A few people have asked if I've seen the latest round of "should-YA-books-have-cussing-and-if-the
This round of "let's officially censor teen novels" comes about after a recent BYU study published in peer-reviewed journal Mass Communications and Society that analyzed 40 YA books on bestseller list and discovered that on average they "contain 38 instances of profanity between the covers."
Gosh, that's a really high level! Way higher than I would expect!
Could it be because one of the books had over 500 usages, that being a memoir by Nick Sheff called Tweak: Growing up on Methamphetamines? I wonder if that altered the sample average in any significant way?
Of the other 39 books, 35 had "at least one instance of profanity" and four were presumably devoid of naughty words. I'm not positive what counts as "profanity" - can anyone with the latest issue of Mass Communications and Society tell me what words are considered profane for the purposes of this study? I'd like to know if swearing and blasphemy have been conflated, or considered separate categories. Is "oh my God" considered as profane as "fuck this shit"?
Andy Woodworth, who does have access to the study, writes in This YA Title Is Not Yet Rated (Yet) that the study selected bestseller lists from June 22nd to July 6th, 2008 to study, and asks how this period was chosen.
And Meghan Miller of Forever YA points out the weirdness of claiming that YA books have swearing rates twice as high as video games when there are so many more words in YA books in "Get the F*ck Out! YA Books Have Cussing?!?".
My own books have swears, on account of I swear, swore as a teenager, and am happy for my teenage characters (all 16 to 18) to swear when I think it is appropriate. "Appropriate" differs from character to character. Ellie from Guardian of the Dead says "fuck" a lot. In The Shattering Keri and Janna do too, particularly in times of anger, pain, or high stress. Sione never does. When he confronts the person he believes is responsible for the death of his brother, this happens:
“You sick old bitch,” Sione said, the last word sitting awkwardly in his mouth. It was the first time I’d heard him swear.
And in fact, I think it's the only time he swears in the book. Swearing is not a Sione thing to do; he was raised to strict standards of appropriate behaviour and follows them even when the people who enforce those standards aren't around. Keri and Janna are both more casual and more rebellious in their speech.
The first time Tegan says "fuck" in When We Wake is [SPOILER!!!] just after she's possibly attracted the negative interest of the government/military by hacking into secret files. She's using a friend's computer and she doesn't know how to disconnect it from the internet in a future where every device is connected as a matter of course:
“Fuckity fuck fuck fuck,” I said calmly. Then I grabbed my rusty iron statue of the lady in the sea and beat the crap out of Bethari’s computer.
After that, Tegan says fuck twice more. Bethari says "fuck" once, when they discover just what the military has been up to, and that it is not very nice. The other two major teen characters, Joph and Abdi, don't.
None of these characters swear around or at their parents, because that is a situation where teenagers tend to be more circumspect unless they are really hurt or angry. As a teenager I once told my mother to fuck off. She slapped me so hard my teeth hurt. (Now that I am a grown-up I regularly swear in front of my mother, and she in front of me, but we don't swear at each other because we get along pretty well. This is one of the many bonuses of adulthood).
Secret Secret Shush Shush*, the book I'm working on now, doesn't contain any swearing so far. It hasn't felt natural to include it for these characters, even though they've so far survived a mass murder, several attempts at dangerous sabotage, and multiple Betrayals of Their Souls. Since one is a tightly restrained military lady under a lot of pressure, and the other is an enthusiastic and not entirely neurotypical guy who is more prone to liking things than not, it didn't really fit. There was one point where the military lady says "shit" and a friend pointed out that this would keep Secret Secret Shush Shush out of book fairs. So I nixed it. That single "shit" is not that important to me, and thus I'm happy to go, you know what, commercial success, probably quite nice. But I would have fought like a tasmanian devil to keep "Fuckity fuck fuck fuck". (I didn't have to. My editors are great).
Obviously, I think swearing in YA is fine. I think swearing itself is fine. But I am totally okay with readers who disagree putting down my books when they hit the first swear word, because I am not in charge of what they do and do not find acceptable.
