Otter's Rock

First, the good news. The other Campbell Award (Yes, for forty years there have been TWO major awards named after that fucker, and yes, it has always been confusing) is also getting its name changed. When the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas decides what name they want their award formerly known as the "John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel of the year" to be known as, they will announce it. They have already renamed their yearly conference from the Campbell Conference to the Gunn Center Conference.

John Scalzi has some interesting comments on the whole thing, and I think this is the most notable and important bit of his post:

Campbell is and will always be part of science fiction’s history. But history isn’t static, even if the facts of history stay the same. Anyone notable enough to be part of the historical record will find themselves the subject of reassessment, for however long they grace history’s record. It is, weirdly, a privilege not many people get. Campbell was never guaranteed a pedestal, or an award, or a conference in his name, even if he got them for a while. He was never guaranteed to keep them. No one is.

On to the Bad News.

The Tiptree Award is remaining the Tiptree Award, at least for now.

James Tiptree, Jr. was the pen name of Alice Sheldon, one of the greatest female SF/F writers of the early 20th Century. More than a pen name, Tiptree was a persona. Besides writing many great classics, Sheldon was an active participant in the SF/F community for decades, as James. Sheldon carried on many friendships entirely via letter, and was by the 1970s one of the Great Old Men of the genre. (Unsurprisingly, most of Tiptree's work explored gender and the social construction of identity.) It was a huge shock when, in the 1970s, it was revealed that James was Alice. Given both Tiptree's body of work and double life, it was an appropriate name for an award encouraging the exploration and expansion of gender.

The problem is that Sheldon/Tiptree killed both her disabled husband and herself in a murder-suicide in 1987. Everyone who knew them believed it was a mutual decision, and yet, it was still a pretty terrible thing to do. Especially because "well, he's disabled and old and if she can't care for him he'd be better off dead" seems to have been a large part of why they finally did it after a decade of talking and thinking about it. After some deliberation, the Tiptree Motherboard has decided to keep the name as it is, at least for now. They lay out their reasons, many of which I agree with, here. (Warnings for talk about suicide, depression, and some ableism.)  File 770 also has some interesting discussion in the comments, including by at least one person who was fairly close with Alice.

And I'm torn. Because on the one hand, Tiptree's writing explored and foregrounded themes that almost nobody else was exploring at the time (certainly nobody else with such focus and consistency). And (unlike Campbell's fascism, which had a DIRECT and OBVIOUS affect on both his work and the genre as a whole), Sheldon's last horrifying act was not directly connected with Tiptree's art, except insofar as the sense of having been trapped with no way out led both to the murder/suicide and shaped Tiptree's work. Tiptree's writings are not notably more ableist than the genre as a whole, nor do they glorify or advocate for the sort of act which was Sheldon's last. It is possible to separate out the work from the evil, because the work did not advocate for or position the evil as good; the evil was, by and large, not present in the work. This is in direct contrast to Campbell, who actively used his work and his position to advocate for all of the evil in his head. You can't separate out Campbell's evil from his work because he made them intertwine so deeply--he did that, he chose that. Tiptree/Sheldon made a different choice, and so it is possible to make a separation between the work and the evil they did.

But how great a separation do we want to make? How much is good or reasonable? Do we want to name this award after a murderer? The Tiptree Motherboard make a case that it wasn't murder because Huntington Sheldon, Alice's husband, wanted to die, so that makes everything alright enough to keep the name. Here's my response, which I emailed to them:

As a person with a disability, there is one aspect of your understanding of Huntington's last days that is a gigantic, glaring problem, for two reasons, neither of which you seem to have considered. And the aspect is this: did he, or did he not, wish to die? For you, this is an important point (and you may well be correct on it). I don't believe that it matters, for two reasons.

