there’s a phenomenon when it comes to enjoying a male character in a piece of media where it’s so much fun and i love my blorbo and i want to talk about my blorbo and read analysis of my blorbo but i realize very fast and very hard that the majority of fans made up a version of him that appeals to their horniness and it’s become the popular and standard interpretation and i do not care for that guy at all like i’d beat him with hammers actually

PLEASE for the love of the universe read anti-colonial science fiction and fantasy written from marginalized perspectives. Y’all (you know who you are) are killing me. To see people praise books about empire written exclusively by white women and then turn around and say you don’t know who Octavia Butler is or that you haven’t read any NK Jemisin or that Babel was too heavy-handed just kills me! I’m not saying you HAVE to enjoy specific books but there is such an obvious pattern here

Some of y’all love marginalized stories but you don’t give a fuck about marginalized creators and characters, and it shows. Like damn

If anyone has any recommendations give them to me please!

Gladly! The pieces on this list aren’t limited to specifically anti-colonial science fiction and fantasy, but they do center related and relevant topics, themes, etc.

Severely underhyped books of assorted speculative genres:

Read widely. Read diversely. People of the Caucasian persuasion need to stop getting pissy when the story doesn’t immediately center them and they don’t automatically relate to everything the character says and does and is. Just let yourself get swept in the story—even if it touches on (gasp!) racism—and maybe, just maybe, it’ll reveal something to you.

Or maybe not! Marginalized sff authors do not have to and should not have to educate their readers. But if I see one more white person complain about how Black characters are fundamentally annoying because they complain too much I’m going to fling myself into the sun

Thanks for coming to my ted talk I didn’t want to do it but here I am

Don't forget Aliette de Bodard! Especially her Xuya and Dominion of the Fallen series.

Zen Cho is my other favorite - Sorcerer to the Crown and The True Queen, and also Black Water Sister.

Throwing in The Kingston Cycle by CL Polk, basically everything I've ever wanted in a fantasy novel. Like if the author had my checklist.

Adding in Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger for some absolutely delightful world building just casually tossed in on every page. YA and very approachable to those with limited free time while still being immensely enjoyable to an adult reader. Just a girl and her ghost dog out to prove a murder.

Absolutely seconding NK Jemisin with a pounding gavel just finished the series starting at The Fifth Season and am downloading everything my library has from them. NOT light but so good I am chewing at the rocks over this.

I will also say the author of Babel is an amazing writer, but I threw that book at the wall because VAGUE SPOILERS AHEAD I cannot STAND a poorly covered up murder. YOUR ENTIRE CAST OF CHARACTERS HAD AN ENTIRE LONG SEA VOYAGE TO COME UP WITH A COVER STORY AND ALL THEY COULD MANAGE WAS "dunno what happened drrrr"????? I WILL INCARCERATE THEM MYSELF. They stopped being sympathetic for me when they started actively shoving the idiot ball up their collective noses.

The Saint Of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera fully rewired my brain. It's weird and thinky and does these wildly, fascinatingly not-actually-anachronistic things with worldbuilding, and while I would not call it an easy read there's a very good reason it won the Nebula a couple of years ago. Cannot recommend enough, and I need to track down the author's other stuff. Also more than incidentally queer, although romance is in no way remotely the focus.

(Also the author gets some very solid props from me for this interview where he said, "you know the Torment Nexus meme? I love it, I enjoy it, but it also elides culpability in a way. It’s like, “oh, we were just warning you against it, we didn’t mean to make it sound cool.” You kind of did, a little bit, mean to make it sound cool." Spoilers for his other book throughout the interview, but a cool read.)

.... so do the characters and relationships in Hades II ever get less boring, ooooooooorrr...

After playing for about 14 hours yesterday (it's my THANKSGIVING BREAK shush), I have circled back around to a zen fugue state. My new headcanon of the entire game is Melinoe's self-insert post-apocalyptic adventure daydream that she tells herself while she's at Witch School being annoyed with herself and her parents and especially the way-less-awesome children of Nyx that she has to hang out with while her brother is off on his cool job with his cool boyfriend and his cool girlfriend and his cool weapons having cool adventures.

