Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 25

The good stuff: video game videos edition

This morning, waking with a fuzzy brain and distinct lack of creative energy, I decided to go on YouTube to catch up on reviews with Zero Punctuation, and I had two thoughts after finishing the latest videos. The first was, “Is there any point to watching Zero Punctuation in HD?” Because I don’t think there’s much reason to see his cartoony presentations without blurry jaggies. I’m not coming for the graphics anyway, but for the fast paced delivery of snark and innuendo.

My second thought was, “Hey, why don’t I make a list of the video game videos I watch most frequently and sell others on checking these shows out?” I mean, sure most of the people I follow already have big audiences, but hey, the more the merrier, right? Right! So here be my list, which I’ll follow up with a thought and *GASP* a request for feedback and suggestions for other shows I might be missing out on. But first…

Zero Punctuation (Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw)

I’ve been watching Zero Punctuation for a long time, usually waiting a few months at a time before marathoning all the verious episodes that have been uploaded in the meantime. I also go back and watch old episodes, mainly because Ben Croshaw’s blazing fast delivery of lines guarantees I’ll have forgotten half the jokes a few minutes after I’ve heard them. The jokes are funny, obviously, or I wouldn’t keep watching, but in a five minute video, Ben manages to skewer the latest games a hundred ways with a delivery so fast that I can usually only remember one or two jokes near the end of each video.

The thing is, Ben’s complaints about games often highlight a lot of issues I have with the same games, so if I want to know what sucks before I buy it, I go to Zero Punctuation first. This is not to say I won’t still buy the game. But I go into it knowing where some of the prickly sticking points will be.

The Angry Joe Show (Joe Vargas)

I don’t always agree with Joe Vargs. His taste in games and mine have only a few areas of overlap. If was had to be in a Venn diagram, the area of overlap would be the nope zone. But I do like watching his videos even for games I don’t plan on playing because Angry Joe is a passionate reviewer. If he loves a game, he’s going to take the time to break down every little thing he loves, and then he’s going to add “having said that,” and launch into a list of flaws. He’s thorough, he’s blunt, and he doesn’t gloss over the flaws of a game he likes. Conversely, if he hates a game, oh, man, you’re going to hear every little thing it did wrong before he tries to find something positive to highlight. In either case, he’s going to add in footage of him playing the game along with his reactions, and when he goes off on a tear, I point to him and tell my hubby, “See? I’m not the only gamer with a temper!” (Hubby thinks I get carried away. He has no idea how explosive I was as a kid. This is probably a good thing.)

Joe’s show also features skits and jokes, and his production values are surprisingly high, with a green screen allowing him to report from inside his high tech base or to do little jokes inside game worlds. It’s a slick looking show, and if there’s any downsides, it’s that Joe’s co-host “Other Joe” doesn’t quite have the same bombastic acting chops that Joe Vargas does. He’s always a bit muted and flat in his delivery, and that’s a shame because he sometimes has some really funny roles that might be better if he just put more effort into his performances.

The Angry Video Game Nerd + James and Mike Mondays (James Rolfe and Mike Matei)

The Angry Video Game Nerd is a show all about validation of my youth filled rages about bad games. My parents would always tell me that I was wrong about cheap tactics, bad gameplay, and wonky graphics. So if I wasn’t having fun with a game, it wasn’t that the game was bad, it just wasn’t for me. So along comes James Rolfe to say, years later, “No, you were right, those shitty games sucked ass.” Even if I can’t tell my parents “see, I told you so!” I can at least nod my head and fantasize about telling them I was right all along.

James’ Angry Video Game Nerd is a character, and his show often involves some absurd guest stars or situations. The editing and special effect are pretty low tech, but in this way it kind of reminds me of old public access shows. So it’s nerdy validation of my gripes and stroking the old nostalgia boner at the same time.

James also does another show with Mike Matei that’s out of the nerd character, Jame and Mike Mondays, and they play and review all eras of games in a more laid back way. They talk about random stuff while playing, and I like the show because it has such a simple premise: two friends playing games and gabbing about whatever crosses their minds at the time.

The Jimquisition (Jim Sterling)

The Jimquisition isn’t so much a show criticizing games as it is a critique of the industry. Jim Sterling also does game reviews, but the episodes I enjoy most are those that highlight certain trends withing games or the community itself where Jim explains his feelings on the topics. I can’t recall a single episode where I disagreed with the points he’s made, and no matter what subject he’s choosing to take on, I know it will be interesting to watch.

Feminist Frequency (Anita Sarkeesian)

I got to the end of this list and realized what a sausage-fest the whole thing was. I thought if I knew any women game critics, and that got me thinking about Anita Sarkeesian. I’ve seen her Women VS Tropes videos, and I follow her on Twitter. But I’ve never really thought of her as a game critic in the same way as the guys because she’s tackling a specific problem in the industry and trying to bring about a positive change. This is good, and I do like her videos. I just sometimes wish she’d do another series of videos where she played games and gave impressions on them, even if it was just to highlight games that she felt bucked the industry trends.

This brings me around to the point of asking for help from my readers. I’m sure there must be women reviewing games in the same way as Joe Vargas, Ben Croshaw, and James and Mike. But when I go to YouTube and look for reviews, it’s almost always dudes. There’s ProJared, JonTron, Pat the NES Punk, and many others. But I never see anything suggested for women game reviewers. Maybe it’s a side effect of the videos I’ve watched, and now YouTube simply isn’t giving me anything but dudes. Still, I’d very much like to see some equal representation and maybe put together a future reviewer update that isn’t so dude heavy. So if you know a woman game reviewer that you like, give them a shout out in the comments and I’ll check them out. And thanks in advance for the help.

The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn

This is going to be a real short post, as all the reading will be done through the link below. Yesterday on Facebook, I found a link to a novella on Tor’s site, The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn by Usman Malik. I thought I’d read a few lines and bookmark the rest for later, but I ended up reading it all the way to the end in a few hours. It’s a fantastic story, and I think you should give it a try.

Book review: Ink by Damien Angelica Walters

Ink is a slow burn kind of horror story, where you know pretty much right from the start that something bad is going to happen, but the question of when that bad thing will come is drawn out to prolong the tension. This can end up failing because if nothing happens for too long, the story can lose the tension it’s invested. But Ink manages to dole out just enough of a sense of dread so that it never loses that building edge. When it finally peaks and starts to reveal the monsters, the tension is aided by a sense of real investment in the characters.

Ink is the story of Jason, a man whose wife has just left him. Worse, Shelley left him for her best friend Nicole, but with her departure, Jason is feeling relief more than anger. Their marriage had been all wrong long before the start of the story, making him feel trapped in a loveless relationship. Now that she’s left, he’s gone out to celebrate his freedom. This is how he meets “John S Iblis” in a bar, who Jason soon nicknames Sailor for his rolling walk. John talks Jason into getting a tattoo to celebrate his freedom. A pity then, that getting the tattoo is doing the exact opposite.

Soon after he gets the tattoo, Jason is having nightmares. Then he starts finding dead animal parts left on his doormat, and the next door neighbor’s kid is giving him funny looks. From these smaller disasters, larger ones blossom and explode, and through it all, Jason is left wondering if he’s going mad, He keeps insisting that his situation can’t be real, until finally he is unable to deny that his tattoo is alive, and it is hungry for fresh flesh.