First, a desire to die is not rational. It is a mental illness. It is part of depression. If a healthy person desires to die, we get them help. If they kill themselves, it is seen as a great tragedy. But when a disabled person is depressed, oh, of course, what could be more natural! Of course they want to kill themselves! Of course they need help ... but we are quicker to offer help to end their life than we are to offer assistance towards a better quality of life and the sort of therapy and medication that might help them be happy. Why is a disabled person's life less worthy than an abled person's? You may have considered this, but your statement certainly doesn't reflect any such consideration. He wanted to die, so his wife can be excused for making it happen. It fits so well into the common narrative of disability and death. It's even used in cases where we know for a certainty that the murder victim did not want to die ... because even in cases where the victim left a ton of evidence that they were happy and wanted to live, people will ignore it because they believe that disabled people must and should be miserable. Of course they must have wanted to die. So therefore the murderer can be excused for having killed them. Regardless of what resources were available to help the couple in 1987 (or in the decade leading up to that during which everybody seems to have known they were depressed and possibly suicidal and nobody did much), we live now in a world with much greater resources to help and yet people still kill disabled people using this as the reasoning. Regardless of whether or not you rename the award, PLEASE reframe the discussion so that you are not contributing to this perception of depression and disability.

Second, let us assume for the sake of argument that he genuinely did wish to die. How did he come to have such a wish? When someone is completely dependent on another person, as Huntington was on Alice, it is incredibly easy for the dependent person to adopt their caretaker's opinions. It is a psychological defense tactic, and it is the same mechanism that produces Stockholm Syndrome. This extends even to suicide. If the "caretaker" wishes the dependent person to be dead, the dependent person will often passively accept their "caretaker's" wishes. (I use scare quotes here because if someone wants you dead or believes you would be better off dead, the level of care is often ... minimal, if not actively neglectful or abusive.) If they can get to someplace safer, though, where they are not told through word and actions that they should be dead and would be better off dead, their opinions on the subject often change DRAMATICALLY. Even staying with the same primary caregiver but having more social contact with the wider world can be enough to work such change.

So the idea that Huntington was suicidal himself is not the mitigating factor you imagine it to be.

I really don't know what the answer is.

tumblr version is here.

I've been in fandom for almost twenty years, and here are some things that are true of pretty much every fandom I've seen: There is a lot more sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism, anti-semitism, etc., in fandom than most of us would like to admit, and the vast majority of it is unconscious. People (mostly white, etc.) THINK they're being perfectly unbiased and fair, and they really, really aren't. Their unconscious prejudices are shining through. And it sucks. We, collectively, suck.

But here's something I think most people miss: when we talk about this stuff, the point is not to make people feel bad. It's not about who's a "good," non-racist person, and who is a "bad" racist. It's not about proving who's "pure" and who's not. (Or at least, if that's why you're doing it, you're a really screwed-up self-righteous asshole.) IT'S ABOUT CHANGE. Because the thing is, we are all swimming in a sea of racist, sexist, queerphobic crap all the time. We can't change the larger culture (at least not by ourselves), but we CAN change fandom. I know, because fandom has gotten better about this stuff over the last twenty years. There is still a LOT of room for improvement, but it's better than it was. And it can get better than it is. But not if we ignore the problem or sweep it under the rug or get defensive. The first step in sucking less is to realize that you suck in the first place. The second step is figuring out how to suck less.

This post is about that second step. This post is about how to take the knowledge that, yes, we have some problems, and work to make those problems smaller. This post is about how to work through that, grow as a person, learn to suck less, and still have fun in fandom while you're doing it.

There are a lot of posts out there about how to be a good ally. There are also lots of posts out there about avoiding racist/sexist/ableist/whateverist tropes in fic. And there are a lot of good posts out there pointing out that fandom gets WAAAAAY more interested in able-bodied neurotypical cisgender white men than about any other character. We all know what the problems are, or at least, we should. But I think there's a need for "okay, I want to be more inclusive/suck less, how do I do it" on a broad level before we get to the nitty-gritty of "these are tropes I should avoid or be careful about." Namely, how does one get oneself to be fannish about characters that all one's cultural conditioning is screaming at you to ignore?

First, some basic principles.
1) This is fandom. It is supposed to be fun. This should not be like that terrible assignment from your least favorite teacher in school, fandom should be fun.

2) We've all been marinating in a stew of racism/homophobia/sexism/ableism/antisemitism/islamophobia all our lives. Even if, on a conscious level, you disagree with any given ism, your gut has been conditioned to prioritize white able-bodied cissexual neurotypical men over everything else.

