Quite Untitled

Just some stuff I like, and chatter in the tags.

[mechkinds-deactivated20230405]

im normal about robots im so fucking normal about robots

[pri2st]

...i say, hunched over the bathroom sink staring into the mirror

[redeyeyuna]

Long Eared Bat in a Coconut Shell 🥥

[tfoutofcontextcomicedition]

[balrogballs]

I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.

Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:

If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.

Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.

I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.

I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.

What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?

Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.

No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.

There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.

Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.

The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.

Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.

Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.

I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.

Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.

I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?

This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.

You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.

So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.

But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.

Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.

We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.

[headspace-hotel]

quote i wanted to emphasize

You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal.

[rootsandtides]

[kagayuzen]

The 42nd Traditional Kaga-Yuzen Crafts ExhibitionSilver Award: Visiting dress ‘New York, New York’ Miyoji Ishida

Author’s Comment : The lights of the skyscrapers in Manhattan are beginning to turn on, and I created this work with a bird’s eye view of New York City, which is being transformed into a vibrant city.

The 42nd Annual Exhibition of Traditional Kaga Yuzen Crafts is being held at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, from September 16 (Wed) to 22 (Tue). 

[wheelchairoftheseus]

how manual wheelchair users move (explainer for non-users)

frequently when i’m out and about with someone walking, they can’t anticipate what path i will take and therefore they’re in my way pretty frequently. this is fine! i can politely ask them to step to the side. but it makes me think about how little non-wheelchair users understand the way wheelchair users move. as someone who used to walk everywhere, it was an adjustment period for me to figure out how to navigate the world in a chair. here are some things that didn’t occur to me so that you don’t cut off your friend right as they’re building momentum to go up a ramp 😆

for context, i use an active manual chair. the world is very different in a power chair. even among active manual chair users, there is a huge diversity in physicality and strategies for getting around. this is a general guide that i think will apply to most manual wheelchair users. i’m starting super basic and getting more complicated as i go.

———

1. manual wheelchairs are a momentum game. it is very easy to maintain speed and direction. but speeding up, slowing down, or turning, is hard. one thing this affects is if we’re on a wavy sidewalk or other twisty-turny walkway, that is a pain in the ass and i am taking as straight a path as i can.

2. wheelchair users also have to pay attention to the slope and condition of the pavement, so our path somewhere will be different than yours, even if we’re taking the same route to the same place. for example, i usually have to go down slopes straight, not diagonally, to avoid tipping over sideways. one area this affects is crosswalks. many intersections have one curb cut for both roads you could cross, which means i will go down curb cuts to a crosswalk as if i am aiming for the middle of the intersection.

your path in orange, mine in blue. to you it seems indirect, but to me it’s the path of least resistance.

i also will be building speed in the second half of the crosswalk. this is a much easier way to tackle a ramp. if i approach with momentum, i won’t have to drag myself up the slope once i get to it.

3. building momentum and maintaining it is only half of the job. the other half is stopping. manual wheelchairs cannot stop on a dime if they’re moving with any kind of speed. if i tried to stop immediately when going downhill, i would fly out of the chair. so don’t walk right into the path of a wheelchair in motion and then stop! i will have to turn to the side very quickly and hope i don’t tip. i can’t tell you how often parents pushing strollers will stop their stroller directly in my path and then get offended when i am alarmed and turn sharply to avoid hitting their child. from their perspective, i was being careless and going “too fast.” in reality, normal walking speed takes a few feet to slow down from and stop.

4. in terms of slope. see this street in san francisco?

i can’t go down this street, it’s way too steep. i would give myself friction burns on my palms trying to control my speed. if i was in a situation where there was no avoiding this street, like in an emergency, i would be breaking my straight-slope rule and zig-zagging in the middle of the road.

this would require several zig-zags back and forth, more than the four that i drew. i also could not go up this road other than with this method. up or down, i risk tipping over sideways if i’m not careful.

4. in a similar vein, consider terrain. slopes with grass or carpet take huge amounts of energy to get up. this grassy hill isn’t insurmountable, but it would take me like thirty minutes to get up there. honestly i would probably go backwards, because it’s easier to pull yourself up a slope than push yourself.

other types of terrain can be completely immobilizing, though. this decorative gravel pathway is beautiful, and inaccessible to me. my casters (front wheels) simply will not go through that.

5. in terms of walkways and obstacles. if there’s a deep gap in the pavement lined up the way i’m going, and it’s, say, an inch wide, that is an obstacle for me. my casters are one inch wide, and my back wheels are an inch and a half. i’ll get stuck in it like a train on a track.

i have to straddle this, even if it means being too close to the middle of the sidewalk and preventing us from walking side by side.

similarly, if a crack is greater than an inch high, i’m gonna wheelie over it. at two inches, i have to. a wheelie may require a change in speed, either faster or slower depending on the person.

i have 4 inch casters, so a lip as little as 2 inches will stop me in my tracks. a lip as little as one inch, hit with any speed, can knock my casters out of square. casters can get knocked out of alignment pretty easily depending on the chair. i’d rather not have to pull out an allen wrench and a level, so i’m gonna wheelie.

this happened when i hit about a 1.5” lip on a pavement crack when i was going downhill at maybe 3mph.

6. putting it all together. see how diagonal this crack is?

this is another situation where i have to go straight relative to the slope. because that crack is wide, it will probably also require a wheelie. if i tried to approach that straight relative to the sidewalk, my left caster would get up the slope, i’d wheelie, then my right caster would land in the crack. i have to go this way.

