But when I started looking at reviews outside my corner of fandom, I found something Ian Grey of PressPlay also noticed:

Two parallel realities! Men who see nobody at all and women who see the next Faith (without the crazy, I mean). Don’t tell Disney, or they’ll be marketing the film as 4-D.

Being me, I decided to gather data, not just examples.

In CHARMED LIFE, there is a moment when the protagonist Cat takes out a bunch of stuff from the castle of the nine-lived enchanter who is now his guardian, but even simple things like china plates are magic there—and they all start to shout out their protest.

‘I belong to Chrestomanci Castle!’ they say. ‘I belong to Chrestomanci Castle!’

Because of Diana Wynne Jones, who I never met, I was irrevocably altered: my purpose in life, the things I wanted, the way I think and the way I communicate with other people. Her words changed my world.

That means a lot. She meant a lot to me.

Part of me belongs to Chrestomanci Castle. It always will.

Now, I think the Allegory of the Cave is a useless bit of self-congratulatory twaddle, when it comes to models of human perception in general, but it does seem to have some particular applicability to written fiction.

Re-reading “Omnilingual,” an H. Beam Piper short story published in Analog in 1957 and collected in Federation, I decided it was the classic SF short story, the one everyone ought to read if they’re only going to read one, because it’s both typical and excellent.

So, let us assume thus:

Furyans, as a people (whether that means species or whatever), are extraordinarily aggressive and violence-prone, particularly the men. Their wiring is such, in fact, that it is the job of the women (who hold power) to plan and make decisions and, you know, run the community, where it's the job of men to kill everything that threatens the community. Women think and direct and deal with strategy; men work tactics and the immediate and keep everyone alive.

Or, more crudely, the males are for killing things, and the females are for telling them what they may or may not kill.

"Which is all perfectly understandable, but meanwhile, I am sitting here with all ten fingers stuffed in my mouth squeaking MOLLY MOLLY MOLLY MOLLY MOLLY."

As convenient as it would be for authors, if a detail in a story disrupts willing suspension of disbelief, the flaw is not in the reader.

As I see it, there are 3 differing but related definitions for "Mary Sue":

There is a problem with Mary Sues and it is not just that they are unrealistically larger than life... No, the problem with Mary Sue is that she is an original fic hero barging into a fanfic world which already has heroes of its own.

It's hard to take a principled stand on behalf of semi-literate terrible writing, but I honestly don't see why it's worse to write a dreadful LOTR story *with* Frodo's violet-eyed raven-tressed cousin Sparklesilver Baggins (third cousin! so it's OK for them to get married!) than *without* her.

What do we know about Tom Bombadil? He is fat and jolly and smiles all the time. He is friendly and gregarious and always ready to help travellers in distress.

Except that none of that can possibly be true.

RIP Anne McCaffrey

I am of two minds about soulbonding in stories. (Let me make it really clear up front that I'm talking about the trope/cliché in fiction in which romantic partners share a mystical link between their souls, not about anything real people get up to.)

You know the "he who smelt it, dealt it" strategy of dealing with racism that's so popular with the kids these days? Ably demonstrated here by my assistant [info]willshetterly? And you know how, on the face of it, it makes no sense? I have come up with a hypothesis explaining it!

It's stupid in a lot of ways—the conflation of Livejournal with Fanfiction.net, when they're not actually the same sort of service at all and the use of LJ for fic posting is not even remotely what LJ is designed to do or what it will evolve to facilitate. There's also the resultant stupidity of seeing only two different models, profit and non-profit, as a result of that conflation.

The basics: LotRFanFiction.com was purchased by Keith Mander, who also bought TwilightArchives a little while ago. His thinking:

"I can leverage the technology behind the Twilight site’s redesign to quickly rejuvenate the LOTR site. Plus, plenty of opportunities for cross promotion and integration (SSO, for example). The longer term thought is that with the combined user base, I’ll be able to quickly enter and dominate new fandoms, hopefully creating some returns."

Fandom is... not happy.

The recent discussions on [profile] lg_interview on livejournal have been fascinating to read. He asked a question about generation gaps in fandom, and everyone agreed that they aren't usually primarily based on age. Years in fandom and what part of online or offline fandom you joined first have a much more significant effect. A number of other people mentioned usenet; it prompted me to think again about my own entry into fandom.

OKAY PEOPLE HERE WE GO, EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT *THOR* TO ENJOY

Given how few her appearances on the page are, Lobelia shines through as a genuine three-dimensional personality and one deserving of considerably more fandom love than she ever gets.

Anyway, it premiered last week, obviously, and I have some thoughts. I'll tell you the biggest, broadest ones right up front, but the single thing I reacted to most intensely goes under the spoiler cut.

One thing I love in a good SF story is ways of doing love, marriage, and romance that don't buy in to our society's idea of love+romance+sex+monogamy all on one single person as the only way to do it.

I have a small collection of worlds that have come up with better ways, and I have a great deal of fun trying to fit the 'shipping debates from various fandoms into these other ways of looking at love. I especially love the way that many of them explicitly acknowledge the value of non-sexual, sometimes non-romantic, relationships that are of equal importance with the sexual ones.