3) Racism and sexism suck, and sucking is bad, and it makes fandom NOT fun for those on the receiving end of it. We should all be trying to suck less, both as a goal in its own right and because we want fandom to be fun for EVERYONE.

4) It is possible to work at sucking less while still enjoying fandom.

5) The higher we are in the kyriarchy, the more damage your sucking causes, and the more we are protected from that damage. So, like, a white person is part of the power structure that causes and benefits from racism; we're less likely to see it, more likely to cause damage to others because of it. BUT we also have a lot more power to change things for the better. It's not up to black people or Latin@s or Asians or Roma or LGBTQ people or people with disabilities or Jews or any other oppressed group to fix things--they're not the problem. The ultimate responsibility is up to Whites to suck less. (This doesn't mean that, say, a Black person can't suck--just that they are WAY less likely to damage others through their suckitude.)

So the question is, how do we as White people have fun in fandom while sucking less? Fear not! It's actually pretty simple, you just have to make that a consistent priority.

Let's define Principle 1. How is fandom fun? Well, for me, fandom is fun because there are shows and movies and books that I love, and I love reading and writing fanfic and meta about them, and squeeing about them with my friends. I find all of those activities fun. I hope you all do, too. I want you to keep on finding those things fun.

BUT there is a problem. We are conditioned by our society to value men more than women, Whites more than any other race, able-bodied neurotypical people more than disabled and/or neurodiverse people, etc., etc., you can all fill in the hierarchies that our society has tried to instill in us (and has probably succeeded in instilling more than you realize). The preference for white men in fandom isn't any worse than in other places in our society. It's true, and I think it's important to remember.

The problem comes in when we leave it at that. "Well, it's not my fault, and anyway even if I AM conditioned to pay more attention to whitedude more than anything else, this is fandom so I should be able to just ignore that and go on like always." Aaaaand then you continue to have fun, but you keep sucking, and hurting people in the process.

We have all been conditioned to favor whitedude above everything else. By which I mean, our society privileges stories about able-bodied neurotypical white men above stories about other people. A white man who has super incredible abilities and can do all the things is Batman, a white woman with all the same qualities is a Mary Sue, and is usually depowered to make room for the male hero, to boot. And characters of different ethnicities, or religions, or with disabilities, don't even have it that good. We think stories about white men are interesting because ... those are the stories we've read, watched, listened to the most. We're used to them. We've been taught all our lives that these are the good stories, the stories that matter. And so most of us have learned to prioritize those stories on an unconscious level. And we show that in our choices, which shows we watch, which actors/actresses we think are hot, which characters we write about.

The good news is, that's conditioning. It's not some inborn genetic thing, it's how we've been trained. And we can train ourselves differently!

It starts by being mindful. What we consume shapes us, right? So keep that in mind when you choose what you consume, what movies, what books, what TV shows, what fanfic. I'm not saying "don't watch your favorite show if it's got too many white men." But let's be real: some TV we watch/read because OMG ITS TEH BEST EVAR!!1! and some we watch/read because it's fun and some we watch/read because our friends are and some we watch/read because it's better than other things we could be doing.

When you're making a choice between two shows/movies/books that will probably be about the same level of entertaining, go for the one that's less ALL WHITE MALE. This is the age of the internet, where our choices are much greater than they've ever been before. When you're browsing Netflix on a Tuesday night looking for a fun movie to watch, give higher preference to diverse shows. Not in an "OMG, I can't ever watch anything with white men again, no matter how awesome it is!" way, but rather in a "I've seen so many movies about White Men(tm) in my life--is this one going to just be more of the same? Are there other options I might enjoy?" way. When you've got a variety of options and they would all be enjoyable, go for the ones least likely to reinforce the WHITE STRAIGHT ABLEBODIED NEUROTYPICAL CIS MALE IS THE DEFAULT AND BEST inside your head.

What this can look like in practice: I like Marvel, but I am not a big enough fan to watch all of their shows. I pick and choose and leave myself time for other shows as well. On Netflix there are two Marvel shows I could be watching that are roughly comparable: Daredevil and Luke Cage. Both are about urban superheroes, but Daredevil is white and Luke Cage is black. (Also, Daredevil has some really terrible Yellow Peril stuff.) So I watch Luke Cage. I enjoy it. I'd probably enjoy Daredevil, too, but I don't have time for everything, and so I prioritize. And I don't treat it like I'm taking my medicine and forcing myself to watch something because it's more socially just and not because I like it. I go in expecting to have fun. And you know what? Usually I do.