(also lol at the trash can blocking the curb cut)

these are just a few things to keep in mind when walking about with a wheelchair user! ofc the best strategy always is just to listen when someone asks you to move out of their way 😆 but i think being able to anticipate movement a little better will help it seem less random. feel free to ask any questions!

[loish]

It’s warm again and I’m craving the beach. But not just any beach. Specifically a beach with beautiful cliffs, crystal clear ice-cold water, and vibrant green algae. I don’t live near one of those so I will draw it instead 🌊

[wellsbering]

thought this scene could use some background music

[bahvrik]

just when you think you’ve seen every ds9 shit post

[headspace-hotel]

my brother and I get on bandcamp and click on songs from the live updating list of albums that are selling and we listen to 30 seconds or so of a song and if we like it we add it to a playlist. and we call this "foraging for music."

anyways one of terminology we have coined to talk about music is "Knee Music" which is derived from the fact that album covers that show a person's knees tend to sound the same as each other. It's kind of a sleepy, grungy indie folk pop sound with youthful-sounding, vocals that affect a candid and vulnerable feeling.

or anyway we found multiple album covers with knees in quick succession, and they all sounded the same, hence "Knee Music"

but it doesn't have to be knees to be Knee Music. any kind of blurry, candid-looking photos that include skinny white people is likely to be knee music

[headspace-hotel]

My other brother's method of foraging for music is slightly more complicated: he gets on everynoise and uses random number generators to get a random genre, a random artist, and then a random song from that artist.

For a while, his method was slightly different, instead choosing a random genre and listening to it until he found a song from that genre that he liked.

However, this could be very time-consuming. once he became trapped for a long time in "geek rap" which was mostly a lot of people rapping in potentially spanish or portuguese (?) about Five Nights at Freddy's

[headspace-hotel]

My brother and I have a rating system where we rate songs on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is absolute dogshit and 7 is the best song ever.

The challenge in this is that even if a song isn't particularly pleasant to listen to, novelty will increase the rating, because it's something interesting we haven't heard before. So, it's incredibly difficult for a song to get the lowest rating, because a song that is outstandingly bad has something different about it to make it bad, which paradoxically makes it good.

We had a very hard time rating this song, Burial Etiquette- Ivy Staircase in Ruin. We both disliked it, but we had never disliked a song in this way. The harsh vocals are so far to the background and relatively quiet that it's like, a kind of generic song but there's a guy screaming incoherently somewhere in the next room

We didn't like the harsh vocals, but we also thought they should raise the rating of the song because they made it weirder. We ultimately didn't settle on a rating at all for it.

[headspace-hotel]

We both agree that the best random song we found is Butcher Brown- No Way Around It. It is groovy and makes you want to dance, with a unique style.

The genre is Funk, so we looked into funk some more, but it turns out that funk is not very popular anymore and it was popular mostly in the 1970s.

Only one other random song we rated with a 7, which is Thrailkill- Cattywampus.

Those are the two songs we rated with a 7. I haven't counted up how many songs we rated yet, but the ratings suggest that an excellent song is hard to find...

[headspace-hotel]

The random songs we rated with a 6 are these. a 6 rating means it is a really good song that we would listen to again and again but not the most excellent song possible

Benny Bleu- Five Miles from Town

Death Threat Cassette- Use Your Delusion

[headspace-hotel]

@red-naxe

(Regarding the song Burial Etiquette- Ivy Staircase in Ruin)

exactly! weird art has a charm and fascination to it.

[porcelain-dollbones]

snakes really make you appreciate how gross mammals really are. squamates are very dry and clean

[porcelain-dollbones]

a bird is a kind of reptile that has learned to be yucky.

[st-just]

I have exceptionally limited interest in reading anything branded as 'Romantasy' I've heard of but I am honestly kind of curious what's happening with the apparent hammering of 'fae' into a coherent and instantly understood sort of fantasy-creature-archtype (ala vampire, werewolf, etc) over there. Like I feel like the chain of transmission would be interesting to read about in a media history sense?

[booksandchainmail]

I am very talking out of my ass here, just going with books I've read rather than any actual research, but my theory:

Fae Romantasy comes down to Sarah J. Maas. Maybe (probably) there was more of it going on before her, but she mainstreamed it and got to define the tropes. From that we get fae as sexy, powerful, sort of primal people referred to as males and females, who have soulmates, often look down on humans, use magic, and have an elaborate structure of monarchy and nobility. Sarah J Maas had a successful YA fantasy series that abruptly pivoted in book 3 to include fae, and then her next series was fae romantasy from the start, and also caused incredible discourse due to having explicit sex scenes in a book marketed as YA.

But where did she get this fae archetype from? My argument would be that prior to being romantasy characters, fae were urban fantasy characters. Jim Butcher gets mentioned here for possibly codifying the summer/winter court structure, and also just having a bunch of humanoid human-sized fae nobles in his Dresden Files books. But IMO the stronger connection would be Holly Black.

