Friday Links Should be Packing for Her Trip
Another entry in my Flappers with Swords blog tour: I talk about how my love of costume drama has fed my fantasy fiction in Where Costumes Collide over at Fangtastic Fiction
This one slayed me – I had seen hints of the Normal Girl/Other Girls phenomenon on Tumblr, but it made no sense to me out of context. Enter the Mary Sue to explain it to me – hooray! I love the way that this story documents the way that one person’s attempt to parody the representation of women was misunderstood, then reclaimed, and had a massive fandom build around it, all in about 48 hours. Inspector Spacetime, eat your heart out.
A fascinating, brain-exploding essay on the topic of Women and Ambition which is of particular interest to me because I seem to be surrounded these days by women (including myself) who often feel the need to apologise or feel embarrassed about their successes.
I learned a lot in this essay about Muslim women, and how their lives revolve so much about other women that fiction involving them simply has to pass the Bechdel Test – and if it doesn’t, there’s a problem. I think this is one that all fantasy writers should consider carefully because it’s relevant to the depiction of all female characters in fantasy fiction. It blows the whole stupid ‘it’s historically authentic to make them suffer because women in medieval times couldn’t do anything interesting’ argument out of the water. Even if you have built a fantasy that revolves around ingrained sexist or patriarchal traditions, the women will still be somewhere together, talking to each other.
Over at the Aqueduct Press blog, L. Timmel Duchamp picked up on Kirstyn’s post about learning to feel unsafe as a girl, discussing her own experience and perspective.
N.K. Jemisin talks about why you should never ever apologise for reading an author’s books through the library.
A thoughtful post about the Bechdel Test and how it relates to her own work by Sherwood Smith.
THE FOLLOWING VID SPOILS ALL THE THINGS OF THE AVENGERS MOVIE (well all the cool things involving Black Widow) WHICH IS MOST OF THE THINGS (which is why my daughter is getting Black Widow Lego for Christmas)
