my English prof teaching abt cover letters today and me trying not to bring up the luke skywalker cover letter post:

@serialreblogger​ here you go:

Fantasy books written by women are often assumed to be young adult, even when those books are written for adults, marketed to adults, and published by adult SFF imprints. And this happens even more frequently to women of color.

This topic’s an ongoing conversation on book Twitter, and I thought it might be worth sharing with Tumblr. And by “ongoing,” I mean that people have been talking about this for years. Last year, there was a big blow up when the author R.F. Kuang said publicly that her book The Poppy War isn’t young adult and that she wished people would stop calling it such. If you’ve read The Poppy War, then you’ll know it’s grimdark fantasy along lines of Game of Thrones… and yet people constantly refer to The Poppy War as young adult – which is one of its popular shelves on Goodreads. To be fair, more people have shelved it as “adult,” but why is anyone shelving it as “young adult” in the first place? Game of Thrones is not at all treated this way…

Rebecca Roanhorse’s book Trail of  Lightning, an urban fantasy with a Dinétah (Navajo) protagonist has “young adult” as its fifth most popular Goodreads shelf. The novel is adult and published by Saga, an adult SFF imprint. 

S.A. Chakraborty’s adult fantasy novel City of Brass has “young adult” as its fourth most popular Goodreads shelf. 

Tasha Suri’s Empire of Sand, an adult fantasy in a world based on Mughal India, has about equal numbers of people shelving it as “adult” or “young adult.” 

Book Riot wrote an article on this, although they didn’t address how the problem intersects with race. I also did a Twitter thread a while back where I cited these examples and some more as well. 

The topic of diversity in adult SFF is important to me, partly because we need to stop mislabeling the women of color who write it, and also because there’s a lot there that isn’t acknowledged! Besides, sometimes it’s good to see that your stories don’t just end the moment you leave high school and that adults can still have vibrant and interesting futures worth reading about. I feel like this is especially important with queer rep, for a number of reasons. 

Other books and authors in the tweets I screenshot include:

TLDR: Women who write adult fantasy, especially women of color, are presumed to be writing young adult, which is problematic in that it internalizes diversity, dismisses the need and presence of diversity in adult fantasy, and plays into sexist assumptions of women writers. 

Never forget the amount of hate R.F. Kuang got for explicitly stating that The Poppy War, one of the most triggering books I’ve ever read, should never be shelved as YA. She did so out of extreme concern of the content getting into the wrong hands without warning.

And then two days later Jay Kristoff said the same thing about Nevernight…and nothing happened.

Amaury the chocolate guy has done it again

SIR YOU GAVE IT A PULL TAB OPEN

WHY WAS THE CAN OPENER NECESSARY

I feel like a lot of people don’t quite get what a butler is. The role tends to get rounded off to ‘male servant’ pretty regularly in some media, whereas actually butlers are typically not just servants but chief servants. The butler was generally in charge of either all male servants or just all servants, period, in the household of an aristocrat or other very wealthy person. This meant that butlers have often been fairly powerful and influential people, and sometimes even had a manservant or two of their own.

(Also, fun fact: Mary Roberts Rinehart, the early 20th century mystery writer who is widely credited with popularizing the whole ‘the butler did it’ trope was nearly murdered by one of her own servants, a chef whom she had passed over for promotion to butler. He came at her with a pistol, but it jammed, allowing her chauffeur time to wrestle it away and restrain him.)

You didn’t answer the key question things brings up: did she popularize the trope before or after the would-be butler tried to kill her?

according to wikipedia, before

There’s something glorious about the fact that the author who popularised “the butler did it” had a servant who a) failed to become the butler and then b) failed to do it.

If he’d been butler material, he’d have finished the job.

So was anyone gonna tell me the Greek navy still has a fully functional trireme?

Her name is Olympias! She was built in 1987 and can sail up to 17 knots (30 km) per hour!

Olympias weighs 47 tonnes, but is remarkably agile, able to make a 180 degree turn within one minute. Everything but the bracing ropes was constructed of the same materials as in ancient Greece. (They used steel instead of hemp rope for cost reasons.)

