All posts in category Other

those links

Plugging the Alphahole

“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.

MMORPG powergamers.

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.

8 Comments
by acrackedmoon on April 29, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by acrackedmoon on April 29, 2013

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/04/29/those-links/

eat your links and like them

The Rape of James Bond.

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.

19 Comments
by acrackedmoon on March 28, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by acrackedmoon on March 28, 2013

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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
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Posted by acrackedmoon on March 14, 2013

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

read these links and you too will hate

Some heap of excrement thinks that if you’re annoyed or “upset” by uncritical depiction of rape in grimdark fantasy, it’s basically your own fault because you’re too sensitive. Survivors? Toughen up, dearies, can’t live in that rose-tinted bubble.

Readers who like to live in a rose-tinted bubble without any awareness of the kind of sick shit that does happen during times of turmoil will be upset by this book. If you prefer your heroes gallant and noble, then go read a romance novel. For example, some ladies couldn’t look past the references to rape. Um. Hello. This is WAR. Rape isn’t nice but hey, if you’re living in times of civil unrest, do you honestly expect war-mongering males to politely keep their dicks in their trousers? You don’t have to like what Jorg and his merry band of adventurers get up to. Hell, I didn’t like some of the stuff they did, but I accepted it as realism. Or maybe the fact that I live in South Africa has desensitised me. It doesn’t really matter, suffice to say that I shoved aside my own sensibilities so that I could get into the story.

Isn’t she brave and edgy? Maybe she’ll grow up into an adult human being with empathy someday, but I wouldn’t hold out the hope.

Have Ronan Wills‘ glorious shredding of Kevin Hearn’s Fullmetal Druid.

On the racefail front Hearne fairs better than many of his contemporaries purely by virtue of the fact that almost everyone in Hounded is as white as humanely possible without turning transparent, but there is an eyebrow-raising scene with a (dark and scary) Indian witch spirit inhabiting the body of an aggressively Irish bar worker. Because brown people are great and all, as long as we don’t have to actually look at them.

[...]

If genre fiction at its worst can be thought of as a deep, dark hole than urban fantasy is the mariana trench. Burn it and salt the earth so nothing can ever grow again.

Let’s talk about cutting off Superman’s dick. Sounds good to me.

Turns out Orson Scott Card Has Always Been an Asshat and then some.

So we drove to a nearby city and did the honored guest thing, drinking the free booze and eating the free munchies throughout the day. The culmination of the evening was a party in Robert Adams’ suite. I had never heard of Adams, but he wrote a fairly popular manly-man rape & pillage fantasy series called “Horseclans.” He was there with another SF writer whose name you would recognize less from his SF than from a popular column he wrote for a computer magazine.

[...]

Of course this attempted assault may have had nothing to do with Card, but it’s obvious it had everything to do with Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman. I would probably find the irony much less delicious if Adams had in fact punched me. Card wrote a justification for anyone who ever has a violent thought; Elaine called him on it. And the ultimate reaction to her callout was violence.

Interested in Peter V Brett’s next installment of grimdark, The Daylight War? It is, of course, rapey, misogynistic and racist. By scum for scum and all that.

Which ties it all up to my initial response: if you liked the first two books, nothing I’ve said about the third will dissuade you from reading it. You’ve already had rapiness, perpetual womb-talk and evil foreigners enslavin’ our children and takin’ our wimmenfolk into their hay-rems. There’s nothing worse in this book, so if you’ve come this far… Enjoy.

Plagiarism wank in the YA blogosphere from last year: The Story Siren and Plagiarism. Who the fuck plagiarizes blog content, of all things? How can anyone be that starved for attention or publicity or whatever it is that Kristi Diehm thinks she’s getting? Is the YA fandom basically populated by children?

Remember Colum Paget? He’s back with another round of vile word vomit, this time more disgusting than the last.