Another example: back in 2011, I needed something new to be fannish about. I had enough time to be fannish about one television show in addition to the stuff I was already fannish about. There were two shows premiering that fall that looked interesting to me, both rather similar: Grimm, and Once Upon A Time. Both were urban fantasy. One starred a white man, one starred a white woman. I chose the one starring the woman and went in to it prepared to love the show. Not grudgingly, but "ooh, this could be fun." And I loved it. If I hadn't, I would have stopped watching it after a couple of episodes and switched to Grimm. That was always an option; I wasn't watching OUaT to be masochistic about "doing the right thing." I was choosing which of two interesting options to give brain and heart space to, and I was going in to it with a brain and heart open to being pleased. If, despite that, it didn't please me? I'd move on to the next thing. Plenty of other fish in the sea. But I started with the less-whitedude option.

What this does is it gives brainspace to new possibilities. It erodes the assumption your hindbrain makes that white men matter more than other people do. It erodes the assumption your hindbrain makes that white men are more interesting. The more attention you pay to people outside the cultural norm, the more interesting you find their stories. When you do this, you are actively re-training your cultural conditioning about who matters and who is interesting. And you are having fun while you are doing it.

This has two ways that it will erode your suckage in fandom-related ways. First, it increases the number of people likely to be in non-whitedude fandoms, which is a slight counterweight to the overwhelming whitedude nature of fandom in general. One more person reading the fic and (hopefully) commenting. One more person posting about it, whether you do meta/art/fic/gifs/fanmixes/videos/whatever. Second, if you do this consistently over a long period of time, you will find that your instinct to always focus on white male characters will erode. Your background assumption of who is interesting and who isn't will start to shift.

Do this with the fannish content you produce, as well. You have a tumblr? Give preference to reblogging women and people of color. If you see something about white guys that is AWESOME AND SQUEEWORTHY, go ahead and reblog it and enjoy it while you do. But, you know, a lot of times we reblog stuff that's interesting but not full-on capslock squee, right? Stuff where it takes a second to decide if you should reblog or not. Where you could go either way. And in those cases, make a conscious decision in favor of diversity. Stuff about white men? If it's in that "should I reblog this?" category, don't reblog it. Stuff about anyone else? Do reblog it. When figuring out new content to post, do the same thing. AWESOME SQUEEFUL STUFF? Post away! Interesting but not incredible? Give more weight to stuff about women and people of color and queer people and disabled people and neurodiverse people and Jews and Muslims and all the rest. It's not about harshing the squee, or putting your fannish tastes through some kind of quota system. It's about balance. Trust me. The world and fandom both have PLENTY of whitedude stuff, they'll get along just fine without more. But there's a shortage of everything else, so that's where the focus should be.

And you can do the same with fanfic! Again, I'm not saying "never read your favorites!" I'm saying, be mindful. Are you a big Captain America fan? Check out the Sam Wilson and Natasha Romanov and Maria Hill fic in that fandom, and keep your eye out for more. When you do so, consider filtering out Steve/Bucky stuff occasionally. (http://erindizmo.tumblr.com/post/65292624924/7-step-tutorial-on-how-to-filter-out-characters) After all, presumably you already read a lot of S/B. Your goal isn't to find fics where Sam is in two scenes to get the Whitedude together or help them work out their shit, but fics where Sam gets to really shine. As himself, not just the sidekick to the whitedude. And don't do it grudgingly; do it with open heart and mind, ready to embrace Sam in his awesomeness. This isn't to say you should never read whitedude fic, if that's your thing, but rather that there should be a health(ier) balance. This isn't about forcing you to choke down your bitter fannish medicine; it's about expanding the things you love. It's about creating more opportunities for joy and squee.

And when you read those fics, comment on them! Spread the love! Authors who write about women or people of color tend to get fewer comments on those fics than on stories focused about white male characters, which is discouraging. Share the love; kudos and comment. A comment saying "Good fic" is great, it doesn't have to be long and involved. This holds true for all your fic, by the way, not just the fic where you're consciously diversifying your reading habits. Reading a Steve/Bucky fic and the author wrote Sam well, or Natasha, or Maria, or Rhodey, or Dr. Cho? Tell the author! Point that out specifically. Doesn't have to be elaborate; "I liked Sam" is fine. The point is to reward people for being more inclusive.