In 2018, post Sarah J Maas fae romantasy wave, Holly Black publishes a YA fae dark romance which has many many elements that seem recognizable to existing fae romantasy. A human girl raised in the fae realm, a fae prince who hates her even as he can't resist her, lots and lots of court politics and power dynamic swings. The difference here is that Holly Black has been writing these kinds of books since 2002 (which makes her earlier books old enough to have been influences on the beginnings of fae romantasy). She's maybe best known for her Spiderwick Chronicles series of children's books, which feature all kinds of creepy and gross fae creatures, which feels similar to older folklore. But at the same time she's also writing the Modern Tales of Faerie series, which are YA dark romances about humanish girls and the powerful (but vulnerable) fae boys they meet. Notable here is that the fae here are not monolithic in species: you've got humanish fae (iirc most main characters are in this category), sure, but also more classic creatures like trolls (I remember there being others but not the specifics).

Notable for these books is that they aren't secondary world fantasy: iirc the Modern Tales of Faerie books are set in New York. There's also a sensibility about them that I want to describe as punkish? The protagonists aren't relatable everywomen, or destined princesses: they're mostly homeless teenagers, squatting in subways and trying to survive on the edges between fae society and human society.

And so let's go one step further back. What influenced Holly Black? And here we have a definite answer, because she was co-editor of a Welcome to Bordertown, a 2011 remake/tribute to the Bordertown series, done as a collaboration between some of the original authors and younger authors, like Holly Black, who had grown up with them. The original Bordertown books were a 1980s series of anthologies, with each chapter a short story by a different author. They were set in Bordertown, a city founded on the edge of our modern world and a resurgent magical one, full of strange magic meeting modern technology, populated largely by outcasts and runaways. The summary I have pulled up describes Bordertown as "a place of half-lit neighborhoods of hidden magic, of flamboyant artists and pagan motorcycle gangs", which should give you an idea of the vibe.

This is very clearly the predecessor to Holly Black's Fae books. Only this is published in 1986, and so the magical world that Bordertown sits at the edge of is Elfland. And that's where I think the root is, taking folkloric elves, making them sexy feudal intrusions on the world, and then to avoid confusion with the better known elves of Tolkein, pivoting the name to fae. After all, older sources use the two interchangeably: if you look at variants of Tam Lin some of them have a Queen of Fairies, some an Elfin Queen.

A coda: I think Wen Spencer's 2003 book Tinker is illuminating here. It starts an unusual but modern young woman who meets a powerful, domineering elfin lord when he is uniquely vulnerable, then struggles between her attraction to him and the political and magical dangers he brings. The love interest here is very in line with romantasy fae males! But it's 2003, so he's still an elf, and the book is largely set in Pittsburgh.

[miranda-basset]

I love when people start doing this sort of thing for genre literature! I feel compelled to jump in here and add that while, yes, Holly Block is probably the most influential writer of fae romance novels of the past few decades, she really cannot be considered the initiator of this subgenre - fae romance was already an increasingly common and popular style of romance in the late 90s and early 00s. The earliest one that comes to mind for me is O.R. Melling's Chronicles of Fae series, starting with Hunter's Moon, which was published in 1993; this was back when romantic YA marketed explicitly to teen girls / young women was just beginning to become a popular category. I also have to note that Butcher is not the codifer of the Summer & Winter Court motif in modern fantasies about faeries - this is an older preexisting trope that shows up in Melling as well (the second book of her series is The Summer King, for example, published in 1999), and can probably be traced back to New Age & contemporary pagan / Wiccan ideas about older Celtic mythologies (which itself likely has at least some loose basis in historical ancient druidic religions etc, but I fear I don't have the necessary scholarly background to assess precisely how much.)

I find it interesting that you can really see the difference in reader expectations in a book like Hunter's Moon - Melling can't rely on people already being familiar with 'standard' fairy romance tropes, so she's doing a lot more work to create and build up the surrounding mythology than you see in current publications (and basing it off a great deal of actual historical mythological and folkloric sources) - and the result is a much more grounded and compelling setting, to my eyes. Though I'd have to reread the book to verify this, my memory of Melling's series was that it owed a pretty clear debt to earlier low fantasy YA-adjacent series like Susan Collins's The Dark is Rising (about Arthuriana myths recurring in a modern urban setting; first book published in 1965), and that the author had probably also at least read some of Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry series (a portal fantasy about a group of college students getting sent to a Tolkienesque, Arthuriana-inspired high fantasy world; first book published 1984). So I would link some of the earliest versions of this trope to the growing popularity of Arthuriana retellings in a low fantasy mode.

The explosion of fae romance within YA specifically is also fairly co-terminous with the explosion of YA itself, which took off around the 2000s in large part due to tailwinds from the Harry Potter (first book 1997) and Twilight (2005) booms. (I would probably trace romantasy as a direct descendent of YA more than of any other genre.) Note that Twilight was not just urban fantasy but specifically a YA paranormal romance, which was also becoming a huge category within the adult romance industry at around the same time. The early 2000s are when you get paranormal romance novel writers like Nalini Singh, Kelly Armstrong, Patricia Briggs (who could also be fairly called an urban fantasy writer with a large dose of romance), Laini Taylor, and Kresley Cole etc all taking off; most of the paranormal romances out there began with more traditional vampire & werewolf stuff, but a lot of them start getting very eclectic and 'anything goes' with their mythological references in much the same way Jim Butcher does. (Note that the first Harry Dresden book comes out in 2002, and the first Nightside book - a very similar noir urban fantasy - by Simon R Green in 2003; these authors are all influencing each other, yes, but also all responding to the same trends at more or less the same time.)