Anyway, the study itself concludes:
We are not advocating that book covers be required to contain content warnings regarding profanity. We understand that providing content warnings on books represents a very hot debate, and that inclusion of such warnings is extremely controversial.
However, one of the authors, Dr Sarah Coyne, in an interview: “Unlike almost every other type of media, there are no content warnings or any indication if there is [sic] extremely high levels of profanity in adolescent novels."
My response to this is two-fold:
1) What exactly is an "extremely high level"? Who gets to decide? Governments? Publishers? Teachers? Librarians? Did anyone think of asking readers?
2) Content warnings are stupid.
Or rather, not the warnings themselves, but the bodies that spring up to decide upon and enforce them, and the commercial structures that inevitably alter under the strain, and the mindset that uses content warnings as an excuse to forbid readers access to books without engaging with the specific reader or the actual content.
Media have often adopted "voluntary" guidelines that are effectively compulsory for commercial success. Historically, this has been incredibly restrictive upon the creative process and often appallingly -ist. The Hays Code screwed any depiction of healthy sexual activity outside marriage in film. Have an affair? TIME TO DIE. The Comics Code Authority killed horror comics (no comics allowed with "terror" or "horror" in the title!) and refused to approve any depiction of "sex perversion", "sexual abnormalities", and "illicit sex relations" - i.e., rape, and also queerness or anything not enforcing the "sanctity of marriage". Famously, comics with the CCA seal were not allowed to portray drug use or drug paraphernalia - leading to the famous Spider-Man comic where, despite the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare actually asking Stan Lee to write a comic depicting drug use as unglamorous and dangerous, the CCA refused to approve it. (Marvel published anyway, in what is seen as an important point of the CCA beginning to lose its power.)
Moreover the rules are often almost amusingly short-sighted. Although the MPAA doesn't say how it goes about giving ratings (which is in itself suspect), general received wisdom is that you get to say "fuck" once in a PG-13 movie. The Avengers is PG-13. It includes Loki calling the Black Widow a "mewling quim", which means I was watching a PG-13 movie when the major female character was described as a "whiny cunt", and involuntarily said, in the crowded theatre, "EW!". (I don't think that was gross because it was swearing, btw. I think it was gross because that particular gendered slur pisses me off).
Said Dr Coyne, in the same interview: “Parents should talk with their children about the books they are reading.”
I super agree that parents should talk to their children about the books they are reading. I'm less certain that they should talk to their teenagers, particularly their older teenagers, particularly with a view to forbidding them certain texts. I have a lot of respect for the ability of teenagers to make their own choices about what they do and don't want to read, and I think that as they grow older their parents should be exerting less control over those choices. But, while I've been a teenager, I've never been a parent, and I acknowledge my personal knowledge is limited in this respect.
Relatedly, I am totally au fait with content review websites that point out things like "swearing!" or "blasphemy!" or "sex!" in books. If you're a young reader, or a parent to a young reader, who doesn't want to read those things, then these are valuable resources. I myself make use of various resources, including reviews, blogs, and word of mouth, so that I can get a heads-up on works that contain "retarded" or "faggot" as derogatory terms without any indication in the text that this is disgusting behavior. Or works where the female characters exist only to advance the stories of the male ones. Or works set in places and times where people of color ought not be invisible and yet somehow they are. I don't tend to like those stories.
I'd also venture, and not timidly, that those stories are far more damaging to society than stories where teenagers say "fuck", but I do respect the wish of these anti-swearing readers and their parents for them to be informed readers, aware in advance that they may bounce off the content of a work. I just don't think that content warnings are the best way to be an informed reader.
However, you know what? If I can get official content warnings on books for "blatant homophobia" or "in this book the character with a physical disability is a beautiful angel of compassion", then people who want official content warnings for "There are some swears!" can have those also**.
But until that happy day, I think we can all suck it up and proceed.
* Not its real name.
