Chronicle (**** – liked)
My Neighbour Totoro (***** – loved)

Books

Adult fiction:
The Night Circus (**** – liked)
Ready Player One (**** – loved)
Double Dexter (**** – liked)

Adult non-fiction:
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (**** – liked)
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (**** – liked)

Graphic novels:
Unmanned (Y: The Last Man vol. 1) (*** – enjoyed)

YA/MG fiction:
True Blue (**** – liked)
The Power of Six (*** – enjoyed)
The Son of Neptune (**** – liked)
Gone (*** – enjoyed)

Chronicle by Josh Trank (film, 2012) – Thanks for seeing this with me, Ryan! I liked the originality of this found-footage-style film about three teenaged guys who stumble upon… well, something… that gives them supernatural powers. And I liked the realism of how one of the three protagonists, the lonely outsider Andrew, reacts to the experience. Also, wow, just put together that the popular kid Steve is the same guy who played Wallace on The Wire — crazy good actor!

My Neighbour Totoro by Hayao Miyazaki (film, 1988) – Thanks for seeing this with me, JB, YK, Liz, Amanda, Dan, Ryan, and Kathryn! I love how Miyazaki’s films manage to preserve the conventional innocence of childhood while still keeping the realism of their child characters. And I liked how the fantastic creatures encountered by the two sisters who are the protagonists of My Neighbour Totoro have an edge of creepy danger to them that doesn’t spill over into terrifying. Basically, I like how this movie mutes everything down with a realistic feel without sacrificing evocativeness or depth.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (fantasy novel, 2011) – I’m not sure how I feel about this novel about two rival magicians and their contest with one another that takes place in the rings of a mysteriously magical circus. On one hand, I’m too close academically to the exploration of what makes conjuring and illusion appeal to people to be able to read this novel without tripping up on assumptions with which I disagree. On the other, it’s beautifully written with lyrical descriptions that distill all the best memories and ideas of circuses into an ideal dream.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (science fiction novel, 2011) – Although it started a little slow, I wound up loving this Gen Y tale that takes place about fifty years from now. Teenaged Wade lives in two worlds: an impoverished real world and an exciting virtual reality with an in-game economy and a super awesome treasure hunt for real-world ownership of the VR that requires exhaustive knowledge of pop culture from its creator’s formative years, the 1980s. Part post-modern sci-fi Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, part coming-of-age story, this book perfectly captures the geek-culture zeitgeist.

Double Dexter by Jeff Lindsay (crime novel, 2011) – In the newest Dexter novel, our favourite anti-heroic serial killer tangles with a witness to his crimes who not only sees Dex and his Dark Passenger in action but also decides to become a mimic killer. With 90% less sibling obliviousness (and 100% less incest…) than the TV series, the Dexter novels always have a sharp, funny voice. This one is the best of the recent offerings, although, IMHO, it doesn’t reach the level of the first two novels in the series.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt (non-fiction narrative, 1994) – This is the kind of non-fiction narrative that makes you go, wait, seriously, when you catch that “non” sneaking in there. Berendt details the wacky people and strange conventions he ran into when he lived in Savannah, Georgia, and how a local murder case affected them all. It’s a quick read, and although I can’t say it stuck me with a lasting impression, it did make me curious about the movie.

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely (non-fiction book, 2008) – This book on unconscious human biases has a companionable tone that makes it easy to read, and unlike many popular science books, the author’s personality comes through. In this case, Ariely presents himself as an affable guy who loves his work, which makes it more fun to read. When you boil it down, if you read pop psychology or have taken Psych 101, you won’t find too much new stuff here, but you’ll still have a good time reading.

Unmanned (Y: The Last Man, vol. 1) by Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra, and Jose Marzan (graphic novel, 2003) – This graphic novel stars Yorick, an escape artist who becomes literally the last man on Earth when a disease somehow wipes out all other males on the planet, and it left me intrigued but uneasy. The plot is interesting, but I’m not sure I quite buy that Yorick’s story is the most interesting one to tell here. The gender politics also make me uncomfortable — I can’t imagine the last woman on Earth being permitted to do all the things Yorick does, nor can I imagine her having as much power as he still appears to have.

