Adler's Law = No matter how admirable or impressive a woman, real or fictional, is recognized to be, there will always be at least one person on the Internet who will try to downplay and undermine her and her accomplishments.

See people claiming that Percy Shelley secretly wrote Frankenstein instead of Mary, calling Cleopatra an incompetent ruler ( Read more... )

Given how the existence of fan policing and harassment on the Internet is sadly still an ongoing issue, causing multiple ongoing discussions of it, here are a few things for me to keep in mind:

One: Anybody who sends threats to other people and/or harasses a real person is a bully. It doesn't matter what their rationale is, what their politics are ( Read more... )

As I've been reading through certain reviews and criticisms of fantasy media, I think that I've put my finger on what's been annoying me about them. And I think that my pet peeve is this: in these criticisms, the reviewers are forgetting about the story. Whether it's the characters or the worldbuilding (and very often, it is a complaint about the ( Read more... )

Growing up, I never read any of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" (CYOA) books. I don't know if it's because they weren't readily available to me or because I just wasn't interested. But now I have found one that's just for adults and is explicitly romance-themed. So, I thought I'd give it a try.

The book is "My Lady's Choosing: An Interactive ( Read more... )

This kind of goes hand-in-hand with the previous Tiresome Trope that I ranted about (Tearing Down the Old to Make Way for the New). In this post, though, I'm going to talk about a possible reason for the character derailment that often occurs in that trope: the writers don't know where to go after the end of a character arc.

( Or )

Well, it's been a while since I've made a 'Tiresome Tropes' post. I'm not sure if TVTropes has a term for this, but I'll just label this as a Tiresome Trope anyway.

I'm not a fan of the writing decision to tear down preexisting characters in a sequel or spinoff of the series that they starred in. I'm sure that very often this isn't done ( Read more... )

Based on a Tumblr post that I've seen (http://sursumursa.tumblr.com/post/164185001599/mr-collinses), I wonder if another term to use for "Nice Guy" (TM) is to refer to that person as a 'William Collins', as in the character from Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice."

The post says 'Mr. Collins', but William is the character's first name, although it's ( Read more... )

And here we are. The last story of this anthology. And surprisingly...it's rather nice too.
( Thank God, At Last Something Happy: The Fairytale )

So, after the garbage heap of misogyny that was "Beasts," we've come to "Her Hair," which, like "Poisoned", is a short and inoffensive rest stop after the trainwreck that came before it. It's a retelling of "Rapunzel" and it takes place after the prince has fallen from the tower and is blinded by thorns.
( Hurt/Comfort: The Fairytale )

If you couldn't already tell from my journal, I love (and am slightly obsessed with) "Beauty and the Beast." So, of course, out of all of the fairytales that A.N. gets his cynical hands on in this book, my favorite one gets the worst treatment.

As I was reading this book, I was already irritated and angry. I disliked the smug tone of A.N., I ( Read more... )