A Certain Scientific Railgun is the story of how a bunch of Japanese girls and women beat up a white woman and foil her evil plans.
Exhibit A: a white woman.
No, really. Telestina (or Therestina or however you spell her name) is the only person in the whole show who has a vaguely western name. She also happens to be the villain. The lesson? Don’t let white people be in charge of anything, they come up with evil schemes and howl in maniacal laughter a lot.
Posted by acrackedmoon on June 12, 2013
http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/a-certain-scientific-railgun-or-how-to-beat-a-white-person/
Dan works at a bookstore in a deadly dull shopping mall where nothing ever happens. He’s an angsty emo-kid who sells mid-list books to mid-list people for the minimum wage. He hates his job. Rhoda has dragged her babysitting charge to the mall so she can meet her dealer and score some coke. Now the kid’s run off, and she has two hours to find him. She hates her life. Rhoda bullies Dan into helping her search, but as they explore the neon-lit corridors behind the mall, disturbing text messages lure them into the bowels of the building, where old mannequins are stored in grave-like piles and raw sewage drips off the ceiling. The only escape is down, and before long Dan and Rhoda are trapped in a service lift listening to head-splitting musak. Worst of all, the lift’s not stopping at the bottom floor. Plummeting into the earth, Dan and Rhoda enter a sinister underworld that mirrors their worst fears. Forced to complete a series of twisted tasks to find their way out, they finally emerge into the brightly lit food court, sick with relief at the banal sight of people shopping and eating. But something feels different. Why are the shoppers all pumped full of silicone? Why are the shop assistants chained to their counters? And why is a cafe called McColon’s selling lumps of bleeding meat? Just when they think they’ve made it back to the mall, they realise their nightmare has only just begun…
Jack, is that you?
As for the rest, this is basically Silent Hill fanfiction mashed together with an anvilicious parable against the evil of consumerism, the latter of which is probably not quite what Team Silent had in mind when they developed Silent Hill 3.
Posted by acrackedmoon on June 5, 2013
http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/the-mall-hey-sl-grey-team-silents-suing/
Secritcrush takes on John Scalzi’s Redshirts.
Have you ever watched a movie and thought to yourself that it would have been a funny 3 minute skit on Saturday Night Live but at two hours it was just crushing boredom? That’s pretty much the experience of reading Redshirts by John Scalzi.
[...]
Anyway, what about the treatment of the ladies? Well, you have one lady amongst the four main characters and each one is interesting in their own way. Guess which one is the lady?
You were a novitiate to an alien religion. You’re a scoundrel who’s made enemies cross the fleet. You’re the son of one of the richest men in the universe. You left your last ship after an altercation with your superior officer, and you’re sleeping with Kerensky now.
Because we ladies are only important in relation the dudes and the sexual activities we have with them. (And the usefulness these sex acts are in advancing the plot.)
I’ve been asked to read this book. I don’t read Scalzi. Nothing particular against him, he’s never struck me as someone I’d like to read. This doesn’t encourage. Oh, she has a few words for Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon (voted one of reddit’s most popular fantasy books in 2012 by the way) too.
Damn those women and their ladyparts! They ruin everything. But how can there be a sequel if the Doctor will lose his ghulhunting magic when he gets married to his hooker with a heart of gold? Wait, priests can’t get married.
Anne Rice is at it again! You’d think she would have learned. Nope.
Here is a selection of the more entertaining responses:
HOW DARE YOU EVEN COMPARE SHITTY ASS STEPHANIE MEYER TO THE QUALITY WORK THAT IS ANNE RICE HOW DARE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YOU FUCKING HAG, I HOPE YOU GET HERPES
The review that prompted this was perfectly tame (is Anne Rice that oversensitive? Should I review one of hers and if so which? Pick me a short one), but the reviewer did put the paper copy of Rice’s book to good use.
There’s some buzz about the #killallmen hashtag and something about how it might make men feel bad and feminists should be nicer, I guess? Who the fuck cares, let’s listen to what Another Angry Woman has to say about it instead.
I remember once being at a reading group where we were discussing the SCUM Manifesto. It was a mixed group, and we had loads to chat about. If you haven’t read SCUM, I’d well recommend it, as while its conception of gender is kind of rooted in its time, there’s a very astute analysis of how patriarchy and capitalism interact to produce a system which oppresses women. There’s also some very clever satire of the thinking of the time, flipped and reversed on its head to present a biological argument as to why men are inferior. In fact, the whole thing just inverts this system in which violence against women and girls is endemic, and exaggerates the problem to its logical conclusion. It’s really a very good text, whether or not its author truly believed what she’d written.