True Blue by Deborah Ellis (YA novel, 2011) – This gripping book puts the reader in the shoes of Jess, a teenaged camp counsellor whose best friend has been accused of murdering a child under their care. Ellis does a great job of keeping the reader in Jess’s head while at the same time raising doubts about her reliability as a narrator. The eventual conclusion of the “whodunnit” isn’t as powerful as the exploration of the limits of loyalty to friendships.

The Power of Six by Pittacus Lore (YA fantasy novel, 2011) – Aliens. Still lots of action-packed superpowered teenagers-fighting-evil-invaders madness, this time with 50% more alternating viewpoints. It was a refreshing surprise to have a book in this genre point out that both boys and girls can be in love with two people at once, and such feelings aren’t fake or inferior.

The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan (YA fantasy novel, 2011) – Filling in the other half of the story from The Lost Hero, The Son of Neptune follows our old demigod friend Percy Jackson, who finds his amnesiac self at the camp for Roman demigods, where he makes friends and goes on a quest to stop bad guys. The story is told alternating between his POV and those of his two new Roman friends. As always with Riordan, the adventure is fast-paced, the re-imagining of old mythology is cool, and half the fun comes from trying to guess how things will play out before they do.

Gone by Michael Grant (YA fantasy novel, 2008) – In a town where some children seem to be developing special powers, everyone 15 and over disappears, leaving our protagonist Sam to organize those who are left, try to figure out what’s going on, and battle for power with the evil kids from the boarding school up the way. Aside from the really cool main premise, the plot feels a bit clichéd, and the writing felt stilted to me. Still, I’m interested in how the whole kids-on-their-own thing will play out over the rest of the series.

In fact, when it comes to philosophies I can get behind, I much prefer that of Helga Hufflepuff, who committed to teaching anybody who wanted to learn. Everyone has a right to education. I suspect that I champion the Hufflepuff approach to life as well — work hard, value fairness, be steadfast in your friendships. Living for your beliefs can be as hard as dying for them, and there’s no point in the latter if nobody does the former.

Similarly, if you look at how I’ve actually behaved in real life, the evidence probably sends me to Ravenclaw. It’s safe to say that, as a PhD candidate, I value education and knowledge. I love to read. I love to learn new things. And if I have a point of overweening pride, one thing about which I’m more arrogant than I’d like, it’s my intelligence.

My preference of Slytherin also assumes that Sorting is mandatory and that one must get Sorted into exactly one Hogwarts house, without opportunity to review or challenge the Sorting system. If the choice were between getting Sorted as described in the Harry Potter books or living my life according to my own categories and analysis, I’d choose the latter every time. You can’t neatly divide people by dominant virtue, no matter whose brains are inside your magic hat, and the idea of doing so sets my teeth on edge.

But given the Sorting system as it stands, it’d have to be Slytherin. And while I admit that it would be partly because most of my favourite Potterverse characters would be around to gawp at*, it’s mostly because, if I were ever to be Sorted, I would obviously be living in the universe J. K. Rowling built for the Harry Potter series. And in that universe, only Slytherins consistently have the privilege of making real moral choices with lasting consequences.

I’ll get back to this in a second, because first, I want to introduce a second, more nuanced take on the appealing idea of sorting people depending on what they choose to hold dear above all else: the faction system introduced in Veronica Roth’s exciting YA dystopian novel Divergent (2011).

Divergent, which I recommend reading, tells the story of teenaged Beatrice (Tris), who lives in a post-apocalyptic world in which, upon reaching the age of majority, teenagers must decide to align themselves with one (and only one) of five factions, each of which pursues a particular virtue. Tris, born into Abnegation (selflessness), must choose between remaining in her home faction and joining one of the other four: Amity (peacefulness), Dauntless (bravery), Erudite (intelligence), and Candor (honesty).

