I am the hero of this story

People have discussed how, at one point, “the butler did it” or “Luke, I am your father” were stunning and unexpected. The biggest and most predictable cliches were, at some point, exposed to a big audience for the first time, and they were fresh and original and they worked.

But this doesn’t just happen for everyone at one point in time for every trope, as if the Trope Codifier comes about and from then on all people are like “ehh, it’s been done before.” This is happening on a micro-level all the time. An example is when a niche subgenre or long-running franchise starts to expand and get more fans. Newer installments or examples of the subgenre that are seen as tropey and dumb by Fandom Olds can be really popular with the newcomers because to people who are new, the ideas aren’t cliche or “already done.” They’re new. The same thing happens when a book borrows elements from a different genre—a fantasy book having a romance subplot that would make regular romance readers cringe is acceptable because the romance readers and fantasy readers are largely two different groups of people.

You also see this with people who are new to a genre or category of book—or people who are relatively new to reading in general. Middle grade and YA fantasy continue to produce very formulaic and unoriginal stuff, that people who read hundreds of books in that category generally hate. However, these books often gain fans who are captivated by them, because there will always be people who haven’t read hundreds of books in that category. There will always be people for whom your book is their very first experience encountering a particular trope or reading in your genre or even reading a fiction book for pleasure at all.

And all of us were new to every genre we’ve read, once upon a time. My first real YA novel I read was Origin by Jessica Khoury, and in hindsight the love interest and teenage girl main character were both pretty typical and cliched for YA, and the love interest was definitely described in ways that would make me cringe now, simply because “the ripple of muscle beneath his tanned skin” and the “smell of cedar and wind that clung to him” are in every. YA. novel. ever. But I didn’t have that reaction, and I was honestly pretty taken in, because I was like 14 and hadn’t read a genre-typical YA romance before.

Some books, I would argue, specifically exist to appeal to people that are category/genre newbies. That’s their niche. MG/YA variants of lots of genre fiction are often like this, because kids and teens just...have not read as many books due to just not having been alive as long. Children’s books still (unfortunately) get away with incredibly cliche portal fantasies about boy chosen ones because their audience is one that is always full of people who have never read a fantasy book before. Children, though critical and thoughtful readers, got born more recently than adults. Romance in YA or MG tends to seem formulaic and tropey. Horror in YA or MG tends to seem overdone and tropey. Of course there are outstanding MG and YA books for which this is not true, but for the broad mass of YA and MG literature, tropey works because the audience almost definitely doesn’t have the kind of experience with romance or horror needed to develop a sense that “ugh, this is such an overdone trope.”

So it’s true that “every cliche trope got used for the first time at some point,” but the corresponding fact that “every trope a person percieves as cliche got encountered by them for the first time at some point” doesn’t seem to be getting attention and I think it shapes the way we see genres and tropes a lot more.

There will always be people who will appreciate cliches because there will always be people to whom they aren’t cliches. There’s even some validity to the idea that the people who have read extensively enough in a category to bitterly hate its common tropes are outliers. The vast, vast majority of people don’t read hundreds of books per year, and therefore there’s a sort of volunteer bias going on with reviews of books from Goodreads book bloggers who devote a massive fraction of their lives to reading and reviewing books.

With fairly niche subgenres or just genres that don’t have broad, far-reaching appeal, I feel like it’s way more common to have a plague of what seems like tropey garbage constantly churning out to annoy the “Fandom Olds.” Horror is a good example. I’ve experienced this myself—there’s a post where a bunch of people are like “OH GOD WHAT THE FUCK” in response to a clickhole article where an astronaut is talking about seeing his fellow astronaut trapped outside the airlock begging to be let in while the same fellow astronaut is safely inside, warning him not to let in the doppelgänger. And like, yeah, a pretty fucked up concept—which doesn’t really affect me anymore because the clickhole article was like, the third time I’d seen it used in some online short horror piece. There have been stories in this exact format with some slight variation going around online for a long-ass time. And horror is always going to have this problem by the bucketload because the really (or even moderately) fucked up stuff does not appeal to general audiences, at least not in large quantities or consumed frequently, but dedicated horror fans are going to end up desensitized to all of the common tropes. Which is going to cause problems because the horror that’s the most appealing to general audiences is going to be the exact stuff that seems like insipid tropey garbage to the people who really, really, really love horror.

So now I’m thinking about how literally no one has literally complete knowledge of any given genre or category of book, because it’s like physically impossible to read all the books even in fairly niche categories because there are just so many books in the world. Which means that there are Forbidden Opinions about the cliches and tropes of them all that are literally inaccessible to mankind, but that hypothetically a person who’d somehow read them all would develop. We can extrapolate what those opinions would be, but we don’t know for sure what cliche or originality or uniqueness really is! Because none of us have ever experienced All Of Fantasy!

Like. Everyone’s experience of what a genre is is different, because everyone’s sampled literature differently. So everyone’s understanding of what a unique or original idea is...depends on and is limited by what they happen to have read or not read.

📢New YA Book Releases

Every Body Looking

Candice Iloh

Dutton BYR

Longlisted for the National Book Award.

