#like any genre the book is shaped by the author's lens

[fictionadventurer]

That C.S. Lewis quote about being "old enough for fairy tales again" is really popular in this section of tumblr, but I think I've hit an opposite stage where I'm old enough for realism again. As a teenager in English class, realism seemed like the boring, baseline option that limited your imagination to only the dullest parts of daily life. If I wanted real life, I'd just live it! Stories should give us something bigger and brighter and more exciting!

But as I get older, I'm starting to understand that realism isn't about limiting yourself to the real world, it's about appreciating it. It's about noticing and caring about those tiny details in life. It's about looking at the seemingly ordinary and unexciting people and saying that their stories are worth telling, too. There's a beauty in gazing upon this world in delicate detail and drawing out those fine shades of nuance that you don't notice in the bustle of actually living life. Realism lets you slow down and recognize that our world has wonders, too, and they don't all have to be big and flashy to be worth our attention.

Younger me also got the impression that realism was depressing--we don't get happy endings because they're not realistic. And it's true that realism has a greater share of sad endings, but that can be a comfort. As you grow up, you have more and more experiences tell you that the happiness of life is buried in a lot of murkier emotions--a lot of turmoil and uncertainty and bad decisions--and realism says that's okay. The story's worth telling even if it doesn't end well, even if people don't rise above their baser natures, even if things are a bit dull. Realism can be happier, in some ways, than those bigger, brighter genre stories, because it acknowledges those murkier imperfections of life and says that they don't erase happiness or make someone's story not worth telling.

Lewis' quote is great, but it's not the whole story. Like Chesterton says, children are fascinated by fairy tales, but the youngest children are fascinated by reality--"A child of seven is excited to hear that Tommy opened a door and found a dragon, while a child of three is excited to hear that Tommy opened a door." Fantasy is a fantastic escape, but like all travel, the point of it is to make us see our own world more clearly when we return home. And that's where realism comes in. Those types of stories aren't about casting off childish fancy and focusing on the grim details of adulthood--they can be about regaining an even more innocent and child-like wonder.

[orangerosebush]

If you've seen part of this response before, that is because I'm taking my comments from another post about how you can use a queer lens to interpret the symbolic implications of how Artemis' coming of age adheres (or doesn't adhere, rather) to typical children's lit protagonist arcs.

Specifically, I want to use this post to talk about the genre trend in YA of having the main child/teen character (i.e., the character with whom the presumed teen reading demographic is identifying) end their series having "successfully" become a "normal", heterosexual adult by getting married and having children (which also opens up the possibility of a sequel series, lol). An iconic example would be how the HP epilogue and post-canon canon material outline the minutiae of what former-protags from the original series are now grown up and heterosexually married to what other former-protags; the epilogue materials for HP also mention the children that have resulted from these (exclusively) heterosexual canonical marriages.

Also, if it seems like my wording is repetitive, that is because I want to be precise lol! The subjects I'm treating here are the legally- and socially-diffused power structures that work to render heterosexuality the "norm" at the expense of other sexualities (even heterosexuals suffer under this system, as patriarchy further complicates things here). It would be biphobic, not to mention not grounded in material analyses of power and sexuality, to imply that bi people who are in different gender romantic relationships are "reifying norms of heterosexuality".

With that established, there's a lot of interesting scholarship on how children's lit and YA can function in part to outline what characteristics define a "normal" transition into becoming an adult in the particular society a text exists within. Fiction is a safe space to explore possibility, and if you can delimit what possibilities are possible, then that is an important part of shaping what possibilities are explored socially.

Thus, when we talk about the aforementioned genre convention of having the protagonists of YA series end those series by getting heterosexually married and then having kids, we're not talking about any individual narrative about characters that just so happen to grow up to be heterosexual adults.

Rather, we're talking about the way experiences become solidified as cultural "norms" through complex trends in fiction -- and that is NOT a result of authors intentionally, nefariously going "haha, and today I will use my fictional story to convince my readers that heterosexuality is the only possible sexuality one can have". That is a facile understanding of how norms are culturally produced, not to mention a misunderstanding of the way that the "normalcy" of heterosexuality is internalized through encounters with fiction.

But to return to my point about applying a queer lens to analyze the coming-of-age story in the books, there's this moment in TLC that is so interesting to unpack.

First off, you have to look at how parts of the series function as a metaphor for the struggles of coming of age.

In the above scene that I attached from TLC, you have Butler, an important older male figure in Artemis' life and one of the central adult characters of the series, stating that Artemis being "distracted by girls" is something both "normal" and "natural" that was deferred by Artemis' adventures with the fae. Furthermore, in the first book, Artemis mentions that he was able to discover the People because he occupies a liminal space between the adult world and the child world. Here, when I emphasize a refusal by Artemis to fully enter the "normal" adult world that Butler identifies as being tied to the experience of having one's first heterosexual crush, that isn't me saying that queerness/non-straightness is "childish". Rather, by the (unjust) standards of homophobic power structures that influence our society, for one to enter the adult world — for one to be accepted as a normal adult — one must assimilate into normative heterosexuality. And that very assimilation into heterosexual adulthood is something that Artemis' adventures (adventures that are made possible by him rejecting that world of "normal" adulthood!) have "distracted" him from pursuing.

I think one can interpret there being a hidden queer reading of Artemis "being distracted" from "normal" feelings that he should have been experiencing due to focusing his attention on these adventures. Symbolically, I know that I can draw parallels during my adolescence of avoiding confronting — or rather, preventing myself from feeling — my attraction to women by throwing myself into academics, which was a way to avoid questions from people in my life about why I wasn't dating like my peers were.

I want to transition to my next point with this scene: "Control puberty? [...] If you do, you'll be the first". Technically, Artemis accomplishes that in this book!

When he goes to the pocket dimension of Hybras, Artemis experiences the passing of a few hours, yet when he returns to earth, three years have gone by. Ergo, he is only fifteen years old — making him still a child — yet legally, he is eighteen due to the missing three years, providing him access to the world of adults without having to experience the aforementioned puberty that comes with aging the normal way instead of hopping around in time.

All of this is with just one scene. Honestly, the books are conducive to a bunch of different readings, and I think that one could apply a queer lens to produce readings of the series in which Artemis is gay, bisexual, asexual/aromantic, transmasculine, nonbinary, and/or what have you, using so many other moments from the series.

[livisapharb]

Reading Response 1: The Danger of a Single Story

The stories we read, hear, and tell shape our view of the world and our view of those around us. In her 2009 Ted Talk, The Danger of a Single Story, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reflects upon the power of stories and the consequences of the “single story.” She says a single story is created when you “show a people as one thing... over and over again, and that is what they become,” (Adichie 2009). Ultimately, Adichie argues that when single stories are created, they provide incomplete narratives which rob people and places of their own dignity and power. Additionally, these single stories reduce people to stereotypes and emphasize difference among groups of people. Reflecting on Adichie’s TED Talk, I have come to realize that the stories I heard and was told growing up were extremely narrow in scope. They were dominated by a westernized lens and laced with ideas of heteronormativity and “normative” identities.  

From a young age, I was never much of a reader. I was reading by the time I reached 2nd grade, but my memory of how I got to that point is foggy. Growing up with some sort of undiagnosed learning disorder, reading and comprehending the text in front of me did not come easy. I remember having trouble recognizing how words pieced together to form sentences, and how sentences flowed together to create stories. For a lot of my childhood, I relied on my father, my sisters, or my teachers throughout elementary school to choose stories for me. I remember being read a variety of picture books; Angelina Ballerina was my favorite.

Like Adichie, I was heavily influenced by American literature during my younger years. I delved into the fantasy world of Harry Potter and was enchanted by the countless adventures of Jack and Annie from the Magic Treehouse series. The literature I consumed altered the way I thought about the world and made me believe that magic was real. In her TED Talk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recounted how reading about white, westernized stories influenced the way that she wrote her own stories. It wasn’t until she began to read stories from African authors that she believed someone with the color of her skin could be in literature. Similarly, American literature I read from a young age made me believe that stories would always center around white folks like myself and characterized any other narrative as an “other.”  

As I began to read more throughout middle and high school, young adult romance quickly became my favorite genre. During this time, I began to come to terms with my sexuality. I labeled myself as bisexual, even though I now identify as a lesbian. Though most of the books I read were still very westernized and centered around white characters, I felt left out from the romance novels I was reading, just like I felt left out from the heteronormative world. My favorite book I read during my high school years was Every Last Word by Tamara Ireland Stone. I loved that the book represented mental health. I loved that I could relate to the main character’s internal conflicts with her OCD diagnosis. However, a piece of me was still missing from this book and every single other book I read.  

Heteronormativity dominated the literature that I was exposed to during early childhood, in schools, and in my very conservative hometown. I was never exposed to any queer romance in the stories I heard or was told, and I experienced a lot of compulsory heterosexuality as a result. I believed that if I did not see my sexual orientation being represented in YA novels, that my identity wasn’t valid or worth talking about. Because of the literature I was exposed to, I thought I had to experience at least some attraction to cisgender men. I truly believe that I came out as a lesbian so late in life because the stories I heard about romance were reduced to a single story, a heterosexual story.

In her TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ends with a beautiful quote: “when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise,” (Adichie 2009). I believe that when we reject a single story, we open the world and create a space where everyone feels a sense of belonging. When we reject a single story, we begin to understand those around us and how we as individuals fit into the world. When we reject a single story, we reject the misinformation we have gathered from that narrow scope of knowledge. After reflecting on this piece and my own experiences I wonder, how do we begin to undo all the single stories that literature, the media, oppressors, and systems/structures have created? 

[ymread]

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Title: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Author: Mark Manson

Genre: Nonfiction

Date Published: September 13, 2016

Rating: 2.5 / 5

Overview:

               The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is a self-help book that basically tells us to reflect on our life and filter the important ones from the unimportant and choose what and where to give a f*ck because our f*cks are limited (to choose our struggle and to only choose what matters). This book is emphasizing that problems are constant in life – it never stops and it’s fine not to be positive all the time. Pain, rejections, and failures will always be part of the process of living a good and better life.

Remarks: I am a wrong audience of this book.

This book is overly hyped and has constantly heard of its reputation since then, it did piqued my curiosity and interest and for no absolute reason it was only this time did I pick up this book. When I started reading I thought it was brilliantly written, the writing style is unique maybe because the author is mainly a blogger (it feels like I am reading a long long blog). The first paragraph is a hook! Yet just like any other books, readers may find some flaws and gets disengaged as we flipped through the pages, and when I get to the middle part, there are certain narratives of his that I disagree with mainly because the book is too practically universal nothing new and subjective that it made me lose interest, his narrative is generally speaking from his lens centered and generalized from his own experiences (some of them is not applicable to others) and readers in my bracket have mostly learned the lessons he imparted from this book hence I did say that I am a wrong audience. Heard that this has mixed reviews, went on to read some of them and unsurprisingly we have the same thoughts among those reviewers.

I do think that the book is essentially catered and more suitable towards millennials and Gen Z’s who are yet to discover the other side of life and needs guidance, or any person who is still starting to open up their eyes to the difficulties of life and still on the earliest stage of conquering and solving life problems, the book is pretty basic actually with minute substance. When I get to the end part of the book, it did hooked me up once again.

Personally, what I absolutely like about this book is that the author imparts other interesting real-life stories that are inspiring including his, I always love the part where he talks about his own experiences and how they shaped him to be who he is today. It was a great read, I was about to put it down in the middle of my reading but decided to finish it which I did not regret at all.

Favorite Part and Favorite Key Takeaway:

Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something. This made me realize that if a person is good at something than you, chances are that, that person probably failed many times than you have.