I find myself intrigued by Roth’s take more than by Rowling’s not only because I like Roth’s overall ideological standpoint better (as you could probably guess from what she says in, for example, this interview), but because within the rules of the story, all the factions get the same treatment. Each, Roth suggests, has positive attributes, no matter how awful some of its behaviour might seem; each can be used for evil as well as good; and each runs the risk of becoming harmful if it loses sight of its goals — the reasons why its members uphold its chosen virtue — and starts pursuing that virtue as an end in itself.

Roth’s overall characterization of the faction system is also interesting. Whereas incoming students at Hogwarts are Sorted by a for-all-intents omniscient hat that scans their minds and places them where they ought to be (and even their requests are just actions that “show” the underlying true properties of their personalities), the factions subject teens to a series of simulated scenarios in which their reactions show which faction would best suit them. But they seem free to choose another — like job aptitude tests at school. And the real difference is in the title of the book: some candidates are “divergent”; that is, their tests don’t point them unidirectionally toward one particular virtue, and (this is the important part), unlike other candidates, they are able to perceive the illusory nature of the test simulations even during the test.

I spent a while trying to decide which faction I’d choose if I lived in Tris’s world, but I came up empty. I think intelligence is important — but not to the exclusion of being kind to other people. I’m drawn to the idea of amity — but not at the expense of fairness. Likewise abnegation. And honesty is good when truth is necessary, but sometimes it can be used as an excuse to hurt others. The only one I can cross off is bravery, and that’s just because, yeah, it’s important to have the courage to stand up for what you believe, but bravery for the sake of bravery is just foolishness, and holy cow do some of the Dauntless’s activities sound like no fun at all.

The point is, there’s no obvious “correct” answer in Roth’s world the way there is in Rowling’s. Heroes and heroines have qualities of all five factions, not just Gryffindor. Furthermore, the ability to take a critical look at one’s actions — to step outside my scenario and consider whether certain virtues are appropriate right now and what it will mean about me as a person if I choose to act on them — is the key to acting morally. The divergent get to choose what to do. They get to take responsibility for their moral decisions.

Which brings me back to Slytherin. Of the four Hogwarts houses the way they’re characterized in canon, Slytherin is arguably the closest to being divergent. They obviously aren’t the best house when it comes to morals, what with the whole genocide/magical Nazism thing, but the majority of characters who are shown making considered and explicit moral choices — choosing what’s right over what’s easy (or vice versa) and knowing they’re doing so as they do it — are Slytherin.

True, Gryffindor characters like Ron and Percy Weasley are shown switching sides (and sometimes switching back again), but this is usually characterized less as a real change from one perspective and set of goals to another as moving from a brief denial of one’s “true” self to reality. There are no lasting consequences to Ron or Percy’s flirtations with betrayal; Harry doesn’t die because Ron isn’t there to save him, and Percy’s loyalty to the Ministry doesn’t cost anyone her life. Their only effect is on the emotional lives of those who care about them**.

Contrariwise, Draco Malfoy and Severus Snape (and to a lesser extent, Narcissa Malfoy) may make poor moral choices, but at least the author unequivocally states that they get to choose. Draco’s self-awareness is contrasted with the moral obliviousness of his henchmen, Crabbe and Goyle, who Rowling wants us to understand are so stupid that they stumble buffoonishly over pronouncing simple words at the age of seventeen.

Draco, on the other hand, knows exactly what he’s doing — he can articulate, as he does to Dumbledore at the end of book six, the external forces that motivate his actions, despite obvious discomfort with his new role, and he can struggle, as he does in book seven, with the moral dilemma of whether or not to deliver his hated rival into the hands of a lunatic who wants to kill him. Unlike those of the Gryffindors, Draco’s choices are not obvious because both options have unpleasant consequences: yes, Voldemort really will kill Draco’s family if he fails in his mission, and yes, Draco really will be responsible for another person’s death if he succeeds.