I have been trying to think what I can say or do in memoriam, in tribute. The best thing I can think of is that in 2007 I started to write an essay to explain the end of Fire and Hemlock, because a lot of people find it confusing; the essay was meant to have two parts, and I never managed to write the second... And here, now, now-here, is the second part.

true gender equality is actually perceived as inequality. A group that is made up of 50% women is perceived as being mostly women. A situation that is perfectly equal between men and women is perceived as being biased in favor of women.

So, I was pondering this issue when lsketch42 said some nice things about my SPN reviews and asked if I might consider doing them for WC. And it made me think more about the issue of viewing habits, canon scope, and fannishness.

I want to talk about some female characters I like, and the reasons why....
It's very simple, really: they're all women who aren't afraid to admit that they want things. And, as a bonus, they want things that aren't men. Even Rinoa, who does want men (or, well, one particular man) doesn't walk into the plot because she wants him; she walks into the plot because she wants a revolution.

I was talking this over with seanchai last weekend, actually as part of a tangent about Torchwood (why some people absolutely cannot like Owen or Gwen for the alien sex pollen and the retconning-your-significant-other-to-conceal-your-infidelity things while being totally able to forgive Ianto his cyborg girlfriend shenanigans), and one thing that came up is that different readers/viewers have different, and often very personal and non-rational Uncrossable Lines for characters and for shows.

Hush, Hush is the story of a Bad Romance: quite literally, the heroine is caught in a bad romance with a stalker who shows up, will not leave her alone, refuses to leave her life, and tries to kill her. All of this is made acceptable by the fact that he's hot.

In the Beginning, there was Season One, and it had no Spike in it, so who cares?

Lo, did Season Two brake upon the TV horizon, and it had Spike, and it was good. And everyone was a Spike/Drusilla shipper, and peace did reigneth upon the land. Well, except for those troublemaking UC Spike/Angel and Spike/Buffy shippers, but they were usually up for a threesome and everyone knew they would never be canon anyway.

The Forbidden Forest, where inhuman creatures enact terrifying revels by the light of the gibbous moon, in the shadows of trees grown swollen and horrid on the bodies of who knows what innocent dead. Or are those trees... at all...?

Okay, I think I may have a rationalization for Card Captor Sakura that does not make Clow Reed an utter bastard.

Because when you think about what he did to Yue, in particular, well... utter bastard, yes.

I've seen people say they feel like social issues are only a concern in their little corner of fandom, and they feel this does not reflect or affect the majority. I've been in online fandom for close to 12 years, and the little corner of social justice issues that I find myself in today did not exist 5-7 years ago. It's not that people weren't doing activism or speaking out about issues, not at all, but the kind of infrastructure, widespread support and awareness there is right now in fandom is very, very new. It's still a very small group, it's still restricted to certain areas, but the fact is, it didn't exist until recently, and with every year it's become more accepted and widespread, so I don't know why anyone would think it wasn't making a difference.

A comment in the recent batch of Tor blog posts on steampunk made me reflect on the insistence of one significant faction that steampunk must focus on the mechanical, not the electrical.

As though they were separate. As though the 19th C European technological types weren't all over electricity, and, in fact, magic.

There are a number of issues involved in why a lot of properties fail the Bechdel Test, but on the mechanical front I think two major issues are 1) Stock Roles and 2) Need for Contrast.

Muses. Imaginary Friends. Characters.

I’ve been going back to read the Yuugi-ou manga, now it’s all out domestically and I can see it in one go. And I find myself instantly caught up in the Problem of Ryou.

3 - Genjyo Sanzo ('San' is 3 in Japanese.)
5 - Sha Gojyo ('Go' is 5 in Japanese.)
8 - Cho Hakkai ('Hachi' is 8 in Japanese)
9 - Son Goku ('Ku' is 9 in Japanese.)

"So Becca, what did you do this weekend?"
"I read all fifteen volumes of Gokusen!"

I kept watching SG-1 and Atlantis despite all these flaws because their modest ambitions suited the level of talent driving them--they were never great TV, but they were occasionally entertaining and that, coupled with inertia, was enough to keep me coming back. Universe aims higher, but the same talent is at the helm and it's not up to the task, and I find myself with no reason to keep watching--after all, for all its aping of Battlestar Galactica, Universe isn't as culturally important, and now that it's moved to the fall there's plenty of other stuff to watch instead

We all know (and likely loathe, at least given the posts I see go past from most of you) the damsel in distress: she does something stupid, gets captured/hurt, has to be saved by the hero, and usually ends up clinging to him. I've been browsing some of the manga that readers have classified (on reader-tagging database sites) as "strong female lead" or "strong female character", and I think we need an intermediary.

Something like, "female character damselfied by the author", or "damsel with fighter tendencies," for a less anti-author spin on it.

One reason I wanted to do the little mini-ficathon I'm running right now was to have a chance to play with the Archive's tools for running ficathons (without having a hundred people involved when I inevitably screw something up), and so far I'm genuinely impressed.

Multifandom essays and meta