I Wish I Was A Lizard.

😌

I'M DOING AN EXPERIMENT

To prove something to a friend, please

REBLOG IF YOU THINK ASEXUALS BELONG IN LGBTQ+ SPACES

LIKE IF YOU THINK ASEXUALS DON’T BELONG IN LGBTQ+ SPACES

you'd have to stop the world just to stop the feeling!!

(now available as a sort-of-wallpaper and print~)

I sick

Happy birthday to me!!

driving to a renaissance fair while blasting chappell roan is a different kinda mood lmao

"Ice, is my character a stereotype?Is my story stereotypical?"

Lesson 6: "Let's Have a Talk, First"- Stereotypes, pt 1

Lesson 6: “Why’s she so rude?” (She’s Not)- Stereotypes, pt2

Lesson 6: "Is He the Threat (Or Are You?)"- Stereotypes, pt 3

Application Example: How to spot a Stereotype: An Example

Before you ask me this, I need you to read every lesson and click and search through every single link!

There are as many ways to accidentally (or purposely!) scribble up a stereotype as there are stories to tell. It takes our entire lives to learn and keep up with the ways media (fiction and nonfiction) will find ways to depict us negatively in a narrative. Why would it be any easier for you? 😅

If you actually want to develop the skill to see what and how stereotypes manifest in your media, you have to study it. It will take you time! You will have to read, and then you will have to apply what you've read! That's part of media analysis and comprehension! Because at the end of the day, I could present you with a surface level, lovely story containing a stereotypical narrative, but if you didn't know what to look for and why, you wouldn't see it.

And again, I will always tell you to engage with Black stories. Why do you want to put me in your stories, but you don't want to engage with anything created by me? Why do you want to know how to write my voice, but you're not willing to read anything spoken by my voice? How else do you plan on figuring that out? What is your intention, here? Let's ask ourselves these questions!

In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.

What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)

Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.

The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson

AND WE'RE LIVE~~~

Help us fund this funky softcover edition of Winter's series of short stories featuring queer knights: PRISM KNIGHTS!!

The stories are a bit of a 6 shades of Gay situation where each colour of the rainbow follows a different queer identity in the shape of knights and royals. They're a messy bunch. Here's our quick pitch of the series at cons:

Coqelicot -- a redux of Rapunzel featuring evil lesbian knights. Bronze -- a redux of The Princess & The Pea featuring a nonbinary, ace knight caught in a time loop. Lamplight -- a redux of Beauty & The Beast featuring a trans knight learning to love and forgive herself. Juniper -- a redux of Cinderella featuring a tragic gay knight running from his past and right into a blacksmith's arms~ Sapphire -- a redux of Sleeping Beauty featuring a polyam ship between a dragon (she/her), a knight (she/they) and a royal (they/them)~ Velvet -- a redux of 12 Princesses featuring a bisexual knight overcoming grief.

We're funding a softcover anthology version of the series and I get pretty much nothing but high praise from folks who have read (and reread???) these books time & time again! We'd love to get your support for the project this time around (or a bit of a share if its something you want to see even more of)!

Check it out here!

Instagram credit: chaptersofshau

hey not sure if you heard but it's actually probably better if you don't go gentle into that good night