** I am not actually advocating this. For one thing, "there is fuck in this book" is way easier to quantify than "blatant homophobia". And for another, I think content warnings are stupid. I'm just saying that when it comes to the ills of society, I know which I'd rather not have uncritically reflected in my reading material.
Pros: Holy crap, Abed was right, it's really good. And, except for the first ten episodes, not about "cougars" (WORST WORD EVER). Instead it is grown-ups being silly and loyal and smart and having in-jokes in a way I recognise from my own friends, although these people are generally in much nicer housing. And drink even more wine. Also it's lovely to see Courtney Cox playing someone kind and warm and yes controlling but also generally hilarious, instead of having to do one neurotic character note for four seasons YES FRIENDS I AM STILL BITTER SHE WAS MY FAVOURITE. But my favorite is actually Lori Keller, who is a lower-class, loud-mouthed, brightly dressing young lady fully in charge of her own sexy times. Bangin'.
Cons: Uh I guess it's not really about big events? If you watch TV for explosions or post-modern explorations of dramatic form and genre (hi, Community!) then this may not be your kind of thing. But it is very genuinely about love and found families. And I suspect you can skip the first ten episodes with very few repercussions.
Freaks and Geeks:
Pros: There are ugly people! WHich is shorthand for the show's whole thing about feeling very real, right down to no, you probably aren't going to be a rock star from playing in your garage. It does some interesting things with class and John Francis Daley is wandering around being like FOUR YEARS OLD and adorable. I kept squinting at the mean blonde girl going, "who IS that" and then I realised IT WAS LORI KELLER. Also, James Franco plays a character that I'm not sure if I want to punch or make out with more, which is exactly how I feel about the persona of James Franco. I find this symmetry pleasing.
Cons: It's super white. And I got bored and stopped watching after episode… four, I think? Yes, I know, you can no longer be my friend, it happens. If I don't continue to use my limited TV time on other things I might get back to it.
Game of Thrones:
Pros: Pretty people and beautiful dresses and awesome set dressings! Tyrion being a bamf! Dany being a bamf! Sansa being a bamf! Lots of bamfs actually. Also, hot Gendry, and Jon has lovely hair.
Cons: My same problem as with the books, really, which is that everyone is kind of a bad person and terrible things keep happening because This! World! Is! Grim! And Joffrey exists. Then the TV show has some extra problems, where the complex Dothraki culture is reduced to "dark barbarians" (somehow they are *more* barbaric than the sibling-fucking warmongering misogynists to the west, presumably because those guys are mostly pretty pale) and the genuinely touching first time sex scene in Game of Thrones (where Dany still has very limited consent as regards the marriage, but Khal Drogo really doesn't proceed with intercourse until she indicates that's okay with her) becomes a flat-out rape scene of a small pale young woman by a big "savage" dark man. Which is a horrible mush of racist stereotypes WITH a disturbing rape scene, thanks a fucking bunch, HBO.
ALSO NIGHT'S WATCHMEN. PLEASE WEAR HATS. VERY USEFUL.
Joan of Arcadia:
Pros: I LOVE THIS SHOW. Here is a young woman struggling through Big Questions and also her friends and love life and who says to the mean girls at school that she doesn't have TIME to care about who's gay or not, she has better things to do and even though it took godly intervention to prompt that action and it came after she had in fact betrayed a friend as regards sexuality I still really liked it. Also Adam, Joan. KISS HIM. (Don't tell me if she kisses him, I want surprises).
Cons: Also pretty damn white, although a kind reporter lady just turned up. As I recall, she is so far the only Black character who hasn't been God in disguise, which bothers me. I suspect some of the endless horror (at least in the episodes I've watched so far) about Joan's brother Being An Athlete Who Now Uses A Wheelchair might be more than a little wearing on watchers with physical disabilities, and some of the plot stuff is too conveniently wrapped up because! Divine Plan! But I'm really still in the honeymoon phase. I want to hug this show and all its actors to me.
Me: Because I am disgusting!