Similarly, Rowling makes it clear that the reader is to condemn Snape’s crimes precisely because he had an explicit ethical choice. He knew darn well what was at stake if he chose to side with Voldemort — his best friend laid it out for him over and over again — and, later, he knew what kind of suffering he’d bring on himself and what kind of good he might achieve  if he accepted Dumbledore’s offer of redemption. Yes, Snape’s and Draco’s situations were kind of lose-lose, and no, everything didn’t exactly come up Milhouse for the two characters, but at least their choices were freely made and, more importantly, made with awareness of making them.

Getting stuck between a rock and a hard place is scary, but I’m even more scared of losing my moral accountability. I don’t want to wear the blinders of one faction, no matter how good the virtue at its core. Significant ethical dilemmas are not conflicts between good and evil but between one good and another, and therefore the ability to see and value different kinds of virtue is necessary to leading a moral life. So as much as I’m down with bravery, intelligence, and fairness, and as much as I think selfishness is ultimately destructive, sorry, Golden Trio: from my meta-fictional perspective, I’ve got to side with the divergent house of the snake.

Also, let’s be honest: who do fans agree has got it going on? Snape. That’s right. There, I said it.

* And to share my dislike of casual hugs.

** I’d be willing to hear an argument that Peter Pettigrew exercises real moral choice, but I’d also want to counter-argue that his ethical standpoint is constant: do what you are least afraid of without considering personal utility, only he’s so cowardly that in the end this puts him at odds with both the Order of the Phoenix and the Death Eaters. Also, there’s some ambiguity over whether Peter’s final actions stem from his own agency or from the magical life-debt he owes to Harry.

Let me get one thing out of the way: it’s not that I actively dislike Joss Whedon or his work. I recognize that it’s above par in a lot of ways. It’s clever, the banter is snappy, there’s an individualistic touch of whimsy, he challenges stereotypes, and he uses old ideas in ways that don’t often get seen in mainstream media. Those are all neat things. Likewise, if people ask me to watch some Whedon with them, sure, why not?

Let me also say that I haven’t watched all the Whedon canon. I’ve seen Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and the first two episodes of Firefly and now Cabin in the Woods. I know there’s a whole lot of Buffy and Angel out there that I’ve never encountered. I know I’m basing my assessment on a small subsection of the Whedonverse. The thing is, based on that assessment, I don’t think further exposure would be the best use of my time — evaluated in terms of personal enjoyment, and not, you know, the fact that instead I’m sitting here in my pajamas writing things on the Internet. The sad truth is, Joss Whedon’s work just doesn’t float my boat.

Before I explain why not, I should clarify: I don’t mean to say that these shows and movies should’ve been different to accommodate me and my tastes or that there’s anything superior about me for not liking something everyone else loves. Joss Whedon should create the stories he likes — obviously there are plenty of smart, talented, and cool people who enjoy what he does, and that’s awesome. I am happy for all the smart, talented, and cool Whedon fans and colleagues to continue to be so as long as they derive pleasure and inspiration and new ideas and all sorts of other exciting things from it.

But… although Dr. Horrible and Firefly and Dollhouse and the rest obviously chatter enthusiastically to the people who like them, erudite with wit and insight, to me, they’re silent.

To explain what I mean, let me use the example of Cabin in the Woods, the film Whedon co-wrote with Drew Goddard, who also directed it.

Many reviews of Cabin in the Woods, to avoid spoilers, describe it like this: five college students go to an abandoned cabin in the woods. This is a horror movie, but if you think you know what happens, you don’t. But the reason I think I didn’t enjoy it as much as many of my equally intelligent friends is that I thought I knew what happens… and it did.

Again, please note the phrase “equally intelligent.” I’m not trying to say that I’m super-smart and they’re naive, and with my preternatural brainy powers, I saw through the narrative feints and zoned in on the true plot. Nor am I better or worse read than are my friends — of course we sometimes like different things, but I’d say we consume narrative at equal rates and overall, we enjoy similar types of stories. The fact is, many of them also figured out what was going on in the early moments of the film, but it didn’t matter to them the way it did to me. Mine is not to provide a reason why, except to say that people’s minds work differently, and mine, apparently, veers in a direction that makes Whedon’s stories and characters feel bland.

