Farewell, Darkover - part 1

So. Once upon a long past time, I was a kid of 10 years who was given a book that said on its cover it was rated "13+". Well, I was a wannabe-precocious kid who mistook reading complex Fantasy for having a personality, so I read the damn thing. It was one of the Darkover books Marion Zimmer Bradley had written. It was several years after MZB's death (not that I was aware of that; at that age, I didn't think much of the authors of books that I read), but several years before everyone learned what, by now, everyone knows about MZB and her husband. Back then, there was no way for me to know that this particular series and 'verse had been created by a pedophile rapist and abuse apologist.

The book caught my attention, and I went and asked for more. The friend who gave me the first soon borrowed me the entire series, one by one, and the same way others got engulfed by Hogwarts or Middle Earth when they were young, I got engulfed by Darkover. It was Fantasy, it was Sci-Fi; I loved it. And while I enjoyed them immensely, I didn't have much more critical reading comprehension than your average pre-teen, or else some alarm bells might have gone off earlier. Back then, they didn't. I didn't analyse what I read; I built myself into that world, made myself a home there. It was a world of magic, powerful women, difficult relationships, its very own kind of technology and society, a play on speculative history - it was my very first great love among books, just a little more obscure than the usual picks of most of my generation because the friend who introduced me to them was a generation older and as such had books from the 1970s just lying around. And by now, I've reached the point where I taste bile whenever I see MZB's name. Oh well, it is a farewell comparable to what many young trans people had with the Harry Potter books. And rejecting books that had such an impact on me hurts, which I'm sure is an experience a lot of kids had with some revered media at some point.

From 10 to maybe 13 or 14, I read everything Darkover had to offer. I spent hours upon hours talking about them with my friend, I drew my favorite characters, I drafted up fanfiction long before I knew the word "fanfiction". There were parts of the books, parts of the worldbuilding that, even then, were a little dark for my age. Discussions of sexuality, incest, abuse in families and relationships, systemic oppression... I wasn't ignorant of these themes, but I also can't say that I fully comprehended how Darkover presented them. If I had, I might have noped out way back when. I knew the books discussed pedophilia, incest, rape and controlling, abusive, authoritarian relationships in the framing of its fantasy society - but I would have claimed with all the same certainty that these things were being condemned in the books. In hindsight, and with a look at a critical review of MZB's way more famous bestseller, The Mists of Avalon, I can't help but think that a lot of Darkover was actually, much like MoA, some form of apologia.

After MZB's kids told the public in 2014 what the hell had been going on in their home, I feel like her books very quickly made their way into obscurity - which is right and well; the generations who grow up without them will probably be happier and healthier for it. But I haven't seen a lot of later reflection by those who have read MZB, and who were influenced by her writings. I suspect it's because I'm born too late to be in contact with the people who did; that isn't actually my generation, as the books reached me by way of someone in whose time they "belonged". Despite MZB being occasionally called a "female Tolkien", her books weren't the evergreen The Lord of the Rings is. They were very much 60s' and 70s' books. But there's also a darker side to this: A few people whose opinions I've read who insist, even now, that even The Mists of Avalon, the darkest and most vile of hers in terms of apologia and disgusting content, is and always has been a feminist masterpiece. Which it is not. It's not worthy of reverence, it's not worthy of praise or of being defended. Because it cannot be separated from MZB's crimes. The concept of Death of the Author fails where the author made her books all about her personal views - and those views are a nightmare.

MoA will be part of what I want to talk about here, but my primary experience was with Darkover, the oldest books of which predated Avalon by about 20 years. I genuinely think MZB got a lot worse and a lot more blunt about her bullshit in later years, and perhaps that's part of why I didn't get it. Perhaps Darkover was too subtle for dumbass lil' me. This is the first part of what'll be a sort of serial essay in which I look into my personal history with MZB's books, and how I came to terms with recognizing, rejecting and condemning wholeheartedly what had once been my fantasy refuge. It's also a bit about taking a stance - by now, I should be enough of an adult to say out loud that MZB was a piece of human garbage who should never have been celebrated as a feminist heroine writer (no, not even "for her time") and whose ideas should hold no place in highly praised literature. And that includes literature I used to love.

i am curious, as someone who’s only exposure to arthurania was reading jane yolen’s young merlin as a child, would you mind saying why hnoc is a bad adaptation? i’m super curious but no worries if not <3

this has been sitting in my inbox for months bc i kept telling myself i needed to write a full essay with proof from medieval lit to make myself feel smarter.  however, since i’ve recently lost all credibility bc i can’t articulate points to save my life, and since i’ve realized that i could answer this in a just a couple paragraphs, now seems like the right time to answer this ask. sorry for the wait.

under a cut bc length

also warnings for mentions of racism bc this is hnoc we're talking abt and sexual assault bc this is med lit we're also talking abt

the basic problems are pendragon polycule itself, the story beats of the album, the fridging and lack of characterization of morgan le fay, the clear influence of pop culture arthuriana, and whatever the fuck happened with gawain/e.

pendragon polycule is... just not a good take.  there’s a bit in the lancelot-grail abt arthur viewing lancelot like a son (and lancelot not giving a shit abt him).  also arthur knew his parents for years before lancelot was even born.  plus lancelot just Doesn’t care abt him and i can’t stress this part enough.  arthur repeatedly tries to have guinnevere killed, mostly in the lancelot-grail, and guinn didn’t really have any say in marrying him bc she was a teenager.  lancelot and guinnevere is a lot better but that’s not saying much.  guinn doesn’t exactly treat lancelot too well... like at all, BUT it’s not intrinsic to their relationship and is completely caused by medieval misogyny and i’m all in favor of modern retellings saying fuck that.  but also lancelot has multiple pseudo-canon boyfriends (this is med lit after all), and one pseudo-canon husband so like... there were better options.  (also lancelot’s husband is basically in a lavender marriage with guinnevere’s maybe girlfriend who most authors just eventually forget abt as the story progresses).

this next one is a problem with a lot of modern arthurian works bc the inclusion of elayne of astolat is too much to ask apparently.  the grail quest isn’t tied to the fall of camelot, it just happens to be one of the last grand adventures the knights of the round table have.  the event that traditionally sets off the fall is the death of the maiden of astolat/the lady of shalott/elayne of escolat/she has a lot of names, her story has a few variations but usually she either is cursed to stay in a tower and weave and only be able to see the outside world through a mirror positioned across from her window, until lancelot rides by and she rushes to see him out of the actual window and her mirror shatters, setting off her death, or she lives with her father and brothers and takes care of lancelot bc he was injured for a time and she gets to go on adventures to find him and she’s friends with gawaine and she dies bc lancelot rejects her and this version’s a lot more fun but also more happens which makes it harder to explain.  the way her story ends however, is that she dies after she makes arrangements for a glorious boat to drift from astolat to camelot carrying nothing but her dead body and a letter explaining that she died of love for lancelot du lac and the court mourns the death of such a beautiful and young maiden (her age varies a lot but i’ve always read her as a young teenager at most).  but the important thing is, camelot is doomed from the moment she washes up on its shore bc she’s an omen of the end and has symbolic meaning and all that, the maiden of astolat washes up on camelot’s shores, the court mourns the loss of a maiden in her prime and she marks the end of camelot’s prime as well, morgan le fay reappears after being presumed dead and warns arthur of guinnevere and lancelot’s affair, aggravaine and modred conspire to bring lancelot and guinnevere’s affair to light, they succeed but lancelot escapes, guinnevere is to be burnt at the stake and lancelot rescues her, killing aggravaine, gaheris and gareth (gawaine’s brothers) in the process, gawaine drags his uncle and camelot to war bc he was driven mad due to the loss of his brothers, lancelot accidentally kills gawaine, his best friend and maybe boyfriend (i have RECEIPTS), and gawaine forgives him on his detahbed while lancelot and guinn rejoin arthur, meanwhile modred, who practically had the throne handed to him, usurps and invites the saxons in, camlann happens, and camelot is destroyed.  no where in there is the grail quest.

