#wizardjail

[wizardysseus]

uquiz where izzie @wizardjail and i assign you a result from our hyperspecific fiction taxonomy. we have developed a very specific vocabulary for describing fictional happenings that you won't find on TV tropes. have at it. or don't. quiz has a money-back guarantee.

[widogasm]

let’s play a game called “things you’ve done in dnd that would get you cancelled if you streamed it”

i’ll start: one time in a haunted house my wizard cast fire bolt at a naked, bound, and gagged npc, and after freeing him our bard @wizardjail dressed him up in a clown costume and we made him walk in front

[wizardysseus]

imo the reason werewolves are associated with poverty and vampires with wealth is that the ways the monsters are othered correspond to the ways people are othered. werewolf stereotypes are also stereotypes about masculinity, often extending to racist gendered stereotypes about black and brown men, as well as (though i think this has been less covered in pop culture) trans women, all of which reinforces their association with poverty. vampire stereotypes are also stereotypes about foreigners, particularly antisemitism and orientalism, which reinforces their association with wealth.

and since they are both fictional monsters, you can do a lot to problematize the different pieces of that, but it's more than flipping the script — "in MY story vampires are poor and werewolves are rich!" — which tropes associate to the ideas you want to challenge? are your werewolves still uncontrollably violent? are your vampires still seductive? is contracting lycanthropy/vampirism an accident? an attack? do they subsist on exploitation and secrecy? how does being a monster disrupt someone's life? can they control the symptoms, and how? and whatever the reality for them is, how are they viewed in-world? (brutish, strong, physically repulsive, virile? desirable, exotic, effeminate, infectious?) because they are certainly viewed a certain way in our world, and that will affect how a reader encounters your work and how truthful it will feel when you play with, challenge, and/or create new metaphors.

[this post isn't exactly co-written by izzie @wizardjail but it is pursuant to our ongoing conversations.]

[wizardysseus]

compiled some of my favorite discussions with izzie @wizardjail in re: hozier's baby

[wizardysseus]

"how did disney's hunchback of notre dame get made" "who is a feel-good adaptation of victor hugo's tragedy the hunchback of notre dame even FOR" shut up. it's for me and izzie @wizardjail . you don't matter

[wizardysseus]

I was tagged by @kareenvorbarra in the last line of fic meme!

Rules: share the last written line of one WIP and tag as many people as there are words.

tagging @theteaisaddictive @red-sea-itinerary @mmonstra @florallychaotic @butchdykeorpheus @wizardjail @syn-odics @libraryleopard @kazz-brekker @jadesabre301 @avas-poltergeist

[wizardysseus]

@elwing tagged me to share the most recent line i've written tyyyy

tagging @theteaisaddictive @wufflesvetinari @avas-poltergeist @warmsafflinas @butchdykeorpheus @wizardjail

[wizardysseus]

💌 hard mode: something that is NOT shrek

phantom of the opera and mall bookstores and weird little primates and the inherent eroticism of wizard-themed accessories and ghost stories

send me a 💌 and i'll tell you something i associate with you

[wizardysseus]

rank odysseus' crimes from most abhorrent to We'll Let This One Slide

per a prior post i added a smart/dumb axis. subject to change because i just drew my silly little dots as the spirit led me

[wizardysseus]

@wizardjail said: talk about ur current wip... and also perhaps some greatest hits discourse from the terrible YA book club

my current wip is spinnerman. the star of the show is picket, who lives in a fairy tale kingdom with her father, a woodcutter anarchist. when he gets a little too woke in front of the queen, picket has to make a deal with a mysterious being called shadowspinner to save his life. adventures ensue. they kind of fall in love and they’re both mad about it.

writing it has been slow because, you know, grad school. but it’s a lot of fun in concept and i think once we start reading bad ya fae romances over break i will be more motivated

as for past exploits of the terrible ya book club.....

perhaps protagonists should have interests and desires that drive the plot forward

“did sarah j maas.... just get bored of her love interest? halfway through her own book?”

political marriages are important actually, and future kings should be having them

if kings aren’t going to marry for political advantage then they at least need to fall in love with woke peasants who will call them on their shit

why are we still stuck on monarchies in ya fantasy, anyway

maybe if you make your dumbledore expy literally the only anti-racism voice in your book - literal real-world racism, not just fantasy racism - that character shouldn’t be the villain, and when you kill him off, it shouldn’t be the happy ending that the old wizard families go back to business as usual. JUST A THOUGHT!

taking rape out of myths where it was there and adding rape into myths where it wasn’t are both bad

[wizardysseus]

(person who hasn't heard of "shrek" voice) beauty and the beast is a monsterfucker story

i’ve written on this subject many times

monsterfuckery is a fine pursuit but it’s not the most productive lens to read beauty and the beast through. if you do, you’re going to be let down by the beast’s transformation into a human being --- which leads to a lot of criticism that amounts to “beauty and the beast ending Objectively Bad.” if you ask me, this is a sheer failure to engage with the story on its own terms. when you’re considering what kind of narrative you’re looking at, the ending matters! the ending is part of the key to interpretation! 

to me, monsterfucking implies that the monster’s monstrousness is part of what the other partner wants from the relationship. if the ending of beauty and the beast were different, do i think beauty would have abandoned the beast? no --- in most versions, she has to admit she loves him without knowing about the curse, after all, and in the original she not only confesses her love but agrees to marry him. you can read that as a journey about the heroine embracing monsterhood, but i would argue that her position in the story is monster-neutral. she loves the beast either way.

and, you know, you would think that would be important to him, since the beast is fundamentally cursed. he does not enjoy being a beast. he does not want to be a beast. his physical (and in some versions other forms of) agency has been stripped from him. his journey isn’t about embracing monsterhood, but about embracing humanity.

go read tam lin! go watch shrek! or even penelope (2006)! but in beauty and the beast, i think people let the aesthetic distract them from looking at how being a monster actually functions in this narrative. if it were a monsterfucker story, it would end differently. and if it ended differently, it would diminish the conflict that drives the story, and beauty’s power in breaking the curse. 

