As part of my goal to clean out my drafts, I’ve summarized the contents of what I’ve saved this year:
Most of disgraced ex-YouTuber James Somerton’s fabrications were obviously motivated by wanting to create a narrative he and/or his audience would enjoy, but he probably could have done that without lying if he had slightly more nuanced/subtle tastes in narratives (why did every homophobe, straight person, and presumed-straight woman need to be an easily scandalized boob out of a vintage snobs vs. slobs comedy?).
A lot of people in fandom want a Pride and Prejudice-style romance, but a lot of media that attracts the biggest fandoms doesn’t feature that kind of romance very often, which often causes tensions in fandom whether or not there’s an exception.
When people describe the body positivity of the 2010s, they’re kind of smushing together the moderate relenting of the more obnoxious 2000s fatphobia early in the decade with a vogue for bigger butts that started a few years into the decade but didn’t peak until a few years later. Neither of which is actually purposeful body positivity.
The Blue Castle is marketed as YA almost entirely because L.M. Montgomery is best known for writing youth literature, not because a romance starring a twenty-nine-year-old woman is anyone’s idea of YA. However, I absolutely adored it as a thirteen-year-old so I would not say its virtues are lost on an adolescent audience.
Are people (general population, not experts in relevant fields) less mystified by the psychology of mass shooters than they used to be? I guess it wouldn’t be surprising if they were.
I don’t think Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights is supposed to be white by 1840s or modern definitions, because I’ve read older literature where a character who appears to be Roma turns out to be white, an Italian character is portrayed in a very racialized way, etc., and it’s just written differently than Wuthering Heights. However, I think the speculation of the white characters on this subject is a deeply questionable source of information, because (a) they don’t know and (b) their guesses are clearly influenced by their general attitude towards Heathcliff a lot of the time (Nelly suggesting that he has high-status parents in faraway countries when she feels sympathetic to him vs. the elder Lintons saying he looks like the hated local minority when they discover him and Cathy trespassing).