morgan le fay is honestly the most questionable part of the album bc there’s not a single text where she dies.  like....  at least with eurydice in udad she died in the original... there’s no basis for morgan dying.  also she is NOT modred’s mother and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar, she interacts with him once in the vulgate bc she had three of her nephews over and that’s IT.  it’s a horrible take which originated in the mists of avalon by marion zimmer bradley who is an honest to god monster for reasons i don’t want to trigger tag this post for.  also she’s one of the most dynamic and thought-out characters in the entire canon and they just made her a watered down morgause (modred’s actual mother, morgan’s sister, canonical milf)... there was no reason for it to be her apart from the fact that she’s more well known......

pop culture arthuriana is,,, one of my least favorite things.  no, morgan wasn’t modred’s mother, no, morgause wasn’t abusive but her husband sure was implied to be, no, aggravaine didn’t kill his mother, that was gaheris, he loved his mother, you’re only saying that bc he has a reputation as the “evil” orkney, no, the once and future king is not a good descriptor for arthur, stop making me read it, no, morgause wasn’t the one to initiate the thing with arthur resulting in modred, no, lancelot and arthur weren’t friends, no, tristan wasn’t a self-centered asshole, tennyson is a fucking liar, no, galahad didn’t have sex or want to, he’s one of the first ever explicitly asexual characters out there, no, galahad’s conception was NOT consensual, lancelot was tricked, and no, elayne of astolat wasn’t galahad’s mother, she’s implied to be younger than him.  those are just the big glaring ones, but i swear it’s bc of arthuriana’s reputation as a mythology and the connotations belonging to that word (no one true canon (which is true but there are still things that just AREN’T canon, not completely written down, passed by oral tradition) that causes ppl to see mediocre modern texts and go “oh. well this is abt as close to the original as i’m going to get” and don’t bother to look into so much as malory (who i only name bc he’s one of the most well known medieval authors with the most commonly used storylines, don’t read malory kids, he’s a mediocre-at-best writer even by medieval standards).  the big perpetrators of modern arthurian tropes are the books the once and future king by th wh*te, who is a shitty person and lets it bleed into his writing (which isn’t like... nice to read or anything, seriously why do ppl love this book so much it doesn’t have redeeming qualities), and the mists of avalon by marion zimmer bradley (it’s poorly written, the story is a mess, and mzb is honestly a monster and one google search will tell you that), and unfortunately the writings of tennyson, which are mostly good but he clearly didn’t read the povest (a later text that’s also my favorite, known for significantly improving ppl’s opinions on tristan, isolde and co.) before deciding he hated both tristan and isolde and he has HORRIBLE takes on them.  high noon over camelot is SEEPED in pop culture arthuriana and i think it would have been so much better if the band had read so much as a SUMMARY of the events of le morte.  it’s evident in the song “the once and future king” bc it’s,,,, literally named after one of the worst books in existence.  it’s shown in the morgan le fay thing, and it’s shown in the pendragon polycule thing.  and hell, i think you can even explain away the lack of elayne of astolat with pop culture arthuriana, bc ppl have had bad takes on her ever since th wh*te combined her character with that of ela*ne of corbenic, and the band probably went “huh, let’s write lancelot’s abuser out of this” and they would’ve been right to do so if that’s who elayne of astolat was.

the final big issue is gawaine, the closest thing the genre has to a protagonist, he’s pretty much canon bi and, in some texts, arospec, he’s a dashing knight of great reknown and he derails every romance to steal hearts, commit murder, and make out with every knight and lady mentioned.  and in hnoc he’s... racist.  that’s it.  it’s,,, almost completely unfounded by the arthurian canon and shows a major misunderstanding of his motivations (like i said earlier, he wants to avenge his brothers bc there’s a reoccuring motif of how much the orkneys value family).  i say almost bc in one text it’s his motivations for killing palomydes but i’ve never heard it mentioned by name bc that’s just what it’s known for.  most arthuriana fans just look away from it except when critiquing hnoc but that one text is an outlier, shouldn’t be counted, and i highly doubt the mechs made hnoc gawain how he is bc they found this text.  it’s just a bad text.

hnoc has,,, quite a few more minor issues, such as villainized ladies of the lake (their ONLY crimes were sealing away merlin bc he tried to assault teenage nimue/ninniane (proto-nimue/vivianne from the vulgate), and that one time vivviane/ninniane kidnapped adopted baby lancelot), assigning brain to merlin (y’know,,, the predator who helped arrange the [redacted] of arthur’s mother and tried to assault a teenager,,,) although merlin is portrayed in a positive light throughout modern arthuriana so i don’t think they knew, giving a song to pellinore, who my perception of has been forever altered bc i was introduced to him through malory and the explanation of torre’s conception, which you can just look up “sir torre arthurian” to find out abt if you can’t just Guess, if they wanted a song abt the questing beast palomydes was Right There AND has been associated with the questing beast for longer, but once again i don’t think they knew.

also namedropping a bunch of knights in the fiction is... it Suggests a bigger world full of all these other stories but they just don’t work bc the world of hnoc wasn’t designed in a way where the appearance of half these characters would make sense.  like,, tristan is referenced as dying in the grail quest in the same sentence as bedevere (one of the characters who is known for almost always surviving), but tristan Isn’t one of the knights who dies on the grail quest, his possible deaths (ignoring the potentially happy ending of the povest for a second) are either being murdered by his uncle, king mark (bc mark married tristan’s gf to try and get tristan killed and also to spite him), bc he was driven into a fury bc of tristan and isolde’s affair, or he’s injured and only isolde (the best healer in the world) can save him so he sends for her and if the ship he sent for her is supposed to fly white sails if she’s there, or black sails if she’s not, and the ship flies white sails but his wife (also named isolde) says it’s black sails (the why depends but usually comes down to jealousy), and so he gives up bc he thinks all hope is lost and usually succumbs to his injuries, either way isolde dies of a broken heart over his body.  there’s no way for the tristan and isolde story to play out like it’s supposed to in the world of hnoc, just as there’s no way for any story with gawaine (and Oh Boy are there a lot of stories with gawaine) or pretty much anyone else, without severely altering the canon.

of course, there are still parts of hnoc i like a lot, most of the music i adore and i just like the idea of space cowboys and the secret good hnoc that lives in my head.  and it has one of my favorite characterizations of galahad, even though galahad hnoc is nothing like galahad arthuriana.  it’s not GOOD but i like it and it’s fun to turn my brain off too, and i’ll always value it as my introduction to arthuriana.

also there are modern arthurian tropes i do like such as characters being genre-savvy/knowing they’re fictional/knowing they’ve done this before (which hnoc does wonderfully!) and bedevere-as-the-storyteller (everyone say thank you lord tennyson).