There’s a lot to like in the story, with the details of the building John occupies described in an other worldly way that contrasts with the banal blandness of Jason’s home and neighborhood. The scenes with Jason and his family and coworkers are often capped with shorter scenes of John watching and waiting for his latest victim to snap and come begging for help. In between these are moments of new love found with Mitch, a fan of tattoos who seems to come out of nowhere and give Jason a new sense of purpose after his wife has walked out on him. And all of this combines to form a nicely woven tale that starts of in the most mundane was and slowly escalates into violence and insanity.

I give Ink 5 stars and recommend it to fans of horror and dark fantasy.

So now I’m gonna talk about puppies…

Way back in 2009, I made the list of Shorty nominations because I jokingly said, “I nominate me for the Shorty’s.” Enough people took me seriously that I made it far enough up the list to bound one spot over Laurell K. Hamilton for two days. It was without a doubt the two most glorious days I had experienced in writing up to that point. Of course I quickly plunged off the list of nominations because it was just a lark, and I don’t have a huge fan-base to appeal to to help me game the Shortys. I have since then never asked to be nominated for the Shorty awards because it’s not that big a deal to me. I’d love to win an award for something I wrote, but only if it was nominated legitimately by someone who liked my book. This makes it a pretty tall order, a nomination from someone who read and liked my book who also has membership standing in a voting body for a qualifying award. I really might have better odds of winning the lottery.

Which brings me to the puppies and the Hugo awards. It’s kind of funny how there’s this group of guys complaining that they’re in the minority while wielding the powers of a majority to screw everyone else over. Apparently to them, it’s unfair that authors who aren’t white, male, and conservative might get a chance winning an award. Because white conservative males are so underrepresented in the award winning world. They’re not voting based on a book that touched them. They’re voting for the candidate who most closely matches their ideals. They’re not even doing this to recognize talent that they feel has been held down for too long. No, they’re doing it to attack the idea of diverse voices infecting their pure white male awards. So they’ve gathered themselves into a little army, and they’re proving that as a voting bloc, they can nominate whoever they want, blocking any of those uppity minorities from getting on the final ballot.

You’d think this sort of thing might make me angry, but I find it to be a rather fascinating look into the mindset of a group of people who, while having the benefits of privilege in virtually every field of media, still want to claim that they’re being held down somehow. I can’t even recall when it wasn’t a topic of contention that awards were reflective of only one culture, race, and gender. The reading audience may be far more diverse, but the voting bodies trend toward white males, and the nominations tend to reflect that reality. I can’t attend Worldcon, so even if I wanted to nominate a book, I’m not part of the voting body. I can’t gather my friends to vote for me or another author because no one I know has or will attend Worldcon either. This means that the only people who can game the system are those people already inside it. And so this group, who already have a dominating presence in the club, are angry that anyone else might have a chance of being nominated, and they’re so angry about this possibility that they would push a few select authors to make sure no one else’s vote counts.

What this does is make the awards increasingly meaningless to the general public. They see these stories of the awards being rigged from the inside, and now they’re thinking how the books aren’t nominated based on the best work of the year. Instead, it’s all about who can rally the most votes for their favorite supposed underdog.

I’ve mentioned very recently how the vast majority of reading selections at my bookstore trend toward straight white characters, and how I have to go online and hunt specifically for any books with characters outside of that dominating culture. Looking at my reading options in the mainstream, I have to wonder who looks at the one or two books that slip through with a different perspective and points to those exceptions as proof that the minorities are taking over and holding their favorite authors down. I’m morbidly fascinated by how much anger these people have at seeing a few exceptions to their majority slip into the nominations and regarding this as an invasion that is holding them down. They’re just so angry that they can’t own the whole block on every award.

I think I’ve mentioned before that if I was looking only to consume media that reflected me personally, I’d have a very short list of works to pick through. It’s rare to find books or films with a trans main character, or even to find a book with any trans characters. The last book I can recall that had a trans character was The Trouble With Fate by Leigh Evans, and that was a secondary character. I give the book kudos and a shout out because the character is presented in a fairly sympathetic light. But if I were basing my reading list on only seeing trans main characters, even that book fails because the main characters are straight cisgendered white people. And okay, the heroine of the story is not of the typical thin model archetype, so again, more kudos for breaking the mold. But what I’m getting at is, if I started demanding that the only media I consume should represent me exclusively, it would be a damn slim pile to pick through. I accept that I can’t get what I want. I read the mainstream stuff, and I know that some of these folks can spin a good tale even if I never find anyone like me within their stories.

So here’s this group of guys who, even looking out at the vast seas of male whiteness in the field, pick out a few dark spots and scream that it’s so unfair how underrepresented they are. It’s just so damned unfair to them that they don’t have total, complete domination. Because if there’s even a hint that anyone else might be climbing the ladder of success, it has to mean their people are being held down.

What this all boils down to is that these guys refuse to see anyone else succeeding. Everyone else is an other. White women? Other. Black men? Other. Gays, trans, or gender-queers? Other. And despite how hard it is for any of these groups to make their voices heard in the sea of white males, when someone does succeed in making a ripple, they feel the need to quash it, lest it lead to more uppity minorities rising above their precious white males.

It should make me mad. It should infuriate me that people who have most of the social advantages scream like babies denied a popsicle because they can’t have all the awards. But mostly, it just reminds me why no one’s struggle for recognition is ever truly over. Hard work is meaningless. Artistic talent is meaningless. What matters to this incensed majority is that the awards reflect their gender and skin color.

I wonder what that must be like, to be so angry in their total domination and victory over everyone else. Here I am, down at the bottom of the artistic pile, with no hopes of gaming the system. Here I am, as a reader, being unable to find more than a few books that offer me a character reflective of my experiences. And yet, I can’t find it in me to be outraged like these guys, who sit at the top of the pile and scream about wanting all the toys. Mostly, I just sigh and keep writing my stuff because that’s just the way it is. The angry majority who has everything will keep stamping their feet about how unfair it is that a few exceptional works made their ballot, and the minorities who have little hope of winning just sigh and walk on by. It should feel good to be on the winning team. So why are these guys always so angry?

I think maybe they’re mad because deep down inside, they know that one day, they won’t be the majority. They’ll have a rank equal to everyone else, with the same chances of being represented as everyone else. And that’s what drives their tempers. They’re mad that one day soon, they won’t own all the toys. They might have to compete on an actual level playing field. And wouldn’t that be a damn shame, having to earn their place in the awards instead of just having everything given to them by default?

Book review: Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

I got Will Grayson, Will Grayson on my birthday because I saw the Italian version in an all-new LGBT section at the local bookstore, and I went, “Holy shit, John Green did a gay romance? This I gotta see.” Only, the English books section didn’t have it, so I had to buy the Kindle version on Amazon. Once I got home, my plans to read got derailed by a serious need to nap. (Hey, I’m 40. Old age does that to you. Funny how when I was five, I hated nap time, and now it’s like my fourth favorite activity after writing, reading, and eating.)

