msslytherin

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Yeah I think you’re in the right place, Al.

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Write fanfic for yourself.

Publish fanfic for the rotation of 3-6 people who are devoted readers and will either go feral or leave you very nice words and yell with you about it.

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Fantasy books written by women are often assumed to be young adult, even when those books are written for adults, marketed to adults, and published by adult SFF imprints. And this happens even more frequently to women of color.

This topic’s an ongoing conversation on book Twitter, and I thought it might be worth sharing with Tumblr. And by “ongoing,” I mean that people have been talking about this for years. Last year, there was a big blow up when the author R.F. Kuang said publicly that her book The Poppy War isn’t young adult and that she wished people would stop calling it such. If you’ve read The Poppy War, then you’ll know it’s grimdark fantasy along lines of Game of Thrones… and yet people constantly refer to The Poppy War as young adult – which is one of its popular shelves on Goodreads. To be fair, more people have shelved it as “adult,” but why is anyone shelving it as “young adult” in the first place? Game of Thrones is not at all treated this way…

Rebecca Roanhorse’s book Trail of  Lightning, an urban fantasy with a Dinétah (Navajo) protagonist has “young adult” as its fifth most popular Goodreads shelf. The novel is adult and published by Saga, an adult SFF imprint. 

S.A. Chakraborty’s adult fantasy novel City of Brass has “young adult” as its fourth most popular Goodreads shelf. 

Tasha Suri’s Empire of Sand, an adult fantasy in a world based on Mughal India, has about equal numbers of people shelving it as “adult” or “young adult.” 

Book Riot wrote an article on this, although they didn’t address how the problem intersects with race. I also did a Twitter thread a while back where I cited these examples and some more as well. 

The topic of diversity in adult SFF is important to me, partly because we need to stop mislabeling the women of color who write it, and also because there’s a lot there that isn’t acknowledged! Besides, sometimes it’s good to see that your stories don’t just end the moment you leave high school and that adults can still have vibrant and interesting futures worth reading about. I feel like this is especially important with queer rep, for a number of reasons. 

Other books and authors in the tweets I screenshot include:

Witchmark by C.L. Polk

A Ruin of Shadows by L.D. Lewis

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

The Day Before by Liana Brooks

A Phoenix First Must Burn edited by Patrice Caldwell

Shri, a book blogger at Sun and Chai

Vanessa, a writer and blogger at The Wolf and Books

TLDR: Women who write adult fantasy, especially women of color, are presumed to be writing young adult, which is problematic in that it internalizes diversity, dismisses the need and presence of diversity in adult fantasy, and plays into sexist assumptions of women writers. 

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people have used the “whoOOooAAA, yugioh hair is SOooOOooOO CRAZY!!!” punchline for like, what, 20 years now? But the thing is, ygo hair is really one of the fantastic little ways that yugioh just Owns how bonkers it is. Just presents the plate of crazy and tells you this how it’s gonna be and if you don’t like it, there’s the door. Characters’ hairstyles are absolutely off the shits and maybe you get one or two little jokes about it (usually in the dub) but you never have people in universe like “but WHYYY does it look like that??!?!” cuz it doesnt MATTER. the hair is zany JUST BECAUSE. so much yugioh mayhem, especially wrt character designs, it exists in universe JUST BECAUSE. they’ll drop a character on you who’s like 7 feet tall with neon green hair spikes that could spear a bird out of the sky and NO you’re not getting an explanation for it, that’s just Javelin Joe and you’re gonna watch him duel now.

it’s all just so unflappably rule of cool to the absolute highest degree. it’s a feature not a bug. and it’s GREAT.

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PLEASE read yugioh

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I feel like witches are sedentary and wizards are migratory. A witch has a home, a cauldron, herbs, you go to them with your problem. A wizard wanders, disappears, shows up at inconvenient times to fix nothing. am i making sense

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klavier finally got his dinner date!

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do you ever think about how you have such double standards for fic writers vs book authors and tv/movie writers?

like you don’t like when fic writers do xyz, but when you read it in a young adult novel you have no problem, or you see it on the screen and you love it.

that’s just so funny to me. the hypocrisy is so funny to me.

you’ll bitch about an age gap fic (even though both characters are concenting adults) but you adore call me by your name which has a 17 year old fucking a 24 year old (and i’m not bashing cmbyn i love that movie i’m just using it as an example).

you’ll bitch about adult fic authors writing minors having sex with each other but you’ll watch gossip girl where teenagers are fucking like crazy on screen.

you do realize that all of that was written by adults, right? most of the media you consume is created by adults. and when we write about teenagers fucking it’s not because we want to fuck teenagers. that’s gross. we’re writing about experiences, and we’re writing coming-of-age stories because we’ve already fucking been through that shit and we have life experiences that you don’t. if we didn’t the content you would have would fucking suck. it would suck.

most of your favorite fic writers are adults. your favorite novels and tv shows and movies were all written by adults. and if you enjoy that media anywhere except for when it’s in fics why is that? is it because fan fiction authors are more accessible to you? is it because you can find us on discord and tumblr and tell us all about your favorite and least favorite parts of what we’ve written? and you can’t do that with the authors of your favorite novels and the writers of your favorite tv shows and movies?

i just think your hypocrisy is bullshit, and maybe you should think more about what the fuck you say to people who write things for free. no one is forcing you to read anything. if you don’t like it don’t fucking read it and leave the people who do write it alone.

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bridge to the turnabout

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You know the problem with reading a book? You get hooked and then it ends and you feel sad

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It's fun reading writers who clearly grew up in suburban/urban environments as someone who grew up on a farm because they're always like "oh it was so creepy, woods at night, eerily breathtaking, something was living in there..." and it's like yeah that'll be the deer.

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atem being protective of kaiba..

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I saw this tumblr post and HAD to draw it, please accept my humble A:TLA offering.

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playing ace attorney like damn they’re all gay??? this is the gayest game ive ever played

gay ass quote if you get it you get it