A Quick Update

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If you know me from tumblr (the same username as my website), that’s on an indefinite hiatus for the foreseeable future.

For various reasons (including someone (some people?) running a smear campaign against me and reblogging my stuff with vicious untruths for at least two straight days), I’ve decided that I currently don’t want to spend time on the platform and that my time needs to be spent working rather than reblogging.

The harassment is a portion of it, but not the entirety. It was just the final straw.

From here on on, I’m only going to be active on Twitter when it comes to social media. I’ll continue to write content on fandom and media racism, of course, but tumblr is no longer in the equation on any level. You can also always reach me on here or via my contact form page on my website.

On top of that, I’m going to be inaccessible for much of the next week. Tomorrow afternoon I’m flying down to help my elderly father with some things and seeing as he’s almost eighty, he doesn’t have internet. Unless I can get to someplace with internet (possibly the Kmart at the mall of it’s still up), I won’t be online.

Barring any awfulness, I’ll be back in Florida by the following Thursday with a notebook full of ideas and a much calmer sense of being.

This trip to see my dad was last minute and his idea since he needs help and wants me to hang out with him and my brother (who’s also visiting), but after the past few days I am glad for the break and the chance to have the cord cut between me and the internet so I can destress.

I’ll have my laptop and notebooks with me as well as my headset so I’m going to carve out some time to write as often as I can so I can come back to y’all with new content (not all of it Patreon-first)!

Thank you all for your patience and understanding!

Urban Fantasy 101: A Quick Guide to Shifter Romances

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This is a new aspect to my Urban Fantasy 101 blog series that I hope y’all find useful! I read a lot of urban fantasy and paranormal romance and I wanted to make little primers for tropes, sub-genres, and whatnot in these overarching genres in order to help introduce new readers to things they might not be familiar with!

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What are shifters?

“Shifter” is short for “shape-shifter”.

Both terms can be used to encompass everything from the traditional fantasy novel fare like werewolves to mythological/folkloric beings like selkies and the lamia.

The most important thing that most shifters have in common across the genres they show up in is that they usually have at least two forms: a base human(oid) form and a full “animal” form. Some shifters have the ability to partially shift parts of their bodies or to inhabit a third full form between beast and human.
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When White Villains Get Woobiefied: Kylo Ren Is Just A Monster In A Mask

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Notes: The following post will mention childhood abuse (and who gets to have that kind of trauma respected/made up for them to give them weight and validate their actions) and spoilers from the film and novelization versions of The Last Jedi as well as mild spoilers for Last Shot. Images come from StarWarsScreenCaps.Com.

More care has gone into fabricating a sobbing wreck of a backstory for Kylo Ren where he’s been dealing with childhood abuse (that is supposed to explain why he’s somehow the most interesting/compelling character of the sequel trilogy) than has gone into showing any empathy or interest in analyzing the one character in the sequel trilogy who does have that backstory, but gets none of the empathy: Finn.

Today in “that’s literally not canon”, I’m going to be picking apart an article from The Mary Sue about how Kylo Ren’s story is about childhood abuse; one that says things like:

“Rey and Kylo relate to one another about their childhoods, which included parental abandonment and neglect, and abuse, as well as their Force abilities.”

First off:

As far as I know, there’s nothing that shows that Ben’s childhood included parental abandonment and neglect. Nothing. Nothing across two movies. Leia sending her Force Sensitive son (who was in late teens/early adulthood) to train with her Force Sensitive brother is not neglect.

We currently have ZERO canon that shows what his childhood was like, but we know that the whole point of the Ben-to-Kylo Ren transformation was that it came out of nowhere and that nothing in Leia’s relationship with her son prepared her for his full leap not just to the dark side, but to full on fascism.

The most we can say with confidence about Ben before he was Kylo, is that he was radicalized by Snoke who preyed on his insecurities at some point most likely when he was a teenager.

