Punitive Punning For Terrible Tales

It’s just that I’m specifically talking about an issue I’ve seen in the SJM and Cassandra Clare “anti” communities where people talk a lot about how racism is bad and especially with the “anti sjm” community how these books are very much white feminist and written by a cishet white woman who doesn’t care much to expand her boundaries of inclusion and how much that work is harmful to poc. Then you try to find the books that they actually LIKE and think are good, and the only books they continually discuss in a positive light are like. Other YA books by white women. With seemingly no effort to include authors of color on their reading lists. Which in my opinion is pretty hypocritical if you’re going to spend so much time acting like you’re championing poc or whatever on the internet.

Obviously read whatever you want! Don’t curate your reading list entirely on getting The Most Diverse Authors Ever because a) you’re really not going to have a good time and b) you end up sorta tokenizing minorities. Of course, constantly push your boundaries and try to understand the stories of more and more people, especially marginalized people! Reading is so good at helping us truly understand and empathize with other people and learn so much more about the world. And that includes EVERYONE, not just minorities; it’s just that we have to work a little harder to seek out the stories of marginalized authors.

When I first started polysorscha, a little over a year ago, I did tend to brandish Bardugo as a “better” version of SJ/M. I’ve gotten my share of flack for that, so I’ve tried to move away from that tendency. I just made a new tag a few days ago called “lb criticism” as a place to put all my non-positive thoughts about her work because I get a lot of anons talking about their dislike of Mal, the flaws in the love triangle, the use of violence against women, etc. There are some still sitting in my inbox as I’m writing this. I don’t mention this as a way of saying “I criticize LB too” because in the grand scheme of things, yeah, I discuss SJ/M and her flaws way more than I do Bardugo, and I praise Bardugo way more than I praise SJ/M. Plus, the point of this post and the issues you’re bringing up are bigger than that. I guess I’m just confused about how liking Bardugo’s books better than SJ/M equates to “seemingly no effort to put POC on [our] reading lists” and ~acting~ like we’re championing POC.

So like, should we try our best to read more diverse books? Sure. Every time a diverse rec list comes around, I’m the first to share it, and it gets passed around anti circles within days. I don’t know how exactly that gets missed.

In addition, I’m entirely aware that it’s hard to read, and also that it’s often inaccessible and expensive! This is something I’ve talked about on my blog before as well. I, too, have a massive damn tbr and I don’t read fast enough to ever really reach the end of it haha, especially because I’m a pretty busy person in general.

I know that antis boost diverse lit! I have an anti sjm tag on both this blog and on my now pretty inactive snark sideblog, @punitivepunning​. I have participated in this community for a pretty damn long time, so I do know what happens around it.

As a person of color who both reads and writes fiction, I’m fully aware of how white traditional publishing is, and how skewed in favor of whiteness the bestselling charts are. I know how damn hard it is to find books by poc, and just how few people talk about even the mind-blowingly spectacular works by authors of color. It always takes extra work to seek out and subsequently boost authors of color, but I’d argue that it also does take a lot of work to generate content critiquing authors like SJM beyond just funny shitposts.

I tried to snark a book once (Tiger’s Curse by Colleen Houck, eventually I gave up and here’s my Goodreads review of it from a few months ago). I thought my comments about it to my friends both in group chats and IRL were pretty entertaining, but ultimately trying to snark it ended up taking quite a bit of effort even though complaining about it periodically in a less structured manner was fun and somewhat cathartic. Obviously, what feels like a lot of work for me will be effortlessly done by others, and vice versa. The thing is, though, snarking and this sort of social media setup for critiques will always be quite time-consuming.

The entire anti sjm community is oriented around reading and critiquing books. Of course, these books are more easily available in places like libraries because they’re popular despite their bad quality. And even though Bardugo’s work is better in terms of quality, she still has the benefit of whiteness propelling her to the bestseller charts and so she gets more attention, and then more library shelf space, which cycles back into more attention. Still, though, I think it’s important to constantly be reading new stuff and actively putting effort into being more inclusive in what we’re reading. Reading fiction critically is a skill just like any other, and we have to keep engaging with new stuff to keep ourselves sharp!

This, once again, isn’t an attack on you or anyone else who is actively putting effort into supporting authors of color. It’s a comment on how, even in a community that critiques racism and puts effort into recognizing and addressing it, whiteness still dominates in terms of what kinds of books get praise.

It’s just that I’m specifically talking about an issue I’ve seen in the SJM and Cassandra Clare “anti” communities where people talk a lot about how racism is bad and especially with the “anti sjm” community how these books are very much white feminist and written by a cishet white woman who doesn’t care much to expand her boundaries of inclusion and how much that work is harmful to poc. Then you try to find the books that they actually LIKE and think are good, and the only books they continually discuss in a positive light are like. Other YA books by white women. With seemingly no effort to include authors of color on their reading lists. Which in my opinion is pretty hypocritical if you’re going to spend so much time acting like you’re championing poc or whatever on the internet.

Obviously read whatever you want! Don’t curate your reading list entirely on getting The Most Diverse Authors Ever because a) you’re really not going to have a good time and b) you end up sorta tokenizing minorities. Of course, constantly push your boundaries and try to understand the stories of more and more people, especially marginalized people! Reading is so good at helping us truly understand and empathize with other people and learn so much more about the world. And that includes EVERYONE, not just minorities; it’s just that we have to work a little harder to seek out the stories of marginalized authors.