When Ada leaves home for her freshman year at a Historically Black College, it’s the first time she’s ever been so far from her family—and the first time that she’s been able to make her own choices and to seek her place in this new world. As she stumbles deeper into the world of dance and explores her sexuality, she also begins to wrestle with her past—her mother’s struggle with addiction, her Nigerian father’s attempts to make a home for her. Ultimately, Ada discovers she needs to brush off the destiny others have chosen for her and claim full ownership of her body and her future.

Ages: 12 and up

Grades: 8th and up

Pages: 416

Available on Bookshop👉🏿Every Body Looking

Find more children’s and young adult books by Black authors here

📢September 2020 New Book Releases

Some titles include:

I Am Every Good Thing

Derrick Barnes

Gordon C. James

Nancy Paulsen Books 

Rocket Says Clean Up!

Nathan Bryon

Dapo Adeola

Random House BYR 

Akissi: Even More Tales of Mischief (Book 3) 

Marguerite Abouet

Mathieu Sapin

Flying Eye Books 

Ty’s Travels: All Aboard!

Kelly Starling Lyons

Nina Mata

HarperCollins 

Jayla Jumps In

Joy Jones

Albert Whitman & Company

Before the Ever After

Jacqueline Woodson

Nancy Paulsen Books 

Lux: The New Girl (Flyy Girls #1)

Ashley Woodfolk

Penguin Workshop 

Find all titles here on👉🏿Bookshop

Find more children’s and young adult books by Black authors here

Oh YA novels.  I love your innovation, your zippy pace, and your relate-able tone.  But just between you and me, YA, there are some problems between your pages.  As a bisexual person, I can’t help but notice that bisexual characters in YA lit have their own collection of harmful tropes that rear their ugly head with alarming frequency.  And YA, these things have got to go.   

6)  I’m drowning in biphobia.  Imagine reading a scene where a character says horribly racist, sexist, or homophobic things to bully another, and the writer never makes it clear that this verbal abuse  is unacceptable.   Seems like some pretty shady writing huh?  Might make you go ‘wtf???’ and put the book down?   Well this happens to bisexual characters all the time.   

I’m gonna pick on the low-hanging fruit of Alec from the Mortal Instruments/Infernal Devices series by Cassandra Clare.   When he is feeling insecure in his relationship with Magnus, he resorts to catty comments about how liking both sexes is nasty.   Magnus and all the other characters just let this slide.  Alec is resorting to stereotypes and slurs and everyone acts like this is no big deal.  

Putting up with verbal abuse is just seen as part of the package for bi characters, so much so that it is rarely even noticed much less remarked upon or corrected.    

5) Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.  We can be the quirky best friend, the mysterious love interest, the sister you barely see, or the ex that broke your heart.  But bisexual characters exist mostly in YA novels to prop homo and heterosexual characters up.  We are rarely the stars of the show.  

Now I know bisexuals are not the only group with this problem.  Just about every minority / historically disadvantaged group has this problem with their representation in literature.  But it doesn’t make it suck any less when you’re looking for yourself in literature and you have to make due with side characters.   

4) The Case of the Missing B-Word.  There is nothing wrong with not liking to be labeled or with needing time to figure out what label works best.  However, a great many characters in YA lit who have emotional and sexual relationships with both genders avoid or actively stigmatize the word bisexual.   Nearest I can tell, authors think they are being open-minded with their characters by writing them this way.   But by having no characters that use the word bisexual, it sends the opposite message - that bisexuality is something to be ashamed of or that there is something wrong with identifying this way.  Or worse yet, that we don’t really exist.   

The most egregious example of this is in The Bermudez Triangle/On The Count of Three by Maureen Johnson when Avery snaps at her friend for suggesting she is bi after having had relationships with boys and a girl.   Her reason?  "The bi girls, they go back and forth" i.e. bisexuals are sluts.  Does any character ever correct this bi-bashing?  Nope.   It’s left to stand and it’s unclear how Avery identifies at the end of the book besides vehemently not bisexual.  

3) Girls, girls, (cis) girls   Finding a bisexual male in YA literature is like looking for a unicorn.  There is also a complete lack of transgender bisexual teens or teens who identify with a non-binary/genderqueer identification.  While the bisexual community doesn’t have a perfect track record on trans* issues, there are a LOT of trans* and genderqueer bisexuals.   They’ve been an active part of our community for a long time, and so it’s odd that when you do have trans* characters in a YA book, they are almost always hetero/homo.  

Also I’ve noticed that a book about bi males will not receive nearly as much attention as books about lesbian, gay, transgender, or bisexual female characters.   There will be fewer reviews, fewer awards, fewer blog posts, and much less buzz.  Lists of LGBTQ books put out by prominent organizations will often have no books with bi male or genderqueer persons.  

2) Caricature not character.  I’ve read some amazing YA books where teen characters have intricate back stories that explain their decisions and are allowed to change, learn, and grow from cover to cover.   Bisexual characters are not often afforded this luxury.  