Me (on twitter): Internets! Last night I dreamed I was a cheerleader. AND WE WON NATIONALS!!! Best dream ever.
Justin: But at what cost? #pregnancy #veryspecialepisode
Me: My cheerbaby will be a WINNER, just like me!
Justin: CHEERBABY GOES TO STATE
Me: I'm going for my run to see if I can shake some of these kinks out. I will sell hello to the sheeps for you
Me: say
Me: what, brian?
Me: BRAIN.
BFF Robyn: ARE THE SHEEPS ALL CALLED BRIAN THEN?
Me: USUALLY THEY ARE CALLED SHAUN.
Me: THAT IS A PUN, OR PLAY ON WORDS.
Today my body was in such pain from the bad things I do to it (clenching my jaw, squinting, sitting in a computer chair for hours, slouching, not touch-typing in an approved manner, flagrantly ignoring my "TAKE A BREAK NOW" messages, Diet Coke) that it kinda refused to stop working just before dinner.
"I'm going to lie in the dark and think non-painful thoughts for a few minutes," I announced to my parents. Four hours later, I woke up.
Mmm glamourous life of the artiste.
In conclusion, Cheerbaby Goes To State is going to be the blogging title of the project after Secret Secret Shush Shush.
Yesterday, John Scalzi wrote a post on Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.
The post garnered much comment and many responses. (For ex: one great post on how John's metaphor could do with some expansion). A lot of people made horrendously stupid remarks on that post that John promptly deleted, but there's a lot of 101 level stuff going on in the comments of the kind that I get way too weary to engage with after a while.
But something that I think is worth my time is a number of straight white dudes saying, well, okay, I'm playing life on Easy Mode. I recognise that. Now what should I do? Sometimes the question came across as disingenuous, but often I read it as sincere. Because after all, working out what you can do can be overwhelming. As a lady with a lot of (straight, white, cisgendered, able-bodied, middle-class, educated) advantages myself, I often worry about what I can do to make life better for players who don't share my lucky breaks.
Many good suggestions were made as a response to this: vote for politicians who want change for good; donate to groups that help (such as QUILTBAG support groups and the like); spread awareness of the issues (awareness itself, a very good thing to raise!). My favorite response along these lines was a comment by Mary Anne Mohanraj, upon whose brain I have a massive crush.
I thought about one thing I do, and one argument against it from people much like me that's been bugging me
So, hi, my name is Karen and I'm a novelist. I write young adult fantasy and science fiction, and I deliberately include people of various ethnicities, sexualities, cultural backgrounds, wealth levels, religious beliefs and ability levels in my work. I deliberately address things I think are wrong with the world in my fiction. My shorthand for this is "writing diversity".
Writing diversity was a choice I made, because it would have been hella easier not to, and if I weren't friends with certain people or didn't read certain blogs or didn't watch certain media products or a number of other things, I probably would have done just that. I've read the work I wrote as a teenager. It is a White European Fantasyland spectacular! And it probably goes without saying that in attempting to write diversity, I have occasionally made spectacularly bad choices that have really hurt and offended some readers.
Occasionally, other similarly privileged writers or would-be writers who don't write diversity, encountering the notion that they could attempt to, like, try, will get upset. "But it doesn't matter what I do!" they argue. "If I write diversity wrong, or write it in a way that you people don't like, you will yell at me! And if I don't write diversity, you will yell at me! I'm damned if I do, damned if I don't!"
This argument, to me, smacks of a lack of understanding about the intention behind the action. Let me be clear, why you write diversity has little impact on how what you write affects your readers. They're not able to see inside your secret soul. You can presumably be a festering bigot and still write diversity really well and inspire people to improve the world. Or you can be a really great person who has fucked up and written something horrible and hurt people badly. The wider effects of your work don't depend upon your intentions.
But your intentions may alter your expectations, and I think that's where the "damned if I do, damned if I don't!" argument misses a crucial point. So I want to talk about intent for a second.
