Yuletide, the OTW, Old Spice Man, Taylor Swift, Inception.

1. If Yuletide were held right now, at this moment, my Yuletide fandoms would be:

• Plants vs. Zombies
• The Room (2003)
• Old Spice Man (and crossovers with every fandom ever)
• Taylor Swift RPF
• Inception.

  2. The OTW is awesome. You should be a member. An OTW member. A member of the Organization for Transformative Works. Won’t you?

  3. Old Spice Man.
  . Nevermind, you’ve already seen that commercial. I like the one for Anonymous, as well as the one for Sardonic look.
  Now read Old Spice Man/Sassy Gay Friend. After you’ve had plenty of time to recover from the dazzling perfection around which your universe has had to expand to fully encompass, read Old Spice!Arthur from Inception–no spoilers because that would be unmanly–and then you should read Old Spice Man/Saito, because the only thing manlier than Isaiah Mustafa is Ken Watanabe, and by “manlier” I mean “more cable of fully demolishing the last frayed threads of your willpower so that you can no longer feebly resist the urge to rip his clothes off at this very moment and instead can only fling yourself upon him in a hapless frenzied heap of desire.”

  And if there are any more Old Spice Man fics out there, well, let’s just say I’m starting a collection. Meaningful Eyebrowface. New numerical item.

  eta, 8/5/10: behold, the zeitgeist hath given us this wonder:
  

  OLDSPICE-KINKMEME.DREAMWIDTH.ORG.
  THE MEME YOU WISH YOUR MEME COULD KINK LIKE.

  4.

• Read More
  Posted by bookshop on Jul 28, 2010 in fandom, film, inception, meta, rants, yuletide | 0 comments

Silence, consent, rape.

This entire post contains potential triggers for frank and occasionally graphic open discussion of sexual abuse and assault, sometimes first-hand. It is all rage-inducing. There is a lot here. There is a very strong trigger warning for this entire post. It all goes under the cut.

The Music of the Night? Turned out to be Slow Jams.

Every now and again I make posts that I almost feel silly making bc the point is so obvious. Like making a post to say “eating soap is bad,” or “more queer characters and women is good,” or “falling for a psychotically violent guy is bad.” And yet! People keep creating these -things- that feel like the creative equivalent of ripping the audience’s collective mouth open and stuffing it full of lye.

And as Carlotta said, “These things do ‘appen,” which is why I am going to tell you all about LOVE NEVER DIES: the Sequel to Phantom of the Opera.

Phantom, as you might possibly be aware, is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s epic blockbuster musical about a psychopath with half a face who builds a lair under an opera house and kills a few people to achieve what would seem a rather contradictory dual goal of turning Christine Daae into a diva and kidnapping her to live with him forever in the catacombs of Paris, which don’t actually exist. Like all good musical theatre nerd-children of the 90′s, I have 15 million pieces of Phantom memorabilia and I can still probably sing every word of the OBCR. I love Phantom the way I love all relics of my childhood, and I care about the Sequel to Phantom the way I care that someone is remaking She-Ra: Princess of Power into a live-action CGI-blockbuster directed by Michael Bay. Alas, if this post were only about She-Ra (though if it were they’d probably find someway to fuck her over, too!).

Love Never Dies, the thrilling sequel, is currently premiering to pans in London. There is a delightfully snarky review of it here at the Times Online, which also does us all the favor of revealing the entire plot. If you don’t want to read spoilers for the sequel to Phantom of the Opera, then something is very wrong with you, but in any case, you now have fair warning, because the relevant snippets of the review are

The White Male Nerd & his Cult of Awesome.

So this week I realized that I am not comfortable identifying with, or participating in, the SFF internet community as it exists outside of fandom.

Earlier this week, regarding Gaiman Fail, my friend Cathy & I had a conversation about the aura of worship that surrounds certain male writers like Neil Gaiman, Joss Whedon, John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, and – let’s be honest – male writers in fandom. My issue is not, as a whole, with each of these male writers themselves, though all of the ones mentioned above have done problematic things and manifested privilege, just like everyone else. My issue is with what I have come to call the Cult of Awesome that forms around these people. How many times during the Amanda Palmer thing did you hear people say, “But Neil Gaiman is still an awesome guy, he just has horrible taste in women.” (More on the Adam=good/Eve=slutwhoredevil thing in a sec.) And how many times this week during, uh, CemeteryFail/Gaiman Fail have you heard, “But Neil Gaiman is still an awesome guy, he’s just made a mistake like we all do!”

Certain male writers, and to some extent certain actors (NPH, Michael Cera, Nathan Filion, Will Wheaton), who tap into a certain level of nerdiness, attract a cult following that seems to manifest in a celebration of said Awesome Guy’s AWESOME GUYNESS!!!!!!

New Year’s Resolution #7: Stop buying YA from Bloomsbury.