(vague spoilers follow — if you haven’t seen the movie, you will probably not find this coherent)

For one, my mind runs on meta-fiction. I guarantee you that one of my first reactions to seeing/reading a story I like is to wonder what would happen if the characters found out they were in a story — how they’d react, whether they’d behave differently, how it would make them feel — and what kind of second-level story you’d need to make the conventions of the first-level story make sense.

For instance, one of the plays I wrote in high school was about a bunch of actors who were pretending to be campy supervillains in order to train a couple of Adam-West Batman-and-Robin superheroes as protectors of their city. There were ultimately too many plotholes for it to work — and also I didn’t feel like the characters had a strong enough emotional journey — but it started from: what if all the silly things that happen in the 60′s Batman TV series happened on purpose? What would it take for them to make sense?

Similarly, if you look at my plays page, you’ll see that two of my grown-up completed plays are meta-fictional. In the one I like best, Murder Mystery, I give my take on Agatha-Christie style we’re-stuck-in-the-manor-house-and-the-murderer-is-one-of-us cozies. In the other, a series of short scenes examine the rules of fictional worlds ranging from Bond movies to sitcoms.

Again, I want to be clear: I’m not arguing that I’m a better writer than Joss Whedon. For obvious reasons, my writing speaks more to me than his does, and those reasons have nothing to do with quality. But by considering those examples, you can see what meta-fiction means to me.

First, no matter what the story’s about, I need a character to latch onto, one I care about who’s going through a traditional hero(ine)’s journey. I know what what appeals most to me are characters who have to learn to trust/love other people or themselves, or characters who struggle with being a good person. Whedon’s characters, from what I’ve seen so far, just don’t appeal to me in this way, whether they’re Dana and Marty from Cabin in the Woods, Dr. Horrible, or Mal Reynolds. Why? I dunno. Third base.

But second, and most important, when I look at my work (and my thoughts and daydreams, etc.), I see that for me, meta-fiction is about examining power and value, and especially about taking power and value away from characters, entities, and ideas that normally have it and giving that power and value to those who normally lack it.

What happens to a character who thrives on power — a Dr. House or a Sherlock Holmes — when it’s taken away? What happens when a character discovers her power and her choices are illusions — that the grown-ups have been letting her win the game because it amuses them? How does she reconstruct her sense of self-worth? Contrariwise, what happens when a character discovers she has the agency to change what happens to her — that she doesn’t have to be a heroine, victim, villain, or what have you?

And what happens to the balance of power when the rules change — is Alicia Florrick still a worthy protagonist by the standards of YA fantasy? If Harry Potter lived in a legal procedural, could he remain the Chosen One? How does the value dynamic between characters from a world of sweeping good-vs.-evil change when they’re plunked into a universe where the rules say there are no black-and-white answers?

I know Whedon sometimes deals with these questions within the narrative; the most obvious and famous example is his challenge, What happens when you take the helpless blonde girl who dies at the beginning of every horror movie and let her take her fate into her own hands? (answer: Buffy). But he poses these questions within the narrative in ways that for me, personally, don’t go far enough down the rabbit hole.

For example, in Cabin in the Woods, the reason we’re given for all the tropes of the horror genre is essentially just “stories all the way down.” Instead of slasher films being the way they are because of what they mean to us, the audience, in the context of our culture, they’re what they are because of what they mean to other, in-story audience-replacements. We don’t have to examine just why it is, for example, that we like it when the leader tells everyone to split up, and we don’t get an explanation as to why the in-story audience likes it either. In the end, Goddard and Whedon leave me with the sense that the laboratory characters are taking an awfully convoluted way to do something that ought to be relatively simple, and I still wasn’t sure why the rules were the way they were, other than the fact that they were, y’know, THE RULES. (Also, I never figured out why the lab folks  fitted out their workplace with a lot of why-do-we-even-have-that-lever?!s.)