WOW that was longer than expected, i feel very passionately abt this, when i was planning to write a fully sourced essay i meant to include a bit at the bottom with recommendations to get into better arthuriana and i think i’ll keep that in this post.

if you like hnoc for the arthurian music i’d like to suggest heather dale’s arthurian music to you, she does occasionally fall into the trap of modern arthuriana (some parts of lancelot and arthur being close, morgan as modred’s mother), sometimes she’s just wrong (galahad at lancelot’s trial, a lot of tristan and isolde), and her stuff is kinda straightwashed sometimes (sir gawain and the green knight, for example) but i’d be lying if it wasn’t catchy, and it’s not quite as bad as hnoc adaptation-wise.  culwch and olwen is pretty accurate (albeit abridged bc culwch and olwen has SO many tangents), as is lily maid (it’s abt elayne of astolat!).

if you liked hnoc for king arthur... in space! then may i recommend to you my own fanfic? it's not posted yet but the second i finish writing the first chapter i'm going to make a Big Deal out of it that'll be impossible to miss!

if you want to learn abt arthuriana through tumblr-osmosis like i did at first, i’d like to recommend the love of my life @acegalahads, first and foremost (it’s me on a sideblog i’m just obsessed with myself), and i can’t recommend my arthuriana mutuals over there, @/gringolet, @/merlinenthusiast, @/jcbookworm, @/elayneofshalott, and @/elaineofascolat (the elayne urls have been popular recently), also i know for a fact that my mutual-in-law, @/itonje makes great arthuriana posts that i look forwards to whenever i open the tag.

here are a few good reference posts, a quick guide to the characters, a guide to characters of color, and a much more comprehensive intro to arthuriana post with even more texts linked to it.

if you want to ease into med lit, i’d like to introduce you to pre-raphaelite poetry, alfred lord tennyson and william morris are my favorites, although tennyson can’t be trusted with tristan and isolde.  the poem the lady of shalott is basically a rite of passage for arthuriana fans, although when it comes to tennyson’s writings abt elayne of astolat, i prefer lancelot and elaine, which is part of his much larger story, idylls of the king.  for morris, don’t trust what he says abt aggravaine killing his mother, but my favorites of his are sir galahad, a christmas mystery, which sounds like a shitty disney sequel, and palomyde’s quest, which i blame for my love of palomydes (that and the one bit of the povest where he asks tristan to be his greatest enemy and that he wants nothing more, gay ppl,,,,).

if you want to read abt lancelot and his husband, there’s the lancelot-grail cycle, which i believe was taken off of archive dot org and i think i found it on @/tobeisexhausting’s blog but don’t quote me on that.

the povest, which was a religious experience for me and i can’t reccomend enough if you want to like tristan and isolde, is here, i don’t know who scanned it but i think i found it on @/lanzelet’s blog

the dutch texts are just good in general, here’s a link to their section of a(n unfinished) site for hosting various texts by my former mutual @/reynier (who’s no longer on tumblr).  i’d like to recommend lancelot and the white hart specifically bc it’s mainly just just gawaine being gay for lancelot.

if you want older works, here’s my scan of the history of the kings of britain, and here’s culwch and olwen and pa gur.

oh wow this is even longer than i thought it would be so i’m going to wrap this up by saying that i always love to talk abt arthuriana more than anything if you have any questions or just are curious!

Queer novel recs

[A repost from my Patreon.]

By request of the one person who is pledging at a Patreon tier that lets them make meta/review requests of me, some recommendations for queer novels. Fiction-wise, I read pretty much exclusively science fiction and fantasy, with the occasional excursus into historical fiction, so that's what you're getting.

SF/F these days is, happily, getting queerer and queerer. As a general recommendation, a good place to start is the lists of winners and nominees of the Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree Award), which, according to their website, "encourages the exploration and expansion of gender." There's also the Lambda Literary Awards, which are awarded to both fiction and non-fiction LGBT books across various categories, including genre (mystery, romance, SF/F & horror). It's obviously not going to be a guarantee that you'll like any particular one of these books, but at least it means that somebody did.

A whole lot of the Hugo award nominees and winners this year coincidentally happened to be queer fiction, especially in the longer categories. The Best Novel winner, Arkady Martine's The Memory of Empire, is a sprawling space opera starring a diplomat who incidentally (very incidentally) happens to have some Feelings for her cultural liaison, and it's a really good book, anyway. I actually voted for Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth, which is billed as "lesbian necromancers in space," and it is pretty much exactly that. It's a murder mystery, which you'd think would be less mysterious in a book where half the characters are necromancers, but this doesn't actually help them much. I thought it was delightful and I have the sequel sitting here on my Kindle waiting for me to read it. But had Gideon not stolen my heart, I would have voted for Kameron Hurley's The Light Brigade. Everything else I have read by Hurley -- well, okay, that's just the Bel-Dame Apocrypha series, actually -- has starred kickass queer people, and this one's no exception. It's military SF in the vein of Starship Troopers or The Forever War with a really well-done time travel plot, in which the twists just keep coming. The narrator's gender is intentionally obscured for about 95% of the novel, and for added fun, they're bisexual. (Charlie Jane Anders' The City in the Middle of the Night also had queer characters but it didn't really grab me.)

(I have to admit I bounced off a lot of the Hugo novella nominees this year, including most of the queer ones, but Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone's This Is How You Lose The Time War (lesbian time-travel agents) did win, although it wasn't really my thing, and Rivers Solomon's The Deep (lesbian mermaids) appears to have gone on to win this year's Lambda instead, although that one wasn't really my thing either. Becky Chambers's To Be Taught, If Fortunate also had some lesbians and I liked that a bit better, but none of those got my #1 vote.)

I have not read it yet and cannot vouch for it but my wife is reading N. K. Jemisin's new short story collection and she says they're very good and a lot of them are queer.

Okay. So. What about less recent queer SF/F, you ask?

I started reading SF/F in the mid-90s, and there wasn't a whole lot of queer SF/F out there in the mainstream SF market, so I imprinted pretty heavily on what there was that I could find, which was basically, at first, the blink-and-you'll-miss-it gay dragonriders of Anne McCaffrey's Pern series. Pern is what The Youth these days would probably call problematic in several ways, but there wasn't much else out there. I also then read Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series, which is basically iddy iddy whump fic with magic telepathic animals who love you, so I'm not saying it's a complete literary masterpiece but Confused Baby Lesbian Sineala sure spent a lot of time wondering why she was identifying so very hard with Vanyel from the Last Herald-Mage trilogy. (I also really enjoyed Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books, especially the ones about the Renunciates (the lesbian ones), Heritage of Hastur (the gay one), and The Forbidden Tower (the one where a telepathic orgy solves everyone's problems) but owing to the, uh, terrible things we all found out about MZB after she died, I don't think I can recommend them. Or read them ever again.

