The Luminous Beam

If you get confused at all with reading order after Kings, I have a reccommended order list you can reference.

I’m chewing over the notion that mothers and children in the story can give the squick. Maybe I don’t quite get it because ElfQuest was a formative story for me starting at age 12.

There was certainly a lot of fantasy fiction I read early on that centers the girl empowerment story, where she hates embroidery and/or kitchen work (depending on her social class) and takes up the sword to go on a quest. Maybe she falls in love (with a boy of course) but definitely doesn’t have kids, because that would nullify her claim to power and freedom. (Also she’s probably like 16 max).

ElfQuest does it different. It’s about family from the start, because what are we fighting for if not our family’s survival? “Family” as it turns out means all elves, no matter how strange their ways are. Certain individuals don’t buy into this, they are collectively referred to as “the loveless ones.”

One of the biggest themes is that love is the opposite of control. You can’t claim to love someone and also make their choices for them.

Maybe this is why fantasy often shies away from motherhood and young children as central characters - because we’re acculturated to have a lot of our choices taken away when we’re in those life stages.

The post about misogyny I’m referring to gives examples of what a fantasy world without misogyny might look like, and it’s more than getting to fight and bleed. At the most fundamental level, it means everyone shares all kinds of work, including raising children.

ElfQuest addresses this problem right away, with the ordeal of Recognition. Leetah is terrified of not being in charge of her own choices. It’s not so much that having kids would be terrible, elf children are rare and precious. It’s that she doesn’t know who she would be once motherhood is a huge part of her life.

I have to believe that a lot of this fear must come from being in a relationship with Rayek (one of the most controlling characters in the whole saga). Because this isn’t really what the elves in general are like. It takes some motherly advice from Savah to point out that no one is going to make her be any particular kind of mother. There may be an ancestral biological magic imperative at play, yet she’s still in charge of what happens next.

This post is getting long, but essentially one of the things that makes ElfQuest so fascinating is that it’s an empowerment fantasy that doesn’t only focus on the young adventurer trope (it’s there, just not always).

All kinds of ages and stages are included, contributing in their unique ways, desiring different kinds of lives, and antagonizing each other in ways that underline the point. Ultimately showing that cooperation, growth and change are painful, but necessary for anyone to both live free and survive together.

Specifically: a mother who wanted a doll and got a person, and therefore I spent a very unhappy childhood being Intensely Angry about all kinds of things and hating the whole business of being a kid at all. When your mother is a traumatized 7-year old in an adult body, you end up not wanting to do much caretaking as an adult because damn was that draining. The idea of being trapped into being a mother myself? Existential hell for me—now that I'm older, I've got a lot more distance. Distance helps.

Nature-wise, I also don't seem to have the gene that makes me find human babies appealing. I'd rather look at earwigs. And you know how lots of people love the smell of clean baby? I can't stand it. *shrug*

I care deeply about the rights of children, and it's easy to empathize in the abstract with them, but I just don't like being around them much. Maybe if I had an elf's lifespan I'd eventually grow to tolerate them better and have kids of my own in a few centuries (like Leetah?), but as a human it's not happening. I care a lot about people being allowed the choice to not have kids.

(And yeah, even though I find children painfully loud, I'm so happy to see kids and teens out in public again (roving in packs, no less!) in my area.)

I find I've always really enjoyed empowerment stories that also feature a found family (going feral for Valdemar as a teen, or say, Circle of Magic by Tamora Pierce, where sometimes a family is four children of different socioeconomic backgrounds and their adoptive bisexual moms). However, a lot of modern takes on found family that I've found recently often get caught up recreating nuclear family structures which I find a lot less interesting.

If you get confused at all with reading order after Kings, I have a reccommended order list you can reference.

I’m chewing over the notion that mothers and children in the story can give the squick. Maybe I don’t quite get it because ElfQuest was a formative story for me starting at age 12.

There was certainly a lot of fantasy fiction I read early on that centers the girl empowerment story, where she hates embroidery and/or kitchen work (depending on her social class) and takes up the sword to go on a quest. Maybe she falls in love (with a boy of course) but definitely doesn’t have kids, because that would nullify her claim to power and freedom. (Also she’s probably like 16 max).

ElfQuest does it different. It’s about family from the start, because what are we fighting for if not our family’s survival? “Family” as it turns out means all elves, no matter how strange their ways are. Certain individuals don’t buy into this, they are collectively referred to as “the loveless ones.”

One of the biggest themes is that love is the opposite of control. You can’t claim to love someone and also make their choices for them.

Maybe this is why fantasy often shies away from motherhood and young children as central characters - because we’re acculturated to have a lot of our choices taken away when we’re in those life stages.

The post about misogyny I’m referring to gives examples of what a fantasy world without misogyny might look like, and it’s more than getting to fight and bleed. At the most fundamental level, it means everyone shares all kinds of work, including raising children.