Experiments with Olympias have helped us understand the capabilities of warships from ancient Greek and Roman times. Triremes like her were built for speed, maneuverability, and aggressive ramming. (Her beak alone weighs 200 kg.) It appears that many of the seamanship feats described by Thucydides were indeed possible!

Olympias is now an exhibit at Naval Tradition Park in Palaio Faliro, Athens, Greece. She's usually dry docked these days, but I've found a couple videos of her at sea!

Evidently landlord and lawyer were some rough slander 250 years ago, maybe we still have some things in common with the founding fathers

my favorite thing about this movie is that it pissed off Nixon so badly (by having a song about how conservatives are obstructionist) that he tried to not only have the song cut but also get the negatives for that scene destroyed and they only added the song back in decades later

it’s on YouTube now though! So you can watch the musical number that made Nixon do a whiny baby tantrum!

shout out to the film’s editor who back in the 1970’s completely hid the negatives for that scene for decades allowing us to have it restored for the 2002 re-release

Rock show today!

Gonna go look at Cool Rocks! Maybe not buy them. Rock budget's running a bit low. (This is wulfenite and roselite's fault.)

UPDATE: I HAVE FAILED TO NOT BUY THE ROCKS

A thumbnail specimen of amethyst from Mondo, Tanzania. Mondo amethyst features tons of cool iron inclusions , such as the thin black needles of goethite inside this one. The color is also phenomenal - in some places this piece is so dark purple that it almost looks blue!

A polished slab of Lake Superior Agate! (Surely I can find room to squeeze it onto my agate shelf somewhere...) This piece is awesome because it has PARALLAX!

See that flickering effect in the banding? That's parallax! It happens when an agate has very very thin layers of alternating opaque and translucent banding. We're seeing the bands cast shadows on each other!

Morganite beryl! This specimen is displaying a bunch of etching. Etching happens when certain acids or chemicals in the environment disrupt the crystal's growth, leading to all sorts of weird shapes. It also contains yellow pockets of clay that were trapped inside of it during its formation!

Tourmaline!! This piece is from Himalaya Tourmaline Mine, in California. This is an old stock specimen; Himalaya Mine hasn't produced crystals this large and perfectly shaped in a very long time. This piece features some beautiful tricoloration: pink, then white, then green (and wow, maybe more pink at the very top?) and best of all, a perfect three sided prism with a perfect termination.

I mean, look at that! That barely looks real, that's the platonic ideal of tourmaline's crystal habit.

Here's a cool fossil! These are two species of crinoid: scytalocrinus disparilis on the right, and halysiocrinus tunicatus on the right. Also called "Sea Lillies," these aquatic animals look like flowers growing out of the ocean floor. They're related to starfish!

Crinoid fossils are common throughout the American Midwest (these fellows came from the Edwardsville formation in Indiana) but they rarely look like this because their upper tentacles seldom fossilize. Usually it's just their stems, which can be found all over the place as little disks that look like beads or washers. Some people mistakenly call them "indian beads." They can also be found all over my house because I'll collect them out of the dirt and then forget I have them in my pockets. Anyway, it's very rare to see intact specimens like this!

Here's the best piece I got: tsavorite garnet! Tsavorite is known for its brilliant green color, which can be caused by impurities of chromium or vanadium. This piece came from Tanzania.

It's also the ONLY garnet species that fluoresces! Here it is under one of my UV lights. Isn't that incredible?!

And we're just... not gonna talk about the Rock Budget!!

As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can't argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.

In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.

He sits on my lap while I spin, he does the little jiggle

Tales of the Jedi, leading to Tales of the Empire which will ultimately lead to Tales of the Resistance and we will get a three episode arc of Jedi Finn training with a lightsaber, General Poe leading the Resistance and finally end with their wedding

so i have a cat now

little lady Socks is 7 years old today!!!!!

