Author: Stitch

Stitch writes about what needs to be written.

Sporking For A Good Cause: Laurell K. Hamilton’s Shutdown (Anita Blake 22.5)

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sporking for a good cause

First things first here is a list of charities that you can (and should) donate to in order to help people directly affected by the government shutdown here in the US. Many of these people aren’t going to get paid even once the government re-opens and right now they’re suffering greatly. If you can donate, you can help someone get a little bit of financial security in these trying times.

Now, some backstory:

In October 2013, the US government was shut down for several days as a result of the Republican congress really hating the idea of letting the United States people get anything close to universal healthcare.

In response to the shutdown and ostensibly for her readers impacted by the shutdown as government workers, Laurell K. Hamilton posted “Shutdown”, a short story (or, more likely, a deleted scene from  the novel that had come out in July of the same year, Affliction) about the werewolf alpha Richard Zeeman introducing his newest human lover to Anita Blake and her main-shapeshifter squeeze, the wereleopard alpha Micah Callahan. This 7200-word story is a quick and frustrating look into the life of one of Anita’s former main lovers.

As Hamilton posted this story with good intentions and reuploaded it with the threat – I mean, promise – to figure out a sequel or original short story if the shutdown continues – with good intentions as well, I am sporking it with the best intentiions at heart. I would appreciate it if my followers/readers donated to one of the charities or organizations I linked to at the beginning of this piece.

So, now that you’ve (hopefully) donated to an organization that’s going to help folks impacted by the government shutdown, let’s start the sporking (for a good cause). The usual trigger warnings for any conversation about the Anitaverse apply here as I’ll be talking about the consent issues in the short, internalized misogyny, kink/sex shaming, and sexual violence. So read carefully if you can!

Note: If you prefer to listen to your sporking, here’s the MP3 narration I did! Don’t forget to donate, you nerds!
Read More »

Ships ‘n Shit: Symbrock

Stitch

Ships n Shit - Symbrock.png

 

One half of the ship is a down and out reporter who’s having a hard time of things.

The other is a hungry-for-brains symbiote, an extraterrestrial blob that thinks violence is both the question being asked and the answer it deserves.

I’m talking about Eddie Brock and Venom, a ship made for monster fuckers in fandom and folks who just really liked the idea of dating someone that basically lives in your body. Fandom has thought of the Venom symbiote as a site for particularly fucky content for years now, and it wasn’t just because of that intensely (and accidentally?) erotic panel between the symbiote and Hawkeye.

(Though that panel helped.)

In the comics, Eddie Brock’s relationship with the symbiote is… fraught. More fucked up, than funny.

In Venom however?

The film manages to balance funny and fucked up and from it, fandom gets… fucky.

Which I am entirely here for.

Now, let’s talk about the characters involved in this ship in a little greater detailRead More »

Fleeting Frustrations #4: What’s the Deal With Reverse Harem Romances?

Stitch

fleeting frustrations 4

There are only about three thousand books that come up when I search for “reverse harem” so let me start out by letting y’all know that I do get that it’s a small part of the overall genre and makes up a teeny tiny percentage of the books published.

But the point of my Fleeting Frustrations pieces is to air a grievance, and on this site: no grievance is too small, too petty, or too focused on a niche within a specific genre for me to air it like laundry on a line.Read More »

What Fandom Racism Looks Like – When White Characters (Somehow) Aren’t White

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wfrll - removing whiteness

Let’s keep this short and salty: did y’all know that there are people – thankfully a minority in their respective fandoms – that will claim a white male character or actor isn’t white for some reason or another.

Well, if you didn’t know before reading that sentence, I’m willing to be that you’ve figured out what you’re gonna learn today in this installment of “What Fandom Racism Looks Like”.

One of the weirdest things I’ve ever come across in all of my years of fandom is this relatively recent thing where fans of a white male character – usually one half of a powerhouse ship involving two white characters – somehow get it into their heads that said white male character isn’t actually white after all.

I don’t get it. Read More »

What Fandom Racism Looks Like: Misogynoir – Introduction

Stitch2 Comments

wfrll - misogynoir - intro

The most disrespected woman in America, is the black woman. The most un-protected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America, is the black woman. – Malcolm X, from a speech he gave May 5, 1962 at the funeral of Ronald Stokes.

Fandom hates Black women – real and fictional.

Fandom can’t stand Black female characters, the actresses that play/voice them, or the Black women who go hard for characters that look like them.

Misogynoir is alive and well in fandom spaces and few people seem willing to acknowledge it or listen to Black women talking about this specific form of racialized misogyny in fandom.Read More »

The Great Big Anita Blake ReRead: Blue Moon

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Content Warning: This installment talks in detail about sexual violence, abuse in relationships, and false rape accusations on top of racism, rednecks, and my usual rage over the series.

blue moon - us 1998 cover
Blue Moon‘s 1998 US Cover

First published in 1998, Blue Moon is the ninth Anita Blake novel and the second in the series to take Anita outside of her normal territory in St. Louis.

