All posts in category Genderfail

THE UNLIKELY HERO – Beau Schemery’s Aryan teenage unicorn fetish

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.

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18 Comments
by acrackedmoon on May 16, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Fantasy, Genderfail, Racefail
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Posted by acrackedmoon on May 16, 2013

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/the-unlikely-hero-beau-schemerys-aryan-teenage-unicorn-fetish/

Karen Lord – THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS

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. 

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22 Comments
by acrackedmoon on April 15, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Genderfail, Racefail, Sci-Fi
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Posted by acrackedmoon on April 15, 2013

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/karen-lord-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds/

Tsutomu Takahashi – HITO HITORI FUTARI

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.

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3 Comments
by acrackedmoon on April 10, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Anime/Manga, Genderfail
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Posted by acrackedmoon on April 10, 2013

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/tsutomu-takahashi-hito-hitori-futari/

rounding up the links

You know it says a lot about everything that Y: The Last Man is often held up as a comic that does awesome shit about gender. It doesn’t.

The reason for all this is pretty simple. It’s an authorial fiat to make Yorick the Most Important Person on Earth. The gendercide could have taken a much more believable form, say, an actual plague, but this would not serve the same narrative purposes. If a virus or bacterium were responsible, it would take time (years) for the world’s population to fully succumb; and even then, there’s always the possibility of other male survivors, quarantined somewhere. If Yorick were spared due to a genetic immunity to the plague, then it would stretch the imagination for him to be the only one. Have you read I Am Legend (no, not the movie)? Don’t worry, neither has Brian K. Vaughan. Likewise if the gendercide were eugenics-based, Children of Men-style; Yorick would have the rest of his generation, at least, to keep him company. But this way, it’s Yorick and only Yorick. He must be humanity’s last hope from the beginning; even the possibility of other male survivors would undermine his specialness (if you doubt that Yorick is Vaughan’s thinly-veiled self-insert, consider that he is an English major who enjoys making jokes about grammar, and is protected by a secret agent bodyguard who is secretly in love with him). And make no mistake, Yorick is special. He is the savior of the human race. It makes no difference whether it’s ultimately his penis or his pet monkey that makes him special; a geeky, aw-shucks Anti-Sue like Yorick is still a Mary Sue.

Unprevailing reviewed The Name of the Wind.

Once the street orphan plot no longer becomes necessary to Rothfuss, Kvothe leaves this life with ridiculous ease. Now it’s off to the cleverly named “University” to become Kvothe-cum-Harry Potter. Indeed, this section is much like a Harry Potter for adults neckbeards–without the benefit of the whimsy or any strong female characters. Kvothe is an orphan, hated by some teachers and beloved by others. He becomes friends all-too-quickly with a couple misfits. He has a rival of noble birth. He gets himself into mischief. He is brilliant in all his endeavors but stymied by the ladies. On that point: women exist as mere curiosities for the sausage fest. Ah, the male gaze.

I still think the title is an elaborate way to say “fart.” I mean, really now.

I had a run-in with Fadzlishah Johanabas, a “doctor” who claims to work with and help abuse survivors but who thinks telling people who disagree with them that they must’ve had a damaged childhood is an awesome tactic. See Storify here. Trigger warnings abound! Man also believes anti-white racism, misandry and heterophobia are real things. Note that I do not want to speak for abuse survivors, and if I’ve done or said anything wrong, call me the fuck out.

A lesbian journalist who loves Ender’s Game interviewed Orson Scott Card. Yeah, pretty much.

Literacy Privilege: How I Learned to Check Mine blah blah blah whatever. It’s obvious concerns about imperialism etc come to the poster as an afterthought and she still doesn’t really get what imperialism has to do with anything. She’s an American and an Anglophone. How did you guess?

“Ghost Stories”: The ubiquitous anti-feminism of young adult romances is from someone who did a shitload of YA ghostwriting, which explains a LOT about that genre, doesn’t it.

I view the genre with an insider’s perspective: I paid my way through university by ghostwriting YA romances for various publishing houses. It was an easy job at first: padding chapter word counts through the judicious use of erotic ekphrasis, mentally calculating how many pennies each adjective added to my bank account: (“His rippling, supple muscular chest, shimmering in the bright sunlight. His smooth, almost preternaturally marble-white skin…”). Yet, after over twenty such books – each written to my employers’ chapter-by-chapter outlines – I began to feel increasingly uneasy about the message such tropes send to the genre’s young, largely female readership.