[writeleg1ant]

The Rise of Dystopian Literature: Why We Are Drawn to Stories of Dark and Disturbing Futures

Outline: I. Introduction - Definition of Dystopian Literature - The Growing Popularity of Dystopian Themes II. Historical Roots of Dystopian Literature - Early Examples and Influences - Evolution of Dystopian Narratives III. Characteristics of Dystopian Novels - Common Themes and Elements - Exploration of Societal Issues IV. Impact of Dystopian Literature - Shaping Cultural and Social Discourse - Influence on Popular Culture and Media V. Influential Dystopian Novels - 1984 by George Orwell - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins - The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood VI. Themes Explored in Dystopian Literature - Surveillance and Loss of Privacy - Totalitarian Governments - Struggle for Individuality and Freedom VII. The Allure of Dark and Disturbing Futures - Human Fascination with Worst-Case Scenarios - Reflection of Contemporary Fears and Anxieties VIII. Dystopian Literature in Modern Education - Inclusion in School Curriculums - Encouraging Critical Thinking IX. Dystopian Literature vs. Reality - Parallels with Contemporary Issues - Warning Signs and Societal Reflection X. The Role of Technology in Dystopian Narratives - Surveillance Technology in Literature - Real-World Implications XI. The Power of Dystopian Imagination - Inspiring Change and Activism - Catalyst for Social Awareness XII. Criticisms and Controversies Surrounding Dystopian Literature - Accusations of Dystopian Fatigue - Ethical Concerns Regarding Graphic Content XIII. Conclusion - Recap of Dystopian Literature's Impact - Continuous Relevance and Future Prospects XIV. FAQs (Five Unique Questions) - Is dystopian literature suitable for all age groups? - How does dystopian literature differ from other speculative fiction genres? - Can dystopian novels serve as a form of social commentary? - Are there any emerging trends in contemporary dystopian literature? - What makes dystopian literature a powerful tool for discussing societal issues? The Rise of Dystopian Literature: Why We Are Drawn to Stories of Dark and Disturbing Futures Introduction Dystopian literature, characterized by nightmarish visions of the future, has witnessed a significant surge in popularity in recent years. This genre explores unsettling societal structures, oppressive governments, and the human struggle for survival. As we delve into the rise of dystopian literature, it's essential to understand the roots of this captivating genre and its enduring impact on readers. Historical Roots of Dystopian Literature Dystopian narratives have historical roots, with early examples found in works like "The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells. Over time, dystopian literature evolved, with authors weaving intricate tales that reflected contemporary fears and anxieties. The genre became a powerful medium to comment on societal issues, offering both cautionary tales and imaginative escapes. Characteristics of Dystopian Novels Dystopian literature shares common themes such as totalitarian regimes, loss of individual freedoms, and surveillance. These novels often serve as a lens through which readers can examine and critique societal norms. The exploration of dystopian worlds allows for a deeper understanding of the human condition and the consequences of unchecked power. Impact of Dystopian Literature Beyond entertainment, dystopian literature shapes cultural and social discourse. Influencing popular culture, movies, and television, dystopian narratives often transcend the pages of books, impacting how we perceive and navigate our own world. This influence extends to education, where dystopian novels are integrated into curriculums to provoke critical thinking. Influential Dystopian Novels Certain dystopian novels have left an indelible mark on literature and society. George Orwell's "1984," Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," Suzanne Collins' "The Hunger Games," and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" stand out as pillars of the genre, each exploring unique facets of dystopian themes. Themes Explored in Dystopian Literature Dystopian literature delves into recurring themes like surveillance, totalitarian governments, and the struggle for individuality. These themes resonate because they reflect genuine societal concerns, making dystopian narratives relatable and thought-provoking. The Allure of Dark and Disturbing Futures Readers are drawn to dystopian literature because it offers a glimpse into worst-case scenarios. The genre taps into human fascination with disaster, providing a space to explore fears and anxieties in a controlled setting. By examining these dark futures, readers can confront and, to some extent, prepare for potential challenges. Dystopian Literature in Modern Education The inclusion of dystopian literature in school curriculums enhances education by encouraging critical thinking. Students analyze complex societal structures, question authority, and draw parallels between dystopian narratives and real-world issues, fostering a deeper understanding of the complexities of human society. Dystopian Literature vs. Reality Dystopian literature often mirrors contemporary issues, acting as a warning sign for potential societal pitfalls. The genre prompts readers to reflect on the present, recognizing parallels between fictional dystopias and real-world challenges. This connection fosters awareness and, in some cases, inspires action. The Role of Technology in Dystopian Narratives Advancements in technology have become integral to dystopian narratives, with surveillance and loss of privacy playing central roles. Dystopian authors explore the implications of technology on society, offering insights into potential future scenarios that resonate with our current dependence on digital surveillance. The Power of Dystopian Imagination Dystopian literature goes beyond entertainment; it inspires change and activism. By presenting alternative futures, authors challenge readers to question societal norms, fostering a sense of agency to shape a better world. Dystopian imagination becomes a catalyst for social awareness and, potentially, positive transformation. Criticisms and Controversies Surrounding Dystopian Literature Despite its influence, dystopian literature faces criticisms, including accusations of dystopian fatigue and concerns about graphic content. Some argue that the genre's prevalence may desensitize readers to its warnings. Ethical considerations regarding the portrayal of violence and distressing scenarios also spark debates within literary circles.

books that changed my life

Embarking on a literary journey is not merely an act of reading; it's a transformative odyssey that has the power to shape our perspectives, challenge beliefs, and leave an indelible mark on our souls. As I reflect on the books that changed my life, I find myself immersed in a kaleidoscope of narratives that have altered the course of my understanding and enriched the tapestry of my experiences. One such life-altering encounter was with Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning." This profound exploration of human resilience, drawn from Frankl's experiences in Nazi concentration camps, instilled in me a newfound appreciation for the strength of the human spirit and the pursuit of purpose even in the face of unimaginable adversity. Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood" served as a poignant companion during moments of introspection. Its exploration of love, loss, and the delicate threads that connect us all resonated with the nuanced emotions I grappled with, offering solace and a deeper understanding of the human condition. The philosophical musings of Hermann Hesse in "Siddhartha" guided me on a quest for self-discovery and spiritual enlightenment. The protagonist's journey echoed my own quest for meaning and purpose, prompting moments of introspection that reverberated long after the final page. "1984" by George Orwell, a dystopian masterpiece, acted as a stark warning about the perils of unchecked power and the erosion of individual freedoms. Its chilling portrayal of a totalitarian regime left an indelible imprint, fostering a vigilant awareness of societal structures and the importance of safeguarding liberty. Each book, a literary gem, has left an enduring legacy on my consciousness, shaping my thoughts, values, and understanding of the world. The transformative power of literature lies not just in the words on the page but in the profound impact it has on the reader's journey through life. Conclusion In conclusion, the rise of dystopian literature is not merely a trend but a reflection of our collective fascination with exploring the unknown, challenging societal norms, and contemplating the consequences of unchecked power. The enduring appeal of dystopian narratives lies in their ability to provoke thought, inspire change, and serve as cautionary tales for the complex world we inhabit. FAQs (Five Unique Questions) What are the 5 traits of dystopian literature? Dystopian literature manifests through vivid characteristics that paint a bleak picture of the future. Typically, these traits include oppressive government control, societal dehumanization, environmental degradation, surveillance, and the suppression of individual freedoms. These elements collectively create a nightmarish vision of a world gone astray. What is the most famous dystopian text ever written? Undoubtedly, George Orwell's "1984" stands as the epitome of dystopian literature. Published in 1949, Orwell's masterpiece envisions a totalitarian regime, Big Brother's omnipresent surveillance, and the manipulation of truth, leaving an indelible mark on the genre and society's collective consciousness. What describes dystopian? Dystopian, derived from the Greek words "dys," meaning bad, and "topos," meaning place, encapsulates an imagined society characterized by oppressive social, political, and environmental conditions. These bleak settings often serve as cautionary tales, exploring the consequences of unchecked power and societal complacency. What are the 4 types of dystopias? Dystopias come in various shades, with common types being totalitarian, corporate, ecological, and technocratic. Totalitarian dystopias feature oppressive governments, corporate dystopias showcase unchecked corporate power, ecological dystopias depict environmental collapse, and technocratic dystopias explore the dark side of technological advancement. What is a book that has changed society? Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is a pivotal work that significantly altered societal perspectives. Published in 1852, this anti-slavery novel ignited fervent discussions, heightened awareness of the horrors of slavery, and played a substantial role in galvanizing the abolitionist movement. How has literature changed the world? Literature acts as a mirror and catalyst for societal change. It sparks critical conversations, challenges norms, and fosters empathy. Books like "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee and "The Diary of Anne Frank" have influenced public discourse, fostering social awareness and advocating for justice. What is the most influential book in American history? "The Federalist Papers," a collection of essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, profoundly influenced American history. Penned in the late 18th century, these essays played a crucial role in shaping the U.S. Constitution, providing insights into the framers' intentions and political philosophy. Which book is the most powerful book in the world? "The Bible" is widely considered one of the most powerful and influential books globally. Its impact transcends religious boundaries, shaping cultural, ethical, and literary landscapes. Its narratives and teachings have left an enduring imprint on human history and continue to inspire countless individuals worldwide. Read the full article

[effervescent-hoe]

After the release of midnight sun we need to support other vampire books by people of color or authors who aren’t racist or Mormon ig

so to answer this ask i found myself turning to Lesbrary bc it was the easiest way i knew to find diverse stories with diverse authors, so this rec list is Bi and Lesbian Literature! with a link to the review on Lesbrary’s site. I haven’t read any of these books (yet!), but hopefully this sheds some light on some amazing stories that can fill that vampire void in our hearts.

This is slightly off topic, but if Carmilla appeals to you, you might be interested in this! Its a new look at The Lesbian Vampire Story through a queer lens. Lesbrary’s review says more than i could, but if you wanted more from carmilla go check it out! This Edition was edited and introduced by Carmen Maria Machado.

The next book i have to recommend to you is Fledgling by Octavia Butler. The protagonist of this one is a black vampire named Shuri, and she’s completely lost her memory, slowly relearning what her brain injury took from her and building up her life from scratch. It sounds very good, so check out this lesbrary review here for a better look!

Here’s a compilation of Black lesbian (and bi, queer, trans, and non-binary) fiction authors you should know.

Here is a selection of ten great Gothic works with sapphic characters to get you started with the genre… 

so i know this wasnt exactly what was asked of me, but i think the twilight fandom would love a wlw oriented direction to point themselves in via literature, especially vampire/supernatural/gothic. Not all of the authors mentioned here are POC, but i think that queer stories are also appealing to people seeing this post, and others in the fandom. 

BUT as a bonus, here’s so more Diverse Vampire Fiction

(goodreads) Vampire Books by POC (https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/133571.Vampire_Books_by_POC)

An Article from https://www.diversereading.com/ on Fiction With Black Vampires (https://www.diversereading.com/fiction-with-black-vampires/) also please check out the website as a whole to diversify your reading experience

Here’s 7 Wonderfully Diverse Vampire Novels

Those are the links I have for you today folks! Happy reading! I hope you enjoy this collection of books and I hope it fills the vampire shaped hole in your heart!

Because I would like these authors to get more visibility I’m tagging @rose-lily-hale and @bellasredchevy

I really hope that the fandom starts getting into more diverse vampire literature, and this ask was such a great opportunity to showcase some amazing authors that deserve the spotlight! Please feel free to add on your favorite books/authors!

[alexriderfanficrecs]

Valaks

So I’ve broken my own rule about not letting these things get too long, but this author deserves it. Full disclosure: this rec had help from two friends because they simply couldn’t resist piling in on this post.

Valaks is a popular author in the fandom for good reason. It’s not only the originality of the ideas and high quality writing that does it, but the sheer breadth of what’s on offer. Seriously, this author does it all. Nearly all genres are covered - fluff, crack, full AU, hurt/comfort, mission fics, angst and more. The range of characters explored is staggering too, with fics covering the usual suspects - Alex, Yassen, Tom, Ben Daniels, K Unit - but also more minor characters, like John Rider, Nile and Ms Bedfordshire. We are not exaggerating. There’s something for everyone here.

https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valaks/pseuds/Valaks 

We had a really hard time picking out our favorites, and would definitely recommend you just head over to AO3 and check out their whole catalogue. But here are five fics that stand out particularly well within their individual genres.