Cause of the fall out: A tweet by someone who said, and I’m going to try to paraphrase because I don’t really want people to know who they were, “this sh*t done to women by, you know, MEN”… it represents a standard position that I commonly see online and elsewhere, and I don’t mean a standard position taken towards MEN, it’s a standard position taken towards men, women, black and white, rich and poor, believers and atheists. It’s a position that takes the actions of individuals in a group, and characterizes the whole group in those terms. Although the example I’m giving here from my recent experience is a run-in with feminists, this is not a problem with feminists. You can find this kind of statement among just about any political group, Democrat or Republican, religious or unbeliever, windows or mac. This is an attitude is common across the human race, and it’s key doorway into hate, because it leads one from being angry at the actions of a few to hating an entire group.

[...]

One argument that was put forwards in defence of this statement was that the use of MEN in capitals didn’t mean men as an entire group, it meant some men, or ‘too many’ men. I don’t really buy this argument. If I’d made a comment something like “This sh*t being done by, you know, MUSLIMS” then even if I was talking about something were the transgressors were Muslim, I think people would see my statement as tarring all Muslims with the same brush, implying they were all like the transgressors. Claims made that the comment just referred to men in the plural, because the transgressors *happened* to be men, are also disingenuous, because the transgressors are also human beings, so the comment is equivalent to “This sh*t done by, you know, HUMAN BEINGS.” A statement which I don’t think anyone would make, because it doesn’t really mean anything. For a statement in this form to make any sense it has to be singling out a group and claiming that the group identity is significant.

[...]

Again, before I get too high-and-mighty on this issue, I have to confess that I’ve done this generalizing thing in the past myself (Full disclosure: After hearing a slew of reports of misogynist events happening in what can broadly be called the ‘Islamic World’, I once wrote a blogpost decrying Islam. But Islam, like most religions, is a broad church, and though those problems exist and are ongoing, there’s vast numbers of Muslims who disapprove of the behavior and oppose it. However, if we define it as a ‘Muslim problem’ we make it harder for them to deal with the issues, because they have to waste time defending their religion from the generalized accusations).

tl;dr Colum Paget barged into a hashtag that’s a safe space for women and proceeded to shit all over it demanding that they be nicer and WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ!!! Like, he literally tried to tone-police women talking about sexual assault. Feminists tore him a new one, causing him to cry big white male crocodile tears and come up with that analogy about Muslims, since “misandry” is just as bad as Islamophobia, do you see. He then proceeds to screech that if you wimmen keep being so “inflammatory” you won’t get anything done and will just alienate good allies like him, you know. Whatever will we do then. The fun thing about Paget is that the last time he was called out on twitter, he deleted his twitter and threw a fit about how I’ll send minions to physically attack him at cons (because the most vulnerable demographic at SFF cons? Why, white men! Like Jay Lake). Who knows best about being oppressed and hated? White men! Who should get to be the ultimate authority on both, and on agitating for equality or how that should be done? White men! Who should get to tell minorities just what to do? White men!

He’s @SirEnigmatic, by the way. Keep in mind that the dude’s deeply creepy in person and likes to pester people who want nothing to do with him both online and off (especially minorities at cons, many of whom know exactly the kind of views he holds), so yeah.

32 Comments
by acrackedmoon on February 10, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by acrackedmoon on February 10, 2013

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/read-these-links-and-you-too-will-hate/

talking horse palate cleanser

Wow, for a bit I thought this was a parody.

But trust me, one day in your first trimester it’ll hit you that for each of the six billion people on the planet, a mother was pregnant and went through what you’re going through. It’s the most ordinary thing in the world and yet, when it happens to you, it’ll be the most extraordinary experience you’ll have had to date.
[...]
In a way, telling yourself that you’re not ready to become a parent is like saying, “I’m not ready to broaden my horizons.” Or, “I’m not ready to be humbled on a daily basis.” Or, “I’m not ready to feel my heart swell up with admiration and pride.”

I know it seems like a big step. I know it looks like motherhood is giving up yourself. It’s not. It’s just shedding the parts of you that you don’t really need anymore. There’s no guidebook that can prepare you for that; you learn through the experience of it. Motherhood is like boot camp for the soul.

So… motherhood turns you into a zombie? Notice she doesn’t mention fatherhood. This is about her passing judgment on another woman (and by extension, all women who don’t want children) because she’s internalized patriarchal bullshit and wants to harangue every other woman into becoming as fucked up as she is.