Other older queer SF/F that was beloved among my friend group: Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint and its sequels are about a duelist and his boyfriend and a lot of people liked this one, but I never liked it enough to keep up with all the sequels. The first few of Lynn Flewelling's Nightrunner books, however, punched me straight in the id; the protagonists are a pair of spies and thieves who are, more or less, this fantasy world's version of elves. There are a whole lot of grätúìtôūs dīåcrìtïcs and after the third book everything gets a little too horrific for me, but I really loved the first three.

But if I had to pick a top three list of authors who have written queer SF/F, this would be my list:

(1) Diane Duane. She is pretty much my favorite author ever, so I am biased here. I first discovered her work with her Star Trek tie-in novels (which, if you like Vulcans and Romulans, are amazing) and then her YA series Young Wizards, which is about teenagers who can do magic and use it to make the universe a better place and it's about ten thousand times more meaningful to me than Harry Potter ever was. But, anyway. She also has a fantasy series called The Tale of the Five, which is an everyone-is-bi-and-poly series started back before that kind of thing was even cool. Also there's a group marriage involving, like, six people, one of whom is a fire elemental. There are three books out in that series, she's still writing novellas set in it, and she swears that she's going to write the fourth and final book that we've been waiting about 25 years for.

(2) Melissa Scott. Everything I have ever read by Melissa Scott, either as a solo author or with her late partner Lisa Barnett, is queer as hell and has amazing worldbuilding. I first encountered her work when I randomly picked up Trouble and Her Friends (lesbian cyberpunk) at a used bookstore and ended up adoring it. Her other works include Shadow Man (set in a future where humanity has a whole lot more intersex people), The Kindly Ones (which has a protagonist whose gender is never specified), and The Armor of Light (alt-history involving Kit Marlowe and a demon). But my favorite series of hers is the Astreiant series, which is a Professionals AU with the serial numbers filed off, but they're filed off really well. It's a series of police procedural mysteries set in Fantasy Matriarchal Renaissance Netherlands, starring a m/m couple, and the fantasy gimmick here is that astrology is really real and really works. They're a lot of fun.

(3) Nicola Griffith. All of her books are about queer women. She has a few that are modern-day thrillers that I didn't so much care for, but I really love her SF. The first book of hers I read was Ammonite, about an anthropologist who gets sent to a planet of only women to try to figure out how they reproduce and ends up going native instead. I really adored it. I also remember really liking Slow River although I no longer remember the actual plot, except that the main character worked at a sewage facility. And it's historical fiction rather than SF, but she's probably most famous for Hild, a novel about Hilda of Whitby. I liked it a lot except for the part where it annoyed me that Griffith invented out of whole cloth the idea that women would have a special female companion and made up a name for it in Old English and everything, and most people who read the book probably believed it was a real thing. But, uh. I did really love Ammonite. I am so weak for planet-of-women books. (This is why I am so sad that I can't ever read the Renunciates of Darkover books again.)

That's about all I can think of right now. I hope some of those recs are, at the very least, new!

Y’all cried for years about Peggy Carter and Steve Roger’s Big Sad Tragedy Love Sadness and now y’all want to crucify Endgame for giving you the thing you absolutely wanted in 2011 and again January 2015 to March 2016.

I know this because I was there and remember you going on about it at great length. You’re all a bunch of... of... vacillating fussbudgets, that’s what you are.

You know what, it’s over and done with now so I’m just going to shout it from the rooftops:

BUCKY BARNES’ ENTIRE PERSONALITY EXISTS ONLY IN THE MIND OF FANDOM TUMBLR! 

Sebastian Stan’s performance was amiable, friendly, and as complex as a roux. It was supposed to be a base on which to build a more complex sauce. The films did not do this. Ever.

I saw First Avenger three times and forgot Bucky existed before the credits rolled every single time. The Winter Soldier is unquestionably one of the best Marvel films, and one of the best superhero films ever made—and watching it is always accompanied by a jarring mental gear-shift wherein I have to go ‘oh no, the Winter Soldier took off the mask! He’s... some generic stubbly white dude! Should I know this dude? Pretty sure I don’t know this dude. Was he in a CW show? Is that Robert Pattinson? I’ll bet Cap is a big Water for Elephants fan, no wonder he’s shocked to find himself in a fight with legendary cinematic heartthrob Robert Pattinson—who has really let his hair got to shit, wow...’

Tumblr created a much better Bucky Barnes than ever existed on screen, one with three dimensions, a sense of humour, identifiable character traits, fun banter, and scenes that were always worth re-blogging because of how delightful they were. Had that Bucky Barnes ever existed on screen I could at least partially understand Tumblr’s wounded sense of betrayal that their OTP didn’t make it to the endgame (that is, the OTP they didn’t bury in a shoebox in the backyard labeled AGENT KARTAR RIP in crayon three years ago.)

But he didn’t. Not ever. All the gifsets of smouldering good looks in the world couldn’t give ol’ Buckles MacBarnes screen presence, interiority, or meaningful development. It wasn’t the direction the studio wanted to go. Which, for Stan Stans, was a bummer and no mistake. But here’s the real kicker: fandom made that age-old mistake of projecting fandom onto text that could not support it and then got upset when their projection didn’t puncture the silver screen and wind-up in the actual movie.

Let me clear about something: when I say ‘the text couldn’t support it’ I don’t mean the MCU movies were incapable of better, more nuanced, actual interesting characterization for Barnes. I don’t think the MCU often tries for nuance or the like, but I know—once in a Guardians 2 or so—it at least makes the effort.

No, I mean they couldn’t. Literally.

You are all probably too young to remember Marion Zimmer Bradley and the Darkover series. Darkover was a hugely influential sci-fi fantasy novel line that had its biggest impact during the boom in the 80s and into the 90s. We don’t really talk about it anymore because, uh... uh... well, because the author was a monster and if you must know more and aren’t easily triggered you can go look it up yourself, but I warn you it’s probably best not to. But forget about why we stuffed Darkover down the pop culture memory hole—one of Darkover’s leading claims to influence was that MZB was an enormous supporter of fan fiction. She promoted her fans’ works, she read her fans’ works, she made agreements with her fans and used their ideas in her own books in exchange for front-page credit and some cash. All very amiable, they published some fan anthologies, it was a great relationship.

But then she and a fan had A Thing. MZB read a work of Darkover fanfiction that was similar to a Darkover book she was currently writing. She saw some ideas she liked and reached-out to the fan to see if they’d be willing to make the usual arrangement. Fan said ‘no, I’m going to publish my own book.’ MZB said ‘like hell you are that’s my intellectual property and anyways I’ve got my book to publish.’ Fan said ‘boy that sure seems a lot like the book I wrote, you’re trying to rip me off.”