Part of the power of SCUM is the effect it has on men. At my reading group, the men present were allies, and I remember vividly one saying “I don’t think she went far enough at the end, letting some of the men live and act as the Men’s Auxilliary”. All of the other men nodded along. They got that this idea is just fantasy, just a satire.
If you’d rather read stupidity, you can go spit on this post. Or on this whitey’s opinion which boils down to “BUT WE’RE GOING TO MAKE THE MRA AND HOMOPHOBES HATE FEMINISM EVEN MORE,” an objection we can all agree is pretty fucking worthless.
It’s Time To Face Up To The Problem Of Sexual Abuse In The White Community.
Hardly a week goes by without another white man being arrested in connection with sexual abuse.
I’m beginning to feel sorry for whites. I have many white friends and I know most of them are wholly opposed to sexual abuse. But they must be worried that their whole community is getting a bad name. I can imagine that, every day, with each unfolding case, they must be hiding their face behind their hands, pleading: “Please, God, don’t let it be a white person this time.”
The White Saviour Recreation Complex.
Before the aquatic centre will be the Lance Armstrong US Postal Service workout area. It is named in honour of Lance Armstrong for best exemplifying the “ride-it-hard-and-never-admit-you-stole-it” white attitude that makes America great. Adjacent to the weightroom will be a yoga studio where white people can contort themselves into all sorts of positions including this one where think they have a clue about yoga’s origins.
Perhaps the most spectacular part of the complex is the aquatic centre. The centre feature and Olympic length salt water pool filled entirely with white-tears. The salt water system allows for more efficient filtration of dirt particles and systemic critiques. The leftover salt from the filtration process will be recycled for applying to wounds. Perhaps the most spectacular aspect of the aquatic complex is the moral slide. This exciting water slide allows one to move from Christianizing morality to atheism through a wonderful series of convoluted twists ending at base of the same orientalist ladder where you begin.
Holy shit this fucking thing: How to fold a thong: A straight man working at Victoria’s Secret.
Desperate to regain my swagger, I decided I needed to study women, to go somewhere I could immerse myself in them. The first place that came to mind was a brothel.
[...]
After getting up the nerve to walk into the store and ask a manager for an application, I spent the next month trying to get an interview. Persistence was the key here. Talk to anyone who’s successful in the arts, business or convincing women to have anal sex, and they’ll tell you, aside from skill and plenty of lube, it boils down to one thing: persistence.
[...]
“Comfortable handling women’s undergarments,” she jotted on my application. She seemed pleased with this.
It came as a surprise, then, when I hadn’t heard anything from them almost three weeks after the interview. I began to panic. Had I done something wrong? Was I too forward about handling my mother’s panties? Should I have worn a little less purple? I couldn’t think of any glaring mistakes. The only thing it might have been was a bad review from one of my references.
Christopher Pilny, writer of this fucking thing, is apparently a “humorist.” I agree. There’s a lot of humor to be derived from skinning him alive and giving him an acid bath.
Posted by acrackedmoon on June 2, 2013
http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/06/02/requires-only-that-you-link/
Despite the suspicions Mother Dragon shared with Celestrian before her death, he may be the last surviving unicorn of Vrelenden—though most may simply think him some crazy person with a horn attached to his forehead. Nevertheless, Trian has nothing to hold on to but hope, and he’s about to hang that hope on an unlikely hero named Renwald Mallorian. Ren may have been born an accountant’s son, but he’s longed to be a professional hero for as long as he can remember, and he’s read every book on the subject he could get his hands on. When Trian arrives and hires him to find the last remaining unicorns, Ren jumps at the offer and their quest begins.
But the evil Father Denkham is intent on obtaining the last unicorn and sets a deadly assassin on their trail. If that isn’t bad enough, they’ll face a Vampire, Dragon, bandits, and zombies. Their only hope now is for Ren to prove he’s the hero he always dreamed of becoming—but no book in the world could have prepared him for what’s in store.
Yes, that’s a unicorn furry wearing a thong. This, as you will soon gather, is a book about copious teenage unicorn sex. Rejoice, for we’re about to embark on the beautiful and magical journey of someone’s D&D campaign involving a shitload of erotic roleplay turned into a novel.