But we don’t know anything about what Snoke did – that presence probing Leia’s uterus back in that Chuck Wendig book does not count — but I suspect we never will considering his abrupt death in The Last Jedi.Read More »

A thought about werewolf stomachs:

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I don’t remember who I was having this conversation with (but it was probably someone in the English department because that’s where I keep having these conversations) but the subject of werewolves and their eating habits came up and the person I was talking with was like “okay, but what happens to the raw meat when they turn back human”

And I didn’t even have to think about it.

Werewolves aren’t human.

They’re humanoid.

They’re always werewolves even when two-legged.

Werewolves aren’t wolves either.

Therefore, their stomachs are werewolf stomachs – not human or wolf.

So they can eat anything that humans can eat as well as anything wolves can eat.

I argue for all of the benefits and none of the drawbacks.

Trust me, I’m a werewolf expert.

Five Things I Want From Amazon’s Eventual Lord of the Rings Series

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For some wild reason I can’t understand, Amazon has decided to start with a quarter of a billion dollar budget for their upcoming Lord of the Rings series. As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, that initial $250 million dollar deal is only the tip of the iceberg since, “When production expenses like casting, producers and visual effects are factored in, the series is expected to cost north of $1 billion”.

Shows with bigger budgets than most Hollywood blockbusters are a current “big” thing with HBO’s Westworld and Game of Thrones pulling in huge audiences and costing millions of dollars per episode. (Westworld$100 million price tag reportedly had a for its first season and Game of Thrones surely has surpassed that in all of their seasons.) Same goes for the BBC and Netflix series Troy: Fall of a City.

The thing about this newly locked in Lord of the Rings deal is that we’re at $250 million for a series we know next to nothing about and that’s kind of amazing. This is an expensive series that has the potential to go anywhere and do anything – within the confines of Tolkien’s worldbuilding.

So here are five things that I desperately want to see from this Lord of the Rings series that no one on this green-ish earth asked for.

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[Stitch Goes Places] Elizabeth Acevedo & Tomi Adeyemi in Conversation @BooksandBooks

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I love book events. Talks, signings, readings… You name it and I’ll probably enjoy watching an author I admire and adore do it because I just think they’re cool.

So when news first dropped about Tomi Adeyemi going on a book tour to celebrate the release of her debut novel Children of Blood and Bone AND that she’d have a tour-stop in my lovely neck of the woods at local bookstore Books and Books AND that she’d be in conversation with the ridiculously talented Elizabeth Acevedo (whose debut novel The Poet X is also amazing), I got obnoxiously excited. Read More »

#NowWeRise – Children of Blood and Bone Blog Tour (Moodboard + Blogging Bits)

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You know, I think this might be the first time I’ve ever done a blog tour?

When I got the email about possibly doing something for the release of Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone in its release week, I kind of like got all giddy. What a great opportunity to do something fantastic in order to celebrate one of my favorite books of 2018!

In Tomi Adeymi’s Children of Blood and Bone, the Ìwòsàn Clan is the clan of the Maji of Health and Disease. As a result of this totally awesome “Discover Your Magic” graphic, that clan is… my clan, but my majj power isn’t that of healing, it’s of inflicting disease.

My maji power (Cancer) is the magical equivalent of Typhoid Mary.

Which I find fitting because of my relationship with illness.

I’m honestly always sick.

Or suffering from something.

Right now, I’m actually pretty sure that I might even have the chicken pox. (Though… probably not as I was vaccinated as a child and I think that’s supposed to stop that from happening.)

So for me, there’s something absolutely captivating about the idea of maji whose power centers around causing illness instead of healing it.Read More »

While You Sleep: A Black Panther Drabble Collection

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While You Sleep - Title Card (1)

Four times T’challa watched someone sleep and one time that the tables are turned.

Absolutely un-beta’d. Spoilers for Black Panther abound. The last two snippets are set between the end of the final fight scene and the last scene in California. They also diverge from the end of the film.