I‘ve been looking forward to the debut YA novel Magic Under Glass for months. I ordered it before the first of the year! it came! The author, fabulousfrock, sent me a bookplate! I was excited!

And then I wasn’t.

This is the description of the main character of Magic Under Glass from the review of the book by The Book Smugglers:

This is the U.S. hardback cover of Magic Under Glass, published by Bloomsbury USA:

That…. is not anyone who looks like Nimira to me.

You may recall that last fall, Justine Larbalestier’s incredible book Liar was at the center of a storm of controversy over the fact that its publisher, Bloomsbury, had whitewashed the cover and used a white face to represent an African-American heroine. After the ARCs started coming out and people started to realize what had happened, enough of an outcry went up on the interwebs that Bloomsbury acted fast and changed the cover to feature a beautiful and far more accurate portrayal of the main character, Micah. (My rec for Liar is here.)

The publisher of Magic Under Glass? Guess who!

The cover of Magic Under Glass? It’s been public since the Liar controversy. Bloomsbury was able to yank the original cover of Liar and change it 2 months before it went to press. They had over six months to do the same for Magic Under Glass.

But it was a debut novel whose author didn’t have a foothold in the publishing world that would allow her to protest, as Larbalestier did. Also, the reviewing blogosphere generally doesn’t review books before they’re published. So without the author to spearhead a call to action, there has been none over the whitewashing of Magic Under Glass, and Bloomsbury? Well, obviously, they weren’t concerned.

Until we come to the always awesome Book Smugglers, who with the new cover in hand, close their review with, “Nimira is supposed to be dark-skinned !!!! The book trailer captures that and is true to the book (check it out ) but the girl in the US covers is definitely white.”

______________________

SAME SHIT, DIFFERENT FUCKING YEAR. THANKS A LOT, BLOOMSBURY, FOR RUINING THE ONLY DEBUT NOVEL OF 2010 THAT I REALLY WANTED TO READ. ENJOY SPENDING THE MONEY I GAVE YOU FOR IT, BECAUSE IT’S THE LAST TIME I EVER BUY ONE OF YOUR BOOKS, YOU RACIST ASSHOLE SHIT PUBLISHER. FOR GOD’S SAKE HOW DOES THIS CRAP KEEP HAPPENING?
______________________

1. I really wanted this to be a review of Magic Under Glass. It’s too late to save this book from its cover, and I do want to encourage everyone to read it, talk about it and support fabulousfrock. But after this? From now on?

2. Stop buying books from Bloomsbury Kids. You’re on a budget crunch this year anyway. Stop buying books from Bloomsbury. (NOTE: please see Edit, below.)

3. All of you amazing, fantastic readers who are working on your YA novels: don’t sell your works to Bloomsbury. Sell them to publishers who encourage diversity, publishers who respect chromatic cultures and characters.

4. Support Tu Publishing. It’s necessary. It’s important.

5. If you’re as outraged by this as I am, say so. The contact info, including email, for the Bloomsbury Kids’ Marketing office is available here.

The flip side. (“Pickering, why can’t a woman be more like a man?”)

Hello to everyone coming over from !

I am very pleased at the outpouring of response to my post about gay subtext and heteronormativity.

And the thing is, you can’t talk about hating the heteronormative tropes of mainstream media without facing up to the fact that having this conversation within the context of slash fandom is, well, profoundly hypocritical.

Because what 2 things do heteronormative tropes reinforce, again and again:
1) the idea that there’s a gender binary and that men and women fall into strict gender patterns/roles within it; 2) the idea that this is the only realistic and “right” way in which healthy normal relationships can be formed and stay intact.

And then we look at slash, predominantly male/male pairings, and what do we see:

1) the idea that there’s a gender divide and that men and women fall on strict sides of it, unless gender patterns are deliberately being subverted in ways that ultimately promote male/male hegemony; 2) the idea that the male/male pairings are the only “right” readings of the texts we are slashing, that women are not invited to this party, that if women happen to be canonically involved with one half of the m/m pairing of your choice, they are going to be shunted aside, dismissed, overlooked, badmouthed, maligned, ridiculed, and generally subjected to all the misogyny you and I have been subjected to all our lives, simply because we’re women. Only we’re, of course, doing it to other women. Fictional women, but still women.