Melinoe isn't Too Uptight And Not Fun, you are. Melinoe is going to imagine a whole story where her entire family is chained up in Tartarus and she gets to master her own cool set of weapons, only she gets to fight on the surface too, so there Zagreus, and she gets to bring her pet frog along if she wants and that's just great.

Somebody get me some fanfic about Melinoe's actual boring life and the journey of self-discovery and real-world-badassery she gets to find within herself that lets her move on from this very boring BS please and thank you.

The linked article

so ive worked in childcare for a bit now. during the pandemic, the place i worked started a day program for kids whose parents needed to return to work. turns out the school district uses memorization and cueing, and when combined with online learning that read all the instructions to them, overwhelmingly the kids aged 5-9 just... couldnt read.

i brought in a bunch of my books from childhood, and we started having one-on-one reading lessons with the littles. then i went out and bought about fifty more books secondhand. first step was covering the pictures so the kids couldnt guess what the words said and had to actually TRY reading them first. second step was making a list of new words for each kid so we could learn about those words, what they meant, and if the kids were old enough, some of the etymology behind them (because if you can recognize latin root words, it's easier to make connections for pronunciation later on eg. unicorn -> universe).

the kids HATED this. reading was previously the easiest class and now it was really, really hard. but reading class had also previously been the most boring class; their books were ten pictures with a single sentence on the opposite page. we got through it by taking turns reading books the kids picked out from my collection- they would read one sentence or paragraph, then i would read the whole page complete with funny voices, then it would be their turn again, etc. it turns out that if kids are motivated to hear the rest of a good story or a lot of information about a topic they love, they're more willing to struggle.

the kids improved so rapidly that i honestly almost cried a few times from how proud i was. one little girl (kindergarten aged) went from being unable to sound out the whole alphabet to reading goodnight moon by herself in two months :'>

all this, though, was NOT my job. my job was to keep the kids on task during their online schooling and prevent them from killing each other or starving. i am not a teacher. the school system was failing these kids to the degree that outside individual reading lessons were necessary, and school systems across the US are still doing this!

if you are a parent or teacher or childcare worker, PLEASE check to see what your kid is being taught. ask to see examples of lesson materials. raise concerns about the importance of phonics over any other reading strategy. join the pta, go to school board meetings, send emails- just make sure your kid is actually learning to read.

This is the only day you can RT this

If you got enough money to live happily and comfortably for the rest of your life, but everyone who saw you immediately knew what fandom you are in and understood what that means, would you take it?

You can have 20 billion dollars but you have to drink this perfectly fine glass of water first, would you do it?

Look, all I'm saying is, if "everybody you meet IRL instantly knows all about what being in your fandom means to you" amounts to a perfectly fine glass of water, you are NOT doing fandom weird enough.

Mutual pining is great, but you know what's even better? Mutual pining where they're both fully aware the feelings are requited, they just can't do anything about it for other reasons. Or maybe they technically could but they've had to choose not to, because of The Circumstances.

for those who don’t remember, “mole interest” was an experiment I did 2 years ago because I wanted to test what causes tags to go trending on tumblr. My hypothesis was that all it takes is one (1) post blowing up in an established tag to make the entire tag trend.

I had randomly generated 2 words, which is where “mole interest” came from. I failed to consider that by generating a new tag, it wouldn’t have had enough posts already in it to prove what I now call “the mole interest effect”.

But now it does.

In 2023, we said “fuck it” a la mythbusters and ended up doing whatever it took to get #mole interest to trend. And it did. And it happened to be September 11th that day, and we managed to get #mole interest to trend ABOVE #9/11.

So, in the name of science, I ask you to reblog just this post. Let’s put the mole interest effect to the test.