When you find a particularly good fic based on a certain woman or character of color, check out the author's page. Chances are, they've got more like it. If they do, and you like their work? Subscribe to them so when they write something, you see it. Again, the goal is to still have fun with awesome fic, but shifting what you consume to be more diverse. Because that will shift your internal default away from the Straight White Neurotypical Ablebodied Man that our society tries to push as the default. And that will affect how you see the world both in fandom and out of it.

Part of the fun of fandom, for many of us, isn't just about consuming content, it's also about creating it. I love writing fanfic. And here's where a lot of peoples' asses start to show, and where they start whining about how they just write what they write and they only get plotbunnies for whitedude. And that may be true, but again, this is something you can actually change. If your brain doesn't come up with plotbunnies for characters of color, or for women, or for lesbians, or for a mixed-race canon couple, or for disabled or neurodivergent people? You can work on coming up with plotbunnies on your own and train your brain in the process!

For example! Say you are a fan of The Flash. For every episode you watch, come up with one plot bunny for a non-white male character. You don't have to write it; that's another step down the road. It doesn't have to be something huge. The first step is getting your brain used to generating plot bunnies for characters you normally wouldn't. If Iris had a big part in that episode, think up a story idea for her. What was she doing while Barry was fighting the villain of the week? How's things going at work for her? If Joe had a big part, think up an idea for him. If there was an Iris/Barry moment, think up a story idea for that pairing. Wally, Cisco, Caitlynn, Lisa Snart, you get the idea. If you're a Supergirl fan, come up with a story idea for Hank or James or Renee Montoya or M'Gann each episode. You don't have to write it, the goal for this part is to get you used to thinking of these characters as people with stories. People you are interested in. I mean, if you get a great idea and want to write it, awesome, but step one is to get your gut and your hindbrain primed to think about these people and care about their stories. You've already been primed to care about and think about white male characters by everything you've seen and read and heard since you were a baby, but there's been precious little priming you for everybody else, so a little extra effort is probably going to be needed.

The next step is similar to the choosing-fandoms step, only for choosing plotbunnies. You will probably have some ideas that just yank you over and demand to be written, so write them. But if you are anything like me, there are also times that you want to write and have a lot of different ideas you could write, you just have to decide which. And in that case, you can probably guess by now, give more weight to the non-whitedude options. If you have four plot bunnies you could write, and two of them are about white male characters and one of them is about a white woman and one is about a character of color? Give more weight to the woman and (especially) the character of color. I'm not saying "you can never write white men again!" I'm saying that in your decision-making process, recognize that the rest of the world is weighted WAY THE FUCK IN FAVOR OF WHITE ABLE-BODIED NEUROTYPICAL CIS MEN, so to provide balance, we should be weighting in favor of everyone else, and giving the most weight to the people that society gives the least weight to.

The things I've outlined in this post don't magically get rid of all that social conditioning overnight, and they don't magically fix everything. What they do is they give you a place to start, and aim you in a direction so that, if you work on it over time, you will suck less while still having fun in fandom and making it more inclusive. And the more people who do stuff like this, the less fandom will suck over time.

Grace and Frankie, for those who don't know, is a hilarious Netflix show starring Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda as two women whose husbands (Sam Waterston and Martin Sheen) announce that they are leaving them because they've been having an affair for the last twenty years and want to get married now that it's legal.


I enjoyed season one, and although not particularly fannish about it I was looking forward to season 2, which will be out in May.

I was reminded of this because fancake's current theme is "older characters," and as I was choosing fics to rec I thought I should check out the Grace and Frankie fic and see if there might be something there, both for me and to rec.  I wasn't expecting huge amounts of fic, but I thought it was worth checking out.

I found four fics.  Disappointing, but eh, it's a Netflix show about older people with no SF/F elements, so not terribly surprising.

Of those four fics, three are about the main characters' husands.  One is about their kids.  Not a single fic is about the actual main characters of the show.