Before these authors, the first genuinely popular paranormal romance writers I know of are Tanya Huff's Victory Nelson series (1991), and Laurel K Hamilton with her Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series (1993). Hamilton was in turn extremely influenced by, who else, Anne Rice & her Interview with the Vampire, from all the way back in 1976. Huff herself is also writing in the shadow of Rice, but I think even more than Hamilton owes a debt to the low fantasy tradition of 'fantasy noir,' ie fantasy in the style of noir mysteries like Raymond Chandler's or Hammett's - you see this influence in 70s authors like Roger Zelazny, who was writing from the intersection of high fantasy & 'sword & sorcery' Conan the Barbarian style low fantasy, which is linked, fascinatingly, to the rise of the 'fantasy hero as hardboiled PI' trope. I've heard this can be traced to works like Leiber's The Swords of Lankmar (1968) and Cook's Garrett PI series (1987), neither of which I've read - but this is how you get Huff's hardboiled PI heroine investigating & romancing various handsome supernatural creatures in the 90s, which in turn is how characters like Butcher's Harry Dresden arrive on the scene. Anyway, Hamilton's subsequent Merry Gentry series is one of the first adult fae romances out there, & it started publishing in 2000.

Wen Spencer's 2003 Tinker seems like another key step in the development of the fae romance trend, I agree! I would suggest that Tinker in turn seems very influenced by Mercedes Lackey's SERRATed Edge series (first book published 1992), about magical Tolkien-esque elves living in modern society & engaging in hobbies like car racing, wooing mortal women, etc. (Older fantasy romance authors like Mercedes Lackey are underrated as influences in the current romantasy explosion, imo.) Charles de Lint also kicks off his Newford series with its first book, Dreams Underfoot, in 1993, which I would argue is probably one of the major influences on Butcher & other urban fantasy writers in terms of the sort of classic urban fantasy setting, ie a bunch of magical / fantastical beings from diverse & contradictory myths jostling uncomfortably together in a modern Western city. (Neil Gaiman also copies de Lint fairly shamelessly in American Gods and Neverwhere.) As far as I'm aware, de Lint is the one of the earliest authors to invent this kind of location as a permanent basis for an ongoing series. Holly Black's first book, the fae romance Tithe (2002) owes quite a bit to de Lint, and I think probably also made it to publication in part due to Hamilton's making the fae romance trend relevant via her own Merry Gentry series.

I wasn't aware of Terri Windling's 1986 Borderland series before, so I'm glad I've stumbled across it because of this post! A glance at the authors who wrote for this anthology is pretty interesting - Charles de Lint is published in it, as is Ellen Kushner and, later on, Patricia McKillip and Steven Brust, all of whom are major fantasy writers of the late 20th c. McKillip is a writer best known to me as one of the group of authors who first started to popularize the 'fairy tale retelling' as a distinct form of fantasy in the 80s and 90s, along with people like Gail Carson Levine (Ella Enchanted, 1997), Robin McKinley (Beauty: A Retelling, 1978), Patricia Wrede (Dealing with Dragons, 1990), Juliet Marillier (Daughter of the Forest, 1999), and Tanith Lee (Red as Blood, 1983).

So I would make the inference from this connection that the earliest forms of paranormal / urban fantasy are developing in relation to the popularization of the 'gritty' or 'dark' fairy tale retelling that starts to take off in this era (along with the similar but lighter 'fairy tale satire' which is more in line with what Wrede is doing, for instance; think also Shrek), and that this is directly related to the newfound popularity of writing about faeries who are tall, dangerous, inhumanly beautiful, immoral or amoral, & thus appealing love interests - as opposed to the kind of classic, bowdlerized Victorian / Disney version of fairies as small friendly cutesy creatuers with wands & flowers etc. (Terry Pratchet is doing something similar in his 1992 novel Lords and Ladies, where much of the humor derives from the contrast between the characters' expecations of elves and the unpleasant reality they encounter.) The same cultural push to create 'realistic' adult versions of children's fairy tales seems to be behind some of the earliest books about faeries in urban fantasy settings.

(I think it's also helpful to keep in mind that the elf vs faerie distinction is more or less a modern invention - these aren't really discrete categories in most of the historical mythologies they're derived from, and of course the modern concept of the 'fantasy elf' is pretty much entirely due to Tolkien, who was himself working from essentially the same body of myths that people later went back to in order to reinvent cutesy Victorian faeries as sexy fae lords. As you note above, older anglophone literature often uses 'elf' synonymously with faerie! Obviously this is a bit of a simplication & the divergences between Germanic versus Celtic folklore etc are real - but that's more a matter of interest to actual folklorists. The takeaway is, when Mercedes Lackey or Wen Spencer write about urban fantasy elves, they're often pulling from a similar mélange of source folklore as other contemporary authors writing about the fae. It's all more or less the same trope, imo.)

Anyway, then Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely series publishes its first book in 2007, and this is, I would say, where the tropes of fae romance that are most popular today really become codified - this is an explicitly romantic YA urban fantasy series about high school girls falling in love with various faerie kings and lords, and the plot beats I think will be pretty recognizable to anyone reading contemporary books in this genre today. Holly Black's later The Wicked Prince series is definitely, to some degree, in conversation with Marr (who of course was in turn writing in conversation with Black's earlier Tithe when she created Wicked Lovely).