Ruthless: A one-shot set in pongnosis’s Devil!verse that explores how far Alex is willing to go when it’s Yassen’s fate on the line. We’re all fans of the relationship built up by pongnosis between Alex and Yassen, and this story is so realistic and close to the original’s tone and characterizations it feels like you could be reading a sequel/outtake from it. The gradual build of tension in this fic, from Alex’s first prickles of uneasiness to the climax and then the resolution, is masterful. And there’s so much grit and realism - definitely no shying away from the realities of working for a terrorist organization. We adored the whole thing.

Alibi: Alibi is a story examining the other side of Alex’s life: his time in school and the relationships with people outside the immediate scope of MI6, specifically Tom and Jack. This story pulls into sharp focus the impact that a year in the the shadier sides of life have not only on Alex, but the impression of him held by those closest to him. What’s more, Alibi is a wonderful look at Alex Rider through a very contemporary lens in 2020: classes held via Zoom, the ever-present reach of technology and how relationships function online. For a book series with a loose sense of the ‘present’ that updates with each publication, seeing an author tackle some of the singular challenges of the current year was a personal delight for us.

In Loving Memory: This is described in the summary as “How could the Organ Hospital get any worse”, and that about sums up the angst level of this fic. It’s brutal. But so beautifully written. The story explores the concept of memory orbs - orbs that show the individual memories of a person from whom they have been extracted - and what would happen if Yassen came across one of Alex’s. It is a wonderfully original premise, and executed with flair. Valaks is often described as an “angst author” and, whilst we consider this to be an unfair characterization given the aforementioned breadth of their work, there is no denying that they do angst very, very well and this fic is no exception. We cried.

Sweetest Thing: One of the best things about Valaks’ work is that there is always something to suit any craving - something shown very well by Sweetest Thing. It proves its title right by demonstrating the recovery process Alex goes through after a catastrophic mission and the relationship that develops between him and Yassen. First and foremost, this fic is about the ways that people can find joy and meaning again, and it does it all realistically. ‘Realism’ is often misconstrued to mean ‘bleak’ when speaking about fiction, but here Valaks reminds readers that the small joys of good company and good are worth thriving for. At just over 1.2k, it is a short and sweet (if you’ll pardon the pun) story that lingers long after you’ve finished reading.

Gentleman’s Agreement: This fic is so good it’s now building its own small following of GA-verse fics (another rec for another time). Set in a semi-canon compliant world in which Alex still works for MI6 but is on his own, Yassen survived Air Force One, and they develop a “gentleman’s agreement” for when they encounter one another in the field. Only then Alex hunts Yassen down to ask him a favor. This fic explores a possibility which isn’t that far-fetched: what would Alex and Yassen do if they kept encountering one another in the field? And it has it all - humor; suspense; the mildest of angst; a tantalising ending leaving you wondering what happens next. We especially love this fic for the way it completely nails the tone of both Alex and Yassen. It also has a wonderful prequel in the shape of Turncoat.

The above recs feature quite a bit of Alex and Yassen, but we’d underline again that there is so much more in Valaks’ collection than just that pair. Some other highlights include A Warm Reception (a Ms Bedfordshire-centric trope flip), Druggy (a multi-chapter mission fic centering on Tom and Alex but heavily featuring Ben as Alex’s partner in MI6) and Signals (an Alex and Nile mentorship story).

[awed-frog]

“The big flaw with this is that it completely misunderstands who JK Rowling is and why she wrote the books. Simply put, this novel is a Christian tale. You miss that, you miss the entire point of everything it has to say.” Elaborate? Sounds interesting and I haven’t heard that before.

Well - I love this to bits and sort of wrote my thesis about it, so here we go.

Basically, you’ve got several kinds of heroes, but ‘left-wing hero’ is almost a contradiction in terms (more on this later). There’s your average Greek hero, whose status as a hero is more of a social class than it is a job and who generally doesn’t have any morally redeeming qualities (have you met Theseus?). Then there’s the medieval Christian hero - he comes in different flavours, but what’s relevant here is the Perceval model: basically the village idiot, whose only power is his good heart and who has no desire to challenge the status quo (because kings are divinely ordained and also poets tend to work for them, so ‘That vassal guy of yours has rescued yet another damsel’ story is going to be better received than ‘Your tax system is corrupt and this knight will now implement direct democracy’). Next you have the modern superhero, who was born in a very different historical context (the vigilantism of 19th century US) and as such has very different priorities. Namely: in his world, there is no higher authority and it’s up to him to use his superior skills to be judge and executioner so he can protect the most vulnerable. This understandable but toxic narrative will later get mixed up with WW2 and then the rampant capitalism of the last 30 years, resulting in the current blockbustery mess.

Anyway - if you’re a Western writer, it’s basically impossible to escape these three shaping forces we’ve all grown up with (classical Antiquity, Christianity, and US-led imperialism/capitalism), so most books and movies of the last forever decades can be analyzed through this lens. In the case of JK Rowling, what you have is a Christian author who openly used her YA series to chart out her own relationship with God. This is not a secret, or a meta writer’s delusion, or anything: she’s discussed it in several interviews. Her main problem, which is most believers’ main problem, is how to reconcile her faith in a benevolent God with the suffering in her daily life; and something she’s mentioned more than once is how her mom died when she was 25, and how this was very much on her mind especially when she was writing Deathly Hallows.

Now, I don’t want to write a novel here, so I won’t analyze the entire series, but what it is is basically a social critique of British society, mixed up with Greek and Roman elements in a cosmetic way only, and - crucially - led by an extremely Christian hero. 

In every way that matters, Harry Potter is a direct descendant of Perceval: he’s someone who’s grown up in isolation as the village idiot (remember how he was shunned by other children because he was ‘dangerous’ and ‘different’), randomly found a more exciting world of which he previously knew nothing (he’s basically the only kid who gets to Hogwarts without knowing anything about the magical world, just like Perceval joined Arthur’s court after living in the woods for 15 years), and proceeded to make his mark not because of his innate powers or special abilities (he’s average at magic, except for Defence against the Dark Arts), but because he’s kind and good and humble. And in the end, he willingly sacrifices himself so everyone else can be saved: a Christ-like figure who even gets his very own Deposition (in the arms of Hagrid, the closest thing to a parent his actually has). 

(This, by the way, was the only reason why Hagrid was kept alive. JK Rowling had planned to kill him, but she absolutely wanted this scene - one of the most recognizable and beloved image in Christian art - in the books.)

And even if he ultimately survives his ‘death’ (like Jesus did), Harry refuses the riches and rank he was surely offered and chooses to spend his days in middle-class obscurity as a husband and father (if I remember correctly, Harry and Ginny’s house isn’t even big enough for their three kids). And no, of course he doesn’t stand for anything or challenges the status quo: that’s not his job. His job, like Jesus’, was to defeat evil by offering himself up in sacrifice; and the entire story - especially the last book - is a profound, intimate, and very moving reflection on faith.

(“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's”, remember? It’s not your job to change anything in the temporal, material world; your job is to nurture your immortal soul and prepare it for the true life that comes after death.)

Like - I don’t know how it was for younger readers, but for me, reading Deathy Hallows as an adult, it wrecked me. Even as an agnostic, I read it over and over again, and I kep finding new meaning in it. The whole thing is basically a retelling of the Book of Job, one of the most puzzling and beautiful parts of the Old Testament. That’s when Harry’s faith in God Dumbledore is tested, when his mentor, the cornerstone of his world, disappears; when Harry has to decide whether he’ll continue to believe in this absent, flawed figure despite all the bad things he keeps uncovering or give up his faith - and thus his soul - completely. The clearest, most startling moment exemplifying this religious dilemma is when Harry decides not to go after the wand. Getting it is the logical thing to do, the only way he can win, but Harry - while mourning Dobby - decides not to do it. That’s when he recovers his faith, and starts trusting his own kindness and piety (whatever happens, he will not defile a tomb) over everything else.

Another key moment is King’s Cross - here, and once more, Harry forgives his enemy, thus obeying Jesus’ commands. He sees Voldemort, the being who took everything from him - and he pities the pathetic, unloved thing he’s become. This is what sets him apart from everyone else and what makes him special: not his birth, not his magic, not some extraordinary artefact - but simply, like Dumbledore puts it, that he can love. After everything that’s bene done to him, he can still love; not only his friends, but his enemies. He forgives Voldemort, he forgives Snape, he forgives Malfoy, he forgives Dudley; and I see so many people angry about this, ranting about abuse victims and how hate is a right, but I think they’re missing the point. This is a Christian story; from a Christian perspective, your enemies need love more than your friends do. 

(“It is not those who are healthy who need a physician” and all that.)

And in any case, a hero is inherently not left-wing. The whole trope relies on three rock-solid facts: the hero is special, and he can do something you can’t, and that gives him the right or the duty to save others who can’t save themselves. Whether it is declined in its Christian form (the hero as self-sacrificing nobody) or in its fascist form (the hero as judge and king of the inferior masses), that is is the exact opposite of any kind of left-wing narrative, where meaningful change is brought about not by individual martyrdom or a benevolent super-human, but by collective action.

So, yeah - Harry changes nothing and is not the leader of the revolution, but it’s unfair to link this to JK Rowling’s politics. It’s just how the trope works. And, in fairness to her, many kind and compassionate authors who write books concerned with social justice tend to lean towards this kind of hero because the only workable alternative - the fascist super-hero - is way worse. Had Harry been that, for instance, he would have ended up ruling the wizarding world. Would that have been better for its democracy? A 19-year-old PM who knows nothing about the law or justice or diplomacy? A venerated war hero drunk on power? Instead, JK Rowling chooses the milder way out: Harry and his friends do change the system - little by little, and within the limits of the genre. Hermione becomes the equivalent of a human rights lawyer, while Harry and Ron join the Aurors (and I know there’s a lot of justified suspicion towards law enforcement, but frankly having good people in their ranks is still the only way to move things forward. It’s been years and I still haven’t heard a practical suggestion as to how a police-less nation would work). As for the government, it is restored to a fairer status quo - again, not the revolution many readers wanted, but also not the totalitarian monarchies or oligarchies or the super-hero’s world.

And as to how one can write a story that’s actually revolutionary - I don’t exactly know. Some writers rely on multiple narrating voices to try and escape the heroic trope; others work on bleak stories which point out the flaws in the system and stop short of solving them. I guess that, in the end, is one of the problem with left-wing politics: they’re simply less eye-catching, less cinematic. On the whole, it’s dull, boring work, the victories achieved by committees and celebrated with a piece of paper. From a literary point of view, it just doesn’t work.

[rpgsandbox]

                                         *desperately* click! click!

Thirsty Sword Lesbians battle the Lady of Chains when her enforcers march down from the frosty north. They rocket through the stars to safeguard diplomats ending a generations-old conflict. They sip tea together and share shy glances at the corner cafe with their old classmates and comrades. Even when swords are crossed, they have the potential to connect more deeply than anyone expects.

A sword duel can end in kissing, a witch can gain her power by helping others find love, and an entire campaign can be built around vagabond matchmakers piloting their sentient gay spaceship from system to system.

If you love angsty disaster lesbians with swords, you have come to the right place.

Thirsty Sword Lesbians by April Kit Walsh is a roleplaying game that celebrates the love, power, and existence of queer people—specifically queer people with swords and a lot of feelings. Flirting, sword-fighting, and barbed zingers all mix together in a system designed for both narrative drama and player safety. This innovative take on the Powered by the Apocalypse engine is a breeze to learn and ensures that no matter how the dice fall, something interesting happens to move the story forward.

In this game, you will solve problems with wit, empathy, and style, fight when something is worth fighting for, and redeem (or seduce) at least a few of your adversaries. You’re part of a community that embodies important ideals and you’ll strive to protect it and make your world better.

Play as one of nine character types: Beast, Chosen, Devoted, Infamous, Nature Witch, Scoundrel, Seeker, Spooky Witch, and Trickster. Each explores a particular emotional conflict that drives the drama and shapes your character’s story. Are you a Beast, faced with the dilemma of expressing your inner truth versus fitting in to a society that demands you conform? A Devoted, who sacrifices for others while struggling to care for yourself? A Trickster, who craves closeness but fears vulnerability? In long-term play, you may even resolve your initial arc and advance into a different playbook as you continue to change and grow, facing new challenges.