Lawyers got involved, and though it never went to court, in the end MZB’s book was cancelled because the publisher refused to publish it because they didn’t want to even risk the idea of a lawsuit. MZB was furious that her book had to be discarded, and at that point basically forbid all fan fiction for ever.

It didn’t make front page news, but in the pretty small world of writing word got around. After that, writers don’t just not-read fan fiction—they can’t. They can’t dive into Tumblr or AO3 and read people’s funny scenes, their sprawling theory essays of What Is To Come, or their fan fiction. As much as creative teams try to please fans and go out of their way to please them (often to a fault), at the same time they go out of their way to remain Legally Ignorant of the vast majority of the entirety of fandom. Because the day Steven Universe shows a gem named Steveite and they look a lot like wetforgarnet76′s Steveite gem from 2016 the creative team has the ability to say “no, we never saw that drawing.” This is why creators on Tumblr don’t follow —or at least shouldn’t follow—their own tags. So it you want get mad that Buck Barnum wasn’t as well-served by the MCU as you would like, I get that. It’s true. But if you want to throw a shit-fit that Disney didn’t take 90 million Cap/Bucky slash fics on AO3 into account when crafting Endgame you need to step off. Because they can’t. They. Can’t. They. Can’t. You wanted a queerer MCU. Who didn’t? Are you mad that Disney didn’t see the queer potential in Cap/Bucky? I mean there wasn’t one—Chris Evans had more on-screen chemistry with the motorcycle he lifted while selling war bonds than he ever did with Sebastian ‘Smile Blankly, Boggle Vacantly’ Stan—but yeah, I get where you’re coming from. But don’t make the mistake of substituting fandon for canon and then cry foul because Marvel ignored all those intense moments of unrequited passion that existed only in AO3 tags. No, the creators didn’t take fanon into account. They couldn’t, and largely shouldn’t. That being said I have no doubt that the Russos have been asked about Buckmerica for years at convention panels and probably handled it with the usual stiff awkwardness of all those clueless writers who couldn’t grasp queer subtext if it was written in the night sky by the explosion of a million stars. The queer record of the MCU is abominable, and the entirety of Captain Marvel is basically a two-hour clam-jam by Nick Fury who refuses to leave Danvers and Rambeau alone long enough to give them the opportunity to take a reunion tour of the Bone Zone. The Russos could not, in any way, have been unaware of Cap/Bucky Being A Thing ( a thing that would have been like watching Chris Evans hump a mannequin but hey, that does it for some people). Dropping the ball is one thing, acting like they maliciously printed out a copy of your 40000-word opus The Star-Spankled Man In A Jam and tore each page in half because of their personal loathing of you is quite another. And—I can’t stress this enough—all you fussbudgets were emotionally invested in Peggy/Steve shipping once upon a like-three-years-ago-at-most stop acting like nobody wanted this. I swear this website has the self-reflective capacity of a damn goldfish sometimes.

Book meme

via @ameliasscanwells​

1) Diabetes: A very sweet book.

Worm Loves Worm, J.J. Austrian and Mike Curato. Picture book about the wedding of two agender worms. No matter how cute or cool I think a picture book is, I try not to give it a 5-star review before testing it on the preschoolers, and let me tell you: They loved the worm book.

2) Chickenpox: A book that you read once and will not read again.

Mists of Avalon. Mists of fucking Avalon. I am frankly astounded that I got through it as a child (pretty sure I skipped sections). Even before I Knew About MZB I had no plans to reread based on the sheer size of the thing. Which is also why I still keep a copy around, it’s very good for killing centipedes.

3) Influenza: A contagious book that spreads like a virus.

Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series. A couple years ago I bought the box set for @portmanteaurian​ for his birthday and with in a month or two he had read them, I had read them, my mom had read them, and @lufwoodemilius01 was partway through the series. I don’t know why tumblr won’t let me tag her.

4) The Cycle: A book that you read every month, every year, or very often.

I do reread a lot but not in any kind of organised manner. In the last couple years the author I find myself rereading/craving rereads of most often is Jane Yolen; I had been working my way back through the Pit Dragon Chronicles before I took a break from that to focus on #sapphicathon stuff.

5) Insomnia: A book that kept you up all night.

My most recent ‘read past my bedtime’ book was This Is Where It Ends, which I made the mistake of starting to read at around 10 at night. It’s not the best book in the world by any means, honestly it’s pretty emotionally manipulative and I definitely understand why a lot of people didn’t like it. But once it hooks you you have to keep going ‘til the end to see who survives.

6) Amnesia: A book that’s been forgotten and failed to leave an impression on your life.

Unpopular opinion time: Malinda Lo’s Huntress. I vaguely remember what happened in Ash but I have literally no idea what happened in Huntress.

7) Asthma: A book that took your breath away.

I first read Among Others on a camping trip and I wanted to tell the world about it and I couldn’t because I was in the forest and it was hell. A unique magic/faerie story that is also a love-letter to public libraries and SFF fandom. I should reread this next year actually.

8) Malnutrition: A book that lacked food for thought.

As part of my quest to find recs for every #sapphicathon square I read Collide-O-Scope, a mystery that took the detective character at least a hundred and fifty pages too long to solve. The book also included what it called ‘panic attacks’ but were, uh, narcolepsy; a ‘nine’ year old character who acted and talked like she was about six; and a string of spelling and grammar mistakes. Usually I wouldn’t harp on proofing errors but literally this book had drug runners with ‘bricks of heroine’. It was that bad.

9) Motion sickness: A book that took you on a journey through time and space.

The Kissing Booth Girl And Other Stories is a short story collection; various genres of speculative fiction, some erotic, most some flavour of queer. Lot of ‘human character falls in love with/has sex with non-human character’ stuff. Lot of darkness, but a lot of hope as well. This is pretty criminally under-read; it has less than FORTY ratings on goodreads.

Farewell, Darkover - part 9

The next section was really grating to read, as that's not only where MZB's arrogance really goes off the charts; it's also where she proves to be a real twat about the topics she's been praised for writing about. Buckle in for all the glory of her representation of strong feminist characters, homosexuals, and intersex people! ...ow.

First, there's more about individual Darkover books and a dispute she had with German translators. She casually name-drops her second husband who was just such an important partner to her - excuse me, there's the taste of bile again. Don't tell me how loving and supportive your fucking NAMBLA husband was. Onward to hard times in the magazine editing business... bitch?

"if this was the level of the competition, why was I worrying?"

Could you be any snootier?

"I resolved to try a female protagonist."

Woooow, now that's a novelty. I hate people who think they have invented fire or something. And it gets better:

"[...] Allira, the eldest, raped, and summarily married off to a bandit chief. Allira turned out to be a washout as a heroine. Try as I might to infuse her with heroic spirit, all she did was cry"

For one: That's your character. If you failed to make her a heroine you found compelling, that's really on you. And then. I find it rich enough from someone who was afaik a rape victim herself, but a rapist? Calling a traumatized rape victim who curls up to cry (a character MZB herself created, to boot) a whiny, "jelly-spined" washout? That's, uh. Sure something. Reminds me a lot of how MZB, who had her own abused children around, wrote Morgaine in MoA having very clear symptoms of PTSD and depression after being violated - and constantly waved her obvious poor emotional well-being off as not a big deal and something she really should just get over. ...Turn up the hellfire, guys.