Posted by acrackedmoon on May 16, 2013
http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/the-unlikely-hero-beau-schemerys-aryan-teenage-unicorn-fetish/
Haha wait what?
I like how the one brown-skinned woman is shunted way to the back while the foreground is dominated by ultra-pale beauties, two of them with what appears to be blonde hair and one with inhuman quantities of eyelashes. And, by the way, they are supposed to be appropriations of Native Americans except they live in a desert and what the fuck is going on. Like, shit, this is the first time I’ve ever seen someone mash up an orientalist harem fantasy with, uhhh, Native Americans. Say, are these clothes even from the same culture? And who dresses like this outdoor in a fucking desert?
Posted by acrackedmoon on May 5, 2013
http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/dokuhime-wait-what-the-fuck/
“It’s not anti-feminist if I like it” seems to be the subtext. “It’s not misogynist if it turns my crank. It’s not problematic if I pretend it’s a guilty pleasure.” [...] It also creates an imbalance, a hierarchy, between pseudo-intellectual readers and those who just read for pleasure and don’t turn a critical eye to every book: “I can read and enjoy the Greek billionaire ordering the virgin around because I took three Women’s Studies classes in college and donate money to RAINN. I’m not That Reader.” Oh, yes, you are. Own it. And talk about it. Don’t pretend the modern-day romance reader is any more liberated/aware/superior than the first person who got tingly when a pirate ravished an unwilling maiden.
Dear Author, as per usual, does more mental gymnastics to justify this shit. A new low when one of their whiteys claims racism actually helps advance multicultural ia ia ftagn Hitler.
Before I go on, I want to note a couple of things: first, in these narratives, cultural diversity and hybridization are viewed as positive values (another way in which I see Romance rooted in an Anglo-American cultural context). Consequently, these narrative involve a certain level of cultural appropriation for the purpose of investigating alternative cultural and social realities, which themselves are not necessarily grounded in an authentically realized portrayal.
[...]
All of Julia’s wealth and social privilege as a Roman did not give her the kind of autonomy and personal agency she has with Wulfric, and her realization makes her want to create a new kind of reality with him, one that blends the best of her Roman and his Goth customs. Wulfric tells Julia that he wants to settle in Gaul to “’learn to live with my Roman neighbors.’” Flipping the social script, Allen grounds notions of civilization and barbarism in human nature, rather than cultural difference. Julia sees in Wulfric a man who is “like his wolf, domesticated until roused, then a killer,” while Wulfric compares Julia to “an exotic animal, half-tame, half-wild.” Although highly idealized and somewhat simplistic in its reversal of the old captivity ideology, (which, does, of course, wind through the history of Rome), Allen’s novel also very bluntly sets the agenda for the transcultural union as one that can represent and initiate transformative, egalitarian social evolution.
To a rational person this might sound like yet another instance of a really misogynistic trope where a woman can only be complete/get liberated by a man, but to romance readers this apparently translates to subversion of the status quo.
This is a fun instance of a whitey appropriating outrage… wrongly.
Jamil being a good Hati (sic), making sure his Ulfric didn’t drown.
What? Random racism what? What does Jamil being Haitian have to do with keeping Richard from drowning? WHY THE FUCK IS HAITI MISSPELLED IN A FUCKING PROFESSIONALLY PUBLISHED FUCKING–
[...]
My brain has hit fail overload. Seriously. HOW DO YOU DO THAT? How do you manage to fail that hard in just three fucking paragraphs?
The problem being that Laurell K Hamilton bases her wolf crap around Norse mythology. “Hati” refers to this, but this whitey–who claims she can “put up with not getting the nuances for racial stuff right”–decides it’s a misspelling of Haiti. She’s an admitted straight white Christian American. I’m sure all Haitians appreciate this valiant outrage.
Pregnant Women in America are Being Persecuted for Losing Their Babies. So the US is, like, 24/7 mass shootings, gang rapes, genocide, rape cults, what else? Sex trafficking. Plus this: Gitmo is Killing Me. Oh, and workplace sexual assault.
On the following day, in front of two other faculty members, I told him that I wasn’t interested in him and that he was to leave me alone. I asked him if he understood and he replied yes. On the following day, as I was leading my class into a computer lab, one of the faculty who had been present the day before (also a male senior faculty) assaulted me. He threw me up against the door and shoved something hard into my back. I fell. I took a moment to get my breath. Shaking, I walked to the art office and reported this to my chairperson. I was being physically attacked, intimidated, bullied and harassed. I thought that, surely, something would to be done to these two people, that some action would be taken. I had been harassed and assaulted. The law had been broken twice. I was in a state of shock.
