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@yogurtverse
Hey, I'm on Tumblr
What's up Tumblr people, I'm CodeNameYogurt. This is where I'll share my writing stuff with all of you (currently doing a rewrite of my first webnovel, Destiny Destroyers. Now available on Tapas, Royal Road and Wattpad) So feel free to follow me for updates on that if it interests you
And here's the first chapter of Mean Streets, a comic about becoming a supervillain because in this job market, it's not that unreasonable an option. Posting this online in the hopes it serves as some sort of motivation to release and make more blender stuff. Anyway, enjoy
I made a webcomic btw
🧪 Want to get the quickest updates to the project? Chat with other readers? Join the MANOR OF TERROR hangout discord!
Ace Attorney Deaths: They say the defendant bludgeoned the victim with a convenient flat object. The circumstances themselves aren't impossible. But the information about the motive is coming from a parrot on the witness stand. Danganronpa Deaths: I thought we were all friends here but it seems SOMEONE couldn't resist killing someone and then dramatically revealing the body in some crazy, dramatic fashion. No thanks to whoever probably tampered with the crime scene to make it more interesting. Zero Escape Deaths: It's all normal murder. The weird part is that the victim came back to life as a clone, or everyone's killing each other, or there's cross-timeline transportation and the destruction of humanity involved. AI The Somnium Files Deaths: Who is the killer, and why would they keep doing THAT to the corpses? And can people stop dying for five minutes, we're only one route in and I don't know what's going on! Buried Stars Deaths: The murders are all kinda normal but we're a small cast and we're not solving this ourselves. Time to call in the big guns... the toxic Twitter feed. Process of Elimination/Tantei Bokumetsu Deaths: You take your eyes off this group for five minutes and they've somehow Rube Goldberged each other into the cruelest and most unusual way a person can possibly die, all without anyone noticing. Gnosia Deaths: The two options are "vanished into thin air" and "chucked in the freezer", and the second one's democratically sanctioned. But there's a secret third option, which is "thrown out the airlock for misgendering someone", and a secret fourth which is "slime". Your Turn to Die Deaths: It's not the murders that are cruel, it's the player's participation in the murders. Ghost Trick Phantom Detective Deaths: The first step of trying to keep someone from dying is watching them die and going, "THAT'S how you died?!" before rolling up your sleeves and fixing the situation. Paranormasight Deaths: In any other game, deducing how someone drowned in the middle of a field while bone dry would be the subject of a huge Ace Attorney style courtroom segment. In this game it's just "probably this one specific curse stone", and the hard part is finding out what criteria they fulfilled on a technicality to activate it.
PLEASE for the love of the universe read anti-colonial science fiction and fantasy written from marginalized perspectives. Y’all (you know who you are) are killing me. To see people praise books about empire written exclusively by white women and then turn around and say you don’t know who Octavia Butler is or that you haven’t read any NK Jemisin or that Babel was too heavy-handed just kills me! I’m not saying you HAVE to enjoy specific books but there is such an obvious pattern here
Some of y’all love marginalized stories but you don’t give a fuck about marginalized creators and characters, and it shows. Like damn
If anyone has any recommendations give them to me please!
Gladly! The pieces on this list aren’t limited to specifically anti-colonial science fiction and fantasy, but they do center related and relevant topics, themes, etc.
Anything by NK Jemisin. She is the best speculative fiction writer of her generation and probably the best speculative fiction writer alive. She is easily one of the best writers working right now, across all genres. That’s not hyperbole. She deserves all the hype.
Anything by Octavia Butler. She needs no introduction. Her short fiction is incredible; “Bloodchild” is one of the pieces that inspired me to write.
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon. Excellent. Just read it.
The Radiant Emperor duology by Shelley P. Chan. It broke my heart and it'll break yours.
Babel by RF Kuang. You’ve probably already heard of this book because Harper Voyager marketed the shit out of it and was right to do so. It’s very, very good. Kuang writes a compulsively readable story, that’s for sure.
The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo.
So Long Been Dreaming: Post-Colonial Science Fiction and Fantasy (anthology) edited by Nalo Hopkinson.
Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (anthology) edited by Nalo Hopkinson.