I read half the book the next day, frequently pausing to laugh out loud and back up to read the jokes to my hubby. Then the next day, I only got in one chapter because I also got Diablo III for my birthday, and I got distracted by the pretty colors and killing stuff. But today my hubby had his turn at Diablo III, and after a nap (see? A very popular activity for me now) I jumped into reading the other half.

And it turns out, it’s not really a gay romance. It’s not really a romance at all, even if there are some romantic bits to it. Instead, this is the story of two Will Graysons who meet in a moment of random serendipity, and how their lives change as a result of that meeting.

One Will Grayson is easily funnier than the other. They both alternates telling their stories in even and odd chapters, and the first Will is friends with a gay footballer named Tiny Cooper. Theirs is a long-term friendship, but one that is strained by Tiny’s preoccupation with producing a school musical about his life. The other Will is a lonely closeted gay who is suffering from depression and self-loathing, and so a lot of his chapters were hard to read. But not because depression is an alien thing. No, it’s because I’ve been where Will is, and those are the kinds of memories best left to lie and gather dust.

Second Will is in an online relationship that is supposed to lead to a meeting, only it turns out there never was a boyfriend and Will is the victim of a cruel catfishing hoax by someone he thought was a friend. In this existential crisis, he meets the first Will Grayson, who tries to help him out by introducing him to Tiny. What follows is actually kind of predictable, but it’s a good thing. This isn’t the one true love ideal that so much YA pitches to the youths. This is messy and complicated, and kinda doomed from the start because both sides are just trying too hard. And while things do end badly, the book still manages to come to a somewhat happy conclusion for everyone, even if it isn’t the one you might be hoping for.

I have two tiny complaints about the book, and point one is Tiny’s musical being approved by the school so easily. Maybe he’s in a really progressive school, but I still have a hard time believing they just handed him a thousand dollars for a school play about a gay student’s love life without asking for something more like the script or the lyrics. And during the book, some of the songs Tiny sings that are supposed to be in the show seem impossible to get past a school board. I’m pretty sure you can’t sing fucking or vagina and get away with it in a school play no matter where it’s held. But if I pretend that nobody actually saw the lyrics to the first draft, and I pretend that this is actually a mild fantasy world, I can let it go. By the time the play is actually shown to the public, the songs are all toned down and come off as almost wholesome.

Problem two is the second Will’s chapters which eschew all capitalization and a great deal of standard sentence structure. At times, it required going back and forth several times to sort out who was saying what, and that kind of threw me out of my groove. And really, why was the lack of capitalization needed? It just feels gimmicky, and it didn’t work for me. Maybe it was meant to emphasize the difference in the way the to Will’s think, but…but the thing is, they really aren’t thinking so different. The first Will is so devoted to the idea of not caring that he ends up almost losing his best friend and missing the chance to fall in love. The second will is so worried about being a bad person because his father was that he’s also conditioned himself not to care. When he does try to care, first for his online boyfriend, and then for Tiny, it’s such an alien concept that he can’t help but screw it up. Theyr’e really not so different, so I guess someone thought changing the punctuation was a way to help the reader keep their chapters straight. Still, I didn’t like it. Maybe that’s just me being a grammar Nazi, or something.

Anywho, these are both minor complaints, really, and I loved the book enough to finish it in just a few sessions. So I’ll give Will Grayson, Will Grayson 5 stars, and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes a funny story.

How I’ve learned to love down-times…

Even before hubby’s return home, I was suffering from mental and physical fatigue. The daily commutes to visit him and still get housework done wore me down, and I chose to stop writing my current story until I’ve got more active brain cells to handle the task. I realize this runs counter to all that “write every day, no matter what” advice, but I haven’t been following most writing advice from the beginning and still manage to have a lot of books written. I think the advice must be meant for people who have trouble getting words down, and the idea is to write every day so that the brain is wired to produce on demand.

My brain really doesn’t work like that. For one thing, I’m never not writing upstairs. I can be out walking with friends, and one of them will invariably ask me, “what’s wrong?” because I’m frowning with a little knot in my brow. I’m not troubled by anything. I’m just working out dialogue in my head. When I do sit down to empty out the words that have gathered and crowded my head, I end up with several days worth of material.

There used to be a time when I felt great urgency to get ideas down now, now, NOW. I had a muse who would wake me up early in the morning with an idea, and if I slacked off, I’d get badgered by internal voices about dying and not finishing this series or that one. Those guilt trips were pretty effective for a long time, and I often had days where I wrote 10-15K. But the side effects of those twelve hour marathon sessions were that I also spent many days or weeks between projects too mentally drained to dress or feed myself. I called the condition brain drain, and I didn’t like not having the mental energy to do anything. So I began allowing myself some room to slack off. I can still have a random day where my output is over 9,000, leading to an easy meme joke on my social updates. But any day that I do write, I consider 1,000 to be my minimum limit for a good day, and anything above that is a great day.

There are still times when I get antsy because I’m not doing anything, but I quell that sentiment by thinking about my editing queue. I’ve got a lot of books done that are in various draft stages, and if I run out of stuff to write, I’ve still got editing work that can be done in shorter bursts. This leaves me free to play a video game or read a book, or just spend time with hubby and the animals.

Lately, I’ve come to appreciate not writing. It isn’t that I don’t love writing anymore. I do. I love sitting down and creating these fictional worlds where my “kids” act out my internal fantasies. It’s still deeply satisfying to complete a project and add The End to the bottom. I love getting a project polished up enough to publish it to my various vendors, and there’s no part of the creating process that I don’t get some enjoyment out of. But I also like doing other stuff. I like going on book hunts with hubby, or hanging out with friends. I like spending time on social sites doing something besides constantly repeat “buy my book.”

I think part of why I’ve reached this point is the ability to look back at what I’ve already released and recognize that I’ve earned my title as a prolific writer. Sometime in the next year, I’ll have published fifty books. If I stopped writing right now, I’d still have enough material to reach sixty. That’s not too shabby considering my haphazard creation method. I’m not at risk of running out of ideas, though, and even as I work on this one new monster soap opera, my muse is back loading my head with other stories to work on whenever I find the free time to do so. But there’s no urgency to get everything done anymore. If I have to put off a certain idea for a year or two, it’s no big loss. If I forget the idea between here and there, well it must not have been all that great to begin with.

In the last few years, it’s this slacking tendency that’s given me more time to read other peoples’ stuff and do more reviews. I’ve been able to get back into gaming and do reviews for them as well. I spend more time listening to music or gardening, or just going walking with my dog and cat. I like having free time, and when I do come back to writing, I feel more energized and ready to work. I’m not as sore or fatigued from writing like I used to be, and the extra time spent exercising means I suffer less fatigue attacks and depressions.

That’s another thing. In the past, I might release a book and promote it, only to get a handful of sales on the opening month. I’d see that as a failure, and after suffering a depressive funk, I’d spend the next few weeks trying to think up a new idea to pitch. I couldn’t stick with a series that didn’t sell, so I just kept coming up with new pitches. The result is that I now have a lot of ongoing series, and I still have the same sales figures even for the newer ideas.

