can keep on having your fun, ect. ect.
And this is really important to discuss and dissect. Because it shapes how we perceive and react to women and their anger in real life. It means a woman is more likely to stay quiet and not stand up for herself because she doesn't want to be just another shrill nag ruining everyone else's fun, she can't say anything to her husband or children not picking up after themselves or else she'll be another shrill nagging housewife, she just needs to quietly and obediently pick up after them. She can't say anything to her neighbor blasting music so loud that it's making her have a hard time focusing on studying because that would make her the uptight shushing librarian. She can't speak up about that microaggression or else that would make her the feisty Latina or the angry ghetto Black woman. She can't call out that misogynistic and/or homophobic remark her roommate's boyfriend just made or else she'll be an angry man hating lesbian. Women see these archetypes of female anger in the media and they internalize it.
Likewise, and most importantly, it's going to shape how men (and of course women with internalized misogyny) respond to women's anger. When a woman is reasonably angry at him for something justifiable, he sees her anger as silly, as shrill, as obnoxious, but otherwise something for him to dismiss and shut her up by besting her like the male protags in his favorite show do when they're being nagged by a shrill housewife or shushed by an uptight matronly figure. And of course when this is the response men have to women's anger, it makes it even harder for women to feel comfortable and justified in speaking up and asserting their boundaries when they have genuine grievances.
the hunger games films tore out the books teeth. like it does the series such a disservice when it stands for nothing, says nothing, passes no judgement.. katniss speaks so plainly in the books about what she thinks of the capital. of what they do to her and her family and the districts. of the different worlds she witnesses as she’s straddled between 12 and the capital.. she calls it barbaric. she calls it disgusting and wrong and horrifying, over and over, and the films were like how do we market this teen romance.