Severely underhyped books of assorted speculative genres:
The Blood Trials by NE Davenport. Given the current chokehold romantasy has on the public it’s insane to me that this book hasn’t sold a billion copies.
The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez. It’ll change you.
The Tiger’s Daughter by K. Arsenault Rivera.
The Lesson by Caldwell Turnbull.
Read widely. Read diversely. People of the Caucasian persuasion need to stop getting pissy when the story doesn’t immediately center them and they don’t automatically relate to everything the character says and does and is. Just let yourself get swept in the story—even if it touches on (gasp!) racism—and maybe, just maybe, it’ll reveal something to you.
Or maybe not! Marginalized sff authors do not have to and should not have to educate their readers. But if I see one more white person complain about how Black characters are fundamentally annoying because they complain too much I’m going to fling myself into the sun
Thanks for coming to my ted talk I didn’t want to do it but here I am
Don't forget Aliette de Bodard! Especially her Xuya and Dominion of the Fallen series.
Zen Cho is my other favorite - Sorcerer to the Crown and The True Queen, and also Black Water Sister.
Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements is a fantastic collection of short scifi stories written by a variety of social justice activists
Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson is so intricately plotted, I really enjoyed the world building in it, the back of book blurb says "The rich and privileged have fled the city, barricaded it behind roadblocks, and left it to crumble. The inner city has had to rediscover old ways — farming, barter, herb lore. But now the monied need a harvest of bodies, and so they prey upon the helpless of the streets. With nowhere to turn, a young woman must open herself to ancient truths, eternal powers, and the tragic mystery surrounding her mother and grandmother. She must bargain with gods, and give birth to new legends."
Dread Nation by Justina Ireland is a YA alternative historical fiction zombie novel in which the American Civil War is interrupted by a zombie apocalypse, and a young Black woman must find her way in a world where the living may be more dangerous than the undead. (it's the first of a duology)
Everfair by Nisi Shawl is a steampunk alternative history, which explores the question of what might have come of Belgium's disastrous colonization of the Congo if the native populations had adopted steam technology as their own. (also part of a series)
The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline is a great ya dystopian book about a world where people have lost the ability to dream and the dreamlessness has led to widespread madness. The only people still able to dream are North America's Indigenous people, and it is their marrow that holds the cure for the rest of the world. But getting the marrow, and dreams, means death for the unwilling donors.
The Getaway by Lamar Giles is a very intense YA dystopian horror that takes place in the future, in which a teen boy and his family work and live at a Disney-esque resort, which provides safety from the upheaval in the outside world.... until the trouble in the outside world gets worse and the most rich members of the board and up moving in and locking the resort down, leaving the families who live & work on the resort at the mercy of the wealthy board owners who control it.
Not a book and not exactly scifi (although some of the stories are scifi) and not always anti-colonial (but a lot of the stories have anti-colonial themes) , I really love the Nightlight Podcast hosted by Tonia Ransom, which is a podcast of horror stories by Black writers and performed by Black actors
not fiction, but semi-related nonfiction I'd rec is Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction by Sami Schalk
Throwing in The Kingston Cycle by CL Polk, basically everything I've ever wanted in a fantasy novel. Like if the author had my checklist.
You know, if I discovered I had time travel, the first thing I'd do is look up what archeological finds were done in the mid-90s, travel back to those digs being made for the first time, and leave a drawing of the Simpson family there. So the guys discover an ancient tomb that just has all these ancient relics and also a perfect drawing of the Simpsons from 2000 years before it came out. The creators would have to cover it, the news would cover it. Just the ancient tomb feat. The Simpsons
happy gotcha day Brick 💙☀️
What if you were about to be sentenced to hell at the pearly gates but you got the divine equivalent of Mario Party bonus stars to get to heaven? Like you took the most medication or read the most novels out of the last 5 people to die so you get bonus heaven points
jack frost punched away by true gif
The thing about censorship is: it actually makes kids MORE likely to stumble across things that theyre not ready for.
Back before this site banned porn, it was all tagged with whatever clear label matched it. If you wanted to search for, say, bdsm, you could type that in and find exactly that. And, crucially, it meant you could filter it out, too. Meaning that people who wanted to find that content could do so with ease, and people who wanted to not find that content on their dash by surprise could also ensure that with ease.