All of which is to say that I think it's correct to point to urban fantasy as an influence in the development of the 'fae lord' as a classic romantasy love interest today, but it isn't quite fair to call urban fantasy the 'source' of tropes about the fae - because urban fantsy itself developed in tandem with paranormal romance, which was in turn strongly influenced by straightforward fantasy authors like Patricia McKillip and Susan Collins. I would argue that the real innovation that Sarah J Maas made in turn was to take what was already, by 2015 (when A Crown of Thorns and Roses was published), the extremely well-known paranormal romance trope of the 'fae lord' love interest, and move him out of the urban fantasy setting back into a high fantasy world.

It's the combination of classic high fantasy stakes and setting (every major character is a king or a lord or a general or a royal advisor! their actions have consequences for thousands upon thousands of innocent nameless subjects! everyone bows & curtsies a lot! the continued existence of the world is always somehow in need of saving yet another time! etc) with the narrative tropes of paranormal romance, in particular (every aspect of the plot revolves around the heroine and her romantic choices & desirability! every man she meets is doomed to love her! every problem can only be solved via the correct utilization of her unique magical abilities, ancestral inheritance, piercing insight, or innate personal virtue! which i say with amusement & affection, not scorn), that makes 'romantasy' a distinct genre, imo. Romantasy is the importation of the paranormal romance plot into a high fantasy world. And that's essentially what Maas invented with her fae romance series.

So in summary, I would argue there are two threads here: one is the paranormal romance, which I trace back to originating authors like Hamilton and Huff, and which is strongly influenced by Anne Rice's take on vampires on the one hand, and by the low fantasy 'noir' trends popularized by writers like Glenn Cook and Roger Zelazny (Simon R Green is an early 90s trendsetter for this kind of thing, as well) on the other. Thus all roads lead back to Anne Rice (obviously) and also to Raymond Chandler (less obviously but more or less inevitably for any American author - and the British are not immune! look at Pratchett's Night Watch). I would classify this thread as the stylization and codification of horror, grit, cynicism, urban grime, etc in a fantastical / supernatural context - things that used to be regarded as frightening, inappropriate, ugly, unspeakable, or otherwise transgressive, like murder and corrupt cops (see: Chandler) or scary monsters from folklore committing thinly-veiled metaphors for sexual assault (see: Rice).

This becomes the standard spooky, gritty, cynical, hardboiled vibe for a lot of early books in the paranormal line. The prevalent attitude is basically 'you thought werewolves were a silly children's story? jokes on you! this werewolf is about to eat your face &/or attempt to sexually assault you' (and of course, in the explicitly romantic books especially, this is all highly eroticized). As happens with all tropes, the original transgressive sources of these vibes are eventually lost until only the vibes remain, and we end up with things like the trope of the paranormal PI main character with no clear explanation for why except that 'it's paranormal, of course you need a PI hero' or 'it's paranormal, of course you need a vampire love interest.' Faeries thus become incorporated here as another instance of the seemingly harmless child's story that are, in the story's mythbusting 'reality,' highly dangerous, scary, & socially liminal figures, & thus capable of filling essentially the same narrative role as the vampire or werewolf lover.

The other thread is the urban fantasy setting itself, which is what revitalizes the modern concept of the faerie as a potential style of love interest in the first place, and this I would trace to late 90s - early 00s YA like Melling's faerie series, which draws from Arthuriana and Celtic mythology - and again, dating to 1993, is the earliest publication of explicitly romantic fae novels that I know of (as in the romance is a large chunk of the main narrative, and not just a subplot). (The separate but related notion of dropping your characters into a hodgepodge of conflicting myths and enjoying the chaos as a storytelling method I think is also coming into popularity at the same time via authors like K.A. Applegate in her very underrated 1999 Everworld series, a truly and delightfully insane YA portal fantasy involving, yes, dangerous faeries.) Melling is writing in turn at the same moment that Charles de Lint's urban fantasies are coming out, and both authors are influenced by the popularization of the 'fractured fairy tale' retelling taken up by many major female fantasy authors of the late 20th c. - all of which blend together in a lot of interesting weird ways in the 90s and then play a major role in shaping the YA boom of the 2000s. The role of Arthuriana retellings in the works of writers like Susan Collins and Guy Gavriel Kay I think is also important (both of whom have also, amusingly, admitted to being directly influenced by Sir James Frazer's iconic 1890 work of late Victorian anthropology, The Golden Bough, thus confirming my personal conspiracy theories re: all modern literature. But that's beyond the scope!)

The style of love interest that emerges from this thread is, at least originally, somewhat more in line with much older legends about faeries taking mortals as lovers - that is, these are highly aestheticized and romanticized narratives (as opposed to the 'grit' of early paranormal) that nonetheless derive most of their tension and suspense from the impossibility of any mortal truly being able to trust or rely on a faerie, who are depicted as inherently capricious, inhuman, unfeeling, and unreliable lovers. (Think of the faeries playing games with the mortal characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream - not quite actively malicious, but certainly high-handed and careless enough to feel that way to their victims.)

In the hands of 2000s and 2010s writers like Holly Black, Julie Kagawa, and Melissa Marr (all of whom I would read as some of the direct antecedents to Maas, especially Marr) this narrative merges with the tropes of the paranormal romance to create a kind of gritty fairy tale romance, with fae love interests who take on the narrative role traditionally played by vampires in, for example, Twilight - powerful and compelling supernatural figures who, because of their fundamental nature, pose a danger to the female heroine they are inevitably in love with. (Vampires inherently want to drink your blood! Werewolves inherently want to eat you! Faeries inherently want to fuck with you just for the sake of it! Which makes a human woman attempting to romance any of them inherently fraught & dangerous, & therefore a structurally interesting premise for a romance novel. And, of course, the metaphors for the difficulty of regular human heterosexual romance abound.)