Content warnings for character death, trauma from character death, and implied violence.

i.

The first time that T’challa holds his newborn sister Shuri in his arms, he worries for a moment that he’ll drop her. Then she nuzzles close in her sleep, tiny lips parting with a smacking yawn, and he knows that he’d never hurt her. Not even on accident.

She’s hours old and so very small, warm and soft in the cradle of his elbow, her dark little face tucked up against his chest. She barely has any hair atop her head aside from a faint whisper of black hair that is pitch black and feather light against the dark brown of her skin.Read More »

[Problematic Fave] Batman Thrillkiller

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Content warning: I talk about two canonical ships that involve adults and teenagers (one in relative detail and the other not in specifics) and a reference to the writer’s transmisogyny in another series.

Problematic Fave - Batman Thrillkiller

Earth-37, the alternate earth that serves as the setting for Batman: Thrillkiller, was one of my favorite worlds in the DC Universe despite the fact that the actual story and art are… problems.

Back when I first read the miniseries, I think it hooked me with narration boxes that see our masked heroes juxtaposed against the transitional period that this Elseworlds tale exists in:

We tend to define our lives by the decades – the gay nineties, the roaring twenties, the depression thirties. The calendar reads 1961 – but it’s a time of transition. It’s not the fifties anymore – the decade of Ike, of McCarthyism, of Jack Kerouac – and it’s certainly not the nineteen sixties of the sexual revolution, of the war in Vietnam, of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. Like the rest of the USA, Gotham was jumping with a giddy optimism – no one could guess at the dark days that lay ahead.

This first set of narration boxes is set against a backdrop of Gotham City, Batgirl and Robin at the top in shadow and the city they’re attempting to protect at the bottom. There’s something about watching comics try to establish a sense of realism and historical context in their works that just… entertains me. The next few pages establish the historical context of this Elseworlds — JFK is president, Elvis was discharged from the army, and the Beatles weren’t yet a thing. It’s a set of pages that immediately and successfully establish realism and a connection to the time period and it works.

Thrillkiller is a genre mishmash with elements of noir fiction, your sort of typical superhero story, and some air of the 1950s morality movie in the style of Reefer Madness. Which could be awesome except…

[Small Stitch Reviews] A Princess in Theory by Alyssa Cole

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Technically, there are spoilers for Black Panther in this review… Right there at the top.

A Princess in Theory Cover

If you walked out of Black Panther on your first (or third) viewing and were hit by a craving for some sweet romance in the same vein as the sweetness between Chadwick Boseman’s T’challa and Lupita Nyong’o’s Nakia, boy do I have the book for y’all.

A Princess in Theory, the first book in Alyssa Cole’s new Reluctant Royals series, is a fantastic “lost royalty” story centered on the evolving relationship between a potential princess that doesn’t know her own past (but does know her way around a lab since she’s an epidemiologist) and the prince who happens to believe in happy endings (but needs to do a bit better about his big reveals).Read More »

Women of Color in Marvel Live Action Properties – Elektra Natchios

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Women of Color in Marvel Live Action Properties is an essay series that will look closely at the portrayals of female characters of color by actresses of color in Marvel’s various franchises. I was inspired by the fact that a lot of these female characters don’t get anywhere as much love as white female characters in similar roles and that we’re not as likely to see fandom analyze why they’re empowering. They don’t get meta-fandom or essays unless it’s about placing them in relation to white characters. I want to celebrate the women of color that inhabit the same worlds as our favorite superheroes while looking at how and why they’re important to fans like me.

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Alexandra Reid: Her name was Elektra Natchios. You are not her. You are much more than she ever was. There was a man. They call him the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. And in this other life, he let Elektra die.

Defenders Season 1, Episode 6 “Ashes, Ashes”

Elektra Natchios deserves better than Daredevil – the show and the character.

