Family Business

Oh and quick note for writers:

One difference between this strike and the last one is that there are a lot more fellowships targeted at early career tv writers than there used to be (there have always been some, but the fellowship model is way more commonplace these days)

Studios are about to make a ton more of these opportunities and advertise them widely as a way to break into the industry, and they will be very specific about the fellowship not technically counting as a writers room or a tv job

THIS IS A TRICK TO GET YOU TO SCAB

Sharing any written content with a studio (even if they route it through a 3rd party "foundation" or development org or something) IS SCABBING

What you do in regards to the strike is your business, but the WGA has been very clear that anyone who scabs will be BANNED FROM JOINING THE UNION FOR LIFE. That means even if you get hired, that's no health & pension and no union protections for your entire career. This shit is serious

So please please double check and dig into any new submission opportunities you see in the next weeks. Playwrights especially be careful - many studios are finding their writers through play scripts these days so be very careful about how and where your work is being shared

No writing going to the studios means NO WRITING of any kind

(if you see suspicious fellowship stuff being passed around let me know, I'd love to keep an eye on that for my peeps)

For the most part, my approach to prescribing hormones is “sure,” but I will note that the one thing I lean HARD on patients about is smoking. If you’re transgender, and you’re on hormones, the number one thing we want to protect is your cardiovascular health. That’s frankly the number one thing I want to protect in all my patients, but anyone taking exogenous hormones is at higher baseline risk. And the best thing you can do for your heart is DON’T SMOKE. It’s a bitch to quit, and I didn’t even smoke much or long before I quit in my late teens, and I STILL didn’t enjoy quitting and had smoking dreams for years. It’s harder to quit than just about anything else up to and including crack and heroin, and that’s coming from a patient of mine who recently passed in her early 60s who’d done all of those things—for years and years—but eventually was able to quit everything except smoking. And that killed her. She developed severe COPD and eventually called to say her blood oxygen saturation was dipping into the 70s, which is incompatible with life. She was lucid enough to decline medical care, including refusing to call 911 or go to the ER. A week later, after both I and one of our outreach nurses had contacted her to ask her to please go to the ER, I got a notification that she’d been found dead. She had been so frustrated that she wasn’t a candidate for a lung transplant.

One of my oldest trans patients is in her late 50s. She’s had blood clots that went to the lungs. Repeatedly. Smoking raises that risk. Estrogen raises that risk. She’s a veteran with PTSD; of course she smoked.

These aren’t theoretical. These are humans I’ve cared for over years of their lives. I have been rooting for them—my beloved former addict, who spoke without shame about her years of homelessness and drug use in the city; my queer elders, who are slowly trading in their motorcycles for power scooters. I want everyone to live their fullest, best life.

Smoking doesn’t fit into that. Please don’t smoke. I don’t want you to die like that—not now and not later. I want you to have the future that you may not be able to see yet, but exists.

Since I moved home as an out queer, word got out, and there’s a whole apartment complex of lesbians in their 60s to their 80s who come see me—sitting next to their wives in the office, nagging about blood pressure meds, tattling about not having gotten the shingles shot they said they would. To be clear, when I was growing up in town, I knew no lesbians. Not one. I knew one gay kid in my class, which eventually turned into two. We were it. To see these women living decades with their wives and being able to squabble like any couple in my office over who was supposed to bring their home blood pressure cuff in for us to check it… it means the world to me.

On w*ndigoag:

W*ndigoag/w*ndigo are sacred Algonquian spirits that have spread to other Anishinaabe cultures. They aren’t worshiped or whatever, they are feared.

They’re the physical embodiments of evil, the result of a person falling into the trap of greed and cruelty, usually in the form of cannibalism. Our fear not only stems from the spirits and the danger they pose to others, but also their implications and the constant reminder that anyone can become a monster if they allow themselves to.

They are not bipedal deer and I have no idea where that concept came from. Most traditional depictions show them as humanoid giants made of ice, usually with the body of the person they came from encased inside.

In some stories, they’re killed by people, usually via fire. In others, they can only be killed by luring them to a body of water and getting the attention of a water spirit to fight it.

There’s very, very few stories where the person can be saved. The transformation into a w*ndigo is not a reversible one, and the only real way to save someone from that existence is to free them with death.

We censor their names because, traditionally, we’re taught not to say them out loud in case we get the attention of one or summon one. This is especially important during winter or at night.

