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"it's not queer fiction unless the queerness is explicitly declared in the text according to currently accepted terminology and in a way that meets the approval of the entire audience" I mean follow your heart I guess but I trust myself as a queer person to recognise queer themes
"waaaah the special effects are cheesy" "waaaah they play fast and loose with history" "waaaah it's full of progressive ideas" IT'S DOCTOR WHO BITCH do you go to an Italian restaurant and complain that there's pasta and tomatoes
here's the fucking thing though. crowley lost his flat when he left hell, and he's been living in his car all this time, and he didn't move in with aziraphale because aziraphale did not know because crowley did not tell him. but like. crowley could very much get another flat? I know the rental market in london is a 🎶fucking nightmare🎶 but he is a demon. he could get a flat just like aziraphale has his bookshop. but he doesn't. he lives in his car in the vicinity of the bookshop. he spends all his time in the bookshop, but doesn't live there. he can't get that close, but he won't go any further away, because there's nowhere else he'd rather be. neat
hmm. thinking about how god cast down an angel who'd been creating nebulae and made him crawl on the ground as a snake, where he probably couldn't even see the stars. especially not with those eyes
thinking about "although he was thinking of changing it. Crawly, he'd decided, was not him" and "it's a bit too... squirming-at-your-feet-ish" and how he went along with being Crawly for so long before he decided or remembered that wasn't who he was
#they're just like us
me every time in Broadchurch that Alec Hardy is forced to do something other than be a detective, like socialise with coworkers or go on a date: someone HELP HIM he's in a Situation
It genuinely disturbs me how many of y'all seem to have based your opinions and perceptions of everything on what "influencers" are doing. And I don't just mean believing what they tell you, or adopting their opinions, or buying what they tell you to buy, or whatever. I also mean people who say "I can't stand xyz because influencers are weird about it." So stop paying attention to them? These people cannot be the lens through which you see the world. Not only because they're motivated by a need to gain viewers and make money and this skews what they present to you, but because literally nobody should be your proxy for experiencing life and gaining new information.
Regardless of your circumstances, you do have resources outside of TikTok and YouTube for broadening your horizons, and you've got to peel yourself away from your phone screen and do it. Or you're gonna look back one day and realize you outsourced a huge chunk of your life experience to someone who makes Content™ to fill the space between ad reads.
On safety and censorship: Why lists of content warnings should be crowdsourced and digital, NOT printed on books
Listen to me. I am sympathetic to the reasons people want content warnings for books, and I don't disagree with having them. But I NEED y'all to understand that, when you demand that those warnings physically be on the book itself rather than being, say, on a third-party website, you are just handing book banners another tool for censorship.
Stay with me here, because I know some of you are Already Mad that I'm even saying this. If you're still mad when I'm done, feel free to argue for why you still absolutely 100% need those warnings to be in or on the actual book.
Book banning is fucking rampant in the United States right now. There are people who make it their full-time job to act as censors of content they don't approve of, leveraging anything they can possibly find to get books they don't like taken out of libraries. They are lobbying for extremely regressive laws to be passed, and then using those laws to threaten the very existence of libraries and the jobs of people who work there. We cannot give these people any more tools to do this than they already have.
Content warnings on books are exactly that sort of tool. They are effectively a handy list for a book banner to point to and say, "This book is Bad and Dangerous, and here are all the reasons why."
Now, they could still do this with a third-party website (e.g., StoryGraph) that allows users to add content-related tags for books. But that is an extra step, for one thing. If you argue that it's inconvenient to you to have to look up a book's content warnings rather than find them in the book itself, then you should recognize that it's also inconvenient to book banners. Are you willing to be slightly inconvenienced in order to make their job harder?
Furthermore, when a list of content warnings is printed in or on a book, that gives it more implied authority than a crowdsourced list somewhere on the internet. The implication is that the author and/or publisher agree that the things on this list appear in the book and that they merit warning people about. To a Moms For Liberty wingnut or a conservative state representative, that is a gift tied up with a bow. They can say, "Look, even the publisher of this book agrees that it's filled with content that might harm children! And they want this sitting on the shelf where your nine-year-old child can just pick it up and start reading it whether you like it or not." It sounds a bit sillier to have to say, "A bunch of anonymous people on the internet said this about this book, and we should trust them."
And you know what? For a second, let's forget about those assholes. You still want content warnings. Okay! So which would you rather have: A list of content warnings put together by an author or publisher whose level of understanding of trauma triggers is unknown to you, a list that cannot be added to or improved once printed? Or a list of content warnings crowdsourced from readers like yourself, on a website you can contribute to, that can always be expanded to include things that might have been overlooked?
It seems to me that the main argument for putting the warnings on the books themselves is, "But it's inconvenient to have to look them up elsewhere." I've already pointed out how this is also inconvenient for book banners, and personally I think that's a fair tradeoff, but maybe you're not convinced. What if someone doesn't have internet access? Well, that brings us back to libraries, which offer free internet access to the public, and which also employ librarians who will be happy to look up information like this on a book you're interested in. Or you can ask a friend. Or organize some other way to disseminate this information to each other. Yes, it's an inconvenience—but how big of one? Isn't it a reasonable one to put up with, both to hinder book censorship and to prioritize online resources that everyone can contribute to?
Book banning is a huge problem. If you are a reader, you must care about this. One small way you can help is by accepting the inconvenience of having to look up content warnings rather than have them on the book. You still get the thing you want; you just have to make a small effort to get it. Is that really too much to ask?