                  Backers get immediate access to the playbooks too. 

                                          They're form fillable!

Thirsty Sword Lesbians provides clear, robust guidance and support for running the game, including how to make appealing adversaries, set the tone, structure play, and create a safe environment at the table. Handy reference sheets help you narrate appropriate twists and drama on the fly, depending on the feelings and character types you have in play.

Want to jump into a one-shot? The game includes six adventures that can stand alone or kick off a longer series: Sword Lesbians of the Three Houses, Best Day of Their Lives, Constellation Festival, Gal Paladins, and Monster Queers of Castle Gayskull. For even more inspiration, it features The Starcross Galaxy campaign setting along with five more settings from these contributing authors:

Lesbeans Coffehouse by Dominique Dickey

Neon City 2099 by Jamila Nedjadi

The Three Orders of Ardor by Whitney Delaglio

Les Violettes Dangereuses by Jonaya Kemper

Yuisa Revolution by Alexis Sara

We also provide ample guidance on how to create your own tales of fighting with swords and falling in love, along with a world building worksheet, variant rules, and a set of starting scenario seeds to play with. Because the game focuses on feelings and relationships, it’s a lens you can use to play in a variety of genres. If you like slashfic of characters with swords, you’ll love this game.

Thirsty Sword Lesbians is explicitly designed to tell melodramatic and queer stories; tales fraught with relationship triangles, mystery, intrigue, relationship anarchy, celebration, and revolution. It includes rules to highlight different identities, emotional connections, and setting elements.

This game is not for fascists, TERFs, or other bigots. The team behind Thirsty Sword Lesbians supports racial liberation, intersectional feminism, and queer liberation. We love and respect transgender people, nonbinary people, intersex people, and women. This game is a joyous celebration of lives and identities otherwise marginalized. If you don’t agree, fix your heart before sharing a table with other people.

What if... not Thirsty? The game fundamentally assumes that the characters crave connection, but that connection doesn’t need to be sexual or romantic. We offer you options for changing how the game addresses connection in our variant rules section.

What if... not Swords? It’s simple enough to swap out a different hand-to-hand combat option. Your campaign or your character can use a labrys, the double-bladed axe that became a lesbian icon in the late 20th century. You can use different styles of unarmed combat or even grapple using telepathic self-projections. It’s also possible to replace the swords with mecha, starships, or guns, but it requires some thought and the book will help you think about how to ensure that it stays intimate and relationship-focused. The conflict doesn’t have to be physically violent, either; you can use any kind of conflict that’s adrenaline-inducing and close-quarters.

What if... not Lesbians? We’ll let you in on a secret: you don’t have to play a lesbian. The game plays with themes that are common for all sorts of people who are marginalized on the basis of gender and sexuality, as well as feelings that go beyond the queer experience. If you want to play thirsty sword cishets, we’re not going to stop you—just don’t be surprised if the game turns them queer.

What if... I’m not good at flirting or zingers? You don’t have to be witty or good at flirting in real life to play a character with those skills, and not every character in Thirsty Sword Lesbians is good with words. Shy and awkward sword lesbians find love, too. You’ll find them well-represented in this game.

Ready? Let’s Go!

===============================================

Kickstarter campaign ends: Thu, November 12 2020 9:00 PM UTC +00:00

Website: [Evil Hat Productions] [facebook] [twitter]

[terramythos]

TerraMythos 2021 Reading Challenge - Book 10 of 26

Title: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) 

Author: Oscar Wilde 

Genre/Tags: Fiction, Gothic Horror, Third-Person, LGBT Protagonist (I... guess) 

Rating: 8/10

Date Began: 4/13/2021

Date Finished: 4/20/2021 

When artist Basil Hallward paints a picture of the beautiful and innocent Dorian Gray, he believes he’s created his masterpiece. Seeing himself on the canvas, Dorian wishes to remain forever young and beautiful while the portrait ages in his stead. The bargain comes true. While Dorian grows older and descends a path of hedonism and moral corruption, his portrait changes to reflect his true nature while his physical body remains eternally youthful. As his debauchery grows worse, and the portrait warps to reflect his corruption, Dorian’s past begins to catch up to him. 

Perhaps one never seems so much at one’s ease as when one has to play a part. Certainly no one looking at Dorian Gray that night could have believed that he had passed through a tragedy as horrible as any tragedy of our age. Those finely-shaped fingers could never have clutched a knife for sin, nor those smiling lips have cried out on God and goodness. He himself could not help wondering at the calm of his demeanour, and for a moment felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life. 

Full review, some spoilers, and content warnings under the cut. 

Content warnings for the book: Misogyny (mostly satirical). Racism and antisemitism (not so much). Emotional manipulation, blackmail, suicide, graphic murder, and death. Recreational drug use.

Reviewing a classic novel through a modern lens is always going to be a challenge for me. The world seems to change a lot every decade, let alone every century—whether some canonized classic holds up today is pretty hit or miss (sorry, English degree). And considering the sheer amount of academic focus on classic texts, it’s not like I’m going to have a “fresh take” on one for a casual review. I read and reviewed The Count of Monte Cristo last year, and thought it aged remarkably well over 170+ years.

Somehow I never read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray for school. I tried reading it independently in my late teens/early twenties, and honestly think I was just too stupid for it. Needing a shorter read before the next Murderbot book releases at the end of the month, I grabbed Dorian Gray off the shelf and decided to give it another shot. By the end, I was pleasantly surprised how much I liked the book.

I’m actually going to discuss my pain points before I get into what worked for me. The first half of the book is very slow-paced. The Picture of Dorian Gray is famous for… well… the picture. But it isn’t relevant until the halfway point of the novel, when Dorian does something truly reprehensible and finds his image in the picture has changed. There’s a lot of setup before this discovery. The first half of the book has a lot of fluff, with characters talking about stuff that happened off screen, discussing various philosophies, and so on without progressing the story. Some of this is fine, as it establishes Dorian’s initial character so the contrast later is all the more striking. I just think it could have been shorter. I realize this comes down to personal taste.

I’m also torn on the Wilde’s writing style. He’s very clever, and there are many philosophical ideas in his writing that did genuinely made me stop and think. The prose is also beautiful and descriptive; this is especially useful when it contrasts the horror elements of the story. However, there’s a lot of unnatural, long monologue in the story. Not sure if it’s the time period, Wilde’s background as a playwright, or just his writing style in general (maybe all three), but the characters ramble a LOT. My favorite game was trying to imagine how other characters were reacting to a literal wall of text. 

I also feel the need to mention this book has some bigoted content, as implied in my content warnings. The misogyny in the story is satirical; it’s spouted by the biggest tool in the book, Lord Henry, whose whole shtick is being paradoxical. You just need basic critical thought to figure that out. However, some things don’t have that excuse. A minor character in the first half is an obvious anti-Semitic caricature. There’s also some pretty racist content, particularly when Wilde describes Gray’s musical instrument collection. While these are small parts of the book, it’d be disingenuous not to acknowledge them.

All that being said, there were many aspects of the book I enjoyed, particularly in the second half. Wilde does a great job characterizing terrible people who fully believe what they say. Lord Henry is an obvious example, and Dorian follows his lead as the story progresses. One of my favorite bits was after Sibyl’s suicide (which Dorian instigated by being a piece of shit). Dorian is initially shocked, but as he and Lord Henry discuss it, they come to the conclusion that her suicide was a good thing because it had thematic merit. It’s just such a brazen, horrible way to alleviate one’s guilt. 

Dorian also goes to significant lengths to justify his actions. At one point, he murders Basil to keep the portrait a secret. While he briefly feels guilty about this, Dorian grows angry at the inconvenience of having killed this man, supposedly an old friend. He even separates himself from the situation, expressing that Basil died in such a horrible way. Bro, you killed him! It was you! The cognitive dissonance is just stunning. 

It’s also viscerally satisfying to read about Dorian’s downfall as his awful choices catch up to him. Dorian becoming tormented by the portrait is just... *chef’s kiss*. Is it surprising? No, it’s pretty standard Gothic horror fare. But there’s something to be said about seeing a genuinely horrible man finally pay for what he’s done after getting away with it for so long. I wish real life worked that way. 

There’s the picture itself, too. I know it’s The Thing most people know about this novel -- but I just think it’s a cool concept. I like the idea of someone’s likeness reflecting their true self, and the psychological effect it has on the subject. Most of the novel is fiction with realistic horror elements, but I like that there’s a touch of the supernatural thanks to Dorian’s picture. It’s an element I wouldn’t mind seeing in more works. 

It's sad to read Dorian Gray with the context of what happened to Wilde. The homoeroticism in the novel is obvious, but tame compared to works today. Wilde and this book are a depressing case study in how queer people are simultaneously erased and reviled in recent history. Wilde was tortured for his homosexuality (and died from resulting health complications) over 100 years ago, yet the 1994 edition of Dorian Gray I read refers to his real homosexual relationship as a "close friendship". It's an infuriating and tragic paradox. Things have improved by inches, but we still have so far to go.  

As I grow older I find I appreciate classic works more than when I was forced to read them for school. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a gripping Gothic horror story. Some aspects didn't age particularly well, but that's true for almost anything over time. If you're in the market for this kind of book, I do recommend it.  

[bopinion]

Book of the month / 2021 / 08 August

I love books. Even though I hardly read any. Because my library is more like a collection of tomes, coffee-table books, limited editions... in short: books in which not "only" the content counts, but also the editorial performance, the presentation, the curating of the topic - the book as a total work of art itself.

Through a different Lens

Stanley Kubrick (& Sean Corcoran, Donald Albrecht, Luc Sante)

Photography / 1997 / Taschen Publishing House

Every now and then, I sentence the kids to watch movies that I think are relevant - whether from a personal or a cinematic point of view. While my little son tends to be served light fare like "Blues Brothers," my big daughter sometimes has to chew a little harder, as happened the other day with "2001: A Space Odyssey." Her enthusiasm was a bit restrained, even if I exclaimed about 23 times, "That movie is from 1968. There were no special effects then, it's all actually built!".

Even regardless of that aspect, this epic can be considered groundbreaking. From the genre reference of the classical music background and the excellent script, to the technological authenticity and the almost psychedelic color scheme, to the revolutionary camera work. Above all, the visual composition of this film is the true mastery of director Stanley Kubrick, who is not considered one of the most important filmmakers of all time for nothing. Of course, I also have the matching book in my library ("The Making of Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'", also from Taschen, of course), but this time it's about another work of this visually powerful creator: his early work, photography.

"In the Streets of New York" is the title of the publisher's documentary "Through a different Lens" on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at the Museum of the City of New York. For it was there that Kubrick, just 17 years old, went on his first stalk of optical impressions. In 1945, he signed on as a photographer for the magazine "Look," for which he photographed stories with a human touch in the streets, clubs and sports arenas of New York City for five years. In the process, he captured with his camera just about everything that made up life in the Big Apple in that era: People in the laundromat, the hustle and bustle at Columbia University, sports stars, showgirls in their dressing rooms, performers in the circus, Broadway actresses rehearsing their lines, cab drivers changing a tire, couples kissing on the train platform, shoe shine boys, boxers reconsidering their career choice in the ring corner, patients in their dentist's waiting room, prominent businessmen, politicians, children in the amusement park, and commuters on the Subway.

Even these photographs from Kubrick's younger years reveal a startling sense of composition, tension, and atmosphere, and seem like film stills to never-shot dramas from the jungles of the big city. "This exhibition reveals how (Kubricks) formative years laid the groundwork for his compelling storytelling and dark visual style. They also show a noir side of New York that's no longer around." (Vanity Fair) "Photography, and particularly his years with Look magazine, laid the technical and aesthetic foundations for a way of seeing the world and honed his ability to get it down on film. There, he mastered the skill of framing, composition and lighting to create compelling images," explains Sean Corcoran, curator of the exhibition "Through a different Lens" and co-author of the book. Apparently, it was clear to the young man from the very beginning where his talent lay and how he was able to hone and master it.