While I previously said positive things about how the series takes Anita out of her comfort zone by removing her from her base of operations and her main allies (back in Bloody Bones), sending Anita to Myerton, Tennessee was not the greatest idea because it wasn’t necessarily executed well and relied on stock portrayals of prejudiced southerners to provide a lot of the background characters and minor villains.

After werewolf alpha (and Anita’s ex-boyfriend) Richard Zeeman is falsely accused of and arrested for rape in Tennessee while on a research vacation, Anita takes the initiative to travel down south to keep Richard’s werewolf-y secrets from coming out. The only problem, is that Richard’s pack and family aren’t very fond of Anita and neither is the master of Myerton, a vampire with more power than common sense.

Throw in pack politics, the ghost of the rapist Raina, a bunch of rednecks, and a mystical conspiracy to find the mythical Spear of Destiny and you’ve got one big ole book.

Strap in folks, we’re about to talk about what Blue Moon does decently, what the book gets wrong, and what parts of the book should’ve been killed by magical fire in the woods of Tennessee.Read More »

[Book Review] Once Ghosted, Twice Shy (Reluctant Royals #2.5) by Alyssa Cole

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Note: I received a copy of this novella from the publisher as part of my participation in the blog tour for Pure Textuality  in exchange for an honest review. (Pure Textuality is also hosting a giveaway of a paperback of the first novel in the series! Yay giveaways!!)

Book Cover - One Ghosted Twice Shy by Alyssa Cole.jpg

SUMMARY

Alyssa Cole returns with a fun, sexy romance novella in the Reluctant Royals series!

While her boss the prince was busy wooing his betrothed, Likotsi had her own love affair after swiping right on a dating app. But her romance had ended in heartbreak, and now, back in NYC again, she’s determined to rediscover her joy—so of course she runs into the woman who broke her heart.

When Likotsi and Fabiola meet again on a stalled subway train months later, Fab asks for just one cup of tea. Likotsi, hoping to know why she was unceremoniously dumped, agrees. Tea and food soon leads to them exploring the city together, and their past, with Fab slowly revealing why she let Likotsi go, and both of them wondering if they can turn this second chance into a happily ever after.

 

REVIEW

At this point in my life as a romance reader, I can safely say that I love Alyssa Cole’s writing more than I love naps. If you know anything about me, you’ll how much time I spend sleeping at the most ridiculous parts of the day and how much napping is part of my “routine” Me saying that her writing is better than the naps I take at least once a day? Now, that is a serious claim to make.Read More »

[Snippet] Little Wolf, Big Red

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Originally posted on Patreon at the $1 tier back on October 6, 2018.

little wolf, big red

Red walks into her grandmother’s kitchen to find a werewolf at work cooking dinner. It’s not what she’d been expecting to happen during her vacation from work.

Red isn’t expecting the wolf that she finds in her grandmother’s sunny kitchen. It’s not like she’s never seen a werewolf before, this part of the country is lousy with them. However, Red has never seen a werewolf in her grandmother’s house before. Not with how… complicated the relationships are between her grandmother and the local packs.

Hell, Red has even worked with a few werewolves at the zoos she’s been working at across the years. They’re the best people to have at your side when dealing with the natural wolves that many zoos have, and they can handle the heavier predators.

The werewolf bending down in front of the oven doesn’t look like any of the werewolves that Red has worked with before. For one thing, Red thinks to herself as she watches the werewolf straighten up to a not-so intimidating height, this is the shortest werewolf Red has ever seen. She barely comes up to Red’s shoulders and she seems like such a tiny little thing. Read More »

Stitch Does Stuff In January

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stitch does stuff in january 2019

I’m starting 2019 out right: by planning to write a bunch of stuff that I might not get to do because I always overshoot like it’s my job.

I’m aiming for big writing goals while learning how to use my time wisely and manage my writing time better.

Will this work? Who knows.

Will y’all get good content out of this no matter what happens? Definitely.

So here’s my January 2019 to-do list.

One thing I’m doing that’s new is posting my fiction goals (original and fan fiction) which aren’t set in stone and are moving from month to month because they’re primarily me adding words or doing revisions on existing work. Usually I keep it private because of how often i miss my goals or write unrelated things…

But I’ve realized that y’all might not know I’m always working on some kind of fiction and I’m trying to change that because my fiction writing is important to me and I want it to be important to y’all as well on some level.

Let’s get started.Read More »

#flashbackfriday: Black Panther Fandom Racism Bingo

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Originally posted back in March 2018 after realizing that the MCU fandom never actually stopped its anti-black nonsense. Best way to play? Spend some time scrolling through the unfiltered Black Panther tags on AO3 with a drink in your hand and drink every time you land on something in one of the squares. Repeat drinking is encouraged. (The original, archived inspiration.)

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I’m back with another “fandom racism” card, this one more explicitly for the Black Panther fandom. I think this one can be used for scrolling through tumblr tags or AO3 as a drinking game, but I like my liver a bit too much to play it and see how it goes.