Drew C of Ferretbrain reviewed Farming Simulator 2013 seriously. It sounds kind of fun, actually.

Slash fandom is pretty hilarious.

Here’s the kicker… Neither of us is a Sherlock/John shipper. We both see Sherlock and John as two men who have a very unique and incredibly strong friendship. Here’s the irony: I have been called a homophobe for not shipping Sherlock and John. I received hate messages in my (now deleted) Sherlock blog when I answered ‘do you ship Johnlock?’ with the single word ‘no’. It was oddly amusing: “Homophobe”, “die cis scum!”, “go kill yourself”, “you must be a lonely, fat, hag”.

The poster’s an old gay dude and while queer people can internalize homophobia, I’m gonna go on a limb and say that not participating in slash bullshit isn’t an expression of that. Also, what does “die cis scum” have to do with anything? Aren’t the actors and the characters, like, cis males?

15 Comments
by acrackedmoon on March 14, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Genderfail, Other
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Posted by acrackedmoon on March 14, 2013

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/rounding-up-the-links/

HOUNDED – Kevin Hearne is a rancid neckbeard ape

Atticus O’Sullivan, last of the Druids, lives peacefully in Arizona, running an occult bookshop and shape-shifting in his spare time to hunt with his Irish wolfhound. His neighbors and customers think that this handsome, tattooed Irish dude is about twenty-one years old—when in actuality, he’s twenty-one centuries old. Not to mention: He draws his power from the earth, possesses a sharp wit, and wields an even sharper magical sword known as Fragarach, the Answerer.

Unfortunately, a very angry Celtic god wants that sword, and he’s hounded Atticus for centuries. Now the determined deity has tracked him down, and Atticus will need all his power—plus the help of a seductive goddess of death, his vampire and werewolf team of attorneys, a sexy bartender possessed by a Hindu witch, and some good old-fashioned luck of the Irish—to kick some Celtic arse and deliver himself from evil.

People’ve been asking me to have a go at this for a while, and what do you know, it turns out to be exactly the same type of excrement as Jim Butcher! Misogyny? Check. Wish-fulfillment bullshit? Oh yes. Juvenile Gary Stu material, aka Rothfuss? You fucking bet.

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17 Comments
by acrackedmoon on February 14, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Fantasy, Genderfail, Racefail
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Posted by acrackedmoon on February 14, 2013

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/hounded-kevin-hearne-is-a-rancid-neckbeard-ape/

why tone doesn’t matter – the white tears burden

Look at that tweet. Absorb it. Drink it in. Gape. It gets worse. And no, @cheilt isn’t talking about xenophobia directed at Eastern Europeans. She is a native white Irish living in… Ireland.

Now I’ll tell you a story about why tone never matters because white people will flood you with their tears at the slightest provocation. Lesson: being manipulative, racist faux-martyrs is an entrenched characteristic of the white culture.

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31 Comments
by acrackedmoon on January 22, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Genderfail, Racefail
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Posted by acrackedmoon on January 22, 2013

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/why-tone-doesnt-matter-the-white-tears-burden/

let’s roundly shit on everything

It’s the end of the year and a bunch of genre blogs and websites are doing their unpaid marketing drone bit probably in the hope they’ll get free books and some scraps of attention from publishers or authors. First we have Fantasy Faction’s Top 10 Anticipated Fantasy Books for 2013, a list populated almost entirely by white men from a website catering specifically to neckbeards.

Remember this Liz B review of Theft of Swords? Remember “a chivalrous knight of archaic dimensions”? Yeah, same author, formerly self-published and perpetually redditor Michael J Sullivan. I haven’t read the synopsis and have no idea what this book is about, but going by the cover I’d guess it’s generic as fuck and going by the author’s previous works it is probably about as progressive gender-wise as a Conan story. Verdict: unreadable shit.

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31 Comments
by acrackedmoon on December 28, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Fantasy, Genderfail
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Posted by acrackedmoon on December 28, 2012

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/lets-roundly-shit-on-everything/

links round-up the headstomp edition

Michael Tedder is a pathetic Joss Whedon fanboy.

For example, there are vast differences in technology between the rich planets and the Dust Bowl planets, and the characters tend to use Manadarian curse words to signify that, in the continuity of the “Firefly” universe, West and East cultures have fully integrated.

[...]