Stanley Kubrick was born in New York City on July 26, 1928, as the first of two children. His parents came from Jewish families, and all of his grandparents had immigrated from Austro-Hungarian Galicia. His early passions were excessive reading, cinema and chess. He was first gifted a camera, a Graflex, from his father when he was 13 years old. And he immediately took off as a photographer for the William Howard Taft High School student newspaper. After graduation, he turned his hobby into a career and at the age of 18 became a full-time photographer for Look, to which he had previously sold amateur photos. As early as 1950, Kubrick directed his first documentary, "Day of the Fight", about life in and around the boxing ring, which he had already explored photographically. Although only 16 minutes long, the film was already considered a sensational study at the time. His future career path was set, the rest is history.

"Through a Different Lens" was an extremely successful exhibition, which subsequently also went on tour. Not only Kubrick fans were impressed by the mastery of optical staging that was already visible at an early stage. Corcoran: "Kubrick learned through the camera's lens to be an acute observer of human interactions and to tell stories through images in dynamic narrative sequences. (His) ability to see and translate an individual's complex psychological life into visual form was apparent in his many personality profiles for the publication. His experiences at the magazine (Look) also offered him opportunities to explore a range of artistic expressions. Overall, Kubrick's still photography demonstrates his versatility as an image maker. Look's editors often promoted the straightforward approach of contemporary photojournalism at which Kubrick excelled. It's clear he always got the photographs that were needed for the assignment, but that he was also unafraid to make pictures that excited his own aesthetic sensibility."

Beyond the 100 photographs in the exhibition, the book presents 300 of Kubrick's images, including unpublished shots and outtakes. Annotated by Corcoran, his colleague Donald Albrecht, and renowned writer and critic Luc Sante, who has published most notably in Interview and Harper's. They place the motifs in their context, refer to stylistic aspects, and thus point to Kubrick's (imminent) artistic career. Above all, in contrast to the exhibition, the book offers all friends of photography - whether fans of Kubrick or not - a rare insight into the proverbial pioneering early work of a brilliant artist. And into one of the most interesting eras of the "city that never sleeps" - yes, even Frank Sinatra was photographed by young Kubrick.

From the extensive, mostly euphoric reviews of the book "Through a different Lens" or the oeuvre documented in it, let's take one example each from a professional and an amateur:

"The man who later led a genre to its lonely high point and at the same time to its final point with each of his films knew already at the age of barely 17, that's how old he was at the time, that expression and form shape every impression." (Die Welt)

"I can't praise this book enough. Wonderful collection and very informative. An absolute must for those wishing to understand more of how Kubrick valued the frame." (Yvi on amazon.com)

P.S.: Just for the sake of completeness, let's mention Kubrick's cinematic output after his breakthrough: 1960: Spartacus / 1962: Lolita / 1964: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb / 1968: 2001: A Space Odyssey / 1971: A Clockwork Orange / 1975: Barry Lyndon / 1980: The Shining / 1987: Full Metal Jacket / 1999: Eyes Wide Shut. No, this is not a selection of greatest hits, this is a complete listing. And thus the proof that he has indeed realized a significant peak in the respective genre. His great influence on the history of cinema is also shown by the fact that he is the only director to appear a total of five times in the list of the 100 films with the best critics' ratings.

In addition, two side notes: Kubrick spent several years preparing a film biopic about Napoleon Bonaparte. The preparations were so far along that he could have started production at any time. However, the release of "Waterloo" (1970) and its poor financial results dissuaded him and the film studio from the project. The project has since been known as "The greatest Movie never made". He also dealt intensively with the subject of the Holocaust. After the release of "Schindler's List" (1993), however, he discarded these plans explaining that Steven Spielberg had already told all the essential.

Stanley Kubrick died of a heart attack on March 7, 1999, in his home at Childwickbury Manor near London, where he had lived in seclusion since the 1960s and had set up studio and editing rooms in the former stables.

Here's a short trailer for the exhibition "Trough a different Lens":

https://youtu.be/EgPlnjeBs7E

[mediaevalmusereads]

My Friend Dahmer. By Derf Backderf. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2012.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Genre: memoir, graphic novel

Part of a Series? No

Summary: In 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer — the most notorious serial killer since Jack the Ripper — seared himself into the American consciousness. To the public, Dahmer was a monster who committed unthinkable atrocities. To Derf Backderf, “Jeff” was a much more complex figure: a high school friend with whom he had shared classrooms, hallways, and car rides. In My Friend Dahmer, a haunting and original graphic novel, writer-artist Backderf creates a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a disturbed young man struggling against the morbid urges emanating from the deep recesses of his psyche — a shy kid, a teenage alcoholic, and a goofball who never quite fit in with his classmates. With profound insight, what emerges is a Jeffrey Dahmer that few ever really knew, and one readers will never forget.

***Full review under the cut.***

Content Warnings: ableism, allusions to animal harm/death, implication of murder

Overview: This graphic novel/memoir has been on my radar for a while, but I only recently picked it up for reasons I can’t quite articulate. I’m not sure what I was expecting - thrilling tale of teen psychosis, the makings of a depraved murderer, I don’t know. Perhaps my lack of concrete expectations served me well, since what I found in Backderf’s book was a sympathetic look at Jeffrey Dahmer as a teenager and all the warning signs that were ignored by the adults around him. In a way, it was a heartbreaking read. I don’t think Backderf was trying to excuse Dahmer’s crimes by showing that he only did it because he had a rough life. Rather, I think Backderf was trying to reconcile the “serial killer” Dahmer with the kid he actually knew in real life. For that, I’m giving this book 4 stars.

Writing/Art: Backderf’s art style is fairly “cartoony” in that it doesn’t try to have accurate proportions or imitate reality. Certain facial (or any anatomical) features are exaggerated and there’s a lot of heavy linework, which doesn’t quite communicate “horror” as one might expect about a tale about Jeffrey Dahmer. In a way, I think this works for the story Backderf is trying to tell: it almost seems absurd and grotesque that nothing was done to help Dahmer as a kid, and the art style embeds these feelings in the shapes and linework. One might also argue that the style almost seems juvenile (though it isn’t) and that quality enhances the fact that this story is being told through the eyes of a teenager.

Personally, though, Backderf’s style has never really been my aesthetic of choice, but that’s my personal preference and not a knock against the author/artist. If it works for you, that’s great.

In terms of narration, I liked that Backderf was honest about his impressions of Dahmer. At no point did he claim that he “always knew something was wrong about him,” nor did he seem to play up the proto-serial killer vibes. Instead, Backderf uses subtler, unsettling feelings that show something was “off” but not so “off” that they could have been expected to report Dahmer to the police or something. In a way, it’s fairly truthful and shows how sometimes, you can get a vibe off someone, but not really know what’s going on with them. It also reassured me that Backderf was writing not to somehow leech fame off of Dahmer (for whatever reason) but to work out his own emotions.

Plot: This graphic novel is divided into five parts, plus a prologue and epilogue, that each focus on certain aspects of Dahmer’s life. Part One establishes the setting and Dahmer’s home life; Part Two portrays Dahmer’s alcoholism and the rise of his darker urges, which he desperately tried to control; Part Three is about Dahmer’s relationship with Backderf and their antics at school; Part Four is about how the end of high school was a breaking point for Dahmer; and Part Five is a reflection on how Backderf and his friends left Dahmer behind and how that isolation allowed him to start killing.

I think the organization of these memories into separate sections worked well. Though they followed a loose chronology, I felt like each section had a theme or goal so that Dahmer’s story felt like it was progressing rather than just existing all at once. I appreciated the sympathetic lens that Backderf uses to tell his story; multiple times throughout the novel, he questions where the adults were and how it was easier to not make a fuss. I think, in doing this, Backderf communicates the difference in culture in the 1970s and avoids portraying himself and the literal kids around him as responsible for not stopping Dahmer.

The only thing that I think could have made this story a bit more “real” and grounded for me would be if Backderf had used more of Dahmer’s own words from interviews. To his credit, Backderf quotes Dahmer in a few places, such as the epilogue and at the beginning of Part One, but I think I would have liked to see Dahmer’s voice more often, or at least Backderf’s reactions to Dahmer’s voice more often. Backderf says in his author’s notes that his portrayal of Dahmer is constructed from his own memories and the memories of others who knew him, as well as from transcripts and recordings of interviews with Dahmer, but I wonder if more of Dahmer’s own voice could have been woven into the panels. To be fair, though, this book isn’t trying to illustrate Dahmer’s life from Dahmer’s point of view; it’s specifically a memoir about Backderf’s perception and relationship with him. But it would have been interesting, I think, to see if there was a disjoint between what Dahmer said about himself and what Backderf saw as a kid.

Characters: I hesitate to analyze the figures in this book as “characters” because they’re all real people. I don’t have the knowledge to determine if Backderf is “accurate” in his portrayal or not, but that wouldn’t be productive anyway, since the point of this book is to offer a perspective rather than an objective account.

Instead, I’ll use this space to communicate how certain figures come across to me as a reader. Dahmer is incredibly sympathetic, to an extent. Backderf does a good job of making him feel like an outcast and a loner at some moments and something of a lolcow at others, which seems consistent with accounts that state that Dahmer seemed to have friends but was actually very isolated. From these moments, I got the sense that Dahmer was suffering; rather than taking joy in his “perverse” urges, it felt like he did everything he could to suppress them until the only thing that kept him in check (high school social life) disappeared. As a whole, then, it seems like Dahmer was a kid in desperate need of help, but he didn’t live in a culture that could really do so. If that was Backderf’s goal, then he achieved it.

However, I do think Backderf toes a little too close to the line of portraying Dahmer as wholly sympathetic. To be fair, it’s a hard balance to strike - you want to condemn Dahmer’s later actions, but you also want to sympathize with the kid he was at the time before he started his killing spree. To address this, it might have been interesting to flash back and forth between Backderf’s high school memories and his impressions or emotions when learning about Dahmer’s crimes or arrest/trial, but I’m not sure if that would have been in line with what Backderf was trying to do. So, it’s just an idea.

Backderf and his friends come across as a little insensitive, but not in a malicious way. They never really clicked with Dahmer or considered him a friend, merely someone they occasionally hung out with and used for pranks (as in, they got Dahmer to pull pranks and laughed at his antics, they didn’t pull pranks on him). I don’t think I can fault Backderf for that - people aren’t obligated to connect with everyone, nor do I think its fair to ask why Backderf and his friends didn’t do anything. I did get the sense that there was some regret in Backderf’s account, perhaps some shame at the more tasteless things that passed as fun in the 1970s (making fun of people with cerebral palsy, doing a Hitler skit for the school variety show, etc. - some of this behavior is addressed in author’s notes). But I do think he communicated the divide between the world of teenagers and the world of adults, and how that kind of environment affected him and Dahmer differently.

TL;DR: My Friend Dahmer is a sympathetic account of Jeffrey Dahmer’s early life, told through the eyes of someone who knew him. Rather than thrilling readers with a proto-serial killer narrative, Backderf communicates how the environment of the 1970s prevented Dahmer from getting help, thereby showing how easy it was to miss the “warning signs.”

[aion-rsa]

The United States vs. Billie Holiday: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics Was Formed to Kill Jazz

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This article contains The United States vs. Billie Holiday spoilers. 

Federal drug enforcement was created for the express purpose of persecuting Billie Holiday. Director Lee Daniels’ The United States vs. Billie Holiday focuses a cinematic microscope on the events, but a much larger picture is visible just outside the lens. Holiday’s best friend and one-time manager Maely Dufty told mourners at the funeral that Billie was murdered by a conspiracy orchestrated by the narcotics police, according to Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari. The book also said Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was a particularly virulent racist who hounded “Lady Day” throughout the 1940s and drove her to her death in the 1950s.

This is corroborated in Billie, a 2020 BBC documentary directed by James Erskine, and Alexander Cockburn’s book Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press, which also claims Anslinger hated jazz music, which he believed brought the white race down to the level of African descendants through the corrupting influence of jungle rhythms. He also believed marijuana was the devil’s weed and transformed the post-Prohibition fight against alcohol into a war on drugs. The first line of battle was against the musicians who partook.