The appeal of the faerie lover specifically over the vampire or werewolf is, I think, that the faerie still retains some of the wondrous, fanastical, romantic glamor by which we tend to define high fantasies and classic fairy tales more generally - they can be magical, capital r Romantic figures in a way quite distinct from the gritty, noir-coded, 'realistic' supernatural appeal of the vampire as depicted in paranormal romance. So the resurgence in popularity of fae lord love intersts today over the vampires or werewolves of the previous decades we might put down to a broader cultural turn away from a kind of emphasis on realism, cynicism, low fantasy 'punk' aesthetics etc, and towards a desire for more idealistic or romantic (or, in the cynical view, more sanitized) narrative figures - which is also, perhaps, echoed in the current parallel surge of the popularity of romantasy over the older paranormal romance.

I think there's also something worth unpacking in the transition from the popularity of socially liminal paranormal love interests like vampires, werewolves, etc - all of whom, in urban fantasy / paranormal settings, tend to explicitly exist in various underworlds, demimondes, on the margins of real or normal society, & so on - to today's version of the romantasy fae lord, who has been transformed from his original urban fantasy character (where, again, he essentially fulfills the same narrative function as the vampire - mysterious, dangerous, liminal, beyond the bounds of the real) into sort of the opposite of a socially marginalized role. Instead of living in the fantasy demimonde & concealing his true nature as a faerie from society etc, the romantasy fae lord (who in most romantasy I've seen - ie the Maas version - is functionally just a pop version of a Tolkien elf; there's very little of actual faerie mythology remaining in these depictions) is fully socially integrated into his world, & inhabits a role of overt social & political power - he's literally a feudal lord. So what's being eroticized & romanticized is no longer transgression or 'the outsider' in any sense, but rather a much more traditional (some might argue regressive) figure of inherited, established (& necessarily masculine) authority. It's a really interesting shift, anyway!

*post script: I'll also add that the various permutations of 'soulmates' and 'mated lovers' & the relentless tendency to call people 'males' & 'females' etc in romantasy I believe comes almost entirely from Maas, who in turn is getting it pretty exclusively from older high fantasy paranormal mashups like Sherrilyn Kenyon's Hunter Legends series (1999) and Wilson's Lord of the Fading Lands series (2007). (So for example the Wilson series is, to the best of my memory, about an immortal shapeshifting dragon king & his romance with his reincarnated true love / fated soulmate, a human woman; I do acknowledge that I read it a very long time ago & so may be wildly misstating the plot - the jacket summary calls him a 'Fey King,' which I simply don't remember at all, but seems even more suggestive!) Anyway, these are all popular tropes in this kind of fantasy romance, & as far I'm aware don't really have much to do with the incorporation of faeries as love interests specifically - it's just a sort of intersection of Maas's particular writing habits & the paranormal romance tradition that shaped them.

*post post script: a little more browsing led me to Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, published 1987, which according to Wikipedia is in fact one of the earliest instances of urban fantasy & is also, serendipitously, a faerie romance. Cool! Anyway this seems relevant for those interested in the timeline; I haven't read it myself & thus can't especially comment on its role in the development of the genre, however, beyond noting the fact that it too seems to be taking much of its fantasy & fae references from pre-existing Celtic & British folklore.

[mask131]

There we go! I found back the group of authors I talked about in my previous reblog of this thread! I kept thinking of them as the "New Inklings" but this got me nowhere. Luckily I got back the article I discovered the group's existence through. It was written by A.F. Ruaud for an encyclopedia of fantasy: it was the Scribblies, also called the "Minneapolis school".

Ruaud describes this group as having caused a "quiet revolution" in fantasy literature in the 80s. This is a bit off topic from the original subject so I will put it under a cut but here is what Ruaud has to say about the group:

Minneapolis, which he describes as a sort of "giant real-life Twin Peaks" became in the 1980s the center of North-American fantasy, it was were a renewal of the genre was born. The Scribblies were formed out of a small group of fantasy and sci-fi enthusiasts putting together a writing workshop (which was back then very popular in the USA, with the Clarion Workshops for example which had an influence on the shifts in the sci-fi genre). However unlike the Clarion Workshops (which caused a unification and a "cleaning" of the sci-fi genre into a more "neo-classical style"), the Minneapolis group was merely to help six individuals with very different styles and tastes to refine their writing.

Of the six only one of them never wrote any books: it was Nathan Bucklin, who rather became a songwriter. But the other five became writers: Patricia C. Wrede, Steven Brust, Emma Bull, Pamela Dean and Will Shetterly. They formed the Interstate Writers Workshop, aka Scribblies, jokingly named after the Industrial Workers of the World aka "Wobblies". In parallel to the formation of the group, Ellen Kushner began her career in New-York with the anthology Basilisk reprinting old texts mixed with new ones - John Harrison, Ursula Le Guin and Alan Garner are in the same pages as Joan D. Vinge,R.A. Lafferty, Michael Bishop and Elizabeth Lynn. Ellen Kushner, with her anthology, wanted to point out how a "traditional" fantasy was starting to dominate the industry, as opposed to a more uncommon, out-of-the-usual fantasy - and Ellen Kushner promptly collaborated for Basilisk with a freshly-beginning fantasy artist known as... Terri Windling, who even replacd Kushner as a fantasy editor later (she dropped this in 1981 to either write her own texts or do radio shows).