Joss Whedon is the great male feminist of pop culture, and as such “Firefly” had well-rounded characters like Gina Torres’ Zoe Washburne, the ship’s second in command, and the ship’s engineer Kaylee Fyre, played by Jewel Staite. (There was a fair amount of saving damaged-genius River Tam, played by Summer Glau, throughout the series and movie, but this story line eventually paid off in a thematically satisfying way that found the character embracing her inner strength in a way that there’s not really room to explain here but which involved a lot of awesome kung-fu moves.) These characters were more than just obligatory love interests and rescue Macguffins, and they weren’t perfect Mary Sues, either. They had fleshed-out character needs and personality flaws (Kaylee was insecure, Morena Baccarin’s Inara was emotionally closed off), they often drove the episode’s plots and, as is usually the case in Whedon productions, they got the best one-liners.

Stomp this man in the head. Twice. Then put a red-hot poker in his ear–that’s a common male wish-fulfillment fantasy (see: Terry Goodkind) so we’ll be doing Tedder a favor, honest. Notice how he makes sure to tell you that the ladies are no Mary Sues, but he doesn’t feel the need to apply the same qualifier to male characters. One of his favorite moments in Firefly includes “Inara struggling not to cry after she learns that Mal had sex with her best friend,” for an extra bit of telling. Tedder, I suspect, self-identifies as a Nice Guy (lit. a creep). The rest of the article consists of him proudly proclaiming that no matter how much cheetos, sweat and assorted filth might be found in Whedon’s beard, Tedder will still kiss it.

Hayley Campbell is… I’ve no idea who she is. Anyway, she wants you to know that she’s one of the boys and that the world we live in is totally post-feminist.

These shrill cries of Won’t somebody think of the [women]! and labelling things as sexist (until they are mathematically (!) proven otherwise) thoroughly undermine and dilute the stuff that is actually sexist. [Sub-Beef: Why, when women are challenged on the internet by something they said do so many run away and hide? I'm not talking about the cases of scary harassment or stalky dudes. I've seen people flee not because of threat but discussion and disagreement. If you stick your arse out, someone's going to kick it. Always. Don’t hide. Come back, get angry.]

My problem with the whole Women In Comics thing is, and let me state this bluntly, not women in comics. Women do great comics. Men do great comics. Women do some absolutely terrible comics, and so do men. End of disclaimer. My problem is the ghettos women build for themselves. A badly-designed women-only anthology is nothing but a childish reaction to the No Girls Allowed sign hanging on the tree-house door. Need an example? Pick any you like. They are uniformly awful because of the very thing that they are saying: they aim for some sort of equality (“don’t treat us differently, we are cartoonists too”) and miss the target by fencing themselves off (“we are different”). It’s self-defeating. Put everything together in a big heap and we will decide what’s good or not based on words and pictures, not gender. A women-only anthology is in no way empowering. It is not helping. It’s actually kind of embarrassing and completely old-fashioned. In the 1970s/1980s there was a need for Wimmin’s Comix and Diane Noomin and Aline Kominsky’s Twisted Sisters, but there isn’t now. The latter, while still being a women-only anthology, outgrew the particular brand of feminist bullshit I have problems with.

Some of the comments are surprisingly spot-on. The rest are the wails of mental infants.

Ronan Wills stomps on the desiccated zombie head of Ray Bradbury.

What amazes me about Fahrenheit 451 isn’t that it’s so universally acclaimed, but that it’s so beloved by geeks and nerds. Go onto any internet community in which average beard length stretches below the chin  and you’ll find “list your favourite book” threads routinely ranking Fahrenheit 451 in the top three. These are the same people who usually fancy themselves progressive and forward thinking and who certainly love the shit out of their new media, so why they find this pile of lukewarm tripe so appealing is beyond me. Or maybe it isn’t, given what most internet nerds are like.

I hated this book. Dear god did I hate it. Probably more than is strictly fair if I’m being honest, but it pushed several of my personal nuclear-meltdown buttons (in case that wasn’t obvious enough).

Oh, and if you’re ever in doubt that SFF continues to be a regressive shitpool that needs to lined up before a firing squad, take a look at these poll results for best SFF novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To the best of my knowledge pretty much every single author named is a pasty Aryan, and the overwhelming majority of them–90% if not more–are men. SFF, that great bastion of progressiveness!

32 Comments
by acrackedmoon on December 22, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Genderfail, Other
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Posted by acrackedmoon on December 22, 2012

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2012/12/22/links-round-up-the-headstomp-edition/

get your links here while they’re cold

A Stripper Reviews the Saints in Hitman: Absolution

So what did you think about the trailer overall?

