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.

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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.

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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.