Speaking of my own intentions, I'm not attempting representation of characters who help display the actual diversity of the world so that people will be nice to me. I'm not including discussions of -isms because I expect my readers to respond, "Oh, she has successfully ticked off the -ism list and is therefore shielded from all criticism upon those grounds!"
Because one, lolno, and two, that isn't the point. If you're writing diversity because your intent is to be awarded cookies or brownie points or whatever the hell people imagine they'll be collecting, ur doin it rong. If you're writing diversity because your intent is to do what you think is the right thing, but you also expect you'll get to munch on delicious praise cookies and never ever have to deal with people pointing out that you've made some offensive mistakes along the way, ur ALSO doin it rong.
The intent behind my writing diversity isn't that I want credit for trying to be a good person. It's that I am trying to be a good person.
Wait, okay, time for some SEMANTICAL DISCUSSION! I know, are you on the edge of your seat? For extra fun, I am going to use a metaphor employing poop, because that is how I roll.
I think that "be a good person" is a deceptive phrase. To me "goodness" is not about being, but doing. Goodness is not a destination, where once I get there I can sit down, cross my legs and say, "Hey, I'm good forever. I WILL NEVER LEAVE GOODNESS TOWN." Goodness is a journey, where sometimes I travel happy and have a great time - and then sometimes I walk right into a pile of cowshit.
Goodness is a continual process of action where I strive, and often fail, to do the most ethical thing or things in a given situation as often as possible. I don't think I can achieve a state of goodness and then stop. I believe that it is my obligation as a human being who wants to make life better for other human beings to do good.
Oh, and what is "doing good" in my perspective? A big part of it doing my best to fight inequalities of power and to increase the general lot of humanity - politically, socially, medically, environmentally, and any other -lys that come to mind.
I want to do good things, and I assume you (you-as-writer) do too.
(If you don't, then I don't really care about anything you have to say on this topic. Citing "damned if I do, damned if I don't" as a reason not to write diversity is particularly unlikely to elicit my sympathy, because it implies that you would do it, if only you were rewarded appropriately. Ignoring the stunning power imbalances and incredible diversity of our world is not a good thing - in fact it contributes to endorsing those power imbalances and dismissing that diversity in favor of an entirely fictional and harmful construction of "reality". I am not going to waste my time listening to people who want me to excuse their contributing to the badness of the world, especially when I have most likely heard and decided against every argument they would make multiple times before. Oh, and this is the point where I note that comments on this post will be screened.)
Anyway, you, writer you, have decided that instead of ignoring the badness, you are going to include diversity in your writing. Yay for you! And yes, when you get it wrong for some readers - spectacularly, harmfully wrong - they may point that out to you and you may feel bad. You may feel that you have been kicked out of Goodness Town! But you were never actually there, because Goodness Town doesn't exist.
Instead, what has happened is that while traveling along Goodness Road, you have encountered some cowshit. Some people are now avoiding you because you smell atrocious and are making their lives more unpleasant. Some people have been avoiding you all along, because past experience has taught them that people who carry your brand of backpack are way more likely to stink of cowshit. And eventually someone else points out, kindly or otherwise, that, hey, you smell atrocious*! You should probably do something about that stench!
And no, it's not fun to realise you are coated in cowshit. As someone who has frequently dived into a big pool of it, I honestly empathise with your sadness and shame. If you want to sit down and cry because you got cowshit all over yourself and made other people suffer your stink, that's okay. Just make sure that you sit at the side of the road, out of smelling distance, so you're not blocking the way for other travelers. And under no circumstances should you insist that others should halt their journey and listen to your Tragic Story About That Time With The Cowshit, It Even Got In Your Hair. They've got better things to do than listen to your sobbing. Cry, and then go and find a hose.
It's important that you continue along Goodness Road, even if you are going to be forever more known to some people as "That Cowshit Traveller". Because you're not traveling Goodness Road so that you can avoid people pointing out the times you step in cowshit. You're traveling Goodness Road because you want to do good.
tl;dr, without poop metaphor: It is important to me to write diversity because that is the good thing to do, not because I am trying to collect praise or ward off criticism. Sometimes I screw it up and people point that out. When this happens, I generally have an anxiety attack, which sucks. After I recover, I work harder at getting it right.