I think it’s an excuse to show violence against women by making them the initiators of violence. It’s as if the makers of this video game are saying, “Hey, these women asked for it. It’s okay to kill them and beat them up because they’re the ‘dregs of society.’” It’s as if [the game is saying] they are subhuman and deserve to die. But that’s not who they are, it’s what they do for a living; stripping is a job, not an identity.

Someone is doing one of those chapter-chapter dissection of an Anita Blake book. Cool. No beef with that, these things are usually entertaining to read. Except–

Three: You are a bitch [Anita Blake]. And not the good, awesome, Sigorney Weaver kind of bitch, either. You are everything that people hate about women.

We call that internalized misogyny, friend, and I’m not talking about the internalized misogyny of Anita Blake the fictional character. She also complains that Anita dresses like a hooker and praises a different series for having its female protagonist be under some alpha asshole’s paternalistic protection and how that is awesome.

And then you have Bran, aka the Marrok, the Alpha of All Alphas in the United States. You do not fuck with Bran. Bran helped raise Mercy when Mercy’s mom realized she couldn’t handle having a coyote for a daughter. Adam is scary. Stefan is scarier. Mercy isn’t all that scary at all, but you don’t fuck with her because if you’re fucking with her, you’re fucking with Bran, and as I said, you don’t fuck with Bran.

Here is what I don’t get about ex-fans of the series: out of all the things to criticize about Anita Blake, they go after “she dresses like a hooker,” “she’s a Mary Sue” and “this is a fucked-up self-insert and let’s speculate about Laurell K Hamilton’s sex life” (yes, they’re coming this close to suggesting that she might have been raped). It is possible to say the writing is shit, Hamilton is racist, or that the books are chock-full of internalized misogyny… but no, “she dresses like a hooker” is what people decide is a valid concern. Really?

Caitlin Moran is shitty, as per usual, this time with a nice bit of “this is how easy you are to rape” rhetoric. Another Angry Woman righteously took her to task.

According to Moran, high heels function as some sort of rapist cowbell, advertising that there is a lone woman wandering abroad, ripe for the picking. I’ve never lain awake listening to the sound of heels and thinking about how easily I could rape that person, and I’m pretty sure vast swathes of the population share this nocturnal activity because we don’t believe the problem is what a woman wears.

Perhaps Caitlin Moran has been listening to some of the criticism levelled at her, though, by her attempt at a dimly intersectional analysis, over which the wail of a sad trombone sounds. Rape culture, unfortunately, will not be solved by Moran’s clever manifesto of All Women Shall Have Taxis. What if the taxi driver is a rapist? It’s not unheard of: recall, for example, the Black Cab Rapist who earned his moniker after raping women who had got into his taxi.

Dear Author is doing another round of hand-wringing over “mainstream respectability” for romance.

Because it’s not just about Romance as a genre. It’s also about (primarily) women writing about the inner lives of other women. It’s about validating books that take as their subject matter the emotional journey to love, even and especially when that love comes in a form that challenges the social status quo (e.g. m/m or f/f Romance). It’s about legitimating the domestic elements of fiction and appreciating the reality that for many people in the world, love was and is still a revolutionary concept (e.g.multiracial/multicultural Romance).

This is some manipulative rot. Imagine saying “SFF should be more respected mainstream because MINORITY AUTHORS WORK IN IT” when both you and I know that SFF is still dominated by straight white people. When you attempt to characterize a genre, any genre, as defined by minorities (when in actuality that genre is 98% majority and upholding the status quo) you are a lying shit and appropriating minorities to serve a majority concern because you want to pretend your favorite toy is a legitimate adult’s serious business. “I don’t read genre fiction because I enjoy stupid shit,” you crow. “Oh no, I read it because it’s progressive and full of minorities!” Please.

Oh, and what is that last line about how love is still a revolutionary concept for many people in the world followed by ”multiracial/multicultural”? Is that an “enlightened liberal” with a savior complex freak on? Can someone be so vapid as to believe anyone anywhere–and the phrasing suggests benighted thirdworlders–needs romance novels to teach them what’s love? (The targets she has in mind would probably be Indians and Middle Easterners, due to western perception of arranged marriage and Islam. There’s a specific racist dog whistle being blown.)

23 Comments
by acrackedmoon on December 18, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Genderfail, Other, Racefail
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Posted by acrackedmoon on December 18, 2012

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/get-your-links-here-while-theyre-cold/

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