The best part is that Kovac was addressing a straw-woman. The “career woman” that she so resents isn’t even real but a caricature she painted to look shallow, silly, and useless (unlike her, the superior all-knowing mommy). Amusingly despite having shat out what she believes is an “open letter” that’ll make people sympathetic to her and contemptuous of the straw career woman, counter-articles instead sympathize with the fictional Doris and tear into Kovac instead. Even other mothers feel Kovac is a self-righteous, condescending piece of shit. Incompetence in action!

Yes, parenting is joyful, ego-shattering (in a good way), and awe-inspiring. But parenting is not the only endorphin-oxytocin-dopamine natural high out there. And it’s certainly not the only way for a woman to reach her highest potential—do you hold the same rite of passage to fatherhood as wholly necessary for a man? People everywhere soar high and engage in meaningful, excellent, and fulfilling lives without children (or dogs for that matter).

Nightmare Mode has an explanation for the gamer mentality.

We throw tantrums, as if our games were holy objects and that a particular gun being available “only at Gamestop” somehow violates our sacred human rights.

It does not. My own insistence that games, their developers, and their critics bend to my will betrays an ugly truth about human nature that is accentuated by videogames: I am fundamentally self-centered and unloving, desperately concerned with my own well-being to a lopsided degree.

Games didn’t train me to be this way, but they provide an outlet for it. They provide constant positive feedback – regular assurance that even if I fail repeatedly, I am still always “leveling up.” They go out of their way to assure me that I am accomplishing goals and unlocking enough to justify the activity. Games fall over themselves to win me over, and to show me that they are worth my time.

Merritt Kopas talks about Oppression and Play.

Because dys4ia requires active participation by the player, it draws them into the logic of a system bigger than the individual. It gives non-trans players a tiny glimpse of the frustrations of living in a society that tells you over and over that you do not exist, and that, when it on occasion deigns to admit that you do, then drops obstacle after obstacle in the path of your desires and goals. Here, one student said that the game helped them to better understand the process of transition and all of the institutional and societal barriers involved. Another told me that the game helped them to better understand the idea of ideology as a force bigger than the individual, something that can structure one’s options and choices in life without one’s knowledge or consent.

Another Nightmare Mode piece takes on Sometimes games want you to think they’re critiquing violence, but instead they legitimize it.

The engineer explains: “We do not know our enemy. How can we hope to stop something we do not understand? If we can capture one of these creatures alive, we may be able to…communicate with it.” The military personnel immediately understands: “…and interrogate it,” he intones.

And I can’t help but feel like this is the exact same conversation that took place before the Executive Branch of the United States started performing extraordinary renditions.

The actions that we take have consequences that aren’t immediately apparent. The scariest part is that those actions don’t have to happen in the “real world” to have serious effects on our day-to-day meatlives. XCOM, in some small way, legitimizes a certain way of acting in and thinking about the world.

Mattie Brice’s Would You Kindly.

This is why the recent public foray about video games and violence is rather laughable. Games are clearly overestimated when it comes to the kinds of topics and play is actually there. American society, at least, has identified guns and violence with boys and men for as long as I’ve been alive, and most likely before the first video game. It reminds me of an anecdote Brendan makes in his book, that cover shooters remind him of playing games of pretend as a child. Video games are currently a translation of that, a reincarnation of stereotypically boys’ activities that do impart cultural values, but do not simulate anything real. We can see this throughout all other media, and can attribute the homogeneity of both the artists and the audiences they target. This is why our Vice President calls a meeting to solve gun violence over the rare attack at a predominately white school and not the frequent, systematic murder of transgender women of color.

I know many developers and players are excited about the avenue of satire. The ‘gotchya!’ is easy to formulate and punctuate an otherwise typical game. But letting business as usual carry on until the final stages serves no one any good- it creates the illusion that these problems are outside of us, easily boxed away when we please. Indeed, challenging the player from the get-go with actual problems might not be fun and require the help of someone who isn’t white, heterosexual, nor a man.

Boo-hoo.

Basically, Nightmare Mode is the best gaming site around. Read it sometime. Related (re: the Dead Island mutilated bikini torso): It Belongs in a Museum.