Because I may be damned by others if I do. But I'll damn myself if I don't.
* Some people have no sense of smell, and will tell you that you don't stink at all. It is generally a better idea to take the advice of the people who are waving their hands in front of their noses.
What is up with me is that I finished The Professor, by Charlotte Bronte, which is the first Project Bronte book that I actively hated.
Oh my god. Okay, I expected the Brontes to be racist, even if I choke at it every time. I mean, I read Wide Sargasso Sea like a billion (eight) years ago, and the way that book takes down Mr Rochester's filthy and shameless treatment of his first wife is both awesome and guaranteed that I would never ever ever like Mr Rochester ever. Reader, I would have strangled him.
So, racism, I knew, would turn up. Sexism, I also expected, because hey also Rochester. But I wasn't anticipating religious intolerance, nor a nationalism so virulent and horrible that almost anyone not English or part-English - even if they are white and European - is constantly derided as immoral on the basis of their non-Englishness.
I could take it in Villette, because in that story the narrator is clearly marked as unreliable in a number of ways. Lucy constantly lies to the reader; she has what we might now call untreated depression and social anxiety disorder which may skew her perceptions; and her distaste for Catholicism and Belgium/France is marked with a hint of strong fascination.
When Lucy says "God is not with Rome" and goes on and on about how awful Catholicism is, it is easy to read that as her shrinking away from her very real attraction to the beautiful pageantry of the High Mass. When she denounces the horrible Frenchness of her fellow teachers, it's easy to see that as jealousy and oversensitivity. After all, Lucy falls in love with and becomes engaged to a French man so staunchly Catholic that he is constantly described as a lay Jesuit, so it's hard to take her distaste at face value.
But in The Professor, which was an earlier work than Villette, and sort of functions as a practice for it, the narrator is supposed to be both reliable and virtuous, when actually he is a smug bigot.
William Crimsworth goes on and on about how awful the girls in the Belgian school he teaches at are. Sure, they might be pretty, but they are so slutty! They keep making eyes at him! And if they are not pretty, then they are sooooooo fat and stupid. They are lazy! Super lazy! The only decent scholar in the class is a tiny ugly girl who has - this is the best bit - been poisoned by Catholicism. She is bound for the convent, poor thing, and must be pitied in a particularly patronizing manner because of it.
The director of the boys' school is a filthy liar, the directress of the girls' school is a shameless harlot who keeps coming on to him even when she is engaged to the boys' school director. These Europeans! They are such disgusting, immoral devils of deception!
Enter a Protestant half-Swiss, half-English girl, who is thin and sort of pretty but not in a whoreish showy way! He falls in love with her, he reads the poetry she writes even when she tells him not to, he's happy that she's so demure and subservient she constantly calls him "master", even when they are married, and his favourite thing to do when she argues with him is to hold her captive on his knee until she becomes sweet and pliant again.
I HATE WILLIAM CRIMSWORTH. And I hate The Professor.
But I love Hunsden. He's gay, right? That picture of the opera singer is totally the Victorian equivalent of a girlfriend in Canada.
Then I started Wuthering Heights, and I hate everyone in it so much (except for Nelly!) that I began reading Daniel Deronda in self defence, and I like that muuuuuch better. Gwendolen is my kinda gal.
I think I must have become an adult without noticing.
I mean, for reals, thanks to Unfuck Your Habitat I've been making my bed every morning for the last two months.
I have spent most of the day writing, re-watching the third season of Avatar: The Last Airbender (god so brilliant although as always I thought there should be more made of Katara's bloodbending and of course while I think both Katara and Aang are lovely people who would be just great together once Aang had grown up a little I still cannot help shouting, "NO! HE IS TWELVE!" at the screen when they kiss) and dissecting the Avengers movie with my friend Melanie who FINALLY got to see it, since she is in the wilds of North America, where it opened TODAY, how awful.
