Hi! You may know me as woodburner. Or hey, you may not. Anyway, this is a mostly open journal - subscribe/unsubscribe at will, no need to ask permission. :)

OMIGOD

OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD KORRA KORRA KORRA KORRA KORRA KORRA KORRA KORRA KORRA KORRA KORRA KORRA KORRA KORRA KORRA KORRA OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD

OH

MY

GOD

pls halp I'm stuck

- So this morning I totally dreamed that bb_shousetsu was a host club in addition to a BL mag. There was a decorative golden cage (JUST DECORATIVE OKAY) with a pretty boy space case (seriously, he was not even in Earth's orbit) lounging inside on cushions. There were dead-tree versions of the mag stacked up around the outside of the cage, and he was browsing through one of them with a confused and intensely focused expression.

I just. Don't even know, okay.


- KORRA!



omg. *_*


- So like, it's International Women's Day or something. Badass.

@tinytempest: For #internationalwomensday, rec some stories & novels by or about women that showcase how awesome women are. #femalefictionrec

Seeing as I could list approximately ELEVENTY BAJILLION titles that I think EVERYONE SHOULD READ NO REALLY GDI READ IT NOW, and that would be counterproductive since everyone would be all, tl;dr, I'm going to make a list of the very first 15 that pop into my head to avoid the crushing guilt of leaving out some eminently worthy book.

...Needless to say, my list will pretty much be SFF only. B/c I uh. Rarely read anything else?

In no particular order:

The Orphan's Tales, Catherynne Valente

Midnight Robber, Nalo Hopkinson

The Etched City, KJ Bishop

Steam Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, by various authors, ed. by JoSelle Vanderhooft

Leviathan series, Scott Westerfeld

Half World, Hiromi Goto

Redemption in Indigo, Karen Lord

Bayou (graphic novel series), Jeremy Love

Skip Beat (manga series), Yoshiki Nakamura

Ooku (manga series), Fumi Yoshinaga

The Shadow Speaker, Nnedi Okorafor

White is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi

The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner

The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead

Liar, Justine Larbalestier

The Alchemy of Stone, Ekaterina Sedia

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, NK Jemisin


...wait that was 17. And gdi I am already thinking of others. I didn't even include anything more than 15 years old! TOO MUCH AWESOME EVERYWHERE, CAN'T KEEP UP.

(Oh, and uh, it goes w/o saying some of the above has triggery content. Anyone wants warnings for something, feel free to ask, but be forewarned that I'm horrible at remembering specific instances of such things.)

MORE LADY RECS IN THE COMMENTS, GO!

So I am late to the party squeeing about this, because despite hoping up and down in my chair at the news I was too busy agonizing over Anthy's glasses to post about it. (I wish I was kidding.) But. You guys.



OMG YOU GUYS. FEMALE AVATAR. BAMF FEMALE AVATAR. Look at her back! That BAMF stance! Those muscles! Those hips! SWOON. Could she have been designed more for me, seriously. Seriously.

And check out this interview with Mike and Bryan.

Some choice excerpts (emphasis mine):

Michael DiMartino: [...] And we have so many great female fans out there, who really responded to Katara in the first series, we thought we have the fan base who are really going to enjoy seeing the Avatar be a female.

Konietzko: Mike and I, we love those characters too, and we’ve encountered countless fans who are male who really like those characters too. We just don’t subscribe to the conventional wisdom that you can’t have an action series led by a female character. It’s kinda nonsense to us.

Can I just... marry you guys? Please?

Also I swear I saw something somewhere where they were saying that Nickelodeon wanted them to tone down the awesome ladies, and they were like, no bitch, but maybe I dreamed that? Because I can't find it now.

If Tenzin is Aang’s son, who is his mother?

DiMartino: [To Konietzko] We can say that, right? [To Speakeasy] It’s Katara. It’s not a huge surprise.

looooool you guys are such trolls, ilu so much.

I also love how they flatly refused to talk about The Last Airbender movie. Generally you'd expect them to hype up a major feature film which could boost their own earnings, but no, they make it clear they don't want anything to do with that piece of shit. Haha.

So yeah, anyway, SO EXCITED YOU GUYS. BAMF LADYBENDER AVATAR. SO. EXCITED.