One of the great classic movies that I love is Hobson's Choice, a 1954 film about ... well, IMDB puts it this way: "Henry Hobson is a successful bootmaker and tyrannical widower of three daughters. The girls each want to leave their father by getting married, but Henry refuses as marriage traditions require him to pay out settlements."



Most places that give a synopsis of the film say something similar.  Promotional materials for the movie (and the play it's based off of) focus on Henry Hobson.  And they are all WRONG.  The movie isn't about him at all.  It's about his daughter, Maggie.

Maggie is thirty years old, strong-willed, knows what she wants and gets every bit of it.  She wants to run the shoe shop (she's an awesome businesswoman) and she wants to be married to Will Mossop (a timid employee that she can see has a lot of potential) and she wants her father to respect them both and treat them well.  Secondarily, she wants her sisters to be able to marry the men they are in love with (which they can't/won't do, unless their father pays their dowries, which he's too cheap to do).  And she gets everything she wants in the end.  It's her choices that drive the story, not her father's.  Henry Hobson is a blowhard, a verbally abusive alcoholic who spends most of his time at the pub while his daughters and employees do all the work.  He wants to marry his daughters off, then changes his mind when he realizes he'd have to pay "settlements" for them, but that's not what starts the plot going.  I mean, it's what most people thing starts the plot off, but actually it doesn't change anything.  He wasn't letting them court before, and he's still not letting them court, and nothing around the shop changes.  What starts the ball rolling is Maggie deciding she's had enough and she's not going to take it anymore, and she's going to marry Will Mossop and her father's going to treat them right.  When he won't, she takes Will off and they start their own shop, which soon becomes a success, and she manages to manipulate her father into giving her sisters their settlements so they can marry the men they want to.  And then the final denoument is when Henry's alcoholism develops to such a point that he can't take care of himself, and Maggie and Will take over his shop--but on their terms.  Henry gets to keep his name over the door, and that's it, and he has to treat Maggie and Will with respect.

Through it all, Maggie is the one who makes all the decisions and does most of the work.  It's all about her wishes, her skills, her plans.  She's the protagonist of the story.  Sure, there are a lot of scenes with Henry out with his drinking buddies, but they're all largely the same, and none of them really enhance the plot or anything because nothing happens.  Henry doesn't advance the plot.  He's not the protagonist; he's the obstacle the protagonist faces.  Despite the fact that he's played by the star (Charles Laughton) and the movie spends so much time on him, it is, fundamentally, not his story.

Finally have time to re-read canon for my Yuletide fic.  The things I didn't notice when I read it and loved it as a teen ... it has not, thank goodness, been visited by the Suck Fairy in the meantime, but it does have certain elements that have not aged well.  The two protagonists are wonderfully complex and nuanced women, but one of their mothers is ... well, not quite the stereotypical Evil (step)Mother/Evil Powerful Woman, about as close to it as you can get without being, you know, evil.  (Thankfully, she has a very small part in this book, and will be off-stage soon, to leave me to focus on the two awesome protagonists.)

And I'm only thirty pages in and I've gotten several reminders that, of course, beautiful women can't really have women friends because of course jealousy will ruin everything!  From my vague recollections that stops being A Thing pretty quickly, here, and I hope so, because it's really getting old.

Most of the book (so far) has aged very well.  It's just that thread that runs through this first bit before the Adventure starts that's really annoying me.  (Teenage me, being homely and geeky and having no clue and less interest in makeup and hair and styling, and thus having no clue about what Beautiful Women were actually like, probably just nodded solemnly and accepted it as Received Truth.)

ETA: Hah.  Just spotted a factual/cultural error.  In places with intense sun and heat, wearing long, loose garments that cover your skin but allow a breeze through can be better protection from the sun and even sometimes cooler than shorts and a tank top.  Someone who spent time in the Sahara Desert as a child should know this.

ETA2: The worldbuilding and eloquence of language is not quite as breathtaking as I remember it being, but it's still pretty darn good.  Funnily enough, while one of the heroes seemed so grown-up to me as a teen, she now seems ... a bit juvenile for her age.  Though that may be an artifact of the literary style of the era the book was written in.

Remix 2014 and Rarewomen 2014 are both open for business!  There is tons if fic in tons of fandoms, go read and enjoy and comment!