I hate this. I hate that I feel like I can’t legitimately talk about how much I love certain female characters, because (like Elizabeth from White Collar), it’s seen as just trying to “politely include the women for the sake of political correctness.” because of course everyone knows how much we want the men to fuck at the exclusion of all else. I can’t talk about how much I love Whip It because no one cares. I hate that I can’t talk about how much I love the Devil Wears Prada fandom without feeling like I only love it because Andy/Miranda is a substitute for a m/m pairing that isn’t present, or legitimately ship Gwen/Morgana without worrying that i’m just doing it to get them out of the way for Merlin/Arthur. And I can’t legitimately talk about how much I hate Ginny Weasley (oh, the hatred!) because no matter how much I love Hermione Granger, Minerva McGonagall, Lily Evans, Rita Skeeter, Cho Chang, Fleur Delacour, Parvati Patil, Bellatrix Lestrange, and any number of other HP women, I’m going to hear “INTERNALIZED MISOGYNY!” until my ears bleed. ETA, April 2011: you know what, forget it. I don’t even hate Ginny Weasley at this point. I read the things I used to say about her and I just feel tired, and I just hate that I hated her for so long. I don’t want to use the word “hate” about any female character, period. But that said, I *do* hate that it’s so hard to turn off the automatic negative voice in my brain, because we’re trained to hate women and girls–by society, but also by m/m slash fandom itself.

i swear it’s not feminist week on my journal or anything, but

T

And before you say “it’s just a joke, lighten up,” imagine SB that is a hot 17-year-old girl. Is it still funny?

Just contacted Sendspace. We’ll see if I get a response.

eta: Sendspace responded to my contact promptly and seemed very interested in knowing what the ad source was; no word on what action they’ve taken, if any, to correct.

What I took away from SETC 2009: absolutely no mention of That Monologue About Pee. D:

I (and my old friend from back home who is now Dorrie’s stage manager, of all coincidences that will never stop being marvelous) at the SETC auditions. I was an auditor, same as last year. I am happy to report that for the most part the audition pieces were much less dynamic and occasionally traumatic than they were last year; however, the overall quality of auditionees, we all agreed, were far, far lower than last year. It was sort of a dismal weekend on the talent front, but we still had a great time, and Dorrie tells me that after I left for my drive back, they had some really good luck with some of their callbacks, so between that and getting to share late-night talks with a good friend, I am well-satisfied.

wants me to write a musical with her. I am obsessed with James Hampton. 1+1=2, and so and I are going to write a musical about James Hampton.

Has musical theatre always been this bland, this substanceless, and I just never noticed? Or are people so desperate to find unused material that they turn to inferior songs just to try for something different? I’m so tired of the perennial ditty about being ready for a hypothetical change without or within, that may or may not be just around the bend, that may or may not involve the new love of your life or the decision you just made, all while using metaphors of flying or soaring or reaching or singing. You have to find your corner of the sky. You have to get to the other side of the tracks. Oh, to be a movie star. If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere. You want to be in someone else’s story. You’re not afraid of anything. You’re gonna learn how to fly — ~high!~ (and papa will watch you). You want to go the distance. You want to make it out There, or just around the river bend. You want more than this provincial life. You want to be a part of that world. You want your reflection to show who you are inside. (Props to Aladdin, btw, for eschewing the Want Song since the whole plot is a Want Song. Though “A Whole New World” will suffice.)

You want to find the movie in your mind, you want to dream the impossible dream, this is the moment, damn all the odds, fine, fine, but what does any of that actually mean? Just TELL US already. Oh my god, writers, at least say “let’s open up a restaurant in Santa Fe!” or “i want to be evil! i want to hurt flies!” instead of “something hypothetical has changed within me, something hypothetical is not the same, I’m through with playing by the hypothetical rules of someone else’s hypothetical game,” but it will take three minutes of belting above C to decide that all this means is that you’re going to eschew lesbian sex with your best friend Glenda. Just. I’m really tired of it all, and my want song right now is: No More. (There should be more DO NOT WANT songs in the world.)

of the 275-ish 30-second monologues that I saw this weekend, I’d say 80-90% of the female monologues were about women reacting to relationships with men: ones they’d been in, ones they were in now, ones they wanted. And they were nearly all boring. I was just. Really. Bored. The male monologues were mostly about things happening. There were a bunch of times that I thought “hey, I’d love to do that monologue” before realizing that I couldn’t because it was gender-specific. And I only thought about that about the male monologues. I find this depressing, and I find it discouraging, and I find it sad.

I also find it depressing and discouraging and sad that among organizations dedicated to promoting innovative new musical theatre:
- the recipients of the Fred Ebb Foundation award for excellence in songwriting have all been men
- the recipients of the Shen Foundation grants to promote important new musical theatre have all been men
- the recipients of the Signature Theatre American Musical Voices project have all been men
- the recipients of the NAMT new works program 2009 grant have all been men minus one female lyricist
- the recipients of the ATW Jonathan Larson 2009 grant have all been men
- the recipients of the NEA 2009 musical theatre grants have all been men, with the exception of Being Audrey, the short-lived and snidely received musical by Cheryl Stern and Ellyn Weiss. (Because, as we all know, “watching a middle-aged woman cavorting like a teenager or twentysomething is embarrassing.”)

God forbid real women should cavort. Or picture themselves as Audrey Hepburn. Or have adventures. Or write musicals. No wonder the monologues for women are boring. And I randomly clicked just now on the 50 greatest movie monologues of all time, and no wonder only 2 monologues on this list are of women. One of which was only added because “we need more ladies.”

Gee, you think?