“Marijuana is taken by… musicians,” Anslinger testified to Congress prior to the vote on the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act. “And I’m not speaking about good musicians, but the jazz type.” The LaGuardia Committee, appointed in 1939 by one of the Act’s strongest opponents, New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, ultimately refuted every point made in the effective drug czar’s testimony. Based on the findings, “the Treasury Department told Anslinger he was wasting his time,” according to Chasing the Scream. The opportunistic department head “scaled down his focus until it settled like a laser on one single target.”

Federal authorization of selective enforcement should come as no surprise. Just this month, HBO Max released Judas and the Black Messiah about how the FBI and local law enforcement targeted the Black Panthers and put a bullet in the back of the head of Fred Hampton after he was apparently drugged by the informant. In MLK/FBI (2020), director Sam Pollard used newly declassified files to fill in the gaps on the story of the U.S. government’s surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr. Days ago, The Washington Post reported the daughters of assassinated civil rights leader Malcolm X requested his murder investigation be reopened in light of a deathbed letter from officer Raymond A. Wood, alleging New York police and the FBI conspired in his killing.

During the closing credits of The United States vs. Billie Holiday we read that Holiday, played passionately by Andra Day in the film, was similarly arrested on her deathbed. She was in the hospital suffering from cirrhosis of the liver when she was cuffed to her bed. They don’t mention police had been stationed outside her door barring family, fans, and well-wishers from offering the singer comfort as she lay dying. They also don’t mention that police removed gifts people brought to the room, as well as flowers, radio, record player, chocolates, and any magazines. When she died at age 44, it was found that Holiday had 15 $50 bills strapped to her leg, the remainder of her money after years of top selling records. Billie intended to give it to the nurses to thank them for looking after her.

As The United States vs. Billie Holiday points out, the feds had been watching Holiday since club owner Barney Josephson encouraged her to sing “Strange Fruit” at the integrated Cafe Society in Greenwich Village in 1939. Waiters would stop all service during the performance of the song. The room would be dark, and it would never be followed by an encore.

The lyric came from a three-stanza poem, “Bitter Fruit,” about a lynching. It was written by Lewis Allan, the pseudonym of New York schoolteacher and songwriter named Abel Meeropol, a costumer at the club. Meeropol set the words to music, and the song was first performed by singer Laura Duncan at Madison Square Garden.

Holiday and her accompanist Sonny White adapted Allan’s melody and chord structure, and released the song on Milt Gabler’s independent label Commodore Records in 1939. The legendary John Hammond, who discovered Holiday in 1933 while she was singing in a Harlem nightclub called Monette’s, refused to release it on Columbia Records, where Billie was signed. 

The song “marked a watershed,” according to David Margolick’s 2000 book Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights. Influential jazz writer Leonard Feather called the song “the first significant protest in words and music, the first significant cry against racism.”

Holiday experienced the brutally enforced racial segregation of the Jim Crow laws during her trips south with her bands, according to Billie Holiday, the 1990 book by Bud Kliment. She was also demeaned at the Lincoln Hotel in New York City in October 1938 when management demanded she walk through the kitchen and use the service elevator to get on the stage. Holiday also caught flak for being considered too light skinned to sing with one band, and was on at least one occasion forced to wear special makeup to darken her complexion.

Holiday was 18 years old when she recorded her first commercial session with Benny Goodman’s group at Columbia Records, but knew firsthand that an integrated band would be more threatening than an all-Black group. According to most biographies, Holiday began using hard drugs in the early ’40s under the influence of her first husband, Jimmy Monroe, brother of the owner of Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem.

Anslinger, the first commissioner for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was an extreme racist, even by the standards of the time, according to Chasing the Scream. He claimed narcotics made black people forget their place in the fabric of American society, and jazz musicians created “Satanic” music under pot’s influence.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday doesn’t shy away from the drug czar’s blatant racism, but Garrett Hedlund’s Harry J. Anslinger doesn’t capture the full depths of the disgust the man felt and put into practice through his selective enforcement. Hedlund is able to mouth some of the epithets his character threw at ethnic targets, but most of the actual quotes on record are so offensive there is no need to subject any audience to them today. The film barely even mentions the strange and forbidden fruit imbibed in slow-burning paper that Anslinger obsessed over almost as much as Holiday’s song.

Read more

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Commissioner Anslinger came to power during the “Reefer Madness” era, and shaped much of the anti-marijuana paranoia of the period, according to Alexander Cockburn’s Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press. His first major campaign was to criminalize hemp, rebranding it as “marijuana” in an attempt “to associate it with Mexican laborers.” He claimed the drug “can arouse in blacks and Hispanics a state of menacing fury or homicidal attack.”

Anslinger promoted racist fictions and singled out groups he personally disliked as special targets. He said the lives of the jazzmen “reek of filth,” and the genre itself was proof that marijuana drives people insane. On drug raids, he advised his agents to “shoot first.” Anslinger persecuted many black musicians, including Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington. When Louis Armstrong was arrested for possession, Anslinger orchestrated a nationwide media smear campaign.

The Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ “race panic” tactics had a double standard. Anslinger only had a “friendly chat” with Judy Garland over her heroin addiction, suggesting she take longer vacations between films. He wrote to MGM, reporting he observed no evidence of a drug problem.

Anslinger ordered Holiday to cease performing “Strange Fruit” almost immediately after word got out about the performances. When she refused, he sent agent Jimmy Fletcher to frame the singer.  Anslinger hated hiring Black agents, according to both Whiteout and Chasing the Scream, but white officers stood out on these investigations. He did insist no Black man in his Bureau could ever be a boss to white men, and pigeonholed officers like Fletcher to street agents.

Donald Clark and Julia Blackburn studied the only remaining interview with Jimmy Fletcher for their biography Billie Holiday: Wishing on The Moon. That interview has since been lost by the archives handling it. According to their book when Fletcher first saw Billie at the raid on her brother-in-law’s Philadelphia apartment in May 1947, “She was drinking enough booze to stun a horse and hoovering up vast quantities of cocaine.”

Fletcher’s partner sent for a policewoman to conduct a body search. “You don’t have to do that. I’ll strip,” Billie said before stripping and marking her territory in a provocative show of non-violent defiance by urinating on the floor (another action Daniels’ movie glosses over). Holiday was arrested and put on trial for possession of narcotics.

According to Hettie Jones’ book Big Star Fallin’ Mama: Five Women in Black Music, Holiday “Signed away her right to a lawyer and no one advised her to do otherwise.” She thought she would be sent to a hospital to kick the drugs and get well. “It was called ‘The United States of America versus Billie Holiday,’” she recalled in Lady Sings the Blues, the 1956 memoir she co-wrote with William Dufty, “and that’s just the way it felt.” Holiday was sentenced to a year and a day in a West Virginia prison. When her autobiography was published, Holiday tracked Fletcher down and sent him a signed copy.

When Holiday was released in 1948, the federal government refused to renew her cabaret performer’s license, which was mandatory for performing in any club serving alcohol. Under Anslinger’s recommended edict, Holiday was restricted “on the grounds that listening to her might harm the morals of the public,” according to the book Lady Sings the Blues.

The jazz culture had its own code. Musicians not only wouldn’t rat out other musicians, they would chip in to bail out any player who got popped. When it appeared Fletcher, who shadowed Holiday for years, became protective of Holiday, Anslinger got Holiday’s abusive husband and manager Louis McKay to snitch.

Two years after Holiday’s first conviction, Anslinger recruited Colonel George White, a former San Francisco journalist who applied to join the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The personality test given to all applicants determined White was a sadist, and he quickly rose through the bureau’s ranks. He gained bureau acclaim as the first and only white man to infiltrate a Chinese drug gang.

White had a history of planting drugs on women and abused his powers in many ways. According to Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, after White retired from the Bureau, he bragged, “Where else [but in the Bureau of Narcotics] could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?” He “may well have been high when he busted Billie for getting high,” according to Chasing the Scream.

White arrested Holiday, without a warrant, at the Mark Twain Hotel in San Francisco in 1949. Billie insisted she had been clean for over a year, and said the dope was planted in her room by White. Bureau agents said they found her works in the room and the stash in a wastepaper basket next to a side room. They never entered the kit into evidence. According to Ken Vail’s book Lady Day’s Diary, Holiday immediately offered to go into a clinic, saying they could monitor her for withdrawal symptoms and that would prove she was being framed. Holiday checked herself into the clinic, paying $1,000 for the stay and she “didn’t so much as shiver.”  She was not convicted by jury at trial.

Afterward White attended one of Holiday’s shows at the Café Society Uptown and requested his favorite songs. After the show was over, the federal cop told Billie’s manager “I did not think much of Ms. Holiday’s performance.”

In 1959, Billie collapsed while at the apartment of a young musician named Frankie Freedom. After waiting on a stretcher for an hour and a half, Manhattan’s Knickerbocker Hospital turned her away, saying she was a drug addict. Recognized by one of the ambulance drivers, Holiday was admitted in a public ward of New York City’s Metropolitan Hospital. She lit a cigarette as soon as they took her off oxygen.

In spite of being told her liver was failing and cancerous, and her heart and lungs were compromised, Holiday did not want to stay at the hospital. “They’re going to kill me. They’re going to kill me in there. Don’t let them,” she told Maely Dufty.

Billie went into heroin withdrawal, alone. When Holiday responded to methadone treatment, Anslinger’s men prevented hospital staff from administering any further methadone, even though it had been officially prescribed by her doctor. Drug cops claimed to find a tinfoil envelope containing under an eighth of an ounce of heroin. It was found hanging on a nail on the wall, six feet from Billie’s bed where the frail and restrained artist could not have reached it.

The cops handcuffed her to the bed, stationed two policemen at the door and told Holiday they’d take her to prison if she didn’t drop dime on her dealer. When Maely Dufty informed the police it was against the law to arrest a patient in critical care, the cops had Holiday taken off the list.

Outside the hospital, protesters gathered on the streets holding up signs reading “Let Lady Live.” The demonstrations were led by the Rev. Eugene Callender. The Harlem pastor, who built a clinic for heroin addicts in his church, requested the singer be allowed to be treated there.

Holiday didn’t blame the cops. She said the drug war forced police to treat people like criminals when they were actually ill.

“Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn’t treat them, then sent them to jail,” she wrote in Lady Sings the Blues. “If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs.”

Holiday’s social commentary didn’t end with “Strange Fruit.” She wrote and sang about racial equality in the song “God Bless the Child,” her voice captured the pains of domestic violence. Most of Holiday’s contemporaries were too scared of being hassled by the feds to perform “Strange Fruit.” Billie Holiday refused to stop. She was killed for it. But never silenced.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday is streaming on Hulu now.

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The post The United States vs. Billie Holiday: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics Was Formed to Kill Jazz appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[recentanimenews]

From Bakeneko to Bakemonogatari: The Secret History of Catgirls

It’s a question society has asked for ages: what came first, the cat or the girl?

The catgirl is one of the most resilient images in anime today. However, even the term “catgirl” is a little vague. Close your eyes and try to imagine what that word actually means. Did you think of a girl, but with cat ears? Did she have a tail? Does she have a verbal tic? Was she — by some mystical, scientific, or by some other supernatural occurrence — able to transform into an actual cat? If you said yes or no to any of those questions, are we still talking about the same kind of “catgirl”?

The answer is no one really knows. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying to investigate the origins of this immensely popular character type. Does such a thing as "the first catgirl" truly even exist?

Black Hanekawa as she appears in Nekomonogatari

What We Talk About When We Talk About Catgirls

Broadly speaking, characters with animal ears are described as kemonomimi, which literally means animal ears. What about catgirl etymology? As expected, characters with cat ears are described as nekomimi, aka cat ears. The term nekomusume (cat girl or daughter, literally) has also been used, which is also notably the name of the character Neko-Musume from Shigeru Mizuki’s popular 1960s supernatural manga GeGeGe no Kitarō. Ralph F. McCarthy, the first to translate Kitarō in a bilingual edition published by Kodansha in 2002, localized this name as “Catchick.” This is all to say, the invented euphemism “catgirl” is just one of many used to describe the same thing: a cat-like girl who may or may not claw your eyes out with a mischievous smirk.