Terri Windling was (as said above in the previous posts) the woman behind an enormous part of the fantasy of this era. She created the anthologies Elsewhere and Faery! with the idea that "fantasy" was not a "minor" genre, and she was versed in fantasy works outside of the Tolkien and post-Tolkien. She pushed for the re-printing of authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Sylvia Townsend-Warner and Angela Carter, and she was the advocate for a fantasy that would become a more common-day part of literature. Because, despite the works of people like Lin Carter and Donald A. Wollheim in the 70s, "fantasy" was still a marginal genre. While sci-fi could get its own specialized collections, fantasy was usually mixed with other genres or bound to the "youth and kids" section of bookshops. Terri Windling changed this - for example by convincing some youth authors to start writing for adults (like Jane Yolen).

And of course there were the Scribblies.

Patricia C. Wrede began her career with youth fantasy, by her cycle of Lyra, sold to Terri Windling for Ace Books. The other Scribblies followed: Pamela Dean with the Secret Country trilogy, Will Shetterly with Cats Have No Lord (influence by Goldman's Princess Bride) plus The Tangled Lands. But these authors were still "classical" in their handling of the genre, still set within the post-Tolkien wave of fantasy. This was not so much the case of Steven Brust and Emma Bull. Brust, following the paths of Leiber and Zelazny, was the most prolific and diverse of the Scribblies - the Vlad Taltos series, To Reign in Hell, his The Sun, the Moon and the Stars, Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grill, and his The Gypsy, one of the early urban-fantasies, written in collab with Megan Lindholm.

As for Emma Bull, she actually created one of the very first books that formed the genre we know today as "urban fantasy" - as said in the post above, 1987's War for the Oaks, the cult-classic deemed precursor of the entire subgenre. And, under the direction of both Emma Bull and Will Shetterly, the Scribblies created their shared universe known as "Liavek" - where they could write all sorts of stories in an urban yet pseudo-medieval enviroonment. Slowly other authors joined the Scribblies: John M. Ford, Jane Yolen, Gene Wolfe, Alan Moore. Charles de Lint and Megan Lindholm (later known as Robin Hobb) both made their debuts with the Scribblies.

Charles de Lint also had his career propelled by Terri Windling. After publishing a fantasy collection for young readers, "Magic Quest", which reunited the works of Diana Wynne Jones, Tanith Lee and Jane Yolen, Windling created a shared universe for a teenage audience: the famous "Bordertown" which has been talked about above. Windling wanted with this universe to develop the recent "urban fantasy" style - so she imagined that the fairies returned to modern day, colonized a city of North America that they moved to the frontier of Faerie, and this resulted in a cohabitation of technology and magic, elves and humans. But the theme was not so much merry or humoristic as "harsh, punk and fascinating". Bordertown was not a commercial success, but it became a cult classic like so many other works tied to the Scribblies - Scribblies who gained more members with Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Charles de Lint and Midori Snyder.

There were four Bordertown volumes from 1986 to 1998, with three other novels set in the city and released in the 90s - Elsewhere, Nevernever (both by Will Shetterly) and Finder (by Emma Bull). Ruaud claims that in hindsight the entirety of the "Bordertown" project was the precursor of what we call today the "Young Adult" books - and a new book was even released in 2011, Welcome to Bordertown.

Terri Windling then went on to create two more collections. One was the Ace Fantasy Specials (based on the Ace Science Fiction Specials of Terry Carr) but only gathered three books: Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, M. Lucie Chin's The Fairy of Ku-She, and Delia Sherman's Through a Brazen Mirror. The second collection was the "Fairy Tale" collection begun in 1987 with Steven Brust's The Sun, the Moon and the Stars. It focused on reinterpreting fairytales into folk-fantasy adult novels: Charles de Lint's Jack the Giant Killer, Kara Dalkey's The Nightingale, Patricia C. Wrede's Snow White and Rose Red, Pamela Dean's Tam-Lin, Jane Yolen's Briar Rose, Tanith Lee's White as Snow and Gregory Frost's Fitcher's Bride.

Later Windling left Ace for Tor, where she began a new fantasy line to which Steven Brust and Charles de Lint participated. She also continued her series of fairytale-themed books - alongside Ellen Datlow she notably created a large collection of fairytales rewriten by fantasy authors - which began with 1985's Snow White Blood Red (a collection which Ruaud claims was, again, "precursor" to what American television would be obsessed about just a few years later, pointing out the success of TV shows like Grimm and Once Upon a Time). The article also mentions some other noticeable anthologies of her - the annual The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror or her four mythical-fantasy books illustrated by Charles Vess (The Green Man, The Faery Reel, The Coyote Road, The Beastly Bride) - as well as her own novels, her own writings, of which Ruaud claims The Wood Wife is the masterpiece, in a style close to Robert Holdstock and Charles de Lint.