Where this has led me is to the understanding that it’s okay to only have a few sales per title. I’m just doing this as a way to pass the time, and if someone buys my book, that in itself is a victory. I don’t have as much urgency to keep putting out new ideas, or to whip out the next sequel for each ongoing series. When an idea is ready, I’ll get to work on it. But I’m not going to rush myself when I know the sales results will be low. If only a handful of people are going to read it, I might as well take my time and make sure the story I give them is something unique and worthy of their time.

It’s nice, being able to work when I’m ready, and being able to enjoy the times when I’m not writing. It’s nice being able to read to pass the time without thinking about my own stuff. I like having the time to play through another round of The Last of Us, or to sit down and really listen to a new album instead of having it become background noise to whatever story I’m working on. And I like being able to enjoy myself in the present without worrying about my side projects. It’s liberating being able to step back and do other stuff. And it’s great to not be stressed out over what I’m not getting done by “being lazy.” I’m 40, and if I don’t stop to appreciate what I have every once in a while, I’ll come to the end of my days regretting my choice to be so singularly focused on numbers that ultimately don’t matter. Yes, it’s great when I write over 9K in a day. It’s great to finish a story or to publish it. But if that’s all I do, it’s not much of a life, is it?

So maybe my habits don’t conform to the standard advice to write every day, and maybe that means I’m not being as productive as I used to be. But I am happier now, and I’m not as stressed or depressed about things I can’t control. In my opinion, that’s far more important than whether I can still crank out a book every three weeks.

What I mean when I ask for diversity…

So my birthday was on Saturday, and I went downtown with hubby and my sister-in-law to check out a Feltrinelli bookstore that had been closed for renovations since January and just opened at the start of April. This has been a bad year for my book hunting habits, as the Mondadori that had a whole floor of English book closed down for good. The remaining stores only have a single shelf dedicated to English books, and their organization is aggravating, with porn stacked in right next to kids books because it’s all listed by author with no categories.

Feltrinelli at least had more than one shelf, but their English books selection had been kind of slim before they closed, so I was happy to see they’d expanded to a full wall of books, with the classics moved to their own shelf on the opposite wall.

Or I was happy until hubby pulled me over to the other side of the store and I saw this:

It’s an LGBT shelf. It should thrill me, but I still suck at reading Italian. All those books on that shelf were not to be found in the English language offerings. If I wanted any of them (and I did), I would have to find the books on Amazon. (And I did, and I bought one as soon as I was home.)

To be clear, it does make me happy that the store has begun to offer readers a whole shelf of LGBT books. This was not available before their renovations, and I am happy that they’ve made an effort to be more inclusive. But it also sucks because I can see what they’re offering to everyone else, and then I can go back to the English wall, and it’s almost all white straight people.



As I was heading home, I started thinking how that one shelf is what I really want when I talk about wanting diverse books. Because it’s not impossible to find diverse books, just hard. To find books about gay romance or lesbian romance, or romance featuring characters other than white people, I have to actively search for them. I want horror books with a gay character, mystery novels with a transsexual detective, fantasy novels with a hero who isn’t white. It shouldn’t bee so much to ask for, but when I go to the store, I will never find any of these options. Despite the wide range of readers in the market, there’s still only one group being serviced by your average mainstream bookstore.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to reading about white straight people. I do it all the time. But what I’d love is to be able to go into a bookstore and have the same chances of discovering some new story with gay characters, or with people of color. I’d like to be able to go to the store and just browse for those books. That’s why I still go to bookstores even in the post-Amazon age of shopping, for the joys of discovering a new story that Amazon couldn’t bring to my attention. But if I want to read about anything besides more straight white people, I have to get online and hunt for new books. Going to the store means accepting that I will be coming home with books about straight white people.

This is something I feel is missing from the discussion about how “we need more diversity.” What we’re really saying is “we need to see that diversity in the mainstream bookstore.” Because without a doubt, there IS more diversity out there. But it’s not possible to find that diversity by casual browsing in a bookstore. And that’s what lots of people want. They want to be able to go to the bookstore knowing there are characters like them that they can not only relate to, but also identify with. They want to find characters that make them go, “Hey, that could be me.”

The thing about my trips to the bookstore that annoys me is that as a result of 50 Shades of Grey being such a bestseller, there is now a half a wall dedicated to bondage books in English. But there’s no LGBT bookshelf for me. There’s no black or Hispanic authors shelf. But there is a section for straight white people interested in a niche fetish.

If I’m willing to give up on bookstores, I can find what I’m looking for online. But this puts me in a bit of a bind. I want local bookstores to stay open. I hate that the best bookstore in town closed, and I’ve lost the option of browsing a floor of books all categorized properly. I want to support the local economy in every way I can so that I won’t lose any other stores, even if their selections are nowhere near as good. So I go to the bookstores as often as I can afford, and I try to find things to read. Most of the time, I can find a story that interest me. But almost 90% of the time, I can be sure the story will be heteronormative and white centric. Because I also shop online, I know that there’s a whole lot of other options, and it frustrates me that I can’t just browse for a new book with a diverse cast. I have to hunt them down. I have to always be watching other readers online to find these books.

So when folks say we need more diversity in books, it’s not a complete statement, in my opinion. What we need is for booksellers to stock more books with other perspectives. We want to find books that speak to us in the bookstores instead of having to search for them online. Because really, if the local bookstore can find 100 books on bondage, why can’t they offer a shelf for anyone besides straight white people?

You would think this wouldn’t be such a controversial topic, either, but there’s a lot of folks who are deeply offended by this idea. They say things like “Why do your lousy books have to take over the bookstore I shop at? Or, “Why do you have to ruin my fun?” Which is kind of ridiculous. It’s not like stores have to flip the ratio of books on offer to please me. The rest of the store can stay the way it is, and I’ll still buy those books too. But all I’m asking for is a few shelves not dedicated to straight white people.

How is that a bad thing? How is offering other readers an option to find books about people like them going to affect your mainstream reading habits? If the books are on their own dedicated shelves, you can pass them by without even slowing down, like I do when I see the religious studies and self-help shelves. And how is the existence of options for other people ruining your enjoyment of the books you read. Do you suddenly stop in the middle of a good book and think “Oh, this story would be so much better if only those other books didn’t exist”?

And I don’t buy into this idea that bookstores are only catering to their community because most chain stores don’t even have control of what they get. A distribution center bulk orders the books and send them out to their chains without observing local trends. In this way, the real problem lies with those ordering agents who service only one segment of the market and never bother being inclusive to anyone else. Maybe it’s not a prejudice, and they’re simply ignorant of the existence of other markets. Certainly, you can find the same problems with major chain stores having skimpy horror and fantasy sections, while mystery and thriller readers get a huge section of the stores to browse through. But what that means to me is that there needs to be agents hired on whose job is to cover the areas not handled by the mainstream agent. Either that, or the ordering agents ought to be made aware of their blind spots and make more effort to service all of their readers instead of just covering the subjects they know.

