Category: Book Talk

Fantastic Beasts & Invisible Diversity in the Harry Potter Series

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For a body of media that seems fixated on different avenues of oppression, the Harry Potter series is seriously lacking when it comes to actual diversity and oppression that doesn’t revolve around magical beings. Seriously, just about everything’s a metaphor for some form of oppression or some facet of a marginalized identity.

If you’re looking for allegories about human rights and racism shown through a lens of magical humans and magical species, cool. That’s what you’re getting.

If you’re actually looking for nuanced interpretations of how race, power, and privilege intersect and affect each other in a world of magic, maybe look somewhere else.

J. K. Rowling’s world isn’t going to be it.

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“A product of their time” – Observations on racist (but lauded) writers after Octopussy

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Octopussy CoverYesterday I decided to use my last Audible credit on a collection of Ian Fleming short stories.

I’m working through Fleming’s original canon very slowly and when I saw that the audiobook for “Octopussy and The Living Daylights, and Other Stories” was read by Tom Hiddleston, I just had to have it. Tom Hiddleston reading James Bond seems like the perfect combination of my interests and I have been talking about how badly I wanted to see Hiddles in a Bond movie. I figured that this was the closest I’d get.

Here’s the thing though: as much as I have complained about the racism in the James Bond films, the books are much worse.

The audiobook does not help. In fact, hearing Tom Hiddleston narrate Fleming’s weird and clunky prose on top of the racism that the first story is rife with is pretty terrible.Read More »

“Period Typical Racism” – One kind of historical accuracy in fiction that I wish would go away

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Want to throw me out of a story in no time flat?

Include “Period Typical Racism” in a book written after 1989.

(Seriously, I read one Miss Fisher book because it was recommended as a “feminist James Bond” and honestly, I’d’ve preferred to read Fleming’s James Bond books because at least I can go into them knowing that the guy was a racist misogynist.)

The thing about looking at and reinventing older genres like Noir and Gothic fiction, is that you have a duty to reinvent, not rely, on harmful tropes. It’s your job as a writer writing in the twenty-first century to take our century into context. It’s your job to look at what was written years ago and go “no, I won’t do that”.

It’s your job to be better than the writers who were working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Read More »

[Rant]Too Many Alpha Male Assholes

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Content warnings for mentions of sexual assault/”so-called-seduction” and generally awful behavior from these main characters

If he was the MC of one of these novels, name would probably be Wynter. You see, because his eyes are probably as cold and as blue as the arctic sea.
If he was the MC of one of these novels, his name would probably be Wynter. You see, because his eyes and heart are probably as cold and as deep as the arctic sea.

Why is it that in many romance novels, the word ‘alpha’ is often synonymous with ‘asshole’?

I don’t know why we’re getting this influx of assholes disguised as romantic leads, but I’m so over it.Read More »