That’s another part of the power dynamic that interests me, by the way: where is the moral responsibility of the audience? Why is it OK to find it cool when a pretend person’s head explodes but not OK when that person is real*?

So maybe my problem is, I don’t just want to examine genres. I want to tear them apart. I want to vivisect them and shove everyone’s face into their twisted little hearts beating up close and bloody. And I want to have to face the fact that all this blood exists only because I’m the one who wanted to have an operating table.

Rolling Stone‘s review suggests that Whedon and Goddard made Cabin in the Woods by killing the thing they loved — the horror genre. Well, I agree that you can never go wrong with Oscar Wilde. Furthermore, it’s beyond me to say how Cabin in the Woods forces the horror genre to meet its demise — a bitter look? A flattering word? The hands of Lust or hands of Gold?

The one thing I do know is how it doesn’t. And, unfortunately, I’m a sword-loving kind of gal.

* To be fair, Whedon and Goddard touch on this during their scene where the laboratory folks are partying as, on the screens behind them, a main character is getting torn apart by one of the monsters. But it felt like a one-time aside, too fleeting for something in which I’m really interested.

Adaptation (**** – liked)
Plan 9 From Outer Space (**** – liked)
The Secret World of Arrietty (***** – loved)
Hugo (**** – liked)

Video Games

Professor Layton and the Last Specter (**** – liked)

Books

YA/MG fiction:
The Inquisitor’s Apprentice (***** – loved)
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (*** – enjoyed)
The Book Thief (**** – liked)

Adult fiction:
The Southern Vampire Mysteries (vols. 2-11) (**** – liked)
The Magician King (**** – liked)

Adult non-fiction:
Out of Character: Surprising Truths About the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us (**** – liked)
The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest (***** – loved)
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (***** – loved)

Adaptation by Spike Jonze (film, 2002) – I’m not accustomed to seeing Nicholas Cage, you know, acting anymore, so it was a surprise to see him play twin brothers in this meta-film about a screenwriter (who resembles real screenwriter Charlie Kaufman) trying to adapt the real novel The Orchid Thief for Hollywood. The film is quirky and thematically interesting, raising thoughtful questions about how reality gets “adapted” into the printed stories we read and the secret stories we tell ourselves about our lives. Although I liked the main character, I couldn’t help but feel a bit alienated by his sad-sack-dude-protagonist’s point of view, especially when it came to him angsting over his crushes — he’d be thinking “Why doesn’t she date meeeeeee?” and I’d be thinking “Because you are thinking of how you feel and not how she doooooesss…”

Plan 9 From Outer Space by Ed Wood (film, 1959) – Ahahahahaha! This movie is awesome. If you want to know the plot, you are better off not watching it.

The Secret World of Arrietty by Hiromasa Yonebayashi (film, 2010) – Thanks, Ryan, Natalie, and Dan for inviting me to see this! The film takes its main concept from Mary Norton’s novel The Borrowers: there are miniature people who live in the spaces of human homes and survive by “borrowing” things we never miss, like crumbs, buttons, and pins. This movie is beautiful, gentle, and thoughtful. To call it a good metaphor for the difference between people with and without privilege would give a good impression of the overall atmosphere of the film, but it would also imply unjustly that the filmmakers made anything a higher priority than telling the story of the friendship between Arrietty, a Borrower girl, and the sickly human boy who comes to stay at the house where she and her family live.

Hugo by Martin Scorscese (film, 2011) – Thanks, Ryan, for giving me the opportunity to see this in 3D! Having read the book when it came out, I knew roughly what to expect, and the film wasn’t disappointing. I loved how Scorscese incorporated the 3D organically not only in the scenes shot in the twenty-first century but also in the archival Melies footage. The only minor disappointment (for PhD-student me) was that the history of the automaton wasn’t as accurate as it was in the book.