So not a lot of tabs today.
Nail Polish:
I have been doing Avengers nail polish. Because… I am a dork, and also I love painting crap on my nails.
So far, Captain America:
The Black Widow:
The Hulk:
Candy Girl! The NZ online store for nail polish.
Do you live in New Zealand? Do you love nail polish? Are you sick of paying horrific amounts for said nail polish? Do you know that in the US it's like seven bucks a bottle for the really good stuff, what IS that, why is everything so CHEAP there? Also are you sad that you can't find interesting colours at your local pharmacy/department store?
Then check out Candy Girl. Like, for example, the China Glaze Hunger Games collection. I bought Harvest Moon, which is GORGEOUS, for (comparatively) very cheap, plus some other stuff, and when they sent it to me they included LOLLIPOPS. Best forever, Candy Girl, you have stolen my heart.
Laughing At:
Memos From Fury.
Everyone's favorite director of S.H.I.E.L.D. deals with the shenanigans in constant play under his all-seeing eye.
The incredibly awfularious shield designs at A Wiki Of Ice and Fire. Like, not hilaribad because of the artists, who are only drawing what GRR Martin described. The actual shield designs he describes.
House Dayne: Frilly!
House Banefort: "Well, we have a fort, and we're totally evil."
House Blackmont: What an anti-abortion protestor would stick on a poster to illustrate how the culture of liberalism is carrying away America's babies.
And that's it this week, Internets! What's in your tabs?
ME: Man.
MIGGY: Uh.
ME: That is the dress the bitchy girl who used to go out with the guy who is now falling in love with the awkward girl he made a bet to woo wears to prom.
MIGGY: She needs to be blonde
ME: The awkward girl wears that.
MIGGY: Hmmmm buuuuuuut
MIGGY: What about a ballgown so she feels like a princess until the truth comes out? One of these?
ME: THAT ONE
MIGGY: Yesssssss. Maybe that other dress can be what she magically appears in after she cries in the bathroom and the nice dude who's always quietly been there for her comes in there and she's like YOU CAN'T BE IN HERE THIS IS THE GIRLS' ROOM and he's like I'M SORRY I'M NOT LOOKING BUT YOU DROPPED YOUR LITTLE PURSE THAT DOESN'T ACTUALLY FIT ANYTHING
MIGGY: And so she puts her glasses on, gets the funky dress from... somewhere, and they go out and dance together
ME: You wanted Ducky to get the girl, didn't you?
MIGGY: True story: I have never seen Pretty in Pink
ME: True story: It sucks pretty bad actually
MIGGY: Ha! I just don't like the movie trope of "dude humiliates girl and gets her anyway when he realizes better"
MIGGY: It CAN be done well but it usually isn't
THE AVENGERS FIC EDITION.
Oh, fanfic, I love you. I love you especially when you do stuff I like, like for example go into some of the politics of having an international body of superheroes stomp around fighting people with little respect for due process. Or expand upon the sadly little bits of ladies we get in the movies (with the exception of Thor. GOOD GOING, THOR.)
Sadly, the most popular pairings in Avengers fandom tend to be Loki/Thor - which runs right into my incest squick - and Steve/Tony, which is actually fine. There's some really good writing in that pairing, some of which I shall be recommending in a moment. But there is this thing that happens in many fandoms where a dude is an established canonical het relationship, and people want him to get together with another dude instead, so they write the lady out of the picture. Like, she broke up with him and never speaks to him any more. Or she cheated on him. Or she died. Whatever happens, she just doesn't really turn up in the story. Sometimes she is shoved together with another lady - happy ending! Romance for her too! But still very little page time for either of them in the fic.
This makes me sad. I am all about finding romance wherever it is to be found, and lord knows we need more representation of queer people on stage, screen, and on the page. But this does not have to come at the expense of lady time, and it does in a lot of fic, and because I am lazy as heck, I hate trawling through to see if I am going to be disappointed in my lady expectations.