Maybe that won’t happen, and I’ll just keep hunting for diversity online. But if I had the option to browse for diverse books in the shops, I know Amazon wouldn’t get nearly as much of my money. I know I’d happily pay a little extra for print editions and support the stores that offered me something else to read beside the usual straight white people. And yes, I’d still read about straight white people because a good story is still good regardless of who the main characters are. All I’m saying is, give me some options, and I’d reward the store that embraced diversity.

Book review: Dead Beautiful by Yvonne Woon

Dead Beautiful is flawed right from the start, plagued by the problem that it���s imitating a lot of other books in most aspects, and also by its only original idea being unbelievably stupid. And that���s me being kind. It���s not just a bad story because it���s so obvious what books it was borrowing from. (Twilight, Harry Potter, Raven Boys, and Marked all came to mind frequently.) The main problem is that consistency and logic are apparently foreign words to the author. The main character Ren��e(sme) loses her parents right at the start in a double murder that���s obviously suspicious, and yet the police���on loan from the Powerpuff Girls��� Townsville���rule it as natural causes because they died of heart attacks…at the exact same time, with cloth stuffed in their mouths and surrounded by coins. (���Duh, does this…uh…look like a…uh a clue?���)

Ren��e is handed off to her ultra-rich dickhead grandfather who says, ���I want to send you off to a private school. These public schools let you do whatever you want, and that���s no good.��� He insults her constantly, and yet later suggests that she take up a class in forensic science and acts all concerned about her safety before sending her of to Hogwarts…sorry Gottfried. The grandfather is closely connected to this school and knew a student recently died in the exact same way her parents did, and he knows why. For that matter, he most certainly has to know the school isn���t safe, and yet, he tells her she can���t stay in her old school, and this new place is safer.

Yes, he could have actually told her the truth about why her parents died, but instead he lies, treats her like crap, and then abandons her in a place where she���s actually in more danger than she was at home. Even after she gets him to confess about lying to her, the bastard manages to ask ���Aren���t you grateful that I sent you there?��� And passive, pathetic Ren��e goes, ���Um…yes, I guess.��� URGH.

I���ll go on. Right after moving Ren��e to his uber-mansion, the grandfather is like, ���Here���s your dead mother���s school clothing. Just pick some stuff out and wear it.��� Does Ren��e freak out about this or at least complain about wearing clothing 20 years out of date? Nope! And what���s more, once she gets to school, her fashionista roommate is like ���These clothes are so retro, let me borrow some.��� (Yeah, because you know rich kids are all about wearing hand-me-downs from their parents.) AND YET, the clothing her mother wore to the same school is found to not be within the dress code by a mega-control freak teacher who lives for humiliating students. (Paging Argus Filch! Your bitter child hating personality is needed in another book.) Her roommate Eleanor then reveals that she used her contacts in the office to spy on Ren��e���s files. Does Ren��e flip out at having her privacy violated by a complete stranger? Nope! Not even a little bit. She���s got next to no reaction to anything that happens to her or to others around her, and her passive bland personality makes her as unremarkable as her supposedly plain physical appearance.

On day one at this stupid school, Ren��e meets Dante Berlin, so named because Edward Cullen was already taken. It���s the same shtick as in Twilight, with Dante being obviously supernatural and instantly attracted to Ren��e. (She���s his ���singer��� and he responds to no one else at the school, described by other students as standoffish and self-centered.) Every time Ren��e mentions the obvious signs that he���s maybe just a bit supernatural, he says stuff like, ���It must be your imagination.��� Every four or five pages, we need another description of how cold and beautiful he is, in case we somehow forgot those points. Dante is also Edward-like in his protectiveness of Ren��e, which is less interesting here than it was in Twilight.

And I liked Twilight.

Of course Dante is so beautiful that Ren��e forgets about her old boyfriend instantly after they meet, along with her dead parents and pretty much anything else of minor or major importance. At one point she thinks the only time she doesn���t think about her parents is when she���s with Dante. But for most of the first half of the book it���s closer to the truth that she rarely ever thinks about her parents, and 90% of her thought process is all about Dante the ���super cool��� (pun intended) book boyfriend. The latter half of the book at least gets better about bringing them up, but it’s always telling the reader that Ren��e is tormented by their absence, and never shown in her emotional state.

The courses are all given lofty bullshit titles because of course this isn���t a normal private school. It���s fucking Hogwarts on the East Coast. (Except they take on normal students to keep the lights on, never mentioning to ultra rich clients, ���By the by, there���s a good chance your child will end up dead by attending our classes.��� Oh, and no one���s ever sued this school because ���reasons.��� Of course. Logic? Man, fuck logic.)

The classes in this Hogwarts wannabe are all staffed by people who talk like a stupid person might imagine smart people sound like, a pretentious imitation that���s insulting at best and aggravating at worst. In every early class scene, the teacher says something stupid and Ren��e questions it. The teacher says something even more stupid and Ren��e thinks, ���I never thought of it like that. Wow, this class could be fascinating.��� And then nothing is ever really described in the classes again. For subjects that are so fascinating, there���s never any attempt to show why they are, or why this morbid ass school became so popular among mundane rich people when it���s got a known history of students dying in ���freak accidents.��� So not only are the police morons in this world, all rich people are too.

It doesn’t help that there is a point to why the school was founded, and with their ultra selective process, they end up potentially overlooking lots of people who could help with this problem. But of course they don’t tell anyone the real point of the school. Everyone has to guess it because…you guessed it, “reasons.”

Then there���s Ren��e���s supposed prodigal talents in ���horticulture,��� a class that has jack and shit to do with horticulture. The only time she demonstrates any ability in the class is by licking dirt and pairing a bulb with a soil type, and thereafter, it���s brought up again and again how smart she is. Except there are no other examples of her studies in this class, and the example with the bulb is referred back to as her one shining intuitive moment. For that matter, there���s no examples to prove she���s not a complete moron. She can���t figure out a single damn thing on her own without help from Dante, and the book plods along through the school year without her doing much of anything except for having near kisses with Dante. (This is the part that reminds me of Raven Boys, with Blue being unable to kiss Gansey because that would mean his death. It���s the same shtick here, but in reverse.)

Once the secret of the school is revealed, it���s another moment of agonizing stupidity, because if this premise were true, there would be no way to keep it a secret. Even if people didn���t notice all the undead for their obvious supernatural quirks, certainly the HUGE pattern of deaths attributed to these undead would have been noticed and compiled somewhere by modern forensic specialists. But no one has noticed because ���reasons.��� It���s also unlikely that there are only three schools where this phenomena is a known quantity. But hey, the whole thing has been stupid up to this point, so why wouldn���t the big reveal be just as stupid?

I think the most aggravating thing for me in all of this is how Ren��e is so pathetically emotionless about every discovery of being lied to. She might confront someone about it, and they say ���Hey, I had reasons,��� and she relents and goes right back to her usual bland self. Only hours before her grandfather confesses to knowing what���s going on, he was saying ���How can you believe this obviously made up story from someone you barely know?��� Except that story is true, and she also barely knows her grandfather. But does she react with anger when he admits to lying and putting her in harm���s way? Nope! Because she has almost no emotions besides lust for Dante. She���s so pathetically pliable, like a teenage female version of Derek Zoolander.