Professor Layton and the Last Specter by Level-5 (DS game, 2009/2011) – In this prequel to the previous Professor Layton trilogy, play along as Layton and Luke work together for the first time, and meet Layton’s vivacious assistant Emmy while you solve the mystery of the weird specter demolishing Luke’s hometown. The plot is fun, though the eventual solution is off-the-wall, and the puzzles are great, with a bonus Animal-Crossing-style secondary game. I wish there was less block-sliding, though…

The Inquisitor’s Apprentice by Chris Moriarty (MG fantasy novel, 2011) – Although it seems like Jewish characters are somewhat over-represented in fiction if one goes by numbers alone, it’s seldom that I see one as a fully fleshed-out protagonist in MG fantasy fiction, and especially MG historical fantasy. The book tells the story of a Jewish boy, Sacha, who lives in a 19th-century New York City where police inquisitors are trying to stamp out the “anti-American” witchcraft immigrants bring from the Old Country — and who finds himself apprenticed to one of the best inquisitors when it turns out he can see witches. The book is packed with exciting plot and with historical and cultural details.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (YA fantasy novel, 2011) – This book is about Jacob, a teenager who discovers that his grandfather was from a secret outside-of-time enclave of magically gifted children and goes off in search of his roots. I’m not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, it was creative and fast-paced; on the other, I felt like it was restricted, not enhanced by the author’s technique of building a story around found inspiration (in this case, real vintage photographs of kids doing weird things).

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (MG fantasy novel, 2006) – Because I’ve read/seen enough stories set during the Holocaust and/or Second World War, it takes something special to make a book set in that time and place feel fresh to me, but this one about Liesel, a German refugee girl who makes friends with the Jewish man her foster parents hide in their basement, pulled me in. The book is narrated poetically by Death, which is as hard-to-get-into as it sounds and a little confusing. But it’s worth it to see how Zusak makes the reader feel for Leisel’s suffering without ever losing sight of the fact that, y’know, millions of other innocents are being murdered elsewhere, and how he weaves in subplots like the her growing love affair with books and words.

The Southern Vampire Mysteries vols. 2-11 (fantasy novels, 2007-2011) by Charlaine Harris – The adventures of Sookie Stackhouse continue. Sometimes it seems like our favourite psychic waitress is a literal magnet for every hot male vampire, shapeshifter, Were, and fairy in a ten-mile radius, but, you know what? I’ve read this kind of mystery at least twenty bazillion times from a dude protagonist’s perspective where Special! Male! Magic! Detective! (*cough* for example, Harry Dresden *cough*) meets dozens of babes in his travels, so as long as both kinds of stories can co-exist (with each other and with any male-male, female-female, etc. versions anyone might want), live and let live.

The Magician King by Lev Grossman (fantasy novel, 2011) – In this sequel to The Magicians, we reunite with twenty-something Quentin as he and his friends recover from the traumatic events of the previous book by being kings and queens of the Narnia-esque fantasy country Fillory. I enjoyed this novel much better than its predecessor, in part because Quentin has matured enough to not be such a cock. The darker scenes and the lighter scenes are still equally disturbing, although sometimes the alternate chapters telling the parallel upsetting story of Quentin’s old friend Julia seemed to cut to the bone just for the sake of being deep and uncomfortable, including a

(vague spoiler)

scene of sexual violence that seemed unnecessary to the plot.

Out of Character: Surprising Truths About the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us by David DeSteno and Piercarlo Valdesolo (non-fiction book, 2011) – DeSteno and Valdesolo argue that our intuitive understanding of personality is flawed; it’s not about whether people are inherently bad or good but about whether their short-term interests (their grasshopper) win out over their long-term interests (their ant) in a given set of circumstances. Interesting, but I found it kind of forgettable — it seems like so many popular psychology books retell the same set of cool experiments. I know you can’t judge a book for what it wasn’t supposed to be, but I still wish there had been a stronger philosophical aspect dealing with what moral responsibility means given the authors’ premise.