Introduced in Daredevil’s second season episode “Kinbaku”, Elektra is an old flame come back to burn Matt Murdoch, appearing in his apartment under the pretense of asking for a favor from the man she once cared about. Elektra is a morally grey character, a complex figure who disrupts Matt’s life just by existing.

She’s also a survivor of childhood abuse that includes neglect, manipulation, and violence from a parental figure, something that she has not been allowed to cope with. Elektra’s mistreatment by Stick, a man who serves as an abusive pseudo father figure for both her and Matt, is a significant element in the latter half of Elektra’s appearances in Daredevil and yet his abuse’s effect on her relationship and mental health are largely glossed over.

Her complexities as a character who has survived horrible mistreatment and who has been shaped into and used as a tool by two different sides in a war largely wind up not getting their fair share of attention in plots dominated first by Matt Murdoch alone and then the entire crew of the Defenders.

For this essay, I’m going to talk about Elektra as a complex anti-hero, one whose status as a survivor shapes her characterization and her approach to relationships.Read More »

Queer Coded Villains Aren’t That Awesome

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AKA “Hux and Kylo aren’t the queer coded villains you’re looking for”

I woke up  on MLK Day swearing that I’d dreamt up a tumblr post where someone quoted Martin Luther King Jr. in order to defend Hux, Kylo Ren, and the First Order. When I went through my archives, not only did I find out that the post was real, but I then stumbled back over a post I made in response to one arguing that Star Wars’ Hux was coded as queer and that said queer-coding was a good thing.

And I mean –

A fair amount of people not only read Kylo Ren and Hux as queer-coded within their canon, but:

  1. Queer coded villains are actually kind of shitty and they definitely shouldn’t be something to aspire to or admire, and
  2. I don’t know how they leap to that conclusion of Hux and Kylo as queer coded in the first place.

For one thing, there’s a difference between a character – especially a villain – being coded as queer in their canon (typically via stereotypes about femininity/masculinity, style of dress, speech, interactions with other characters) and a queer fan deciding to read a character as queer because they see themselves in the character.

If they’re actually present in canon, queer coded villains typically come from a place of homophobia – conscious or otherwise. They come from a fear of supposedly non-normative genders and sexualities and from society straight up repurposing queerness (or stereotypes about queerness) as a go-to for “spooky and scary” because well –

Heterocentrism kind of needs to portray queerness as a dangerous avenue to stroll down.Read More »

When will it finally be an acceptable time to talk about gun violence?

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Today, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida (the school I did my student teaching in back in the beginning of 2015), a young man with access to an AR-15 and a ton of ammo shot multiple people.

So far, seventeen people have died.

Children have died.

Children have fucking died.

And yet, it’s still somehow not the right time for the US Government to do something about the gun violence that plagues our country and kills children in the safest of spaces.

And the thing that gets me is that it’s somehow never the right time to talk about this violence or to how we can do something about it.Read More »

The Consort – Chapter Two

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THE CONSORT

Iirin meets the two gods that he is apparently destined to bond with and realizes that he really has no idea how to handle what will come next.

Between the moment when the carriage finally slowed to a stop and when its door opened with a muted snap, Iirin managed to come up with and discard nearly a dozen different scenarios where his introduction to the two Tals could go terribly.

Jolted out of his dark thoughts, Iirin found himself gaping up at the man that opened the door for him.

At the temple-orphanage, Iirin was the tallest inhabitant, and even when he did errands in the marketplace, he rarely saw anyone that approached his height in the bustling crowd. However, the man in front of him looked as if he almost could be several inches taller than Iirin if they stood side by side.

In addition to that stunning height, the man before him was striking, with curly dark green hair, warm brown eyes, and light brown skin several shades lighter than Iirin’s own complexion with an undertone of greenery flickering just underneath the surface.

He was also, Iirin realized when eyes met, not a regular demon.

Or even a demon at all.

Iirin had been expecting a servant to help him out of the carriage and introduce him to his future bonded, not one of the two gods themselves.Read More »