ElfQuest addresses this problem right away, with the ordeal of Recognition. Leetah is terrified of not being in charge of her own choices. It’s not so much that having kids would be terrible, elf children are rare and precious. It’s that she doesn’t know who she would be once motherhood is a huge part of her life.

I have to believe that a lot of this fear must come from being in a relationship with Rayek (one of the most controlling characters in the whole saga). Because this isn’t really what the elves in general are like. It takes some motherly advice from Savah to point out that no one is going to make her be any particular kind of mother. There may be an ancestral biological magic imperative at play, yet she’s still in charge of what happens next.

This post is getting long, but essentially one of the things that makes ElfQuest so fascinating is that it’s an empowerment fantasy that doesn’t only focus on the young adventurer trope (it’s there, just not always).

All kinds of ages and stages are included, contributing in their unique ways, desiring different kinds of lives, and antagonizing each other in ways that underline the point. Ultimately showing that cooperation, growth and change are painful, but necessary for anyone to both live free and survive together.

Fitz(Chivalry)

I just remembered that this was a thing that was HILARIOUS in 2006 and apparently that was ten years ago now.

Old people: join with me in remembering how funny we found this on LiveJournal.

Young people: look at this lolrus, it’s so happy, it has a bucket.

Aabria & Brennan either DMing or as PCs, and then Lou Wilson, Erika Ishii, Ally Beardsley, Oscar Montoya, and Vic Michaelis.

(from a few years ago)

Brennan voiced Pike in the audio “movie” of book 1, which you can stream for free:

Wacom recently asked me to talk about why I make queer comics, and given there are multiple bills right now floating around in congress that are effectively "we will kill your livelihood if we get a sniff of queer" I had some pretty strong, simply feelings to relay.

The first-edition of The Joy of Gay Sex, published in 1977, declared, “Vegetable shortening may be the best lubricant, since it is not only greasy but also digestible”[4] Such a statement perhaps gives new meaning to the companies boastful declarations that “Its digestible” and “Crisco has been making life in the kitchen more delicious for years.”  Similarly, in the 1978 sex manual The Advocate Guide to Gay Health, Crisco even earned an entry in the book’s index.  Discussions of the shortening’s use as an anal lubricant indicate its popularity, with statements such as: “The lubricant, typically the cultic Crisco, must be copious.”[5]  In fact, Crisco was so synonomus with gay sex that discos and bars around the world took on the name, such as Crisco Disco in New York City, which was one of the premiere clubs during the 1970s and early 1980s.  Other clubs or bathhouses, such as Club Z in Seattle, even featured murals with Crisco.  Thus, Crisco was conversely also one of many things that led to the formation of gay identities during the 20th century.

from this essay: http://www.columbia.edu/~sf2220/TT2007/web-content/Pages/drew2.html

Like last year I read all of MXTX's books and when I was reading Mo Dao Zu Shi I had someone say to me, "Watch out, it's very sad". And while some of the things that happened in the past in the book are very devastating they happened in the past. The book had a very happy ending!! Come talk to me when one of your soulmate characters makes the choice to leave the other behind because he deserves the life he'll have without them, all while he is begging them stay!!! And that was the end of that book! And for a long long time we thought it was the end of the series. Oh, your soulmate characters got to live happily ever after together! They weren't written by an author who only believes in happily right now? That's great, really.

Then I was reading Heated Rivalry and came on here afterwards to just get some meta on the book and saw a post about The Long Game and an implication that fans will be upset with Shane in the next season because of how he acts toward Ilya...And I just finished the book and...I really do not know where this fits in with the book I read. They had ONE fight in the book and it lasted all of TWO seconds! They both had reliable people they could talk to in their time of pain before making up. And then they fixed it and grew from it and it was great! (assuming that's what they were talking about? The other things I can think of were literally miscommunications and lack of communication that were both settled with very little to do)

It was not an event that a whole fandom refers to as "The Quarrel". They did not fling the hurtful truths only they know about each other around until they were both emotionally broken and were left on their own with no one else to confide in! But they still loved each other, even though they didn't know how to fix it. And it mended slowly and not perfectly, and then it was too late!!

It has been 20 years and I still have not found a book with a portrayal of death has effected so much! To the point where when this character was mentioned in later books I had to put it down and walk away until I could compose myself!! Wolf Father broke me!! I cannot even look at fanart made of the scene from Tawny Man.

BISEXUALS GROW FROM THE GROUND

I am reading Tim Curry’s 2025 memoir, Vagabond

and in it, he not only devotes a chapter to Muppet Treasure Island, but also references this very post

so, to recap

no, Tim Curry is absolutely NOT a Muppet; however

“I have to ask this, and this is a difficult question to ask and I hope it’s not intruding too much on your personal life. If it is, forgive me in advance. So. Was there ever one great love of your life that got away? That you regret.”

“Sure. There always is.”

“Who is-”

“Miss Piggy.”