Ronan Wills read Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim. Trigger warning: pedophilia, of the “she’s really an adult but looks like a twelve-year-old” sort as embraced by Sheri Tepper et al, but with more frills. Kadrey doesn’t really understand gothic lolita, but he doesn’t understand much of anything.

Urban fantasy is well known for being a cess-pit of terrible writing produced by stunted, illiterate racists. It’s possibly the single most worthless genre in all of fiction. So of course when I was offered a copy of Sandman Slim by the proprietor of  Requires Only That You Hate I jumped at the chance. Partially this was due to the front cover blurb describing the book as a “dirty-ass masterpiece” which is quite possibly the least appealing endorsement I’ve ever seen. I feel like I should be wearing gloves every time I pick up my eReader.

Yes, I do go around offering copies of truly horrendous books to people who then read ‘em so I don’t have to. Win-win. (See also this review of Mark Lawrence’s Prince of Thorns. I’m hoping for a similarly thorough review of the sequel. Bread? Well and truly snatched from the author’s mouth! Or his neckbeard, it’s hard to tell.)

Did I say talking horse palate cleanser? Arthur B reviews Waters Rising.

Horses who are rapists: 1.
Rapist cartoonish villains who get some form of comeuppance: All.
Rapist horses who get a pass because they get upset and yell at you if you call them a rapist: 1
Probability that Tepper thinks the horse isn’t actually a rapist: Uncomfortably high.
[...]
“But Arthur,” you may be saying at this point, “you don’t understand! I am a complete moral vacuum who doesn’t care how odious the opinions put forth by a novel on ecology, rape, mass drowning and eugenics are. Surely I can at least enjoy this novel as an ethically reprehensible but competently written science fantasy saga?”

Nope, ‘fraid not. The miserable failure of The Waters Rising as a novel is something which we can all agree on. Come back, Steve Stirling! Take up your axes and ride out with me, oh hordes of Robert E. Howard fans! We can all find something we hate with this novel! Reactionaries will hate the eco-feminism, ecologists and feminists will yell “Get the fuck off my side!”, and all of us can be united in one common experience: the fact that reading this book is an incredibly tedious process.

I think he actually read through the whole thing, too. Could I interest you in Sandman Slim, Arthur? It even has the same pedo schtick.

10 Comments
by acrackedmoon on February 4, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by acrackedmoon on February 4, 2013

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/talking-horse-palate-cleanser/

linking all the links

Subashini writes about Les Miserables and whiteness.

But Red Lights didn’t need De Niro. Maybe it would have been less of a smug mess without him. He plays the character of Simon Silver, a charismatic superstar psychic, with absolutely zero charisma. One imagines that De Niro might have possessed some charisma at some point—so many people seem to love him—but that charisma is gone and you’re left with De Niro and his superstar-psychic soliloquies. With De Niro now you get a superstar playing an actor playing a superstar psychic. Something was lost along the way, and I think the something is Feelings. What happens to male actors who are great (or considered great?) They ossify and become spectres of themselves. This is what awards shows like the Golden Globes “honour” year after year. Ghosts. While real people like black women and women of colour try to find roles that don’t demean them too much.

Check out a strong female character.

White People HQ brings you many pearls of wisdom. For example, on being a straight ally:

Gay people are the in thing right now. They are all over TV and the movies. Every summer they have a huge parade which, if you ignore the first half being filled with uniformed colonizers and harassment agents (the military and the police respectively), is really fun. To get to the parade you will need your ally card. Here is how you get it.

The most important thing about being a straight ally is reminding everyone that you are straight.  Never let anyone think you are gay.  Letting people think you are gay might mean you get a gay card which comes with so much more responsibility than the ally card.  You want access to the parade and maybe some services (decorating and the like) you stereotypically associate with gay folk you don’t want the real struggle. That is draining. If you are really lucky you might be able to use some gay folk to brighten up your dull racist assertions about a particular elsewhere being full of evil people.

Or empathy and whiteness!

A recent TV advert by Unicef offers parents a chance to purchase a card system allowing them to discuss difficult concepts with their children.  Although the concept of parenting-by-card is unusual in most cultures one is expected to jump on the opportunity to have your parenting automated should you present yourself as white. The final card in the Unicef deck deals with something every white person struggles with: empathy.