���Oh, I���m mad at you!���

���No you���re not really. Now sit down.���

���Okay, I guess I���m not really mad. Please, tell me what to think.���

URGHLEKFNHGH!

Just like in all Harry Potter books, the villain doesn���t reveal themselves until the end of the school year, and it���s just as annoying here. And that ending. Ugh, that ending.

I come away from this thinking of Marked and how someone told me I had to keep reading because it got better. And yet, even though I have the next book in the series, I just can���t get over how stupid the whole thing is. That���s how I feel about Dead Beautiful as well. The idea itself could be interesting if it wasn���t handled so badly, and if the story���s main character wasn���t so pliable and meek.

I���m giving Dead Beautiful two stars. It���s a dumb story that makes badly written fan-fiction look good. But if you wanted some Twilight fan-fiction that isn���t specifically about vampires, this book is totally for you. Knock yourself out with a new pretty book boyfriend.

Promoting some good stuff…

Today, I���ve decided to do something a little different from my usual post. I was just thinking how I spend a lot of time talking about what I don���t like, but I rarely talk about stuff I like, or that I���d recommend to others. On Twitter, it���s not so uncommon for me to jump on a request for a new book to list some of my favorite authors or stories, and I thought, why not do that on the blog with a set of lists? So today, for y���all, here are some things I���d highly recommend you give a try. I���ve divided them into four categories: authors, musicians, movies, and games. I may have reviewed some of these in the past, but I���ll also include a brief summary for why I like this stuff.

Also note, these are not my top six selections. I could never make a top list because there���s so much good stuff that I love. These are just some folks and products I think you might like if you give them a chance.

Authors:

Maggie Stiefvater

At this point, I���ve read just about everything she���s published besides her middle grade books, and while I���m not always happy with the directions she goes with her characters, I really admire her writing. In particular, I���d suggest reading The Wolves of Mercy Falls series, starting with Shiver, and also the Raven Boys series. Her faerie books were also good, and whatever else she publishes in the next few years, I���ll be sure to get a copy on the first day of release.

John A. Lindqvist

I have many times said this before, but if you asked me, ���Do I read one of your books first or one from Lindqvist?” I���m going to tell you to check his stuff out first. There is nothing I���ve read from him that didn���t have a great emotional impact on me. He���s made me laugh out loud, and he���s made me so scared that I was jumping at the tiniest sounds in my home. He���s made me so angry I had to stop reading to calm down, and he���s made me cry with gasping sobs and big rolling tears. His talent blows me away, and I really wish everyone would try him, even if I know his stuff will push a lot of people way outside their comfort zone. I���d suggest starting with Let the Right One In, and after that, it���s a tie between Harbour and Little Star. Both were fantastic reads, but Little Star was more memorable. Handling the Undead is a great unique take on zombies, and after reading the longer works, go look up Let The Old Dreams Die, which includes some small stories providing better closure for Let the Right One In and Handling the Undead.

Brenna Yovanoff

Thus far, I���ve only read The Replacement and Fiendish, but I really love how well Yovanoff does creepy settings where people are aware of the supernatural creatures around them and just choose not to talk about it. In particular, The Replacement had shown this nasty dark side of a small town where people knew why their kids sometimes went missing, but said nothing because it led to prosperity for the town while others floundered. That���s something I can believe, and it makes the story both compelling and repugnant. I���m very much looking forward to reading Paper Valentines and The Space Between, and I think more people should give her stuff a shot.

Rachel Caine

I am absolutely addicted to The Morganville Vampires series, and I���d read the first six books back to back over the course of as many days. I had to stop myself because I got nothing else done during that time. I love the premise of a town where vampires rule over the humans living there, and the later books help expand on the premise, making the vampires both dark and human at the same time. I introduced hubby to the books, and he���s raced through the first 12 in less than two weeks. So this isn���t just me and my vampire fetish talking. They���re just that good.

Debra Dunbar

The imp series is fantastic, another series I���ve introduced hubby to that he went through every book in a week. It���s about a demon who lives in the human world disguised as a human she Owned, Samantha. She���s a wise ass and a troublemaker, but she���s also in love with a human, and later with an angel. I love that the story makes her a proper demon, often having thoughts that are downright evil. I also love the supporting cast, and if I have any complaints, its only that I often want to see more of the other cast members in every book. Definitely worth your time.

M.R. Carey

I have read only one book, The Girl With All the Gifts, but damn, it is a great book. I read it in two days, and would have read it in one if fatigue had not made me drop on the couch. This is a zombie book where the catalyst is a fungus, and where the initial outbreak is 20 years in the past. Humanity is still struggling to find a cure, but things are pretty hopeless at this point. But it���s not the setting that made this such a great read. It���s all the characters, even the bastardly dastardly ones. This is the book I handed to hubby on my Kindle, and when he made the ���I don���t like ereaders��� face, I told him, ���No, you HAVE to read this book.��� And a day later, he handed back the Kindle and said, ���You were right, that was a great book.��� So yeah, this is one you ought to pick up.

Musicians:

My Chemical Romance

I own every single album these guys have put out, and I cannot listen to them often enough. They���re my playlist for inspiration while writing, and my morning jams when I want to get hyped. Maybe it���s the guitars riffs that get me pumped up, or the fantastic voice of Gerard Way. I love the lyrics, and sometimes I catch myself trying to sing along even if I can���t sing nearly as well. My favorite albums are The Black Parade and Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, but they don���t have a single bad song in my opinion.

Janelle Monae

Another artist who I own everything she���s done and feel she doesn���t have a single bad song. Janelle Monae is in a class by herself with her sci-fi flavored albums telling the story of Cindy Mayweather, a cyberdroid singer who broke the law falling in love with a human. You really have to get her first three albums and just listen to them back to back to appreciate how they���re all related. But Janelle isn���t just a great storyteller. She���s got an amazing voice that gives me goosebumps, and her vocal range is nothing short of inspirational.

Saul Williams

I���ve just recently discovered Saul Williams through his album Volcanic Sunlight, and that was so good, I had to look up an earlier album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation Of Niggy Tardust. His voice is fantastic, and his lyrics are deep and thought provoking. I only wish I���d heard of his stuff earlier, because it���s really good.

The Casket Girls

This is a lucky find for me, something I found using the related artists feature of Zune on Neko Case. This is kinda funny because The Casket Girls are NOTHING at all like Neko Case. They���re a vocal pair whose lyrics are often a bit creepy or spooky, and their backing music is mostly synth tunes. But I still owe Zune some thanks for finding these ladies for me, because I love them even if their alternative pop sound has nothing to do with Neko���s alt-country style.

Alice Smith

Oh, my god. Alice Smith���s voice is just…I could listen to her album She on repeat all day and never get tired of her. She kind of reminds me of old school lounge singers, having that same impressive variety of vocal range. Just get She, sit back with some headphones on, and let yourself melt into that voice.

Tom Petty

Most of the suggestions on this list are new artist I discovered in the last couple of years, but this one goes way back to my teens, and I have never gotten tired of Tom Petty. His voice is unique, as instantly recognizable as his many, many hit songs. I first heard him on Running Down a Dream, and I���ve been a fan ever since then. But in addition to having a great voice, he���s also a great guy who tells funny stories in between songs at concerts, and he’s got dreamy blue eyes…um, which has nothing to do with his musical telent, I realize. But damn, he is one fine man even as he gets older.