[...]
they began to launch an investigation into my background. I was hounded, harassed and totally ignored. Every day, my student display cases had garbage stuffed in them. No one would sit next to me in faculty meetings and I was not invited to departmental gatherings. I became a pariah. Then, the faculty committee tried to end my contract. However, both professors continued to sit on tenure and promotion committees and to participate fully in the running of the department.
The American national identity sure involves a lot of rape, gang rape, and trying to rape.
In case this was in doubt, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians is Excrement.
Since there are still people who hail JK Rowling as the goddess of anti-racism, let’s shit on her some more.
Rowling is progressive, clearly pro-immigration, and the Harry Potter series illustrate a typical liberal approach to race blindness. Her works still presuppose that integration is synonymous with invisibility, but she also argues for the potential success of Britain’s multicultural model. Their well-integrated and invisible races ensure that Cho Chang, Dean Thomas, and the Patel sisters can be British without disrupting British identity with their racialized bodies. While I appreciated that Cho Chang became a sobbing mess inOrder of the Phoenix without her emotional deterioration being tied to her ethnicity, I can’t separate issues of representation from the larger systemic trend found within the fantasy genre. (Cho is the character of colour with the most screen time. One chapter is dedicated to her character in Order of the Phoenix, where she spends most of the time crying, and she receives a few sentences here and there from books 4 to 7. When we meet her, in book 3, she doesn’t say much of anything.) That characters of colour are in the background allow the reader to know that Hogwarts is Very Diverse, but their importance to the plot is minimal. As the very worst possibility, they act as ornaments to Hogwarts’ status as a Very Progressive School.
Rewind to the three days following the release of World Of Warcraft’s Wrath Of The Lich King expansion. Delise played almost without pause. He stopped only momentarily at his desk to eat and drink, the need for intermittent dozing and defecation seen as infuriating biological interruptions by the young player, delaying his quest to rise through the rankings first. In-game, he accepted every quest he was offered, assimilating the experience points, but discarding those activities he believed would take too long to complete. He never idled, only pressed forward.
Ew.
Posted by acrackedmoon on April 29, 2013
http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/04/29/those-links/
The Sadiri were once the galaxy’s ruling élite, but now their home planet has been rendered unlivable and most of the population destroyed. The few groups living on other worlds are desperately short of Sadiri women, and their extinction is all but certain.
Civil servant Grace Delarua is assigned to work with Councillor Dllenahkh, a Sadiri, on his mission to visit distant communities, looking for possible mates. Delarua is impulsive, garrulous and fully immersed in the single life; Dllenahkh is controlled, taciturn and responsible for keeping his community together. They both have a lot to learn.
What the fuck is this shit.
I was lukewarm toward Lord’s previous book, though I didn’t hate it. It was an easy read. There was a lot of hubbub surrounding The Best of All Possible Worlds enough that I was interested, even though the synopsis frankly sounds like shit.
Turns out, it’s really absolutely fucking shit. My nickname for this book is The Best of All Eugenics.
Posted by acrackedmoon on April 15, 2013
http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/karen-lord-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds/
After the body dies, the soul lives on. Many spirits progress toward the world of light, through the levels of the spirit world where they study how to improve their souls. These spirits are sometimes reincarnated into the physical world, and sometimes they are sent back as guardian spirits for other living people. Guardian spirits must protect their charges souls from the blackness that oozes up from the world of darkness below.
Riyon is a very laid-back spirit, who often skips her spirit classes to fool around. To train her further, she is sent back to the physical world as a guardian spirit. Instead of following a human from birth, she is helping a beleaguered man, the Japanese Prime Minister Kasuga Soichiro, in the last year and a half of his life. After an unexpected close call with death, Kasuga gains some unusual talents, including the ability to see Riyon. Will Riyon and Kasuga together be able to protect his battered soul?
This is pretty weird, somewhat problematic, and kind of unusual. It is a manga about a Japanese prime minister who’s trying to denuclearize Japan. Yes, really.
Posted by acrackedmoon on April 10, 2013
http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/tsutomu-takahashi-hito-hitori-futari/
My go-to example for this used to be James Bond. “Is it realistic that James Bond has never been raped?” I would say. How many times has he found himself utterly at the mercy of men who want to hurt, degrade and humiliate him before killing him? I will accept, on any one such occasion, the odds might be in his favour. I suppose it is plausible for many of his enemies – even most of them – not to think of raping him or having him raped by others, despite having captured him, tied him up and possibly removed some of his clothes. But all of them?