Empathy was largely inbred out of white leadership in order for them to succeed as colonial overlords over a century ago. Nevertheless a combination of training and drugging (mainly privilege and experimental pharmaceuticals) keeps non-elite whites from developing empathy during puberty. This results in strange result when white people encounter others who display the trait.

It’s okay white people, the person who wrote this is white. Calm down. Don’t be a sensitive crybaby. Grow up. Get some skin. Punch yourself in the face.

More on whiteness at Spectra Speaks: When Doing Good Goes Wrong: One Woman’s Story about White Saviorism in Africa. See?

Jaymee Goh lays down some truth, again on white people: Racist Things Steampunks Are Not Immune To: Looking for Other People’s Hurt To be Offended By.

Chiusse goes after misogyny in neckbeard favorite Waste of Time: A Misogyny of Light.

Claire Light has a few things to say about urban fantasy.

Outsider status: although all these conflicts and anxieties and desires are common and mainstream, there’s still the desire to stand outside of the mainstream, to be special and also be to be a bit oppressed. This is partly adolescent, partly American (wherein our entire identity hinges on overcoming challenges and being individual), and partly guilty-white-girl. The last one is why so many urban fantasy heroines are mixed race (never just poc, though.) In this post-civil-rights-movement era, outsider status is most quickly vouchsafed by being a person of color. But, of course, no white woman REALLY dreams of being black, so it’s always American Indian or Asian (although the half-Asians are usually the sidekicks.)

This is why white authors who throw in biracial status for their characters can’t be trusted. Trust them even less if they toot their “inclusion” horn. For more, see Assassin’s Creed 3: Mighty Whitey Fantasy Recast as Biracial Dude.

Ronan Wills gives some thoughts on Djoango Unchained in The Caucasian Escape Hatch.

12 Comments
by acrackedmoon on January 27, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Other, Racefail
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Posted by acrackedmoon on January 27, 2013

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/linking-all-the-links/

being a fan of problematic things while pretending they aren’t

It might seem peculiar that Rowling would go to the trouble to racially identify certain characters only to ignore their racial status for the remainder of the series, but this particular combination of behaviors is characteristic of contemporary neo-conservative racial ideology (Omi & Winant).

According to this ideology, race is assumed to be socially constructed and racial justice is pursued via a “color-blind” society in which everyone pursues the American/British dream by “lifting themselves up by the bootstraps” (i.e., a “just world” that rewards good choices and a strong work ethic). “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our [biological or God-given] abilities,” says Dumbledore (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 333), who later reminds Fudge, the Minister of Magic, that what people grow to be is much more important than what they were when they were born (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire 708). Accordingly, for neo-conservatives, the belief that race (a biological or God-given characteristic) does not matter is typically grounded in one or both of two seemingly contradictory but actually compatible beliefs—that “we” are all the same (i.e., “humans” or “Americans” or “Muggles”) and that each one of us is a unique person.

–Robin S. Rosenberg, The Psychology of Harry Potter: An Unauthorized Examination Of The Boy Who Lived

Fans of a thing will wank themselves into a coma to make that thing look more erudite, more prestigious, and just all around more elevated than it really is. This is not a surprise and not a new phenomenon; fannish investment turns brains to mush and replaces higher functions with zergling behavior because at a certain stage of fannishness what you consume becomes your identity, and you spend both money and time toward this consumption as well as acting as unpaid marketing drones for it, incorporating it into your life philosophy and how you view the world. The synonym for this is “fucking pathetic.”

I’ve been over this before and it’s self-evidently stupid, so what I want to address is the kind of fan behavior that makes you do the opposite of being a fan of problematic things. This behavior comes in two types: ignoring that a problem exists (to wit: fans of Tolkien or R Scott Bakker) or pretending that not only does the problem not exist, the piece of media in question actively solves the problem it is perpetuating.

For the latter, see the fandom of Harry Potter, young adult at large, Joss Whedon, or romance.

(more…)

33 Comments
by acrackedmoon on January 7, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by acrackedmoon on January 7, 2013

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/being-a-fan-of-problematic-things-while-pretending-they-arent/

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
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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
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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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