Mizuki's Neko-Musume is based on the bakeneko, an evil cat spirit who is sometimes able to change between human and feline form. Folklorist Matthew Meyer describes bakeneko as beginning their lives as regular house cats, but later accumulating more human-like traits as they mature. In many stories, they are depicted as lapping up the blood of murder victims, thereby granting them supernatural powers. Of course, they aren’t to be mistaken with nekomata — twin-tailed cat spirits, like Yōkai Watch’s Jibanyan. Much like the rest of Mizuki’s yōkai characters inspired by Japan’s supernatural folklore, Mizuki’s bakeneko are the byproduct of creative license. Neko-Musume doesn’t have cat ears like we might expect them today, but technically she fits the bill for a supernatural entity. Like modern-day big-eyed catgirls, your mileage may vary.

Detail from Utagawa Kuniyoshi's nekozuka print

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, a woodblock artist born in 1798, is well-known for his many cat-centric prints. One of his most renowned projects was a series of prints depicting the 1827 kabuki drama, Traveling Alone to the Fifty-three Stations. In 1852, Kuniyoshi printed a depiction of actor Onoe Kikugorō III as one of the play’s most memorable characters, the nekozuka, a cat monster living in Okazaki assuming the form of a human woman. Kuniyoshi draws this specter with two very noticeable cat ears — a statement that this is a suspicious supernatural entity. This same motif reoccurs in other Kuniyoshi works, noticeably a woodblock triptych depicting the same actor as a cat creature. Again, those notorious ears appear.

Onoe Kikugorō III illustrated by artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi

Is Kuniyoshi’s flair for fantastic flourish the missing link? The secret origin of all catgirls who ever dared meow in the modern age? Well, it’s a little more complicated than that.

Will the Real Catgirls Please Stand Up?

The bakeneko is but just one entry in Japanese folklore’s long love affair with cats. In contemporary media, the concept of a cat-influenced woman is seen in many horror films. In an entry on bakeneko for The Encyclopedia of Japanese Horror Films, scholar Michael Crandol writes: "Bakeneko tales were the single most popular subject of Japanese horror films from the dawn of cinema through the 1960s, with more than sixty such pictures released by 1970.” With films as early as 1938’s The Ghost Cat and The Mysterious Shamisen, to post-war modern classics like 1968’s Kuroneko, the bakeneko sub-genre in Japanese horror is a testament to its ubiquity. Not to mention the allure of mysterious intrigue.

Kaneto Shindo's Kuroneko asks the universal question: will my cat eat me when I die?

From this perspective, the origins of catgirls seem quite hairy. In fact, looking solely through the lens of the traditional bakeneko narrative is extremely limiting. Surely they all aren’t evil women possessed by vengeful spirits? So what else?

In May 2019, independent cartoonist Keiichi Tanaka posted a thread on Twitter asking about the possible origins of the catgirl design proper:

猫耳の元祖って『綿の国星』？ 人間の顔で頭の上に猫の耳、このデザインってそれ以前にあった？

— はぁとふる倍国土 (@keiichisennsei) May 16, 2019

Among the replies included Osamu Tezuka’s character Hecate, a shape-shifting young witch who transforms into a half-humanoid, half-cat creature from the 1950s manga Princess Knight. Others mention Kuniyoshi’s cat-eared nekozuka woodblock prints, alongside the introduction of the classic Playboy Bunny costume in Japan. At first, it seems like Yumiko Ōshima’s manga Star of Cottonland may be the point of origin, but perhaps it’s not so easy to pin down. Did Tezuka, like so many innovations in early anime and manga, do it first? Are catgirls perhaps an underappreciated relic of the Edō period? What about classic '80s shōjo manga?

Feline magic in Tezuka's Princess Knight

Like many great debates in art history, the conclusion is ambiguous. Some might say Kuniyoshi unintentionally invented “catgirls” in the 19th century. Others may say Tezuka refined the concept, but Ōshima popularized the idea of cat ears on cute girls. If we examine catgirls strictly through the lens of anime and manga, the ambiguity and debate regarding "origins" become less of a fuzzy headache. Rather, we can re-frame the question: What works possibly helped catgirls bloom into the anime and manga-centric phenomenon we know and love today?

Chibi Neko, a cat who believes she is a girl

Ōshima’s Star of Cottonland was serialized in shōjo magazine LaLa from 1978 to 1987. The protagonist, Chibi Neko, is a kitten who views herself as a little girl. Because of this, the story is illustrated from her perspective and depicts her as human, with the caveat of having cat ears. In her 1995 book, Phänomen Manga: Comic-Kultur in Japan, scholar Jaqueline Berndt points to Ōshima being the possible originator of this now massively popular trope. In 1984, Star of Cottonland was adapted into OVA by Mushi Production, the animation studio famously known for adapting many of Tezuka’s major works.

Meanwhile, another OVA debuted in 1984: Bagi, the Monster of Mighty Nature. This was an original production written by Tezuka himself in response to gene recombination research approval by the Japanese government. Most famously, it featured an anthropomorphic feline woman named Bagi, who is undeniably more cat than girl. Bagi attempts to gain vengeance on humanity while simultaneously forging a troubled relationship with the action-hero male protagonist. While the Star of Cottonland OVA saw a limited home release, Bagi was broadcasted via the Nippon Television Network as a TV special.

Twin cyberpunk catgirls from Masamune's Dominion

Star of Cottonland and Bagi couldn’t be more thematically different, nonetheless, they both depend on catgirls for their worldbuilding. Masamune Shirow’s 1985 science-fiction manga, Dominion, follows a similar trend with its portrayal of android catgirls in a gritty cyberpunk setting. Adapted into a 1988 OVA series, Dominion: Tank Police features two puma twins, Anna and Uni, catgirls created as sentient love dolls. With their wild hair and overtly sexualized design, they undoubtedly have more in common with Tezuka’s violent Bagi than Ōshima’s initial cat-eared girls. They are, for lack of a better word, an otaku’s modern catgirl with their feral bloodthirst intact.

A Catgirl for All Seasons

A feature from Kadokawa’s Davinci News’ anime department titled "We Investigated ‘Why Are Nekomimi Girls So Cute’” draws attention to the 2013 Fall anime season. Namely, ear and tail-equipped characters from Outbreak Company and Nekomonogatari. What’s the appeal of animal-eared girls, where did they come from, and why are they so seemingly trendy now? Again, Kuniyoshi’s fearsome kabuki portraits are mentioned, however with an important caveat: Kuniyoshi's cat ears were meant to strike fear, not inspire charm. The same could be said for the post-war boom in bakeneko films and their scream queen actresses. The article’s author even suggests that the prominence of the Playboy Bunny outfit, with its appeal to the uppercrust of society and cute tail, might’ve also added to a flourishing nekomimi cosplay craze. At some point, the strangeness of the concept became secondary to cute novelty.

Koyomi confronts the Sawari Neko possessing Hanekawa

This observation points out an important contemporary trend: ornamental catgirls, aka eyecandy, verus catgirls with a narrative purpose. Peak catgirl is somehow balancing both acts. Characters like Bakemonogatari’s Tsubasa Hanekawa — a high schooler who is possessed by the Sawari Neko spirit — unintentionally create the night-prowling, cat-eared alter-ego named “Black Hanekawa.” Black Hanekawa may perhaps be the modern mash-up of bakeneko tradition and otaku catgirl-ness we've long awaited. She speaks in cat-puns, obviously not human, and is most importantly a fearsome supernatural nuance. But on the flip-side, Black Hanekawa is everything we expect from the otaku’s catgirl: ears on top of her head, an eccentric personality, and a desire to exaggerate those feline quirks whenever possible for cuteness' sake.

ฅ(*ΦωΦ*)ฅ

  The modern catgirl’s sensibility is to be a girl first, cat second. While hints of this archetype is seen in Shirow’s 1980s catgirl love androids, early 2000s series like Di Gi Charat and Tokyo Mew Mew have only further pushed this specific everyday flavor of catgirl agenda. Especially considering the infectious prevalence of mascot characters like Dejiko, a chibified catgirl with lucky cat bells on character goods stores across Akihabara. It’s no wonder they’ve effectively lost all their unncanniness. But besides the cultural context — there’s no real reason why cat ears just can’t be cute in themselves.

Dejiko and company promoting a GAMERS character goods store in Akihabara

Nowadays, you don’t have to look very hard to find a cat-eared character. Series like Re:Zero famously feature characters like Felix, whose cat-like qualities are part of the lore. Nintendo series like Fire Emblem have even newly added a “beast” race of animal-eared characters. Not to mention the massive popularity of franchises like Strike Witches and Kemono Friends in recent years, catgirls undoubtedly draw massively passionate fanbases. No matter where they came from, catgirls in all shapes and sizes, clawed, and de-clawed, have never stopped turning heads. The nyapocalypse is here to stay, fur-real.

Do you have a favorite catgirl of all time? Let us knyaow in the comments below!

  Blake P. is a weekly columnist for Crunchyroll Features. He thinks Cats (the musical) deserves a proper anime adaptation. His twitter is @_dispossessed. His bylines include Fanbyte, VRV, Unwinnable, and more.

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

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[rafaelafranzen]

In which I answer many questions about books

I came across this survey from @drawlight and I thought it’d be fun to fill! Fun fact: I’ve been an unabashed devotee of literature and stories all my life and am a stalwart champion of connecting people with stories – I’ve spent most of the last decade attending and volunteering at literature festivals and crossed fingers, am trying to get a job there. I don’t do the tagging thing, but if you’d like to fill this tag me back so I can discover your literary world!

I, like everyone else, am drowning in Good Omens right now, including the script book and original publication, so I’ll omit them from my responses for a bit of variety.

1. What book are you reading now?

Kraken – China Miéville. Yet another book about an impending apocalypse set in London, because I’m a sucker for undercurrents of fantasy in places I’ve walked in. This one’s a dark comedy about a squid-worshiping cult, where the initiating event for The End of the World is a forty-foot giant squid specimen being stolen from the Natural History Museum.

2. What are your favourite books?

I’m a bit of an odd duck in that my favourites change all the time at different points in my life. I hate to do the thing where you divide things up by genre because I think stories are valid in so many shapes and forms but it’s an easy shorthand – a few top favourites:

Literary Fiction: Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither – Sara Baume (a book about a misfit man who brings a misfit dog into his life. I’ll never get tired of recommending this. The poetic turn of prose in this book is astonishing, and I’m reminded of it every time I read something by Drawlight, actually).

SF/F: Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman (again pushes all my right buttons with undercurrents of another world in places I’ve been) and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu – the titular story in this anthology made me cry on the train, in public – you can find it in full here. It’s a quick and heartbreaking read about the tenuous relationship one so often has with their parents.

Short Story: The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble – Julian Gough (A economic satire and the first fiction piece ever published by the Financial Times, which was subsequently adapted to a Radio Play by the BBC which is also available in the link if you prefer listening. Will make you clutch your sides with laughter, teach you about securitizations, futures and hedge funds and global market forces without the need for you to get a degree in economics first, and ensure you never look at goats the same way again.)

3. How did you learn to read?

Other than the obvious – school, my mother used to take me to the library each weekend when I was a kid and let me borrow 4 books using my library card, and another 4 books with hers. I’d devour all 8 and rinse and repeat the next weekend.

4. What foreign languages do you read?

I studied Chinese as my second language for 12 years and subsequently lost pretty much all of it due to lack of usage after. I can still muddle my way through a menu but that’s about it.

5. What’s the funniest book you ever read?

The Teenage Textbook – Adrian Tan (I’m sure I’ve read plenty since that are better, but this is always the first one I think of. A bit of local nostalgia.)

6. What books have changed the way you look at the world or the way you live your life?

Without a doubt, This Is What Inequality Looks Like by Teo You Yenn. It is a non-fiction book told through the lens of people in poverty, and just as equally, from vantage point of the privileged, us folk who are more or less living in the median of society and the different frames of ‘common sense’ that need to be considered from these perspectives. It is a book about how acknowledging poverty and inequality leads to uncomfortable revelations about our society and ourselves. And it is about how once we see, we cannot, must not, unsee. It is a book that might sober you up for the rest of your life.