- In my head, Yuki Kajiura's Moonflower is totes the theme song to The Etched City. Just sayin'. It's all holy silver twinkling layered over this lush, green sound that's sort of dirty, like it's covered in a layer of grime. (...I realize my personal reaction to that song might be a little odd.) I can't even listen to it without thinking of the book, esp. the scene near the end with Gwynn in the rain.


- Am I the only person who can spend days on end writing and tweaking and writing and tweaking a story of less than 1000 words? Seriously. This is ridiculous.

(I have retooled the structure of this Umineko ficlet at least three times. Idek.)


- You know, I was gonna post about the shithead's (as you-know-who shall be referred to from now on) massacre of the Avatar series and link to all the hilarious reviews panning it (such as Roger Ebert's), but everyone's already done that, and I just don't have the motivation to deal with talking about it anymore.

So I will just quote @DrunkHulk on the subject: "DRUNK HULK JUST FIGURE OUT TWIST! M NIGHT SHYMALAN CAREER WAS DEAD WHOLE TIME!"


- On the subject of whitewashing (but not bad movies), Cindy Pon's Silver Phoenix is getting a new cover for its paperback release... and well, just look at it. The cover of the upcoming sequel will pretty much be a carbon copy, too. Sigh.

As I said to inkstone, regardless of whether those women are white or not, we are obviously meant to interpret them that way. And not only are they whitewashed, those covers are completely inappropriate to the material. Those clothes? What the fuck? That modern, teen paranormal romance look? The story is a fantasy adventure set in ancient China, people. I just. What.

I have seen some inexplicable covers, man, but those should come with some 4chan-esque "pic unrelated" label.


- Oh! And I just watched the new eps of Leverage! I spent the whole of 301 going, "Billy is AWESOME! Where did they FIND this guy?! ...And why does he remind me so much of Hardison???" Well uh. Apparently dude playing him was Edwin Hodge, Aldis Hodge's (dude that plays Hardison) brother. *g*

halcyonjazz neatly sums up everything that is wrong with the upcoming live-action Avatar movie:

The whitewashing in the upcoming live-action adaptation, The Last Airbender, is nothing but offensive. Period. It's pissing on everything Avatar was trying to change by introducing that oriental fantasy doesn't have to be subjected to orientalism for it to work for the American audience. The fact that they claimed they made the changes BECAUSE American audiences would better relate is offensive.

The fact that they can’t acknowledge that Aang is modeled to be Tibetan, not white, is offensive.

The fact that they made all three heroes white--including characters Sokka and Katara who were anything but--is offensive.

The fact that in response to this criticism, Jackson Rathbone (who is slated to play Sokka) said that all he needs to do to play the part is get a tan is offensive.

The fact that they made the Fire Nation--the ENEMY nation--as the lone nation to have dark-skinned people by making it a faux-India is offensive.

The fact the casting director said "If you're Korean, bring a kimono" for auditioning extras is offensive.

The fact that they’re progressively uprooting any Pacific-Asian influence that makes Avatar--going so far as to get rid of the Chinese writings--is offensive.

It is offensive. It is offensive. There is no defence for this.

It shows that Asians are still considered less than other ethnic minorities in Hollywood. It shows that Asians aren't allowed to play Asians in a show made FOR Asians in America. It shows that the only way for Asians to play the lead characters is to make movies outside of America.

That is offensive.

There is no difference between a white man wearing bootblack for Othello and a white man getting a tan to play an Inuit. I don't even know how someone can think there is, but there isn't. No amount of special effects, high-budgeted art-direction and cool kung-fu moves The Last Airbender will undoubtedly have will mask the fact it's racist bullshit and an abortion of the original show.

The strangest thing to me is that Hollywood is pulling their typical "if it ain't white, white people won't watch it" bullshit even when they have the proof right there in front of them that white people will, in fact, watch it. This movie is being made because Avatar was such a wildly successful cartoon - and it was a cartoon populated by Asian characters.

If you're not angry about this, you should be. It's irrelevant whether you're an Avatar fan or not; the implications and repercussions of this joke of a movie go far past the boundaries of fandom. If you somehow hadn't seen the links yet, you can get news and info from aang_aint_white and racebending.