Probably the worst example of this is The Difference Between You And Me by Madeleine George.   The lesbian character gets her dynamic relationships with family and friends explored, where the bisexual character barely has family mentioned.  We know all about the lesbian character’s feelings, but only get a small window into the bisexual character’s feelings and it’s pretty much only one feeling - anxiety.  We know the motivation of the lesbian character to be reasonable based on the life experiences relayed to us, but the bisexual character can just change her mind with no explanation.  

It’s trading on caricatures of bisexual people as fickle or slutty or incapable of commitment.  Instead of giving reasons why these characters may be this way, they just are.  And then at the end of the book, no attempt is made to change them.   Because they just are.  

1) Voicelessness.   This is probably the worst one.  It seems without fail that when an ensemble book has a bisexual character, the pivotal events in the life of that bisexual character will not be narrated by the bisexual character themselves.   It will probably be narrated by some other character in the book.   

The two biggest offenders of this are The Difference Between You And Me and The Bermudez Triangle/On The Count of Three.   In both cases the break ups and the break up aftermath are narrated by the lesbian character in the moment, and the author never goes back to give us the bisexual character’s side of the story.  There might be a mention of being sad, but whereas we get to live in the other character’s pain and experience it fully, we don’t get to do that for the bisexual characters.   

It also sets up a weird dynamic where a book can pat itself on the back for having bi characters while keeping them flat, one-dimensional, or even packing the book with implicit and explicit stereotypes. 

So please YA, can you clean up your act?  

“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

Navigation and Pormpuraawans In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.

Blame and English Speakers In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.

Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.

Booker, offering a guilty smile: ton vase préféré s'est cassé, ma cher [your favorite vase broke (itself), my dear]

Nile: le vase, il s'est casse? mais QUI l'a fait, mon chou? hmmm? it just fell comme ça without any help? [the vase, it broke itself? but WHO did it, honey? it just fell like that without any help]

Booker, sweating: *clears throat* Joe

Hollywood dehumanizes people of color on screen using racist media narratives in order to justify oppression and violence against people of color in real life. These comics touch on a lot of complicated subjects about race and gender in media, but I realized mainstream representation metrics like the Bechdel-Wallace Test, Riz Test, DuVernay Test, and Aila Test don’t fully cover the criteria to discuss those issues, so I made a test of my own.

- children and teens who cant get home until a later time have a safe, warm, well lit, populated area to socialize, charge devices, rest, etc

- children and teens have a safe place to go to stay away from danger

There are two different types of nostalgia. 

Restorative nostalgia is when you feel like things used to be better and you long to relive the past, and reflective nostalgia is when you feel wistful about how different things used to be, but you maintain a sense of amused acceptance. 

West African wisdom stories and animal fables.

1. The Tortoise with a Pretty Daughter 2. How a Hunter obtained Money from his Friends the Leopard, Goat, Bush Cat, and Cock, and how he got out of repaying them 3. The Woman with two Skins. 4. The King’s Magic Drum 5. Ituen and the King’s Wife 6. Of the Pretty Stranger who Killed the King 7. Why the Bat flies by Night 8. The Disobedient Daughter who Married a Skull 9. The King who Married the Cock’s Daughter 10. Concerning the Woman, the Ape, and the Child 11. The Fish and The Leopard’s Wife; or, Why the Fish lives in the Water 12. Why the Bat is Ashamed to be seen in the Daytime 13. Why the Worms live Underneath the Ground 14. The Elephant and the Tortoise; or, Why the Worms are Blind and the Elephant has Small Eyes 15. Why a Hawk kills Chickens 16. Why the Sun and the Moon live in the Sky 17. Why the Flies Bother the Cows 18. Why the Cat kills Rats 19. The Story of the Lightning and the Thunder 20. Why the Bush Cow and the Elephant are bad Friends 21. The Cock who caused a Fight between two Towns 22. The Affair of the Hippopotamus and the Tortoise; or, Why the Hippopotamus lives in the Water 23. Why Dead People are Buried 24. Of the Fat Woman who Melted Away 25. Concerning the Leopard, the Squirrel, and the Tortoise 26. Why the Moon Waxes and Wanes 27. The Story of the Leopard, the Tortoise and the Bush Rat 28. The King and the Ju Ju Tree 29. How the Tortoise overcame the Elephant and the Hippopotamus 30. Of the Pretty Girl and the Seven jealous Women 31. How the Cannibals drove the People from Insofan Mountain to the Cross River (Ikom) 32. The Lucky Fisherman 33. The Orphan Boy and the Magic Stone 34. The Slave Girl who tried to Kill her Mistress 35. The King and the ‘Nsiat Bird 36. Concerning the Fate of Essido and his Evil Companions 37. Concerning the Hawk and the Owl 38. The Story of the Drummer and the Alligators 39. The 'Nsasak Bird and the Odudu Bird 40. The Election of the King Bird (the black-and-white Fishing Eagle)

They Called Us Enemy (2019) //   Top Shelf Productions 

George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father’s—and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future. 

In a stunning graphic memoir, Takei revisits his haunting childhood in American concentration camps, as one of over 100,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned by the U.S. government during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon—and America itself—in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love.

Story: Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, George Takei, art: Harmony Becker

Get it here

This was like 1995.