“This fantasy story is about a princess who doesn’t like doing princess-y things! Also she rescues herself rather than waiting for a professional warrior with appropriate equipment!”

Someone get the crash cart. The extreme novelty of this unprecedented, audaciously original, never-before-seen premise actually gave me a heart arrhythmia, symptoms of shock, and a case of hiccups.

George Rape-Rape’s thing about “oh Tolkien could afford to spend decades working out Elvish” is fucking ironic now that it’s been 12 years since A Dance with Dragons. You could’ve just said “Tolkien was a linguist and I’m not” and nobody would hold it against you. But you had to pretend he had advantages over you, which he absolutely did not, other than talent and not being a piece of shit.

Tolkien didn’t sit around with his thumb up his ass for three US election cycles while people mailed razor blades to his editor and gave one-star reviews to other fantasy writers’ first installments just for not being the concluding installments. You did, George.

The person in A Song of Ice and Fire who mocks a lord for letting peasants into a castle, is his sister.

What fucking “otome game villainess”-ass level of childish fucking idiot is this bitch supposed to be, exactly, George? Because “yeah honey the castle has to be so big so all the farmers can hide here if we get attacked, they grow our food” is a thing every noblewoman would learn around the time she loses her first baby teeth.

See this would be an example of Martin being a misogynist: clearly any day this bungler gets her coif and her smallclothes on the right ends of herself on the first try, is a good day. And Martin thinks a feudal society could afford to have any of its noblewomen remain so unspotted by the stain of basic sense? Women run castle logistics, you moron, she would know where the fucking food comes from.

Reminder that fully a quarter of all Christians are at immanent risk of genocide, a higher percentage than any other group of significant size, but by all means keep pretending Christians are not the most marginalized religion on the planet. Violence against Christians is also more likely to involve sexual violence than almost all other forms of ideological or demographic-based violence.

Given the utterly insufferable douchebags posting about Lancer RPG on the hellsite, it doesn’t surprise me that the company that made it apparently boycotted an award because one of the previous year’s winners had content they wanted to morally censure. And I hate depictions of sexual violence in tabletop games, but people who don’t agree have a right to make games and have their work recognized.

You know, we used to have parents’ groups, politicians, and preachers trying to censor or destroy this hobby. Not fucking game designers themselves.

Hot take but most of shipping is just girls playing “house” with their brothers’ action figures. Way to disprove them stereotypes, ladies.

I’m this close to starting a side blog where I do nothing but mock people’s shit speculative biology where they demonstrate they are incapable of considering why things evolve. Think I’ll call it “When De Facto Young Earth Creationists Try Science Fiction” and it’ll involve the image of a hand holding a snake with an apple in its teeth (evoking both Genesis and snake handlers).

The two I just saw: no, aliens would not find sneezing strange. Fucking sea sponges sneeze, it’s for expelling foreign matter from the body. Please explain why alien biology would never have to do that. And no, even aliens evolved from prey animals would not be freaked out by you killing mosquitos. Do you think herbivores don’t kill insect pests?

“Slash shipping is just because most of the characters in this thing are male!”

Please explain how this non-argument is any different from “Well of course we incest-ship, this is a story where most of the characters are in the same family!”

You don’t have to ship at all. You ship because you are tiresomely puerile and can’t think of a way to talk about characters except in terms of love-affair gossip. And, since you are not a gay man, you ship slash because you’re a pervert with a fetish.

Understand, you have every right to be a pervert with a fetish, and to prefer puerile love-affair gossip to something more substantial and taxing. But nobody else made you do either. Nor are they obligated to pretend you are not a tiresome puerile pervert. Let your freak flag fly, by all means: but nobody else has to fucking salute it.

On some Ramadan in the last few years (it came to my attention in blog posts from 2022), AboutIslam.net—not exactly a fringe or extremist site—posted this image, originally here but then moved to here (after people noticed, presumably).

Muhammad Al-Fatih is Mehmed II Ottoman, the literal and metaphorical rapist of Constantinople. The pedophile who kept a stable of little boys—including Vlad the Impaler’s little brother Radu from the age of 8 at the oldest, very likely only 5.

Imagine celebrating Christmas by focusing on various acts of defensive violence by Christians against invading Turks or other Muslims, the way this mainstream Muslim site celebrates the unprovoked, aggressive, genocidal colonization—ubiquitously accompanied by massacre and mass-scale rape and enslavement—of Christian and pagan societies.

“We decided our live-action Avatar would also try to appeal to fans of Game of Thrones!”

Good news: both series already appeal to people who have a sexual fetish for characters in superheavy plot armor.

(But seriously why the fuck does everything still have to be Game of Thrones? Even Game of Thrones no longer appeals to fans of Game of Thrones!)

Can you believe some people want to copy China’s social credit system, when we could be copying their bans on depicting time travel and zombies?

Kinda hard to find reliable reviews of Starfield, since all the negative ones I’ve seen have been “I made up in my head what this game would be, even though this company doesn’t make that kind of game and never has, and now I’m going to punish them for not making the game I imagined.”

It reminds me of “I talked up Turkish delight to myself so much, after reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, that it was a disappointment when I actually had it.” Except these are not kids fresh off their first Narnia read-through, these are grown-ass adults with their own fucking Steam accounts.

Psst.

Unless someone specifies otherwise nobody in an anime or manga is white. Those are Japanese people. And if they have dark skin? Tanned Japanese people, again unless specified otherwise.

I know, very confusing, media produced on the other side of the world is mostly about people from the other side of the world, rather than the demographics you usually encounter on your side.

I keep seeing people thinking My Hero Academia characters are white, and, like…that one American lady is? Nobody else though. Oh and of course a girl named Usagiyama Rumi is clearly black.

I don’t have a problem with fanfic in principle, but fanfic as a real-world cultural phenomenon in the present day has had nothing but horrible effects on any aspect of how people create or engage with literature.

Writers have always started out doing what were essentially fanfics, and often literally were. But the specific way we write, and especially share and talk about, fanfic, pretty much only started with organized scifi fandom in the postwar era, especially Star Trek fans. That’s why “Mary Sue” was the protagonist of a parody of Star Trek fanfic.

A whole subculture dedicated to fanfic of a work, rather than dedicated to the work itself and producing fanfic along the way, produces a feedback loop. The fanfics such a subculture produces are ever more self-conscious and artificial about their trope usage, ever more self-indulgent and pander-y, and ever more prone to mistaking widely-accepted fanon for canon.

“I can’t believe they made fun of this movie I like, on this YouTube channel that’s about making fun of movies!”

Many such cases.

People who claim the phrase “illegal alien” is dehumanizing should be branded, on their faces, with “I still understand words the way a grade-school child would.”

Because, you moron, the base meaning of the word “alien”—which shares a root with “alias”—is the “foreigner” sense. It applies to nonhuman intelligences by analogy to the intraspecies human sense, not the other way around.