If you can’t read the bingo squares, here’s what they say (though the order may not match) and some handy links to explanationsRead More »

What Fandom Racism Looks Like: Beige Blank Slates

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What Fandom Racism Looks Like - Beige Blank Slates

“certain bodies could be read as blank slates not already overdetermined by race” – a partial quote from page 17 of Melanie E. S. Kohnen’s Screening the Closet: Queer Representation, Visibility, and Race in American Film and Television.

Some of fandom’s favorite characters are “blank slates”.

Beige blank slates, that is.

General Armitage Hux from the Star Wars sequel trilogy.

Arthur and Eames from Inception.

Q from Skyfall and Spectre.

Clint and Phil Coulson in the first Thor movie.

Various minor white male characters in a show or film that somehow became one of/the most popular characters in their source media or fandom.

In this installment of “What Fandom Racism Looks Like”, we’ll be looking at the idea of the “blank slate” primarily in Western media-focused slash fandom spaces.

We’ll be asking what a blank slate looks like, what these fans and fandoms get out of these characters, what characters will never be considered blank enough to be loved, and how, while the claim that fandom prefers “blank slate characters” might well be true and there are many instances where the Beige Blank Slate provides necessary representation within fandom, the preference that prioritizes white male characters above all others kind of messes up something that has the potential to be great.Read More »

Urban Fantasy 101: My Eight Favorite Urban Fantasy Reads of 2018

Stitch

Urban Fantasy 101 - Fave Reads.png

2018 was a great year for me for urban fantasy reads and for my Urban Fantasy 101 series overall. I had more hits in the genre than misses and I found books and authors that I’ll always adore. I was able to develop really interesting thoughts on worldbuilding from reading tons of urban fantasy books and I think I’m finally finding a balanced approach between celebration and criticism.

While I read a ton of urban fantasy in 2018, a fair amount of it wasn’t actually published this year. So, I’m going to wrap up the year by talking about the ones that were. Here are eight of what I thought 2018 had to offer as the best urban fantasy reads (that I’ve read all the way through)!Read More »

The Great Big Anita Blake ReRead: Burnt Offerings

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Content warnings: this installment of The Great Big Anita Blake Reread talks about rape and racism in mild detail (and they’re connected in my analysis of Hamilton’s writing in this book) that include repeated references to what winds up being the corrective rape of a Black lesbian

Burnt Offerings - 2000 UK Cover
Burnt Offerings – 2000 UK Cover

Once upon a time, the Anita Blake series used to be genuinely interesting. Hamilton would open the newest novel by introducing a new and weird element of her worldbuilding and Anita, our audience proxy and authorial self-insert would immediately start stumbling all over herself trying to figure it out before saving the day thanks to her inexplicable good luck and all the illegal weaponry and magical powers she winds up with.

Burnt Offerings, the seventh novel in the long-running Anita Blake series, was one of those interesting books back when I first read it a decade ago.

After being approached by a local firefighter to take down a pyrokinetic arsonist before they escalate in the book’s first chapter, Anita finds herself dropped hip deep in a mess of vampire politics and drama as the arsonist begins to turn to vampire victims. This is also the first novel after Anita and Jean-Claude started to sleep together (and I’m pretty sure that means she and Richard are broken up for the time being) and since it’s also set after Raina and Gabriel’s deaths, this means that leopard shifter problems are becoming Anita’s problems for the first time in the series.

This novel introduces several long-running characters who will become an integral part of Anita’s life as the series progresses and I’m going to be honest: like with refreshing myself with Richard, it’s nice to read these characters as they were before Hamilton ruined them. (Even though, this early on, you can see the problems that would later balloon out of control in characters like Asher and Nathaniel as the series progresses.)

So, let’s talk about what Burnt Offerings did decently, what it did poorly, and what I wish Hamilton had left on the editing room floor back when first working on it.Read More »

#FlashbackFriday – “Dear Budding Sleepy Hollow Fandom”

Stitch

Originally published on my Tumblr September 17, 2013. Seriously, it’s been five years of me talking about misogynoir in fandom and with shipping and things have gotten way worse instead of better. (Also, lightly edited for clarity.)

Abbie Mills from Sleepy Hollow Wikia.png

Dear Budding Sleepy Hollow Fandom,

Don’t do the thing.

Don’t do the thing where you go in deep to act like shipping a woman of color in a hetero relationship (with a white dude) is somehow helping the patriarchy.

Don’t do the thing where you constantly bring up how “it’s a preference” when the only people you don’t ship with the lead are the women of color holding court and kicking ass right with him.

Don’t be like the Skyfall fandom that put maybe 5 minutes of interaction between Q and Bond over everything with Moneypenny. (Ignoring how their relationship actually works and their attraction to each other…)

Don’t be like those people that say that Spock/Kirk is more progressive than Spock/Uhura will ever be. (Because it’s not like when the original series was on air, when we had so little in the way of canon interracial anything on screen to serve as representation).

Don’t act as though wanting to be excited about a dark-skinned black woman as a lead and also wanting to ship her with her co-star is playing into the patriarchy.

Read More »