Steve's choices / Bucky's lack thereof

you just know when someone in customer service says “thank you for your patience!!!!” they’re fighting for their lives that day

I love this shot. CONSPICUOUS WATERGATE HOTEL IS CONSPICUOUS right as Captain America is about to get jumped by members of a sinister government conspiracy, after Evil Robert Redford got done telling him his apartment was bugged by the head of the very agency he works for. It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

as we approach the decade-versary of Cap 2 let’s just take a moment to remember some of the best and most overloaded-with-implications fictional building placement of all time. the old-boys-club political wheelings and dealings of Georgetown on one side, the defense-contracting-$$$ skyscraper hell of Rosslyn on the other, conspicuous views of the Watergate Hotel, down on the river in a way that pointedly evokes CIA headquarters at Langley, and they would’ve had to raze a national park to build the damn thing on Roosevelt Island in the first place. 1000/10 no notes.

#I moved here after watching catws for the first time but every time I watch it now I notice all of the DC ass things they put in the movie #And all of the things they didn’t use because no one’s gonna let them shut down the roads around L'enfant Plaza to film a car chase #Going to continue to ignore the fact that the highway scene most definitely was not filmed on 695 #But yes the placement of the triskelion was impeccable #catws #never going to forgive agents of shield for filming a metro scene in dc on very obviously NYC metro cars (@4ever-september)

yeah! i am, if anything, more impressed by the location scouting for the sequences they couldn’t film in DC, because [Eliot Spencer voice] it’s a very distinctive cityscape, and they found all these random-ass streets in Cleveland that managed to evoke extremely specific locations in DC despite not being exact lookalikes. just the fact of you sitting there going “hey, that’s not 695!” speaks to how recognizably that big overpass fight is supposed to be taking place around Southeast Freeway, y'know? ditto the fact that i can sit here pedantically going “L'Enfant Plaza? i thought the Nick Fury car chase started around Gallery Place and proceeded through rush-hour artery hell towards the Triskelion before derailing somewhere past Farragut North.” like, the sidewalks may not be wide enough to pass for DC, but goddamn did somebody find a visually-legible dupe for those K Street bus lanes.

(i will, however, affectionately dunk on the script for not even trying to keep up, from Fury’s GPS navigation namechecking streets that blatantly cannot exist to all the self-writing jokes re: “Sitwell called the airports what? that shoulda been our first tipoff he was with the bad guys.” but not nearly as hard as i’ll dunk on Agents of SHIELD for not even fucking trying. among its many other sins.)

anyway, the immediate impetus for digging this post back up again was going on a 70s conspiracy thriller kick before i rewatch CA:TWS next week, and wanting to weep tears of blood at how casually and omnipresently and recognizably All the President’s Men is shot on location all over the DC area. you know, in addition to being a fab movie and an iconic account of the Watergate scandal and one of the peak performances of Robert Redford’s career. highly recommend to anyone tuned into this thread who hasn’t seen it; if i had to pick one conspiracy thriller CA:TWS is in conversation with, it’d actually be the one that’s more-or-less nonfiction.

I absolutely agree, if I didn’t pay attention to the signage in the scenes and didn’t spend an inordinate amount of time walking around when I still lived in DC proper, the Vibes of the locations they scouted for CATWS would be fully enough to convince me that they filmed everything on location in the places they said they were in.

Everyone involved in CATWS Cared about the movie they were making and it’s so obvious.

yeah! i have to wonder if one of the conditions of getting to disrupt traffic to film those scenes was not messing with the real signage, or if, like the script goofs, there was just some variance between departments re: commitment to the bit. because they absolutely messed with signage elsewhere, including putting up fake Metro station pillars (thus giving internet pedants a source to cite for their irrelevant takes on the exact route of the Nick Fury car chase, lol).

but yeah. they cared, and were given room to care by their corporate overlords. Civil War/Infinity War/Endgame sucked, not because the Russos don’t know how to make good movies, but as an inevitable result of the conditions the movies were produced under. both the Russos and Markus & McFeely were very up-front in the CA:TWS commentary track that the reason it’s good is that Marvel Studios gave them their general brief (“we’re doing Winter Soldier; SHIELD is Hydra; here’s what you can and can’t do in a Marvel movie”), signed off on their conspiracy-thriller concept, and then left them the fuck alone to go through a dozen drafts and polish the fuck out of that sucker until every part of it was gleaming like a brainwashed assassin’s metal arm.