I Am The Blogger Who Allegedly “Complicated” The Steubenville Rape Case. Sounds like America needs to sort out its rape problem. Any of you Americans looking to immigrate somewhere a bit safer for women? While at it, let’s look at the human trafficking that goes on in the US as well. Yes, as in sex trafficking. Land of the free rapists!
Abigail Nussbaum taking apart Sheri Tepper’s Beauty.
Ronan Wills vs The Name of the Wind, chapter by chapter!
At Dear Author, romance fans continue to perform bizarre mental gymnastics to justify racism and misogyny in their genre.
There had been no sound to betray what was passing behind him, but the extra sense, the consciousness of imminent danger that was strong in the desert-bred man, sprang into active force within the Sheik. He turned like a flash and leaped across the space that separated them, catching her hand as she pressed the trigger, and the bullet sped harmlessly an inch above her head. With his face gone suddenly ghastly he wrenched the weapon from her and flung it far into the night.
For a moment they stared into each other’s eyes in silence, then, with a moan, she slipped from his grasp and fell at his feet in an agony of terrible weeping. With a low exclamation he stooped and swept her up into his arms, holding her slender, shaking figure with tender strength, pressing her head against him, his cheek on her red-gold curls.
“My God! child, don’t cry so. I can bear anything but that,” he cried brokenly.
This was a book published in 1919. A google search of “sheikh romances” will reveal that nothing’s changed since.
Deepa D and others tackle shitty YA authors, namely Cassandra Clare, Maureen Johnson, and Claudia Gray–the latter two I’ve never heard of but since they are white it’s safe to assume they’re screaming racists. Plus Libba Bray, whom I understand white feminists just adore. Is there such a thing as a white YA author who makes great big noises about being progressive but who aren’t in action diarrheic bigots?
While we’re at it, why not shit on romance some more. Here’s one bemoaning how awful it is that she can’t find nice, comfortable escapism in historical romance.
World War II was total war — much more so in Britain than in the United States. It affected every facet of everyday life in terribly intrusive ways for a terribly, terribly long time. Rationing in Britain began in 1940 and didn’t completely end until 1954. One of the things I admire about Carrie Lofty’s world-building in His Very Own Girl is that she gets that. The war is everywhere. It infects everything. It is a constant factor in Lulu and Joe’s relationship, the catalyst for their meeting, their disagreements, their reunions, their hopes and dreams, their inescapable sorrows. It is hard and mean and horrible.
Hey, shit-spewing asshole, do you think the rest of the world had it easy and nice during WW2?
Zoe E Whitten is a self-published author. I engaged her because she made some racist tweets. Then I visited her timeline again and it’s full of tweets confessing to child abuse, followed by a rant about how everyone who reacted in horror (including survivors of child abuse) to this is a petty, hypocritical liberal. Trigger warnings: child abuse, sexual assault.
Less potentially triggery is her hilarious post thanking the handful of people who don’t mind the child molesting thing who’d give her the time of the day.
I complain about writers playing it safe and not being real with people, and yes, I complain about readers who demand professionalism from artists like we’re more related to bankers and middle managers than to punk rockers who trash their hotel and pee on the service desk on their way out.
The thing is, I’m not a banker or a middle manager. When I see other writers talk about “professional behavior,” I just laugh and think how their heroes talked and acted. Their heroes would shake their heads at all of this self-censorship in the name of likability. I think some writers are so out of touch with their roots, and they’re so afraid of losing even one sale that they couldn’t say shit with a mouthful. They won’t talk politics or religion, lest they lose sales. They won’t talk up the environment, or human rights, or queer rights, women’s right, or civil rights, because every topic is too risky for their precious sales numbers. If that’s what professional is, I don’t want to be a pro. I want to be the punk with both middle fingers waving in the air, and I want to be the rebel artist screaming, “Fuck alla y’all if you can’t feel what I’m saying!”
For a great rebel punk artist living on the fringe and being real, her reading tastes are a bit… unreal.
So I will close this out by saying I give Breaking Dawn 5 stars, and I’m so hyped after reading this last book, I plan to go back and start reading Twilight again. Count me in as a dedicated Twihard, please.
Posted by acrackedmoon on March 28, 2013
http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/eat-your-links-and-like-them/