True story: Tom had a free concert in Dallas for a charity, and he got sick with the flu the night of the concert, he still went out and played for two hours, and then apologized to the crowd for not sounding so good. He���s a very classy guy.

Movies:

The City of Lost Children

This is in my list of favorite movies to watch over and over, a bizarre cross of sci-fi and fantasy about a genetically engineered genius stealing children and invading their dreams to find a cure for his rapid aging. There���s an army of cyborgs, a collection of clones played by the rubbery faced Dominique Pinon, a mad scientist also played by Pinon, mind controlling fleas, and an evil pair of Siamese twins running an orphanage and forcing the kids to steal for them. But the real highlight of the film is the protagonists, the tough orphan Miette, played by Judith Vittet, and former whaler and sideshow strong man One, played by Ron Perlman. It���s a wonderful quirky story, and I can come into this film at any time and end up trapped until the very end.

La Cura Del Gorilla (The Bodyguard���s Cure)

This is a mystery based on a book of the same name by Sandrone Dazieri about a private eye with a split personality. The main character Sandrone, also called Gorilla, is hired by a video game company to watch over an elderly American actor made famous for his western films. ���Buck��� is played by Ernest Borgnine, and he���s a crotchety old dude who frequently gets on Sandrone���s nerves. While escorting Buck around, Sandrone meets a social worker who is accused of murdering her boyfriend, and although he wants to stay out of trouble, he ends up taking her case to prove her innocence even if his ���socio��� (his bad personality) believes she���s guilty. The two personas pass notes back and forth, and I love the fact that Sandrone never actually sleeps. The moment he closes his eyes, his bad side takes over. This is another film I watch over and over, and I never get tired of it.

The Incredibles

Pixar made the perfect superhero movie, and I���ve seen this maybe twenty times over the last couple of years. I love Mr. Incredible and his desire to get back to his glory days before heroes were all forced to retire, and his family is all just as fun to watch as they fight against Syndrome, a super villain who is developing technology to make everyone ���super.��� Everyone in this film is great fun to watch, even the skeevy boss from the insurance agency that Mr. Incredible works for in his mundane life. But the show is several times stolen by Edna Mode, fashion designer to the superheroes. Just try to watch this and not laugh at her scenes.

Troll Hunter

There are two kinds of found footage films. Those that suck, and those that use the premise perfectly. Troll Hunter is very firmly in the second camp. A trio of students go on the hunt for a trapper who they believe is illegally hunting bears, only to discover he���s actually a government agent hunting rogue trolls and that his bear hunting cover story is made up because the government is working to hide the existence of trolls. This is a great film that shows several species of trolls, eventually leading up to a confrontation with a HUGE mountain-sized troll. This is another movie I watch over and over, and many of the lines make me laugh even after hearing them a dozen times.

Oculus

Oculus is a horror story about a brother and sister who lost their parents to a cursed mirror. The brother was institutionalized after their deaths, and upon his release, his sister asks for his help in fighting and destroying the mirror. She has a plan to document this fight on film, and it���s a seemingly good plan sabotaged by the spirit possessing the mirror. The film flashes back to the past to show what happened when they were kids, but eventually what is a flashback and what is a hallucination begin to blur as the mirror becomes stronger. The ending is…it���s a real mind fuck. I wanted to watch this with hubby, but he flat out refused. He said the sounds I was making while watching it were scary enough.

Birdman

I have just seen this at the theater, and I still don���t quite know what to make of it. At times, I think it���s the story of an actor���s mental breakdown, and at others, I think it might be a fever dream. The film uses some interesting camera techniques that make it feel like it was done in only a few takes, and there���s some random scenes that help create a dreamlike quality. The ending makes me wonder if I really know what���s going on, and as soon as I can get this on blu-ray, I plan to watch it again with director commentary turned on so I can maybe get a hint of what���s really going on. It���s another great mind fuck, and definitely worth multiple viewings.

Games:

Dragon Age: Inquisition

Let me get out of the way that I think this game has quite a few flaws. But despite those flaws, I put in 300 hours playing two campaigns, and I plan to put in at least that many in the future playing through as other races and classes. There���s a lot to love about this game. It���s got a huge talented cast voicing a diverse lineup of characters, a ���party chat��� system that can still give you fresh dialogue even after a couple hundred hours of play time, and a large variety of quests and enemies to fight. In my opinion, it���s not quite as engaging as the first game in the series, but it���s still a great game and well worth your time no matter what system you play it on.

Spelunky

I���ve played this a long, LONG time, and I have yet to get tired of it because it���s a procedurally generated platformer following the adventures of a treasure hunter in an ancient…dungeon? Cave? I���m not sure. For a game that feels so simple on the surface, this is surprisingly deep, with secret levels to uncover and special items that can be unlocked in any playthrough using some devious methods. For all the times I���ve played it, I don���t think I���ve even scratched the surface on all the secrets in this game. And also? I���ve never beaten it. I can make it up to the last stage sometimes, but I���ve yet to defeat the final boss. This should frustrate me and make me toss the game. Instead it constantly inspires me to give it ���just one more try��� until I drain the battery on my Vita or my PS4 controller.

Project Diva f

Another game I���ve sunk close to 200 hours into, this is a music rhythm game set to J-pop music videos. I love all but one song on this game, and when I first reviewed it, I said I might never beat any song on Hard mode. Well now I���ve beaten about a third of the songs on Hard, and I continue to pick it up in the vain hope of beating another.

The Last of Us

This game…I normally give game writing a pass because it���s usually so cliche and uninspired, but aside from a few technical flaws here and there, The Last of Us is a masterpiece of game writing. By itself, having a compelling emotional story could make me gush, but this story is married up with some of the best graphics and character designs I���ve ever seen in a game. Certain scenes convey emotion in the eyes alone, and most games fail this test with their dead-eyed characters. The Last of Us ought to be studied by every other studio for how to animate characters and make them feel real. And then there���s the fact that it���s actually a fun, tense game to play, reviving my interest in zombie games even though I think the trope has been done to death, pun intended. I���ve played this through a few times, and plan to do it again real soon. It���s just so, so good.

Shovel Knight

I���ve got this on my PC, but as soon as it���s released for Vita and PS4, I���m buying it again. Shovel Knight is good enough to earn support with multiple purchases. It���s got a good story, good graphics, good music, and awesome game play that���s reminiscent of old NES platformers while never aping any one game too strongly. It���s doing its own thing, and I love it for everything it does right. It���s challenging without being insanely hard, and for those looking to make it harder, there���s the option to destroy save checkpoints for extra treasure. So you can go for a high score and buy extra stuff with your loot. But if you die, you go all the way back to the start of the level. I can only manage it on a few levels, and it���s on my to-do list to go back through and see if I can make a no-savepoint run. With game play borrowing from Mega Man and Duck Tales, this is something you have to try out. It���s good old-fashioned fun in a new, shiny armor package.