But then tumblr banned porn thanks to pressure from the Apple App store, and ----- did porn go away? Nope. It just stopped being labelled as porn. There's still all the same raunchy content on here as there was before -- its just not tagged, or its tagged with euphemisms, or tagged with creative tags that circumvent the bans, or tagged with completely unrelated should-be-innocuous tags like "oceans" or "photography" or "flowers" or etc.
Which not only makes it harder to find, but also, more importantly, makes it harder to avoid.
Nowadays I can be scrolling my dash and get slapped suddenly in the face by a post that is decidedly not G-rated, and its because neither the OP or the person who reblogged it has tagged with anything, meaning my blocklist (which I have in place so that I'm not surprised by a raunchy gifset while I'm scrolling my dash in the work lunchroom, surrounded by colleagues) hasn't caught it and filtered it out.
And the same thing is going to happen on other platforms. If you ban porn, the outcome is never "there is no more porn" -- the outcome is just "porn is harder to find now and simultaneously harder to avoid."
This post was prompted by a random post i saw earlier today which ive since lost, but which was an advert for some """fishing gear""" that looked pretty much like a dildo. And who knows, maybe that item WAS some kind of obscure fishing gear. But it made me think of how, with the censorship and purity culture infecting every corner of the internet, it means we ARE going to wind up with sites that are selling sex toys that are labelled as innocuous everyday items.
So imagine youre a kid and you get suddenly super into fishing, and you're looking into building a christmas wish list, so you research a bunch of fishing tackle. And there, nestled amongst the lures and weights and lines and tackle boxes, is a bunch of sex toys. None of them are labelled as sex toys. Theyre labelled as miscellaneous fishing tackle. Because, unbeknownst to you, the sex toys companies -- no longer able to advertise their wares honestly -- have started labelling their dildos as fishing lures and their whips as fishing poles and their butt plugs as fishing weights. And those In The Know are aware that to purchase sex toys, you need to look up these Regular Non-sexy Products, and you'll find the raunchy products youre after.
But meanwhile, anyone who wants to find ACTUAL fishing lures and poles and weights suddenly has to contend with mislabelled sex toys showing up in their search results.
TLDR? Censoring porn never makes it go away. It just makes it go into hiding. Which, in an internet era, makes it more likely that the kids you're trying so hard to """protect""" from porn will simply stumble upon it through routes that used to be but are no longer innocuous.
Divergent is a bad book, but its accidental brilliance is that it completely mauled the YA dystopian genre by stripping it down to its barest bones for maximum marketability, utterly destroying the chances of YA dystopian literature’s long-term survival
please elaborate
Sure. Imagine that you need to make a book, and this book needs to be successful. This book needs to be the perfect Marketable YA Dystopian.
So you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can’t get in the way of the audience’s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly–yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.
You think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games’ titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses.
So the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic–they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they’ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite or Dauntless alongside Aquarius and Ravenclaw and INTJ. Congratulations, you just made having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding.
Your readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don’t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn’t need to be anything else.
The villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid plan. You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf.
And you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave–no, special enough to stand against it.
And by making this bare-bones world, crafted for maximum marketability, you expose yourself and every other YA dystopian writer as a lazy worldbuilder driven too far by the “rule of cool” and the formulas of other, better dystopian books before yours. In the following five years, you watch in real time as the dystopian genre crumbles under your feet, as the movies made based on your successful (but later widely-panned and mocked) books slowly regress to video-only releases, as fewer and fewer releases try to do what you did. And maybe you realize what you’ve done.
one quibble: hunger games was intense and sincere and the writer had worked for tv and knew exactly what she was talking about when she wrote how media machines create golden idols out of abused kids and then leave the actual people inside their glamorous shells to rot. hunger games had a genuine core of righteous anger that resonated with a lot of people. the hunger games was genuinely angry about shit that is genuinely wrong.
but divergent was clumsy make-believe the whole way through. it aped the forms and functions of dystopian lit but the writer didn’t actually have any real, passionate, sincere anger to put on the page. she didn’t know what it was talking about, so she didn’t have anything worth listening to.
there’s a difference between anti-authoritarianism as a disaffected, cynical pose and anti-authoritarianism as a rallying cry by people who believe in a bitter world. and the former is something corporations and industries and publishing houses are so much more comfortable with. so divergent and the flood of books published and marketed alongide and after it showed how the dystopian genre was no longer truly revolutionary, no longer a sincere condemnation of corporate oligarchies. the mass-market dystopian genre was now nothing more than an insincere playspace for people who were writing dystopia as a safely distant, abstract make-believe stage for their pretty girl heroes, rather than a direct allegory for everything that needs to be torn down in this world today.