Next is about meeting some of her fans; she refers to one "young girl" whom she still knows by name, creeping me out thoroughly. As she goes on about the ghost winds of Darkover, the creeps get worse; this worldbuilding element was one of her favorite excuses for "everyone falls into a frenzied orgy drugged beyond consent". Onward.

"Most of my readers give me credit for being far more profound than I am. I'm not profound; I simply let the reader figure out what is terrifying to him and visualize that in the blank spaces I leave in my book."

Not only are you not profound; this also testifies to your lack of creativity. "Let the audience fill in the blanks!" - how about you don't leave blanks? Hell, the entire Avalonian religion in MoA is nothing but a big blank. She sneers, in her brilliance, at the final scene of The Dunwich Horror, as describing Wilbur Whately's inhuman features destroyed the horror of it all because...

"I am not horrified, personally, by physiological abnormalities."

ExcusoWHAT? How does that fit with your rampant ableism?? Show me one single physically disabled or disfigured character of MZB's that isn't portrayed in a negative / contemptuous light! Next she dumps on the Lord of the Rings movie of her time and Japanese kaiju horror for the same reasons. I am supremely ignorant in these fields, although I heard that at least the original Godzilla did indeed play with the concept of the unseen horror because he was an embodiment of the terror of nuclear weapons, so shows Bradley's level of knowing-what-the-fuck-she's-talking-about.

"I felt that I hadn't read anything in science fiction that really excited and delighted me, not for ages; not since Stranger in a Strange Land."

Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. Stranger in a Strange Land is the main reason (albeit not the only one) why I have such a low opinion of Heinlein's writing. There's an Übermensch race superseding humanity, no concept of consent, all the homophobia, sexism and racism, Heinlein going on a long tract about the benefits of cannibalism - it's skeevy, is what it is. Call me a tasteless boor for it all you want.

After telling us "that chapter in my life was ended" (meaning writing Darkover), she... keeps blathering on for a while, about other books. Isn't this titled "A Darkover Retrospective"? Finally: chieri, and her inspirations for those.

"Nowhere in Tolkien does it speak of the elves as ambiguously sexed; I don't know where I picked up that idea, perhaps from one of the Theodore Sturgeon stories in which he explored the notion of legendary people who could appear as men to a woman, or as women to a man."

I played with that, too, regarding a Faerie creature - only they don't appear necessarily as the opposite gender of whom they encounter, but as the sexually preferred gender of said person. Meaning, yeah, my Fae is still a hot dude for my gay protagonist (and looks very similar to his ex, too, because Fae are assholes). But figures that she'd think of a hetero norm only. This is our gay literature pioneer?

Anyway, chieri are basically her Darkovan Fae, and with MoA establishing MZB's self-insert being a direct descendant of Faeries, I can only imagine that her Fae and chieri are the sort of naturally Superior(TM) Übermensch she'd love to imagine herself to be. Well, as I said, Fae are assholes, so if the shoe fits. No, I shall not interpret any of her writings in good faith.

"I decided that the sexual element in such a story [about aliens capable of switching sexes] would make it difficult to handle at all, with the kind of taboos operating in science fiction at the time."

I know which kind of societal taboos around sexuality you would have liked to have loosened. Get away from my queer community and my Sci-Fi genre, you sick fuck. Couple paragraphs later, she even mentions how her husband, the other sick fuck, encouraged her to write about the chieri, specifically the explicit sex scene in The World Wreckers. Pervy enough for his tastes, was it? Again, feels more like fetish service than decent intersex rep. Specifically, fetish service to herself. And I wish she would stop telling me about her harmonious marriage and happy home life. It makes me retch. She promised her editor that there would be "no four-letter vulgarisms" in the chieri sex scene, and that just makes me laugh. Child molestation all over the place, but she's too well-mannered to write "cock"? Well, suck it, Bradley. No, wait, she doesn't know what oral sex is. I shall write my next smut very spitefully.

"[Prior to Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, h]omosexuality had always been a major taboo in science fiction."

Uhm. Has it? Sci-Fi up to a more recent time tended to breeze over sexual themes in general. Well, she mentions Sturgeon, but she doesn't mention Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Poul Anderson, Brian Aldiss, David Gerrold. Anyway, I'm not sure why this applies to the Keral-David sex scene at all, because that only took place after Keral, the chieri, was very graphically described as having a female body to the last detail, plus emphasis on his capabilty to get pregnant. Now, I know that there are men in the world to whom this applies. But I doubt that Bradley with her gender essentialism and Sacred Biological Maternity fetish was thinking of trans people when writing the chieri, so how does this pass for homosexuality?

"because I was the first person to attack this problem straight on, I became known as highly sympathetic; in fact, for a time, I managed to become something like science fiction's token homosexual! I had no particular aversion for this position; but I am sure that it encouraged many other writers to stop being afraid of the subject"

1st, no, you were not the first. 2nd, what with you self-identifying as a lesbian, your propensity to represent heterosexual relationships as naturally superior and the only sacred-by-universe-and-nature outcome in your writings either speaks of a severe self-loathing or of your time and age not knowing the term bisexuality. 3rd, yes, unfortunately, you were an inspiration to many. I wonder how many of them are seething at the memory as I am today. I wonder how many of them are rotating in their graves.

She did not, in fact, quit writing Darkover after that. Guess the ego-stroking was too nice to forfeit. Then it's on about how, ha-ha, her editor was wrong about the ideas he turned down, because they sold well later on, so there! ...Stephenie Meyer, is that you? More stories on individual books, her lofty stance on how every woman in Darkover Landfall absolutely had to spread her legs for the procreation of humanity, free will be damned, "Biology is Destiny" and how she thinks feminists can shove it if they don't agree with this (I hate her). Then she defends fucking Heritage of Hastur. And guess what:

"no one was upset by the picture of male homosexuals in Heritage, with a rather curious exception. I received a few nasty letters from confessed homosexuals in the Gay Activist movement, accusing me of prejudice because I, professing to be sympathetic toward homosexuality, had perpetrated the stereotype of the homosexual as brutal sadist, preying on young boys."

Yup. There were people back then who read Dyan Ardais for the gross predator that he was. And she found it curious and nasty that gay men wouldn't be happy about that rep. Here's a hint, Bradley: HOMOSEXUALITY. IS NOT. PEDOPHILIA! GAY MEN. AREN'T. LIKE. WALTER BREEN! Your husband was a freaking pervert, but the apologia isn't anything new; we know you joined right in there.

"I regard Dyan Ardais, not as evil, but as unhappy, a man desperately at the mercy of his own misery and his own obsessions; and Dyan's tragedy, I have always felt, was that he did not come to know Regis well until he had destroyed himself irrevocably in the younger man's eyes."

. . .

Yeah, no. NO. Do not go there. Do not tell me about what a tragic character fucking Dyan Ardais is and how sad I should feel that he had fallen from grace in the eyes of his victims, you utter piece of shit. All I hear is you defending your husband and yourself. I hope either of you died painfully.