(if you - or anyone else following along - would be up for more recs… i actually recommend Citizenfour (2014), a filmed-in-realtime-by-the-journalists-involved documentary on the Snowden NSA leaks, as a companion to All the President’s Men. because the most paranoid parts of CA:TWS are also extensively based on nonfiction, and there’s a striking similarity in the flavors of idealism on display.)

(…likewise, if you have ever looked at CA:TWS and gone “i would watch five entire seasons of this as some techno-dystopian TV show, especially if it had a weird knack for making the audience cry about Caring About People and there were hot dysfunctional ex-assassins who got to be in big gay love and kiss about it onscreen”… may i direct you to Person of Interest (2011-2016), which takes a couple of seasons to pick up steam, but oh boy when it does the similarities are so eerie that at times it resembles a “what if the Insight helicarriers went up” AU)

Oof, I just got hit with nostalgia like a truck.

There was a pretty big crowd that turned up for the scenes they shot in Dupont, but I was one of two entire people who woke up at dark o’clock and got down to the Reflecting Pool early enough in the morning to watch them filming Steve and Sam run laps there.

Still a very treasured memory, especially because I also showed up early to Steve/Bucky shipper hell, and I will never again have an experience like watching the whole fandom pivot on a dime like they did after the movie finally came out.

I think you should watch this

yella creens

“handfools of yella crayens”

this made me feel true inner peace for the first time in months

The absolute best voice-over for this kind of video.

Listen this took me right back to 1994 crayola art studio which was a nostalgia trip I was not prepared for.

Xena doing solidarity right. 

Here She Comes…Miss Amphipolis.

This episode is so fucking wild to me.

Not just because an arguably trans woman (I don’t remember it really being made explicit whether she’s trans or GNC) is the guest protagonist and is written as a whole ass normal person who is beautiful and her cis dude romantic partner knows and he’s just desperately, hopelessly in love with her and wants everything for her, and she ends up winning the beauty pageant and this episode came out in 1997 when we, as a culture, were still calling things “gay” because we thought they were dumb or cringey.

Like, that’s why this episode is beautiful and important.

But less important but also wild to me is that the entire episode is the plot of Miss Congeniality three years before Miss Congeniality was released. I don’t remember what the specific threat was, but Xena’s there because she had to go undercover in the pageant because there was a plot against it and the women in the pageant were going to get hurt. And Xena is, of course, not a girly-girl, so she complained and was awkward and did some very Not Pageant-y things on stage, but inexplicably still ended getting pretty far. But instead of winning the way you might expect it to go, she ends up losing to a supporting character who you’ve come to love and sympathize with, who the pageant means so much to, and who’s worked so hard to be there and really deserves it.

Oh and also, even wilder, if you’re looking at Gabrielle up there in the turban and the high collared robe and thinking the whole Look seems familiar? It’s probably because you’ve watched Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends because she’s dressed (and also kind of talks!) suspiciously like The Duchess

Do I know for certain that The Duchess was at all inspired by Gabrielle’s undercover persona in this random Xena episode that aired 7 years before Foster’s premiered? Absolutely not. But it’s a hilarious coincidence if not.

I don’t know if Karen Dior ever said definitely if she was a trans woman or a drag performer - in those days, there was a lot more muddiness about drag vs trans, which I kind of miss sometimes tbh. Not everyone wants that kind of clear-cut line and it can be restrictive but anyway:

I don’t think it matters much if it was GNC vs drag vs trans. What matters more to me personally is that Lucy Lawless kissed Karen Dior on camera in 1997, and Karen Dior very publicly had AIDS (it’s why she left adult films). This was a big deal bc ppl still had very confused ideas about how AIDS could spread. That kiss wasn’t just a queer kiss no matter how you slice it, it was “you can’t get AIDS by kissing someone.”

When Lucy Lawless appeared at the Sydney Gay Mardi Gras in 1999, she wore the gown that Miss Amphipolis wears in those last gifs.

Also, I can’t find the reference now, but I’m like 75% sure I read somewhere that they wanted to cut the kiss, and Lucy Lawless said “No.”