This is the second branch of this post I’ve reblogged and like the fourth I’ve seen and I’m just thinking about how the Uglies series, a pre-Hunger Games forerunner of the YA Dystopia boom, had significantly less staying power than it could have specifically because…with the toxic beauty standards forced on teenagers being a Big Theme, studios couldn’t figure out how to make a profitable movie out of it. The book got optioned multiple times, but a film version made in Hollywood was destined to fall apart at casting & makeup - their marketing methods relied on exactly what the series was criticizing, which is…part of what made it so popular with teenage girls to begin with.
You contrast that with how the marketing for the Hunger Games films directly contradicts the messaging of the text, and how Divergent seems ready-made for the big screen, and it becomes really apparent why the genre folded in on itself. Capitalism tried to recuperate dystopian fiction criticizing capitalism, and in doing so, butchered the genre.
There’s also something rattling around my brain about a correlation between how made-for-screen a dystopian book is and how much it Doesn’t Understand Dystopia, with the culmination being Ready Player One, a piece set in a dystopia that somehow still actively glorifies capitalism & that was literally optioned for film before the book was published, but I don’t…know how to expand on that point.
One unfortunate addition to this:
“Capitalism tried to recuperate dystopian fiction criticising capitalism…”
Please understand that capitalism is literally “may the best product win” meaning…
Hollywood only forces everyone in film to be unnaturally beautiful because we, the consumers, demand it.
Now, I’m not saying it’s a perfect system, but you have to face the fact that the market is driven entirely by your dollar. There have been attempts at making major motion pictures with unconventional leads, and they flopped even with sufficient advertising and distribution.
Force the change you want to see. Start buying products that include the change you want to see. It’s worked for cartoons, it can work on Hollywood.
I am bringing this back due to Savy Writes Books but, and this is important, Divergent is at it’s core so much worse than you think it is because all of this is true… but the author did have a righteous core of anger about society she wanted to write about.
It’s just that said righteous core of anger is tailor made for a specific type of person.
The protagonist faction that our lead comes from are the government, they’re the trusted ones chosen to lead society after it has collapsed… and they are just straight up christians. They dress in robes, they care for the filthy homeless who failed into being homeless due to their own failure to do Society right, they are selfless by design, abhor money and extravagance, and their initiation ritual for new members has them wash the feet of the older members. Oh gee, who else do we know of who was robed, selfless, abhorred extravagance, and washed the feet of his disciples?
The villains? Sleek, modern, futuristic… and consumed with the drive for intellectualism. They are academics, they are scientists, they are professors, they are the intellectual elite. Their plan is to brainwash the masses into rising up against the selfless feet washing caregivers by lying about how they’re all child-abusing monsters who shouldn’t be allowed to hold power. Naturally, the minute they take power over christian abnegation leadership, they face open rebellion and revolt as they try to kill off everyone who isn’t an intellectual supermind like they are.
Dauntless… literally get brainwashed by Erudite to kill Abnegation. And considering that Dauntless are cops in this world, think about what it means to say “The intellectual masterminds behind all of societies ills are brainwashing the police to commit genocide against the good and morally upstanding selfless christian-coded leadership!” in your YA book.
This is getting more into other essay’s I’ve read but lets talk about Tris and 4, shall we? Tris gets mad at one boy for trying to hurt her, and when he tries to apologize, she refuses to accept it. This makes the boy kill himself and Tris blames herself for it, something that the narrative almost seems to agree with since she tries to give forgiveness even to the older gentleman pointing a gun barrel at her head. Tris breaks through his brainwashing by basically reaffirming her love for him and does this everytime they have an argument. This gets more into tradwife stuff that I wouldn’t be bringing up but considering everything else I’m not giving the benefit of the doubt here: Why does it read like Tris, as a woman, is expected to meet the mistakes of men with forgiveness and understanding without ever getting angry, least she irreparably hurt them? Why does it read like those memes about “All A Broken Man Needs Is A Good Womans Love.”