I have to set a cut again. And yell at a wall for a while. Seeya.

Farewell, Darkover - part 7

There's a real piece of sugar I found in the process of writing my Darkover reminiscences: MZB's own Darkover reminiscences, a retrospective she had penned down in 1980. Oh, darling, do tell. From the mouth of the beast herself. Time to get nasty.

First of all: When she writes in her own voice, she sounds mind-bogglingly similar to Stephenie Meyer, of all people. I cackled. MZB was a fucking Suethor. The same self-importance, false modesty, immaturity, the same condescension toward "cruel editors", the endless "oh, look, how special I am, how educated I am, how many important people I know!" It would be cute if I didn't wanna stomp on her face. Admittedly, it feels good to be able to talk about her like that - what's she gonna do, climb out of her misty sepulcher of oblivion and haunt me? It's a relief that she isn't someone I would have held in high regard, even without knowledge of her crimes. But let's look at some tidbits of this.

"I have referred to the Darkover books as "the series that just growed"."

So, I found zero hints at all that "growed" was ever the correct past tense for to grow. It's always been grew. Am I petty? You bet I am.

"A good part of the credit for encouraging the Darkover series to continue must go to Donald A. Wollheim"

I feel bad for the poor man, having his name attached to yours. I have great respect for Wollheim, and if I thought the Darkover books were way better written than the Avalon series, I have zero compunctions to credit your editor for it.

"with a sick husband and two very small children to support"

I wouldn't exactly call your husband sick. That implies an absence of responsibility, and I think he should very much be held responsible for his actions- oh, you were talking physical health. Carry on. And quit acting like the caring, loving mother; the sheer mention made me grab for a knife. I read what Moira wrote. I can't stand that hateful, homophobic fury, but I have a pretty good inkling who made her that way.

"when I protested, rather diffidently"

Aw, she wants us to think she has a shred of humility. Meanwhile, I think I should go poop on her grave.

She then goes on to tell us how she doesn't actually think her books in terms of series and prefers self-contained stories and thus didn't write Darkover in a way that one book had to rely on its predecessor to be understood (I hope she has to watch the entire MCU in hell ad nauseam), which is fine; just her overblown style of talking about herself is annoying to read. She also shoves in a quote about oatmeal that she doesn't bother to give credit for and I don't recognize; I suspect it's to make her look smart and to make those look dumb who are not in the know. Well, shove it.

Next, she gets really patronizing to fans who'd love them some consistency. Because she can't be arsed.

"Admittedly the inconsistencies are many. Some are minor, and they occurred simply because I have a very faulty memory with a self-correcting mechanism."

...

Bitch. I started to reconstruct the Comyn family trees and a timeline for Darkovan history at age 11. Surely you could have helped your faulty memory by writing things down??

More about how she doesn't like writing series, how she hates cliffhangers... my God, Bradley, this is a retrospective! You don't need to pad your word count here, too! Then a long story about how she had to give up on becoming a singer (which puts her hang-ups in the Darkover books about female singers constantly in peril of being considered better prostitutes in a very strange context; any complexes there, by chance? Gonna go with yes, as there are numerous female characters in her books that put everyone to awe with their singing in ways that more conventionally beautiful women couldn't with their looks), and how she always wrote, from childhood onward. Yeah, so did I. So did many. It's not that unusual. Almost everyone I know on tumblr wrote from childhood on.

"Well, in my middle teens, [...] I started to write fantasy novels with a framework of science fiction."

Heh. I also liked to call what I wrote in my teen years "novels". I assume it's nice when you get published and can feel verified in your blown-up presumptions.

"[Around age eleven, I did] an ambitious project called Ten Tales of the Ancients, which had a short story about a girl in ancient Rome, and one in ancient Greece, and one from an Arabian-nights kind of world, and then I ran out of ancient civilizations and gave up."

...Is that a shoutout to the American education system or what? Not sure if I would have gotten to ten civilizations at that age, but come on! Mayans? Ancient Egypt? Ancient China? Mesopotamia? I feel like her interest in ancient cultures may have been limited. Research is haaaaard, you guys!

Then a lot about the Fantasy and Sci-Fi writers that influenced her. I don't recognize most of the names, might look into those at some later point. The development of the whole Darkover idea via cannibalizing her older stories, that's fairly standard.

"During this time I also managed to read a few books on writing and began to get some foggy notions of what a plot was [...] I was beginning to learn how to plot, and how to tell a story"

By the time she wrote The Mists of Avalon, she had already forgotten it again.

...and I'm setting a cut here. My God, she's being wordy. Next up: her introduction to writing smut!

Farewell, Darkover - part 4

I definitely had a much better opinion of her books then than I now think they deserve. There is knowing of MZB's crimes and how it makes her careless handling of consent and normalization of abuse sickeningly close to real life, yes, but there's also stuff that, in hindsight, makes me wonder how poor my reading comprehension actually was.

The racism, for one - racism was said to be an unknown concept on Darkover... because everyone there was blindingly white, to the point that no one even had dark eyes! When Terrans came to Darkover and some of them had brown eyes, the Darkovans described them as having animal eyes, and were surprised that said people could talk at all. Nah, that doesn't sound wrong, does it? They asked people with darker skin if they had gotten that way through illness. I remember it was set up as a curious innocence on part of the Darkovans - but MZB wrote this. She must have known how it sounded. No innocence on her part. It didn't crop up much, granted, as her protagonists in general didn't get darker than pantone 727. Oh, wait, I was wrong! Ysaye was dark-skinned! What happened to her again? Yeah, her asexuality was overwritten by a psychoactive drug so she wound up having sex with someone equally drugged, she was pregnant afterwards and couldn't even remember how she got that way, an abortion was performed on her against her will, and then she painfully burned to death because of the psychic power reflexes of someone telepathically stuck in her head at that time. Lovely, especially the bodily autonomy. Such feminism.

Additional to that, there was a specific kind of chauvinism that MZB introduced by way of her "special" groups - and that's something her narrative never attempted to excuse. It was presented as a plain fact that those with psychic gifts (on Darkover those with laran, in MoA those with the Sight) were superior to "normal" humans and had a claim to nobility by virtue of their abilities. Not even abilities they worked for, no; something they were born with. I remember one specific line from a Darkover book in which someone thought that, for him, having sex with a non-telepathic person would be like coupling with an animal. Yeah... how do I put that? That is vile. Putting other human beings down to the level of animals? I realize that telepathy would make a difference in how one perceives the people around oneself, but defending this as one's right to superiority? On the basis of an innate trait? Social Darwinism much? And remember that this kind of elitism was something MZB only ever presented as the natural order for her magic societies.

The acclaimed feminism is something else that isn't really there when you look at the books up close. A whole part of Darkovan society considered women as property to be sold, which no one really thought was an injustice to fight against. Darkovan women were mostly at their father's and husband's mercy. Similar to what The Mists of Avalon did, there was made a theoretical point of how virginity wasn't really that valued - except in practice, there was still a lot of slut-shaming over a damaged hymen (learn some anatomy, geez) and over how a pregnant girl was dishonored and couldn't marry well anymore, so there goes that.

