Clever Strangers and Strange Friends

I feel guilty every time I post about something shallow and trivial. However, I enjoy shitposting and we could all use the distraction. The way I distract myself is being spicy in fannish communities.

If you have emotional attachments to a certain cancelled sci-fi show and its creator, skip this post.

Still with me? Okay.

So I want to propose a new TV show for you. It's set IN SPACE in the far-flung future, think gritty space dystopia, think found family, think QUIPS and BANTER and BIG DAMN HEROES. 

Our heroes are the crew of a spaceship. They dress in snappy black and silver uniforms. They're all played by white guys and women, most with blond hair, all of them extremely fit and attractive. They have a cool logo that looks great on merch. Their ships are very cool looking and the best in the galaxy. They stand up for the common man. 

They are fighting a snivelly and sinister enemy, a vast galactic conspiracy that is secretly pulling the strings behind every bad guy of the week. Maybe they turn out to be, IDK, some kind of lizard alien or something.

By the way in case you're getting ideas about historical analogies here, I should make it clear that the first officer on the heroes' ship is a Jewish woman and the heroes don't commit any genocides on screen. In fact, one of them has a speech about how violence is bad in the first episode! They are shown to be very against war crimes in fact, it's the antagonists who are doing all the war crimes.

Now, a poll:

Just finished: Indigenous Ingenuity: A Celebration of Traditional North American Knowledge by Deidre Havrelock and Edward Kay. This is worth a read but also I wanted it to be better than it was. My main issue was the tone of condescension cloaked in breathless wonderment towards its young audience and precolonial Indigenous peoples, which I honestly do not think is intentional on the part of the writers and more a factor of how people think that children ought to be spoken to. My second issue had to do with the ending, which focused on ecological technologies and suddenly jumped forward to present day Indigenous Nations working with governments to create sustainable ecosystems. Very cool, but because of the book's structure and emphasis on precolonial technologies, it made it seem like Indigenous societies today are only working in that field. (This is not remotely true! If the section on communication technology had, for example, included a jump forward to discuss the Skobot, I'd have been fine with this aspect.) But also, it described things like carbon trading fairly uncritically, when in fact while carbon trading is better than carbonmaxxing like our current overlords are doing, it's a fairly useless system that greenwashes the omnicidal criminal corporations turning our world into a burning hellscape. So if the book is inaccurate about this, what else is it inaccurate about?

Beowulf translated by Francis B. Gummere. It's Beowulf. This is the less fun translation, albeit the one I'm more familiar with, because my hold on the Headley one didn't come in on time. We can discuss whether or not it's the most metal of all historical epics.

Currently reading: To Ride a Rising Storm by Moniquill Blackgoose. Speaking of Scandinavian-influenced epics. This is the sequel to To Shape a Dragon's Breath, which as you might recall broke all the way through my general dislike of YA to be one of my favourite books of the year. So far I am binging this and it's excellent. Our heroine, Anequs, wants nothing more than to get through her time at Kuiper's Academy, get licensed to ride her dragon, and return to her people on Masquapaug permanently, preferably with her two love interests, Theod and Liberty. But now the Anglish have set up a presence on the island and she's increasingly being drawn into shitty white-people politics that she wants nothing to do with.

This introduces a whack of new characters and factions. There's a Jewish character, Jadzia (Blackgoose, you fuckin' nerd lol), who I adore, and a secret society called the Disorder of the Grinning Teeth, which is the name of my new black metal band. There's also a new teacher whose name escapes me but who provides an interesting contrast in pedagogy from the first book. I should add that this is very much a magical boarding school story and not a residential school story, so it's very cool to see the idea of colonial educational institutions that could, theoretically, be reformed and democratized rather than needing to be closed and having the people who run them thrown in Forever Jail. 

Also the dragons are cool.

 Let's take a little break from reality and talk about romantasy! Escapist tales of fucking fairies and immortal elves and nothing to do with politics whatsoever, right?

Okay you know whose blog you're reading here. Two new-to-me podcasts with great names, Ordinary Unhappiness and In Bed With the Right, did a crossover episode, "Romantasy, Fantasy, and Trauma." For someone who has never read a romantasy (but read a lot of the precursors) I'm kind of obsessed with it as a genre and even more obsessed with the discourse around it. 

Disregarding the people whose opinions I don't care about, there are kind of two opposing takes on its appeal.

This is a fundamentally conservative genre that encourages women to become tradwives and relish in our own oppression.
This is actually a liberatory genre that allows women to explore their fantasies and traumas.

I don't think either side is fully right or wrong here, and that tension is worth exploring. This episode starts from two positions that many critics and admirers of the genre neglect: That women have agency, and that not everything women like is inherently feminist. From there it looks at where the romantasy boom came from, what its appeal is, and what it says about the psychology of its readers. I came away without a spicy take beyond that it turns out that a lot of the stories I wrote and never showed anyone when I was in my teens and twenties actually fit pretty neatly into the genre, which means that either BookTok girlies and I read a lot of the same books growing up, or there's something very deep in our culture that it speaks to, such that we reproduce the tropes unthinkingly.

I also find it interesting (not really discussed on this episode) that for all that the romance formula is reified into tropes and beats and commercial genre fiction is expected to at least somewhat engage with word counts and structure, romantasy really does appear to be an exception, and you can still write and sell stupidly long books in which nothing much happens, and no one complains about it. Dear Publishing Industry: Another world is possible.