They are not benign spirits. They are not kind. They are not rational. They are evil and cruel, and their only desires center around killing and eating. They’re as rational and logical as a wild raccoon in the late stages of rabies.

You cannot work with them. They can’t be bound, and they definitely can’t be bought or sold. Do not trust any spirit who claims to be a w*ndigo and do not trust any spirit worker who tries to sell you one.

W*ndigoag are Algonquian and Anishinaabe spirits. Algonquian people are the authorities on them, other Anishinaabe people less so. Non-Anishinaabe Natives cannot say that appropriation of w*ndigoag is okay because that isn’t their culture and it’s definitely not their decision to make. You cannot give someone permission to use something that isn’t yours.

The use of w*ndigoag in non-Native media is appropriation. The only exception to this is in when the creators work with Algonquian people to make respectful and accurate depictions. You’ll be very hard pressed to find cases of this.

W*ndigoag are not cryptids because they are sacred spirits. Abrahamic angels are not cryptids. Japanese yokai are not cryptids. Vodou loa are not cryptids. Respect indigenous beliefs as legitimate spirituality instead of reducing our cultures down to bastardized stories.

If you aren’t Anishinaabe, you cannot be “wendigokin”. Appropriation of indigenous spirituality isn’t suddenly okay because your ~soul~ is an indigenous spirit. You are not entitled to our cultures or spiritual beliefs. Jfc.

“Wendigocore” is also bullshit, what the fuck is wrong with you all? Our sacred spirituality is not your ugly ass aesthetic.

(Left those uncensored because it’s a summer afternoon and I want people in those tags to see this. Fuck off.)

Anishinaabe people are not obligated to share our SACRED STORIES with outsiders in order for them to be respected. We don’t want you to make your depictions of w*ndigoag in your stories more accurate. We just want you to leave our cultures alone for once.

Now please stop sending me messages about w*ndigoag. I understand you all just want to learn but I am so fucking tired. I’ve answered these questions dozens of times and I need a break.

Don’t start discourse on this post. I am not in the mood for it.

If any Algonquian or other Anishinaabe people have corrections, hmu. 

If Technoblade is tiny enough can he live in a carved potato house?

Tiny Techno can be as tiny as he needs to be

There’s also a large grey area between an Offensive Stereotype and “thing that can be misconstrued as a stereotype if one uses a particularly reductive lens of interpretation that the text itself is not endorsing”, and while I believe that creators should hold some level of responsibility to look out for potential unfortunate optics on their work, intentional or not, I also do think that placing the entire onus of trying to anticipate every single bad angle someone somewhere might take when reading the text upon the shoulders of the writers – instead of giving in that there should be also a level of responsibility on the part of the audience not to project whatever biases they might carry onto the text – is the kind of thing that will only end up reducing the range of stories that can be told about marginalized people. 

A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.

Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.    

Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast  – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.                          

That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?

It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.      

And at the end of the day it all boils down to how people see marginalized characters as Representation™ first and narrative tools created to tell good stories later, if at all. White/straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.                            

Tobey Maguire Spider-Man "it's a hard knock life" fancam hours

I must not mock Gen Alpha. Mocking Gen Alpha is the mind killer. Mocking Gen Alpha is the little-death that brings total generational solidarity obliteration. I will engage with Gen Alpha lovingly. I will permit them to be cringe. And when they grow up I will turn my eye to their accomplishments. Where mocking has gone there will be nothing. Only generational solidarity remains

I wouldn't call Pratchett's writing unhorny. He's just a tease. He absolutely loves to imply that horny things are happening just offstage where you can't see. Discworld is soaked in love and sex, but the books are about one guy trying to solve a dwarf murder.

I think one of my favorite jokes he ever makes is the timeskip where it's implied that Carrot learns what sex is.

“minor character death” but not death of a minor character, just a character experiencing a non-major death

it's hilarious how if you do any amount of research into life or death melee combat the prevailing themes that emerge are that

you're gonna get tired very quickly

tired leads to injured, injured leads to tired, tired leads to—

you're not gonna be as composed as you expect

humans are more fragile than you think and also more durable than you think. both are true and neither stop them from dying of an infection later (DO NOT GET BITTEN)

DO NOT GET STABBED (generally good life advice)

DO GET A SPEAR

knights are faster than you think