Okay but like, unironically I have Theories(tm) about this, as an ace-as-fuck prose writer, and the theories all essentially boil down to: fish don't have a word for water.

Like, the allos just take a look at something and KNOW it's hot, but the aces have to fucking DISSECT the thing to figure out wtf people are even going on about with calling it "hot", and funny story, turns out when you write a whole-ass 10k of PWP explaining what's hot about the thing in a way that makes sense to you personally, you are a whole lot likelier to make that thing read AS hot to people who normally would not think it was even remotely appealing ( and also, like, to take anybody who was already into the thing out at the knee ).

( see: everyone who has ever told me "I HATE this kink/that kink/this pairing/this genre/this trend, but when YOU write it--" )

And especially in prose, the dissection-explanation gets you into the mood of the scene/head of the character a lot better, while if you DON'T have the dissection worked out but also don't have the crutch of any visual aids to point to, well, then people are a lot less likely to instinctively understand what YOU instinctively understand, even if everyone in the conversation is the same sexuality/has the same tastes/etc etc etc.

So basically, if you're an allo, you probably have not actually HAD to spend that much time breaking down "why is this person/behavior/situation hot to me" unless you just felt like doing it; if you don't bother, though, you don't stop being able to look at something and go "that's hot". Because you just KNOW it's hot; it's like an instinct or a talent, and it's just immediately THERE, before you even necessarily fully know what it really is or develop it at all. You KNOW it's hot, and you don't get why anyone else would need that explained to them when it is just so damn OBVIOUS. You're immediately good at understanding it in yourself, but you don't necessarily understand it in a way where you can explain it to someone else; you haven't put in the practice or developed the thoughts, because you didn't need to, they were already just THERE.

But the thing with prose is you can't just point at the thing and be like "SEE?!??"; you've gotta figure out how to actually EXPLAIN the thing to people, and I feel like that can be a longer process for an allosexual person because they don't necessarily get what it is that they have to explain in the same way an asexual who's starting from ground zero does. The ace person already knows they don't know any of this shit, and knows there's other people who won't get it either, both ace AND allo. The natural talent, meanwhile, is just like "but it's so OBVIOUS, why don't you just GET it??" THEY get it, after all; it's OBVIOUS!!

So yeah, I would like to present, again, my hypothesis/thesis: fish don't have a word for water, but you are currently addressing a semi-aquatic mammal, and man, let me tell you about the water CYCLE.

[Screenshot of a video with the caption, "Smut so good it could only be written by an asexual." The rest of the video is covered up by a comments tab which informs us there are 525 comments. We see one by galacteddy, saying, "coaches don't play."

End ID.]

As a rampantly bisexual autist, this actually makes sense because I too have had to create a PowerPoint presentation on the fly EVERY GODDAMN DAY to explain why I like (or dislike) something to my NT and/or Heterosexual (TM) friends, relatives and colleagues. It's almost always perfectly banal things like "yes Jessica, food has texture and to myself and many people, that is just as if not more important than the seasoning." Or "okay Jason, so the thing about workshop lights is that more is not necessarily better. There's very much an upper limit on how much light the human eye can be exposed to before it starts to hurt, and in the case of myself and our colleagues with migraine disorders, that threshold can be very, very low. So no, I don't think the ten billion lumen search and rescue spotlights are a good choice for a props warehouse."

That kind of self-justification is exhausting and shouldn't be necessary to be treated like a human, but alas, I live in a society that demands it, and if there is one marginal silver lining to this, it's that it's made me Very Good At Words.

I think it's yet another shared experience of the ace and bi communities (and every marginalized community tbh) to have to examine our experiences because they don't match the 'default' and come up with a working theory of why those are different and both valid to maintain our place in the world. The farther afield your experience, the more detailed and nuanced that understanding is likely to be.

To continue your fish metaphor, fish might not have a word for water but fish from the ocean don't have as nuanced a vocabulary for salinity as a freshwater fish who is much more vulnerable to changes in salinity does, and God help you if you're from an estuary.