For MZB's ideas on women having to serve as brood mares? I'll let her speak for herself: "Darkover Landfall stirred up a furor because some outraged feminists objected to the stand I took in the book, that the survival of the human race on Darkover could, and should, be allowed to supersede the personal convenience of any single woman in the group. [...] to those who refuse to accept the tenet that "Biology is Destiny", I have begun to ask them to show me a vegetarian lion or tiger before they debate the issue further." - quoted from here. TERFs must love her. But sure, have all the women in your colony raped into a dozen of pregnancies - with no say even to whose children they have to bear and birth. Why would humans have a claim to spread there in the first place? They weren't native to the world. I gotta say, I only found this particular quote in my most recent look at the subject. When I read Darkover Landfall, I was sure the whole point of it was that the beginnings of Darkovan society were rooted in a terrible crime against half of the population. I had no idea that MZB was defending this viewpoint extra-diegetically.

And then the more basic stuff. How every beautiful woman who chose a place in society away from sex and marriage was deemed a "waste", how the worth of a woman was, even thousands of years after said first colonization, measured by her fertility, to the point that it was considered subversive that the Renunciates vowed to only bear children whenever the fuck they want, how most marriages were arranged without consent, how women treated each other as competition to be bitched out instead of allies. There's nothing particularly progressive about this. Women's rights, in MZB's books, are only something for her "specials", for the few chosen individuals who are born with the right genes and / or stand in the center of the narrative. Everyone else can go hang.

Farewell, Darkover - part 2

The entire subject might bring up the question: Why make such a fuss about it? MZB was a piece of shit; put a checkmark behind that and move on. But, to get back to the JKR issue again, it's not that easy with books one grew up with. In many cases the Harry Potter books, in my case the Darkover books - they left an impression and they were there when we shaped our thinking, when our personalities were still in growth. There's a post somewhere out there that says it's okay to be grieving and / or angry that JKR turned out to be a piece of shit, because you don't leave that behind you just like that. Coping is a process, and in case of Darkover, it's one I have put up.

At some point in my teen years, I had moved on from Darkover. It didn't become irrelevant to me, but I discovered new things that caught my fancy, and I started to move in fandom spaces where I could connect to others who liked the same stuff, something that had never been possible regarding Darkover on behalf of that being rather specialized and generationally dated literature. The friendship that had brought me to the book series had ended, and I put my old drawings and drafts of family trees in a map, sorted my fanfic snippets into a file on my computer, and gave Darkover that special place in my heart and my dreams that we reserve for our first really-important-to-us literature or movie, or game, or whatever.

Sometimes, I still dreamed myself there. On Darkover, people with my hair color were considered special, as it more often than not genetically coincided with laran, the psychic gifts that were a core element of the books. Like every whiny teen who deemed themself a misunderstood outsider, I liked to imagine myself as someone grand and respected, more of a mage than a human, liked to think that, in that society, of course I would be one of the "special" ones. It was much later that I learned to recognize the inherent elitism in that thought process, that I began to realize how dangerous it was to associate physical attributes with an innate claim to superiority... Considering MZB seemed to think of herself that she should just be allowed to do anything, I'm not sure she ever thought of this notion as dangerous.

One time, I was gifted one of the anthology books she had published, and my ties to Darkover were still tight enough that I was over the moon in light of the idea that there were others who loved the 'verse so much that they wrote stories for it. MZB's editor's comment on that book was the first time that I read her words unfiltered, not her stories, just her direct input, and they gave me pause. She didn't appear like the nicest person. I'd never cared much for authors when it was the stories I wanted, but there was MZB rather unambiguously talking down to a lot of people who had sent in their stories for the anthology, saying that she tossed several away without so much as a glance. Of course, there was probably a reason for that, I told myself - she was a professional writer for eternities; certainly, she knew when what she had before her was worthless. Hell, I was a teen stumbling through my first self-criticism in writing; my stuff was probably worthless.

I shrugged it off, I read and enjoyed the stories, I put the book up on my shelf. But in hindsight? It was the first time that I thought of someone whose work I really loved as arrogant, as someone whom I probably would not have enjoyed meeting personally. Although I cannot know that; considering how long she kept her crimes off the radar of people who admired her, there's a chance she was good at pretending to be charming and nice. But I remember that I read how she treated her fans, and my impulse was to belittle myself and my writings instead of taking away an encouragement from it. Which. A person who causes others to think themselves lesser would at least be someone with an uncomfortable ego. Several more years passed before I learned what would give my notion of MZB the actual swan dive.

Midnight! Not a sound from the pavement...~

Well, actually, there is sound, because it's raining again. And honestly, I'm not gonna complain about it. I know, it's not ideal, climate-wise, but hot, dry summers just kill me, so let me have this for now. Is it time already for the Elbe to flood again? I suppose other places need the rain more direly, but after the fires down in Sächsische Schweiz last summer, I'm happy if the forest is too wet to burn this year.

And I love listening to the rain. Even now that I'm itchy and insomniac, it's calming. Doesn't keep my thoughts from hopping around - like, an hour ago I was crying about a season finale of a show I'm watching - but I guess I'll just read @farnwedel snarking about Avalon until I fall asleep. I basically wanna thank them for about one to two dry, stupid jokes in each chapter recap; without that, the whole "reflecting on MZB and Darkover" business that I started would probably be way too dreary. Hell, even now, I've come to mostly spite my way through putting my memories in order. These days, it's difficult to get my brain to be quiet. C'mon, brain, let's go to sleep! Let's not write a tumblr friend an incredulous question about their tags; they hopefully have a nice brain and are asleep now.

Dammit, I still need to buy my train tickets for October. Today would've been a good chance for that, but then, we were tired today and really wanted to go home. My back hurts, and has been for three days; I feel like an old woman. I should be in a better mood, should at least get to feel a little accomplished - finally tackling the remains of uni bureaucracy, and my internship is finished two weeks from now. But the thoughts keep circling; I'm having restless dreams again, wandering through strange houses and meeting people, friends from years ago, family... Last time I dreamed, my grandma was there. She died five years ago, or four? I think it was the summer before Corona. She never made such a fuss or so many words about shit as I do. Oof, why does my brain always take so long to sort itself out? Always thinking twenty things at once.

Like, a couple days ago? I was at my niece's birthday party. Played a while with my nephew, and when I told him I'd go home soon and he got a little smug about not letting me leave, I told him there was nothing he could threaten me with that would impress me. Little brat shot me with a crossbow. Okay, that's not fair; it was a small, wooden renfair crossbow with very light and blunt bolts, but he shot that thing at my face from like three inches away? He's ten; he shouldn't be such a brat, especially not when I'm wearing goddamn glasses! Anyway, I didn't say a word; I just hopped up, grabbed my stuff, and ran out, and even though I'm still sure he was way out of line, I can't stop thinking about how that was not a neuronormative thing to do. Ugh. I wasn't the one who was misbehaving, so why won't you cut it out, brain? Is it because I didn't say goodbye to the others? I had a fright-and-flight reaction, is all. But nah, now, way after the fact, I can think it over. Ten or a hundred times. I wanna sleep...