with their crooked stares

[maychorian]

For the interested, jujuberry136 has good thoughts about those Season 6 Criminal Minds casting spoilers. Well, more like good rants. But I found them very articulate and thought-provoking and I agree with everything she said.

In her extremely excellent link round-up on the recent unfunny business, amazonziti said something in this thread (which is also an excellent

Comments

[maskedfangirl]

Ditto on the fic idea thing. All of these conversations have me thinking about ways to include characters from marginalized groups in fics about this white male dominated canon. Catherynne Valente wrote a fabulous post last year on why it's important to have PoC, women, GLBT people, etc. represented well in genre fiction, and I think the same is true for fan fiction - we look for heroes like ourselves in the safe spaces we make for ourselves in fiction. On top of that, fanfic has always been a great vehicle from which to rectify canon's points of fail - so of all places, this is where groups marginalized in Supernatural ought to be seen in the foreground.

I would really love to get a discussion going about how to effectively write PoC, pitfalls to avoid, how to react when and if you do screw something up, and all that good stuff. I've seen so many comments of "I wanted to write a fic with PoC characters but now I'm nervous" or "Well, better to avoid the subject entirely so as not to screw up!" and it's disheartening. Lack of representation is worse than potentially bad representation. The possibility of getting things wrong and offending someone is intimidating, but there's always the opportunity to apologize and learn from it if you get something wrong - everyone shows their ass at some point.

(And please do write your fic! You're an excellent writer, and I have faith in your ability to do it well.)