Anyway, I am going to rec some fics currently in my tabs, by which I mean "I opened those tabs just now for the purposes of this post". They are mostly long, and they are all great. Teen readers of my blog, you should just assume these all contain explicit sex scenes (I think some of them don't, but I am too lazy to scan through and remind myself of which ones) and approach with whatever caution you feel appropriate.
Tomorrow Belongs To Me, by valtyr.
If you are into the fandom, you know this one already. It is a fic which does not neglect the ladies at all, while simultaneously squishing Steve and Tony together, and also being very funny and poignant and full of plot and also Loki being a fail boat, which is actually a lot of the plot, and we discover the Asgardians are culturally bisexual YAY bi people in fiction!
Steve wakes up in the 21st Century. He doesn't think much of it, and it's dubious about him. He meets a Norse God, joins a superhero team, and feels terribly awkward about the whole momument at Arlington he's rendered obsolete by not being dead. Meanwhile, Tony is trying to make his mark on history by being the man who finally drove Nick Fury over the edge
Gift of Asylum, by Carleton97 and Sister_Wolf.
The pacing goes a little haywire in this one, but as a reader I didn't care that much because I was giggling so much at Darcy Lewis being a snarky queen of awesome. Lots and lots of ladies, including Darcy getting a massive crush on Pepper's massive brain. Also, Winter Soldier! WINTER SOLDIER.
The story of how Darcy Lewis accidentally helps found the Avengers while having an epic, failboaty romance with that dude she nailed in a bar two years ago. Tasers, jackbooted thugs, Tony Stark, and life-altering job offers are par for the course when you help discover an alien/god dude with amazing pecs
Team Building Activities, also by valtyr, who is some kind of Avengers-writing genius.
Lots of Pepper PoV! (I love you, Pepper.) Also exes who are still friends and occasionally sleep together sometimes even when they're trying to cut back. Also Natasha buys Tony several lap dances from dudes to test a hypothesis, AMAZING. (I LOVE YOU, NATASHA). And Tony convinces Steve that Wall-E is a documentary.
Fury's a beautiful princess. Clint's plotting a Communist revolution. Rhodey's not sexy. Wall-E's not a documentary. Clint's not gay but he does give a great blowjob. This fic is not an AU.
Magnetic, by boombangbing.
Sometimes when a lady and a dude are in an established canon relationship and the writer wants to add another dude to that mix, they just totally add him! Awesome. Would you like some polaymory fic, Internets? You can has! And I just now realised this is part of a SERIES, oh my, got to get my act together and scrape up some serious reading time.
Tony and Pepper are in a committed relationship, everyone knows that. Tony still flirts relentlessly with Steve, though, and Steve doesn't know what to make of it. Then he starts having weird feelings about Pepper too, and he really, really doesn't know what to make of that.
Average Avengers Local Chapter 7 of New York City, by hetrez.
This one does not have quite enough lady action for my tastes but it's not like it disdains the ladies either and also it is hilarious and involves union work and Steve being a social do-gooder, which is why I love him so much. He is so earnest! Also he would kick horrible Ultimate Steve's ass. Also it is shorter, like, just over 9k words where all the ones above get well into five digits.
Steve and Tony accidentally start a national do-gooders association and fall in love.
Simple, Not Easy, by LJC.
This is the one where Loki kidnaps Darcy by accident and then she and he become total bros. She gives him some Xanax, she pushes him towards his therapist, she criticizes the way he kills people, she tries to set him up with his ladylove, she makes him watch How To Train Your Dragon and she isn't into him at all! It's totally a friendship fic! Also she gets some hot action with Hawkeye, always a bonus.
Darcy should have seen it coming. She couldn't hang around the spandex crowd forever and not end up with a great big target painted on her back eventually. She was just surprised it took Loki so long.
And it's nearly 2am and I have to get up and go to Retail Job tomorrow, so I will leave it there. Happy reading, Internets. What's in your tabs?
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