I wrote for Remix but not Rarewomen, this year.  See if you can guess my fic!

So, that multi-fandom female-focused remix that tielan and theladyscribe were thinking about looks like it will be a go!  femmeremix will have signups in May, probably.  Here's the tentative fandom list, in which you must have at least 3 500-word fics focused on a female character.  If there's a fandom you'd really like to see on the list, and you think you will participate, go tell the mods; they're still in preliminary planning stages.  These are fandoms in which they have four or more people saying they're eligible to sign up in it.

• Babylon 5 (4)
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer (9) -- does not include Angel (3)
• DC Comics Movies (4) - Batman and Superman
• Doctor Who (5)
• Fairy Tales (6) -- includes Disney Princesses
• Game of Thrones (5)
• Marvel Cinematic Universe (17) (not including Agents of SHIELD)
• Pacific Rim (4)
• Star Trek TOS (5)
• Stargate Atlantis/SG-1 (7)
• Supernatural (4)
• White Collar (4)
• The X-Files (4)

There's one big lie that rapists tell. Most of the other lies are just part of it. "Consent is complicated and confusing and there are a lot of gray areas." "She dressed/acted/talked like she wanted it." "She never said no; how was I supposed to know?" "She just regrets having sex." "We were both drunk and the alcohol muddied things." "He sure seemed like he was enjoying it." "I guess I just got caught up in the heat of the moment." "People do this all the time and only paranoid feminists call it rape."

The one big lie at the center of all these little lies is: "If you were in my place, you could have done the same."

Great article with an important point.  I collect links to articles like this so when conversations about rape and such come up on Facebook or wherever (as they do), I don't have to argue it myself I can point and go: here, this!

Books filled my house as a child.  So did science fiction and fantasy.  (Every year, regular as clockwork, my Dad read The Hobbit to me and my younger brother.)  So, naturally, I became a great reader.  I read a lot, and I read fast.  And, in elementary school, oh joy of joys, I discovered the public library, which was only two blocks away from my parents' business.  You can see where this is going, right?  I started devouring the books there.  But, you know, they had a strict limit on how many books you can check out at a time (only twenty!  the horror, the deprivation!), and I read fast and constantly, and YA books are usually pretty short.  So one day, the librarian (who knew me quite well by then) took me over to the adult (grown-up, not porn, get your minds out of the gutter) section of the library and showed me the science fiction section, particularly the Star Trek novels all on the same shelf.  I was probably just starting middle school, by that point; it's one of the clearest memories I have of childhood, that glorious moment when I saw all those books I had never read, and all of them so much bigger--i.e. more-to-read--than the YA and children's books.  It was awesome.

I started out with the Star Trek books, already being a fan of the series.  Once I'd read all of those, I started expanding.  And one of my first finds was Honor Harrington.  (The series as DRM-Free multiformat e-books)


I was in love. Here was a female character like me, with whom I could identify!  ( Why Honor Harrington is Awesome )

It matters when you are part of the audience.

I spent my childhood reading stories about kids who find various magical things and go on adventures, and also just about every children's book ever published in the UK. I couldn't imagine myself in those books - it was obvious that I was never going to find a magic amulet or a secret corridor or a sand fairy; our house didn't even have a basement - but I certainly knew they were written for me.

And then I became a teenager. I was still voraciously reading, and struggling to find the genre that fit me as well as my childhood reading had. I read everything I could find - hard SF to Anne Rice, Dorothy Sayers to Charlotte MacLeod. I also read an awful lot of stuff published before 1900. (My flirtations with plain fiction and romance novels didn't pan out. I'm just not that type of girl, apparently.)

I kept casting around, though. And I kept going back and secretly re-reading the books I'd loved as a kid. Partly that was because, okay, I read like I breathed, and there were only so many books in the world, and I couldn't afford to turn my back on old favorites. But partly that was because I missed something about those books, something I couldn't identify, something I described to myself as a feeling of safety.

When I found fan fiction, I realized what I was missing. I missed being part of the audience.

I know, I know: you read something, you are obviously part of the audience. But I'm talking about the imaginary audience, the audience in the author's head, the one the book is written for.

Go read the rest.