Ruaud then returns to the Scribblies, mentionning that while was but an informal group they did have a chart - or rather some sort of manifesto - which created what they called the "Pre-Joycean Fellowship", claiming to be against elitism and modernism when it came to literature, defending a style without hypocrisy but filled with humor and a deep attraction to the ancient myths. But, as Shetterly explained in interviews, it was mainly a joke based on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, just an excuse to gather, drink and read books - though they did want to break down the wall that had been built to split "popular fiction" from "proper literature", as they wanted to create books with stories appreciated by ordinary readers and a style that would please more sophisticated audiences. In retrospective he deemed they should have called it the Pre-Jamesian Fellowship instead, as he feels Henry James embodied better the "splitting" of literature. The Scribblies and the Pre-Joycean Fellowship had several common members, but did not entirely overlap. (And the Pre-Joycean Fellowship later morphed into the "Young Trollopes" but that's another story).

Ruaud concludes that three main literary currents were born of the shared work of Terri Windling and the Scribblies:

1- A "return to the origins", a "return to the sources" current, which paid homage to the Victorian and Edwardian tales of fairies, ghosts and other worlds, the era in which "fantasy" began to emerge. It is the current of authors wanting to write fantasy as if Lord of the Rings never existed, to get out of the crushing shadow of Tolkien, to find back the "fresh childhood of the genre", to reconcile fantasy with its past. Examples include John Barnes' One for the Morning Glory, Patrick O'Leary's The Gift and Neil Gaiman's Stardust.

2- Manierist fantasy, a term coined for Ellen Kushner's first novel Swordspoint, but which also applies to her second novel, Thomas the Rhymer. The trilogy Sorcery and Cecelia by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer belongs to this sub-genre, John Crowley's Little, Big could be considered a precursor of it, and the book that truly placed it under the spotlight was Greer Gilman's Moonwise. One of the most recent best-sellers of this current is Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel. Ruaud also mentions another Scribblies work here - the Emma Bull and Steven Brust's collab Freedom & Necessity, which he deems to mix the imaginary Renaissance of manierist fantasy with the Victorian reimagining of the steampunk genre, while also belonging to the "return to the sources" current, and forming one of the rare Marxist fantasies around.

3 - Finally, as said above, urban fantasy, which can be considered the main "product" of the Scribblies' creations.

[sarahreesbrennan]

SORRY this was the one I meant to reblog but got lost in the genre evolution sauce and should not transpose my previous essay! But shared again for the full story on Terri Windling and the Scribblies.

And really fae urban fantasy cannot be considered completely reflected on unless we consider Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue. OK done this time for real!

[elliespectacular]

you're just distracting yourself from your problems by formulating and enacting solutions to them

[romanceyourdemons]

in the tradition of outcast (2014), dragon blade (2015), and the great wall (2016), we need a movie set in the 1630s where a disillusioned member of the embroidered uniform guard and a profit-driven jianghu mercenary flee the corrupt and crumbling ming dynasty and somehow end up in the equally corrupt city of cologne, where they become key players in the fight against the sinister forces of cardinal richelieu and eventually secure the peace of westphalia and the end of the thirty years’ war. this is a million dollar idea i’m telling you

[romanceyourdemons]

i really do love this concept. the protagonist is like i’m sick of dealing with wei zhongxian’s shit, i’m gonna go someplace where people are holy and don’t even know how to act like this (the impression of europe he got from the jesuit missionary he had a tactical lunch with once), and so he travels 5000 miles and as soon as he stops to catch his breath he runs into cardinal fucking richelieu, the european wei zhongxian

[anthonyhurd]

Just feeling like the luckiest soul at the moment. That thing that haunted me as a child brought me community and wholeness as an adult. I’ll forever be grateful for my queerness.

[hellyeahscarleteen]

At Scarleteen, we believe conversations about abortion should be honest, respectful, inclusive, supportive and unapologetic.

That includes providing clear, accurate, compassionate, and nonjudgemental information about it, because everyone deserves the knowledge they need to make their own best decisions about their own body. 

We think, and have always thought, that abortion is good. It’s a stance that – especially in the first two decades of our tenure – resulted in some reproductive health and sex education providers and organizations shunning us, and in constant pushback from people and groups who are anti-abortion. But it’s not an optional stance for us, because telling the truth isn’t optional for us. The truth is that abortion is good: both a personal good and a public good.

Abortion allows people to determine their own destinies. Abortion saves lives. Abortion isn’t some kind of necessary evil but a core tenet of human dignity, freedom and bodily autonomy. It should be safe, accessible, legal, stigma-free, and affordable for anyone and everyone who wants or needs it

Abortion is too often discussed as something that has to be defended or justified. We don’t think it needs an apology. Abortion isn’t something we need to treat as a last-resort moral compromise. We also don’t think that it makes sense to call abortion anything but abortion, something we have in common with the Abortion Positivity Project (APP), who we’re really excited to be collaborating with this week.

We hope you enjoy hearing the folks at the APP explain why saying abortion when we’re talking about abortion – rather than using soft language or other euphemisms for it – can be key to gaining ground in the fight for abortion rights. We’ll also be sharing some of our abortion resources this week for anyone looking for straightforward, supportive information without scare tactics, or judgment: resources that range from explaining what abortion is, how different methods work – including how to engage in self-managed abortion safely and effectively –  and what people can expect before, during, and after an abortion:

From Pro-Choice to Abortion Positive

How to (Un)pack for a Real Discussion About Abortion

All About Abortion

The World Needs Safe, Self-Managed Abortion: Here's Why.

[geopsych]

I think I’ll start posting cooling pictures and videos during the heat wave.

It has to be much colder than the freezing point for ice to form on a running stream. My fingers were probably aching with cold when I took this. But it was beautiful