The intellectual supergenius elite who run the schools are invested in supressing people’s true potential and making sure they’re divided amongst themselves in seperate identities that don’t mean anything at the end of the day- do you get what she is putting down? Do you??????
Saying that the author of Divergent wasn’t angry about society and didn’t have something to say are incorrect. Sadly, it’s just that what she was angry about and what she had to say were both equally terrible
Average Joey Valence and Brae song be like:
"ugh, gave her a quick fuck
Had to leave to not miss the sale on V-bucks
Motivated, don't try to stop me if I see ya
Act funny and I'll slide on ya like Akira"
"Batman beats anyone with enough prep time." Yeah well Phineas and Ferb could have a vague idea who Goku, Superman, or any other character you can think of is and have a device to counter them whipped up in an afternoon
Say what you want about labubu and the horrible consumerist culture around it- I’m talking about the actual design of the dolls. I understood her so much more when I found out that she’s supposed to be just a little girl.
As someone who used to be Just A Little Girl, I don’t think I’ve seen a more accurate representation of what being Just A Little Girl is like. Idk how to explain it. It just captures the feeling of being a chaotic little beast that mixes shampoo to make potions and drawing all over yourself with mamas makeup and making worm hotels so well.
I feel almost a kinship with this terrible little elf girl. I’m so sorry labubu. You deserve better than being the face of scalpers and TikTok consumerist culture. They don’t understand you like how you should be.
This thing eats rocks and sticks I just know it.
No you’re exactly right.
YESSS ITS SO GOOD!
Fucking creature of ALL TIME! I feel like these aren’t appreciated enough.
I LOVE THIS CREATURE! Fucked up little girl of all time! I love how some of the original illustrations are even have a sort of spooky vibe. It’s something I’ve seen some of the figures capture well but none of the dolls… yet.
To me her story is as if a baby Where the Wild Things Are was kept as a pet and an allegory for the trade/trafficking of wild animals as exotic pets.
Did I expect a sudden understanding and a small amount of identification with Labubu to happen today? No. But understanding that she can be viewed as some sort of feral girl representation is GREAT.
I think Disney+ should have a version of the Star Wars movies with audio commentary from some guy really into the expanded universe who gives random trivia about it through the whole thing.
'So yeah the orange droid Luke almost bought killed itself because it knew Luke needed R2s help'
'Yeah that one performer at Jabba's palace killed Jabba's uncle who had a stereotypically gay accent for some reason. Also Hutts are perfectly capable of speaking English they usually just don't because they're assholes'
Also they should curse Disney every time something that's no longer canon is brought into their trivia
Rewatching Clone Wars RN and I think the worst part of Disney Star Wars sequels is Disneys refusal to do anything else with them.
Like, the prequels were HATED when they came out, but instead of just abandoning them and making movies out of the EU books people liked (even if that admittedly would be cool) George Lucas and Lucasfilm instead made a ton of supplemental material, from books to again, Clone Wars, which I think does a lot of heavy lifting in my generations nostalgia for it due to it having some of the best SW content of all time (Darth Maul and Cad Bane my goats)
Disney's reaction to the sequels, on the other hand? Just pretend it didn't happen. More shows about what happened between episodes 3 and 4, please! More light side force users who can use lightsabers but AREN'T JEDI because if they were the whole 'balance to the force' thing wouldn't count.😉 (Also I'm not saying shows like Andor, Rouge One, or Rebels aren't good, I'm saying the eras overdone)
And as a sequel hater, that kinda sucks. The movies had a ton of potential that could be realized with a clone wars-esque series. Finn and Poe solo adventures? Rey searching for force sensitive people across the galaxy and guiding them, all while the Orders last remnants hunt them down with the help of bounty hunters? That sounds pretty cool.
The sequels sucked and I want more of them in the hopes they don't suck, is what I'm saying
