#glittancy

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It took us three whole hours to figure out why we found her voice so familiar.

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Either Wildbow protagonists need to stop being so relatable, or we need to go to the therapist.

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~Our friend ori made this edit, and it was too good not to share.~

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My friend Sarah has the wisdom to no longer use this website (may we all strive to emulate her), but xe told me I could post his latest banger quote here:

Starting all of my books with a disclaimer that says if you stole the book from somewhere, good for you, please distribute copies to all your loved ones. But if you bought it from amazon please know that it was an illegitimate sale and for this crime a curse shall befall 3 generations of your family, and if you (or the next in line) do not have children, the curse defaults to the person or people you care about most. The only way to lift the curse is to pirate the book even though you've already paid for it

A bunch of the shit Sarah idly says is simply too good not to share. Keeping it to myself would be an act of violence against joy.

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@charlottan being banned might be enough for us to stop caring about this shithole of a website

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Hot(?) take: I wish Western SFF authors understood there was more to “epicness” than empires, nobles, and wars. I see those words, even as critiques, and I instantly get exhausted. Some of them end up good stories, but it often feels like that happens despite their frameworks.

Yeah, sure, empires and wars dictate the course of history. But so do random nobodies. And (if I may be petty), why the fixation on history, when only one or two characters in your whole story are actually written well?

I just can’t imagine having such a narrow view of what’s cool, let alone what’s important. Please validate me I feel like I’m losing my mind

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Note: We’re Arab, not Native American, so listen to their opinions on this before ours.

I wanted to have hope that Outlaws of Thunder Junction would be handled well, or even just not awfully. But the evidence is starting to rack up, folks, and it aint pretty:

At MagicCon, Blake Rasmussen (mtg’s Senior Communications Manager) said that, “everyone’s a newcomer to Thunder Junction.”

Also at that MagicCon panel, Aaron Forsythe (VP of Magic Design) called it an “unspoiled land.”

Mark Rosewater (mtg Head Designer) says that, “prior to omen paths [sic], it was uninhabited.”

Could this just be three white guys saying White Guy Things? Sure. Especially since they’ve all shown themselves in the past to be kinda uninformed on the particulars of their product’s storyline. But it’s not a great look.

The narrative that lands are uninhabited and ripe for plunder is inextricable from the American colonial genocide of indigenous nations (which has never stopped). This is especially the case in a setting based on the American West, rife with the trappings of the imperialist genre of American Westerns, and fraught with the colonialist propaganda of “frontier fantasy.” For this world, they’ve even created an ethnic group explicitly based on the Diné nation, per the official MTG Twitter account. Yet they still chose to center the set’s story around the genocidal selling point of “exploring uninhabited lands to find untold treasure and fortune.”

Yes, they’ve said they used cultural consultants. And, sure, that’s gone well-ish (though not without great flaws) for NEO and LCI. But whatever influence those consultants were allowed to have on OTJ, it was clearly not enough. Because holy shit, even the (otherwise amazing) side story, No Tells, says, “Thunder Junction’s a new plane, one that’s still beginning.” (Do NOT go hating on the author; I doubt he had control over that level of worldbuilding.)

All of this has shattered my hope in the set being respectful, or even not actively harmful. You can say, “wait and see,” and we will, but we’ve seen a lot already—and gang, it has not looked good.