It was one of the books heavily drawn on to produce a play titled “Underclass” which I once described to a friend as “the wokest shit sandwich you’ll ever eat”, and I mean this in the best kind of way – it’s the most difficult pill I was ever made to swallow. It left me questioning every assumption I had about poverty, inequality and human dignity, left me squirming and uncomfortable in the way we gloss over the marginalized, and forced me to ask hard questions about the systems of society and who provides for those who fall through the cracks. I saw it a year ago and I still can’t stop thinking about it.  

7. What books have affirmed what you believe about life or the way you look at things?

Not entirely sure how to answer this one, I take away bits from every book and media property I encounter. I suppose if I would recommend anything, especially from the perspective of a writer, that rejection is par for the course so long as you keep forging on, and keep at it, then Stephen King’s On Writing. And on the love for the parts of your life that are odd, glorious and to be cherished, Sue Perkins Spectacles. Her letter to her dog Pickles in the book, available here, is one of the greatest confessions of adoration I’ve ever read, and will speak to every love you’ve held close in your life)

8. What are some of the scariest books you ever read?

To be frank I don’t read much horror, though I used to as a kid. I don’t have enough memory of any specifics to give titles.

9. About how many books do you think you have read in your life?

I’ve not the slightest idea. Probably hundreds.

10. About how many books do you own?

Currently, probably between 50-100, only limited by my bookshelf and now much it can hold. Most of my major book-purchases come around during the Singapore Writers Festival, so annually I drop between $100-200 on new books signed by authors I’ve met in person. Every 2-3 years I cycle out books from my bookshelf I no longer care to go back to and donate it to the book exchange shelf in my local library to make room for new titles.

12. How much would you say you’ve paid in library fines in your life?

Probably less than $5. I’m pretty neurotic about returning things on time.

11. How many books per month do you usually borrow from the library?

Probably less than one to be honest, but when the Writers Festival swings around, loads, to get an advance look at the authors that are coming I may enjoy the work of. Nowadays I usually buy my books.

13. Do you read in bed?

A resounding yes. It’s how I screwed up my eyesight as a kid!

14. Do you ever read while walking or driving?

Sometimes when walking but often I’m just scrolling reddit or catching up on current affairs and UK politics (I don’t live there but I can’t help following it). I don’t drive but I do read books when I commute on public transport.

15. OK, let’s get real. Where’s the strangest place you’ve ever read a book?

What, pray, be a strange place to read a book?

16. Do you listen to audiobooks?

Not particularly, as I find I can absorb information much faster reading words on a page. I also find it hard to multitask when something’s being read out because I want to pay attention to the story. I do, however, listen to radio plays adapted from books!

17. Has anyone ever read aloud to you or you to them?

Plenty, being on the receiving end of readings from many authors from attending the Writers Festival and events at independent bookstores. For me reading: loads of times workshopping my own work while I was pursuing my creative writing minor in university.

18. What was the most difficult book to read?

I attempted Lolita by Nabokov when I was about 14 or 15 and don’t think I got past the first 50 pages.

19. What books do you intend to read but keep putting off?

Craptons. Including the aforementioned Good Omens which I’ve owned for 7 years but never finished. Others that have been sitting on my shelf for the longest time now include The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and The Book of Dust by Phillip Pullman (Lyra, my chosen name that I now use professionally, came from the protagonist of Pullman’s His Dark Materials). As you can see my stable of books mainly tend towards SF/F.

20. Do you buy new or used books, paperbacks or hardcovers, leather or collector’s?

Absolutely! I buy mostly new – see Writers Festival book acquisitions from the earlier question. Mostly paperbacks but occasionally hardcovers if the price difference isn’t too dear. Secondhand bookstores are a dying trade here so I don’t get much opportunity to shop for used. I’m also constantly wary about how much room I have on my shelves and pick my purchases carefully. I usually don’t buy collectors editions because I don’t like having to be precious with my books -  they’re there to enjoy, to crack the spines in and get their corners banged up from being hastily stuffed into bags. With special editions I feel an odd obligation to keep them pristine.

21. How do you feel about writing in books?

Depends. If it’s a book I specifically want for reference, especially non-fiction I don’t mind marking them up. Otherwise I typically don’t.

22. Do you lend books?

I do! There have been books I’ve lent out for years and not sought back though. I do prefer to get them back eventually because books I do keep on my shelves usually hold the memory of the time I had with them, and are usually paperback editions whose covers I enjoyed and are no longer in print. It never feels quite the same to just get a new copy.

23. What were your favourite books as a child?

I read with such volume and variety when I was a child I actually hardly remember specific titles. I’m sure there was Dahl in there somewhere. An awful lot of Blyton and Nancy Drew/Famous Five which are now horrendously outdated but from which I still hold onto fond imagined memories of British summer days and mysterious nights, which are experiences I still sort of seek out when I go to the UK on rambles or hikes.

24. What children’s books do you enjoy as an adult or young adult?

If we’re talking specifically Children’s books and not YA, almost anything written by Kes Gray (Oi Frog!/The Trouble with Daisy series) and Julian Gough (Rabbit and Bear series, whose first book is a great introduction to the concept of gravity, hibernation, and the nutrition of rabbit poo). I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Terry Pratchett’s Discword series, which includes several YA titles but even the main books in the series are fantastic reading for kids I think.

25. Do you ever read the ending first?

Oh gosh, why would anyone do that to themselves?

26. grab the book nearest to you (I picked something non-GO related), go to page 29 and type line 17 (if there isnt a line 17 type line 3)

“You always tell me that when someone is special, then the system has to make an exception." Connect (Julian Gough) – a cheeky one-of a kind signed edition I got from Julian’s apartment in Berlin when I visited him a couple months ago, combining the UK book jacket with US deckled-edge hardback. He started out as a writer I admired, then a mentor, and is now a fond friend.

[rynweaverwriting]

20 Something Questions For the Twenty-Somethings

A birthday present for Ryn by Maria Kornacki

The effort of art is to slow the rapid motion, to bring it to a halt so that it can be seen, known. - Joyce Carol Oates, Telling Stories

In a world where screens and filters allow us to fine-tune what others see, interviews are the unfiltered lens through which the core self breaches through. The word itself contains ‘inter’ (“the inside”) and ‘view’ (perspective). 

Would you be friends with someone for months without asking any questions about each other? I use this logic when diving into the interviews of artists and people I’ve recently discovered. Not to mention, the act of listening is a skill to continuously strengthen. On a similar note, learning about the whole astrological chart and not just the sign leaves more room for understanding on a deeper level.

A well of information unfolds between two people asking and answering a series of questions. Moreover, the responses are often more sincere than a simple google search or post might tell you. It’s a conversation, not just an update. The backstage persona is unveiled. If our social media presence is the cover, then interviews are the story itself. 

Artists are particularly articulate in the art of storytelling and I’ve found that they are equally as poetic in their approach to music-making as they are in formulating verbal messages. Asking the right questions is also required in order to unravel this thread of lyrical conversations. 

Irony lies in the timing of this interview exploration. Citizens are governed to wear masks in public and social distance from other humans. Additionally, we’ve seen an outbreak of discrimination over the color of another human’s skin. As a result, people are taking insistent action for the outdated injustices. “Uncomfortable” sums up the experience to say the least, and yet a nudge of uncertainty provokes growth. 

Live shows are a no-go because public spaces hold too many face-to-face interactions. What does an artist do if their career relies on the support of these gatherings? In this case, music does its best to stabilize and to fill other spaces. Music is the filler of voids and the stationary reservoir. Songs have the same transformative healing through the ears as they did before all of the blindsided turbulence. They go right to the internal matter.

In the middle of writing these paragraphs, I passed by “Izzy the elephant” in my hometown. Everyday for the  past six years, this giant elephant statue holds up a new inspirational message on a whiteboard to brighten people’s day. 

I didn’t fully get to read the end for accuracy, but I’m pretty sure the one I saw read: “Ask yourself, am I shining in the light of my darkness?” 

This global pandemic is a waiting game in the dark. Everyone is still blindly walking around, facing the situation mask to mask. We don’t know how long or what our communities will look like as we merge back into them. I do know this: asking questions is momentum. More wisdom creates an influx of movement. 

What better time to ask questions than a period where we are physically inside and going inward? The world appears to be moving backwards, but a different perspective suggests it’s just a pause. We’ve traveled past the point of our bodies losing grip in the wake of a retrograde. Revolutionary shifts are speeding up the enlightening process. A new reality is being shaped by the steps we’re taking today. 

So, are you a fool for asking questions or do you ask questions because it’s part of the quest a fool is fixated on?

“There is a proper procedure for taking advantage of any investment. Music, for example. Buying music is an investment.” - Gil Scott-Heron

Interview:

1. How did you celebrate your birthday?

Quarantine Questions:

2. How would you describe your quarantine experience from the start up until now? 

3. What have you learned from the time spent social distancing and is there anything new that’s occurred to you based on your current surroundings?

4. How have you been dealing with the concept of temporary virtual shows? In other words, what are your thoughts as an artist in quarantine? 

5. What’s been keeping you motivated during this period? 

Reading, Writing, Consuming, and Creating:

6. How has the pandemic affected your writing? Have you been writing more, less, or the same? What kinds of writing have you been doing?

7. Who/what has been inspiring you lately?

8. What was the last book you read about and what are you currently reading? Have you ever thought about writing a book? If so, what genre would it be?

9. What’s a book/author you’d currently recommend? 

10. Why should people read books?

11. What poets/poems do you resonate with? Any black poets or poems you’ve come across recently? 

12. I noticed personally in my own writing that my style is often influenced by the content I’m reading at the time. Do you find that what you read explicitly or subtly bleeds into your writing or sometimes both? 

13. Going off of the last question, a lot of what I listen to ends up interpreted in my writing. What audible content have you been consuming? Are there any specific artists, songs, podcasts, documentaries, or even films that are resonating with you?

14. How does literature and art connect to music-making?

15. What’s the last interview you watched/listened to?

16. How did the music you grew up listening to shape the way you think about music while creating and listening to it now? Also, you mentioned you had Motown playing in your family’s house. Who did your family listen to?

17. What exactly are you concerned about in terms of artists moving forward from the current state we’re in?

18. What are you hopeful for in the music world after we return to the “real” world? 

19. What kind of content do you think we’ll be hearing?

20. What does the music industry need more of? What do you think there should be less of?

“Meanwhile music pounded across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being a self in a song.”

The Fool and Other Record Reflections:

21. How has timing played a part in the decision-making process of creating and releasing new music?

22. More specifically, how have the past five years shifted your perspective of The Fool? In other words, what parts of yourself do you still see in the record? What no longer resonates?

23. On a similar note, how have you grown musically since we last heard you on the record? This can be sound wise or your mental process anywhere from writing to production.

24. What would you say is one of your favorite songs from The Fool and why?

25. As someone that’s constantly reworking writing pieces almost to a fault, I imagine it’s difficult sometimes to put the ribbons on a piece of music for others to listen to. How do you know when a song is “done”? What about an album?

26. In a Joni Mitchell interview with CBC News: The National, she said she doesn’t like to look back at her music because she hears the things she’d do differently. “Divine dissatisfaction” is what drives her to her next period without making the same mistakes. 

Out of curiosity, how often do you listen back to your music? Do you get too critical or are you proud overall? Is there anything you’d change if you could?

27. So, this next question is sort of ironic for several reasons. The first being I asked and answered this in my previous interview session. The second is that my response focused on the concept of someone asking a lot of questions, but not getting all the answers to make them feel satisfied...

What does it mean to be a “fool” to 28 year-old Ryn? What other lessons have you learned over the past year?

Looking to the Future:

28. Since we’re on the topic of age. With a new age comes a new year of shifts. How do you feel about this new age that we as a collective are heading into?

29.  What are you looking forward to in terms of your next musical era and without giving too much away, what do you want fans to get out of your next record? 

‪When it's safe to resume normal life again, we're going to need live music and comedy more than ever. Please help @NIVAssoc with federal funding by supporting & cosponsoring S. 3814/H.R. 7481, the RESTART Act #SaveOurStages‬

https://www.nivassoc.org/take-action