On August 28th, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. That day, nearly a quarter million people gathered on the national mall to demand an end to the discrimination, segregation, violence, and economic exclusion black people still faced across the United States.  None of it would have been possible without the march’s chief organizer – a man named Bayard Rustin.

Rustin grew up in a Quaker household, and began peacefully protesting racial segregation in high school. He remained committed to pacifism throughout his life, and was jailed in 1944 as a conscientious objector to World War II. During his two-year imprisonment, he protested the segregated facilities from within.

Wherever Rustin went, he organized and advocated, and was constantly attuned to the methods, groups, and people who could help further messages of equality. He joined the Communist Party when black American’s civil rights were one of its priorities, but soon became disillusioned by the party’s authoritarian leanings and left. In 1948, he traveled to India to learn the peaceful resistance strategies of the recently assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. He returned to the United States armed with strategies for peaceful protest, including civil disobedience.

He began to work with Martin Luther King Jr in 1955, and shared these ideas with him.  As King’s prominence increased, Rustin became his main advisor, as well as a key strategist in the broader civil rights movement. He brought his organizing expertise to the 1956 bus boycotts in Montgomery, Alabama—if fact, he had organized and participated in a transportation protest that helped inspire the boycotts almost a decade before.

His largest-scale organizing project came in 1963, when he led the planning for the national march on Washington. The possibility of riots that could injure marchers and undermine their message of peaceful protest was a huge concern. Rustin not only worked with the DC police and hospitals to prepare, but organized and trained a volunteer force of 2,000 security marshals. In spite of his deft management, some of the other organizers did not want Rustin to march in front with other leaders from the south because of his homosexuality.

Despite these slights, Rustin maintained his focus, and on the day of the march he delivered the marchers’ demands in a speech directed at President John F Kennedy. The march itself proceeded smoothly, without any violence. It has been credited with helping pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which outlawed discriminatory voting practices.

In spite of his decades of service Rustin’s positions on certain political issues were unpopular among his peers. Some thought he wasn’t critical enough of the Vietnam War, or that he was too eager to collaborate with the political establishment including the president and congress. Others were uncomfortable with his former communist affiliation. But ultimately, both his belief in collaboration with the government and his membership to the communist party had been driven by his desire to maximize tangible gains in liberties for black Americans, and to do so as quickly as possible.

Rustin was passed over for several influential roles in the 1960s and 70s, but he never stopped his activism. In the 1980s, he publicly came out as gay, and was instrumental in drawing attention to the AIDS crisis until his death in 1987. In 2013, fifty years after the March On Washington, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, praising Rustin’s “march towards true equality, no matter who we are or who we love.”

This month, TED-Ed is celebrating Black History Month, or National African American History Month, an annual celebration of achievements by black Americans and a time for recognizing the central role of African Americans in U.S. history.

From the TED-Ed Lesson An unsung hero of the civil rights movement - Christina Greer

also this video reviewing another one of her series is long but so so worth it

lastly, a quote from one of her new york times best selling novels:

She slid her hand between them, and when she closed her fingers around him, marveling at the velvet-wrapped steel, Rowan groaned again, pushing into her hand.

jordan…… the cunning, cool, gruff rebel leader……………… born outside the Dystopia… a Freedom Fighter…… with a heart of gold……………

Did everyone forget that edward and bella’s relationship met ALL FIFTEEN criteria set up by the national domestic violence hotline  of being in an abusive relationship???Or that bella allowed her SEVEN YEAR OLD DAUGHTER to be romantically with jacob who is the same age as bella just bc of “destiny”???

Did people forget how most of the “savage” and “wild” werewolves on were native american and all the vampires were white for no reason??Or literally ALL of the racist undertones??(check out our #twilight tag) Or how leah clearwater’s cousin is physically attacked by her ex boyfriend which left her  scarred permanently yet they ended up together coz it was their “destiny” ???Or how bella literally left her family,education and single father to raise a family with edward for the sake of “true love”??

Are we just gonna ignore the glorification of stalking and controlling boyfriend behavior and the “not like other girls” form of internalized misogyny??

I could go on and on but please stop acting like twilight was anything but a crappy YA paranormal novel which got popular for some weird reason.The memes and jokes are funny and people headcanoning the characters as gay/lesbian/bi etc is good and all but please please remember why twilight was so much criticized by many many feminists too and stop introducing it to other teens bc the REAL twilight is a shitty and problematic mess which sells a very horrible image of “true love”

You can check out FHPOC’s twilight tag where other mods have discussed about this in detail.

Here’s a site detailing the misinfo

Like, we all know that woman’s creativity can’t fill a thimble. And that’s it. It’s not that deep. I doubt she’s rubbing her hands together and looking for new lines to steal. And she’s far from the only one who’s riding that Game of Thrones bandwagon. 

And tbh the GRRM thing is just a example, I feel like you guys are really reaching at this point, in general. It’s all there in the manual, fam. Did you guys get bored of the shit that should actually be talked about and decide it’s time to nitpick stuff and find arbitrary similarities for your new hot takes? You don’t gotta do that. The woman is still publishing and making entirely new content for you to roast. Have you seen the KoA quotes? Snark gold.