Reading Thoughts - Tumblr Posts
when you find a fic that actually addresses the consequences of all the fucked up shit your favorite character(s) went through
reading fanfiction is like. you are misinterpreting this character incorrectly. i am also misinterpreting them but i'm doing it the correct and sexy way. you dont know him like i know him
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.
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
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.
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
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.
That awkward moment when you feel an actual physical ache in your chest because of the romance of two fictional characters.
People who like rocks see cool rocks everywhere. People who like birds see interesting birds everywhere. The tree on your yard could be an exceptional specimen. The world around you could be amazing and magical, but you aren’t enough of a nerd to see it.
you ever read a fanfic and just sit back and think…someone wrote something THIS good… and then just….published it on the internet….for free…..
I believe very strongly in “I didn’t say it was good, I said I liked it”
but what might be even more important is “I didn’t say it was bad, I said I hated it”
I *needed* sad and dark stories when I was younger, they had an actual place in my life, I needed to read stories about grief and loss and illness and pain and revenge.
People confuse the fucked up nature of the publishing industry at the present moment, where one story exists at the expense of another and one writer gets to publish at the expense of another (a situation created by industry problems and by franchises dominating half of the shelf in genre and kids’ works now), with a broad statement on the whole about what stories should exist, and that makes me sad. And mad.
We need all kinds of stories. And when I was younger, I didn’t just read mainstream works you could find at the bookstore. I also read out-of-print books, old books, and underground books. And now I also read self-published books… lots of them!
Really! The answer is just MORE STORIES!
Things to bring back in books:
Chapter titles
Actually having a synopsis on the back instead of reviews no one will read
Why do people stop commenting on fics if they’re more than a week or two old? Please comment on old fics. Tell me you like my one shot from 2014. Tell me you like my old multi-chap I finished in 2016 that I spent a year writing. I will be fucking thrilled.
call me boring but i just love, like, kind and good-hearted protagonists, you know? i have such a soft spot for them. don’t even ask me why