Portal 2

Yes, this is now an old game, but I���ve played it thought about a dozen times, and it never gets old. Some people complain that it���s too big, but I ignore those people because CAVE JOHNSON. I love all the levels with GlaDOS and Wheatley, too, but it���s the ���prototype levels��� narrated by Aperture Science���s founder that I keep coming back for. The dude is a glorious bastard, and his lemons speech makes me laugh every single time I hear it. Plus, it���s a great game with a unique gun that I love to find new ways to play with. I only wish I could do the co-op levels, but hubby and I don���t get along well in our divergent gaming styles.

So, there you have it, my list of stuff I love and think you should check out. Now you know, I don���t hate everything. Just mostly everything.

Fandoms and their darker side

I’ll state right out that I don’t really understand fandoms most of the time. There are many things I consider myself a fan of, but nothing speaks to me so strongly that I become deeply invested in it. I might make a Halloween costume for a character I like, and I might buy a collection to have that thing on hand for repeated viewings, but that’s about the extent of my devotion.

To be clear, when I talk about fandoms here, I’m not really talking about the cosplayers. I get their motivations. You like a character in some creative work, and you make a costume to be them from time to time. I get that, and I think cosplay is a pretty cool way to express your love for something. In the same way, I understand people doing fan-fiction stories and art. You are inspired by something, but want to take the story in a different direction not considered by the creator. Also cool, and sometimes just as interesting as the thing you are borrowing from.

No, what I’m talking about is the growing darker side of fandoms. I’m talking about fans who attack and abuse members of other fandoms for not liking the same things, like the bitter feuds in the console wars, or the fight between fans of various book series. I’m talking about people who send death threats to reviewers for daring to criticize their beloved game/comic/TV series/book, or worse, people who send death threats to the creator of their object of affection for not taking it in the right direction. I keep seeing people leaving social media because of these fandoms becoming ever more menacing, and I don’t get it. This is really how some people express their love, by becoming violent?

At times, I feel like I want a fandom built around any of my stories because it’s always so gratifying to have someone tell me they like the characters and can identify with them. I get that every once in a while, sometimes in a good review, or sometimes in a personal email. But it’s a rare occurrence, and a lonely part of me wishes I could get a random affirmation from fans to keep up the good work more often.

Then I see how fans have sent death threats to Veronica Roth and Charlaine Harris for not writing the story they wanted to see. I see critics closing their online accounts over a bad review, and content creators doing the same to get away from death threats or “swatting,” the act of calling the police in the hopes of getting the SWAT team to attack a person’s home. I see these things, and then the idea of having a fandom isn’t so appealing. And even the idea of being part of some fandoms becomes troubling because I don’t want to be in any group where people think it’s okay to behave like this. How is it okay to send the creators of My Little Pony death threats because they changed the voice of one bit character in a single episode? How does anyone justify that kind of reaction to themselves or anyone else?

I love Teen Wolf. I think it’s probably one of my favorite TV shows in a long time, but there are things in every season that didn’t work for me, or that deeply upset me. There were a few things that made me really mad. But aside from complaining to my hubby or sending out a few random tweets to my followers, I don’t see a need to vent my anger at anyone on the show. Okay, so the show didn’t do what I wanted. I have a few options from this point. I can stop watching. This isn’t going to happen because even with the flaws, it is still one of my favorite shows. I can write a fan-fiction that addresses the parts I don’t like. This is possible, but not very likely because I prefer writing stuff I can sell, and to me fan-fiction is a financial dead end even if it does feel creatively satisfying. I can accept that my beloved show has some flaws and keep watching. This is likely going to be my response until they stop making the show and I have to find something else to fill in the empty space.

But you know what isn’t an option? Sending a death threat to the writers or the producer. And maybe the reason I feel that way is that I never love deeply enough to resort to violence. I have at times argued passionately for a thing I loved to a critic, but I also kept my debate respectable. I go into it saying things like “Here’s some points I think you overlooked in your assessment,” not, “Well you fucking idiot, here’s why you’re wrong, and if you don’t change your mind, I’ll hunt you down and kill you.” I might never even change their minds when I make a defense of that thing I love, but we can’t all love the same things. We all look at each creation from our own perspective, and you may not see that thing in the same way I do. That’s okay.

Any long-time readers of my blog know I can be a very harsh critic of things I don’t like. I’m notoriously picky, and things that don’t bother other people rub me the wrong way when I see them. Inconsistency is a huge deal for me, so if a story narrator says a character has certain qualities that aren’t shown in their behavior, oh boy, that really steams me up. So I make a mean-spirited review, and I really lay into the thing I hated.

But once I’ve done my review, I’m done with that thing. I don’t hunt down the fans of that thing and tell them why they’re wrong for liking it. I don’t obsess over the thing I don’t like and keep going back to it as an example of everything wrong with the world. I did my rant on it, and now I can move on and find other stuff to love or hate.

These days, a lot of my choices in picking up a new thing are based not on the fans gushing about it. Instead, I see someone saying how this thing is disgusting and how the people who love it are rotten scumbags. I see that kind of hate, and I think “Jeez, what’s the big deal with that thing? Let me go look at it and see if it’s half as awful as these people are making it out to be.” And you know what? even when I don’t like that thing, I just don’t get the hate that some people have for it and the surrounding fandom. Okay, you didn’t like it. I understand that. I might even agree that the thing isn’t very good. But I can’t see attacking other people for liking it, or for attacking the creator.

It’s one thing to love or hate a thing, and another to lose sight of the fact that there are real people on the receiving end of our vitriol. I don’t blame the internet for causing this behavior. Before the internet, there were people sending death threats though the mail. All the internet does is make these attacks public. It’s a magnifying glass for a problem that already existed. But I do think the internet and its public nature give people filled with hate more validation of their feelings. So you can hate and send death threats to someone else, and you’ll get a lot of back patting and gladhanding from others who also feel the same way. And in this way, you feel okay doing it over and over again because hey, there’s someone else who agrees with you.

I think social sites have made this problem worse because we can all filter input into our personal bubbles. People who tell us we’re overreacting can be muted, blocked, or deleted. So we don’t deal with criticism anymore. We accept validation of our beliefs, and we shut out anyone with a contrary opinion. And in some arguments, I think that can be good. After all, if someone is starting their criticism with “Look, you stupid fucking douchebag,” I’m not inclined to take their input as a legitimate form of criticism. But it can also be bad because if I’m genuinely wrong about a topic, I can block out all dissenting views, even if they are making a valid point. I don’t have to learn anything, in other words. I can just go on spouting whatever ideal I hold, even if it’s wrong, and I can make sure the only people who reach me are the folks who also hold the same point of view.

I can’t really see a solutions to this myopic style of fandom. I wish we could all love the things we do without having to make it into a bitter fight, and I wish that people could understand how their hate harms other people in very real ways. But I don’t believe I can change anyone’s mind about this.

The collective bullying of fandoms reminds me quite a lot of school, where there are some cliques who just cannot get along. The social sites are not directly at fault for the existence of these cliques, but they do enable us to find our tribes and stay safely wrapped in a bubble of like-minded consorts. And that makes it even harder for people to learn how mean-spirited they are and grow past that kind of abusive behavior.