[wizardysseus]

B, F, P (so you can be petty if you want), and Z for writing meme...

B. Who’s your favorite side-character from something you wrote?

you know i love magnus and i know you love magnus but i already talked about him here

my favorite side character from beauty and the beast wip is definitely sofia. she’s an Older Sister, but feels like she hasn’t been a very good one, which is writing from the heart lol. i tend to write about siblings a lot, because i have a lot of them, and imo authors tend to undervalue any kind of sibling relationship between “hate each other completely” and “love each other devotedly.” sofia’s experience, and mine, is more in the middle: she can love her sister and still resent things she does, and feel guilty for resenting them, and wonder how much of that responsibility is hers, and not want it, and still step up to the plate as a protector and a friend.

F. What stories are you planning for the future?

#1 is my batb revision. i’ve got a lot of other things on the back burner, though, not least of which are threads (woods horror / gay coming of age), the priestess and the knight (romancing a faerie knight), and library keepers (“high fantasy” series).

P. What are your pet peeves in other people’s work?

it takes a skillful writer to sell me on a first-person narrator or the use of, like, more than 3 povs. the real kicker is multiple first-person povs. if i see that when i open a book, you’ve got an uphill battle

protagonists who do not give a shit about their surroundings

protagonists who don’t... drive... the plot... at all

as you also talked about: heroes who are called compassionate, but can’t actually be assed to care about anyone but their significant other

“monster romances” where the love interest is just a dude

for the love of god. your heroine is not not like other girls

feminist retellings that uh. take shallower views of women and their experiences than the texts they draw from

Z. If you could choose one work and immediately finish it, what would it be? How would you end it?

if not batb revision, then witch penelope (the one where penelope becomes a witch to get rid of the suitors)... i haven’t written it but it would be a short story so it feels like i should be done already. i haven’t decided if i would end it with odysseus returning or not. i’m predisposed to want a reunion, but i don’t think i’ll know if it feels right until i write the rest.

[wizardysseus]

hours late but i was touring a cemetery by lanternlight. tell me about that one with the aliens because i have NEVER heard about this

it’s OLD!! the premise was something like, earth has been taken over by bodysnatching aliens, and the pov character is a human who gets rescued from the brink of being snatched by an Enigmatic, Dorky Badass girl. he has amnesia and nowhere to go, so she travels around with him in a very dr who/companion kind of way, trying to help the resistance along the way

at the two-thirds point of the book, he would have found out that she actually is one of the aliens, but when she was first assimilated, she was living with the human girl’s consciousness alive in her head for a long time, so that really fucked her up

i honestly don’t remember what else i had planned... is this basically the plot of the host? smeyer call me, i’m sure i can improve on it

i’m not gonna post an excerpt because i haven’t touched it for years and i don’t hate myself enough to read back what i wrote back then, but i’d still like to get back to it one day

[wizardysseus]

3 17 26 32 43 58 61 79 85 94... i went through and selected the unloved numbers

very appropriate because the notation for almost every one of these songs ought to be, in one way or another, “you did this to me”

spotify wrapped 2020, #3: “oblivions” by the national

#17: “lost river” by murder by death

#26: “stray italian greyhound” by vienna teng

#32: “sleeping states” by gregory and the hawk

#43: “i was married” covered by ruth b.

#58: “goodbye, my danish sweetheart” by mitski

#61: “which witch” by florence + the machine

#79: “stronger than ever” by raleigh ritchie

#85: “champagne” from in the heights

#94: “happy” by mitski

[wizardysseus]

10, 11, 17 for the books... also 13, for fun

end-of-year book ask

What was your favorite new release of the year?

return of the thief by megan whalen turner!! god, for a second there i was about to say i hadn’t read any new releases i loved, but rott was everything i wanted and more. if i could make everyone read this series, i would.

What was your favorite book that has been out for a while, but you just now read?

i’m sorry i keep saying fruits basket but it’s gotta be fruits basket! a close second would be derek walcott’s odyssey play.

Did any books surprise you with how good they were?

my expectations for a ballad of songbirds and snakes by suzanne collins were pretty damn low, but i found it surprisingly engrossing. and then saw a bunch of reviews that managed to miss the point so completely that i ended up appreciating it even harder and upped my rating! someday i will write my essay cracking open the hunger games and the underland chronicles.

answered 13 here!

[wizardysseus]

3 for positivity, 13 and 16 so you can vent

3 answered here!

i think my answers for 13 and 16 are the same, so:

What were your least favorite books of the year? What is the most over-hyped book you read this year?

tie between the folk of the air series by holly black and the house in the cerulean sea by tj klune. i liked the folk of the air slightly more (and prefer black's prose to klune's), but i did not see what all the fuss was about for either of them.

however, nothing i read this year was as bad and infuriating as madeline miller's books so improvement overall.