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler (non-fiction book, 2011) – I know I’m biased when it comes to judging this book because it’s selling what I want to buy, but I did think the author argues well that abstractions of individuals who maximize personal profit are not good models of overall behaviour. The author does concede that, yes, always-selfish people exist, but they are not the majority. His examples of businesses and projects that do well through cooperation and social rewards are a nice rebuttal to the idea we so often see in pop culture that rationalism = being a douche.

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz (non-fiction book, 2010) – Some critics say that this book exploring the nature of what it means to be wrong, how it makes us feel, and how we should approach the experience meanders a bit, and I’d have to agree. But that was kind of what I enjoyed about it: how it flitted from field to field. If it didn’t quite bring everything together into a cohesive whole, well, part of the joy was working out the slight contradictions between different perspectives.

Over the past year, I’ve found myself unintentionally becoming a YA novel hipster. As my friends and family get hooked on Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games and its sequels, I hear myself saying things like, “Oh, yeah, I read those when they came out, which was three years ago” and “You can’t wait to pick up the sequel? I know how you feel — I had to wait a year until it was published.”

But since the production of the fantabulous Hunger Games movie, I’ve been out-hipstered!

“*yawn* A movie about teenagers killing each other for entertainment? Yeah, I enjoyed it back in 2000 when it was called Battle Royale… Are people still into that?”

See, here’s the thing about hipsters. They/you/we are the butt of everyone’s jokes because they are super-duper annoying.

It’s not because hipsters’ opinions are different from other people’s — well, OK, that’s occasionally the case, because there are individuals of every stripe, hipster and non, who can’t tolerate other people thinking things with which they don’t agree. But in general, Hunger Games fans (for example) aren’t getting irritated at someone who says they wouldn’t like Suzanne Collins as much if they’d only read Koushun Takami (for example) because they can’t deal with someone saying their favourite story is not the best story in the universe.

Instead, it’s because it’s really exasperating when the discussion you want to have is, “What’s good/bad about this story?” and the only discussion the person you’re talking with wants to have is, “My favourite story is better.”

There is a huge difference between saying, “This is what I don’t like about book/movie/game XYZ. For an example of a book/movie/game that avoids this problem, check out ABC. Instead of doing these problematic things, it does these great things. XYZ could have incorporated them in the same way.” and saying, “XYZ sucks because ABC is similar, and I liked ABC!”

The latter is a valid criticism only in circumstances where the artists are deliberately trying to create a version of ABC that audiences will like better than the original, and even then, it’s a poor argument. I didn’t like the Matthew Broderick live-action Inspector Gadget (or The Seeker as an adaptation of The Dark Is Rising, or the Walden version of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) any more than you did, but I can elaborate on the things I liked better about the original version, and the things that disturbed me about the values implicit in the way the artists responsible tackled the remake, and, most importantly, I can concede that if you have different tastes, you might like the remake better.

Back a few years ago, when I liked The Hunger Games (or the works of Diana Wynne Jones… or Susan Cooper…) a lot and no one around me seemed to have heard of it, sure, I recommended it to people. But if they said they preferred Harry Potter or Twilight, well, that was their prerogative. If they wanted to discuss it, we could. If they didn’t, we didn’t have to. I’m used to liking things other people don’t like or haven’t heard of — that’s kind of what academics do, and, hipsters, take note: nobody outside an Indiana Jones movie thinks we’re cool.

Yeah, I would’ve had more favourable reactions to others’ opinions on Rowling’s writing or Twilight‘s plot if I knew they were comparing them to the same stories I was (for instance, J. K. Rowling compared to R. L. Stine is different from J. K. Rowling compared to C. S. Lewis is different from J. K. Rowling compared to T. S. Eliot). And I honestly think Suzanne Collins is a better writer than Rowling or Meyer. But that doesn’t mean people are wrong to enjoy the Harry Potter series or that the popularity of Twilight is in some way threatening to that of The Hunger Games.

Because the underlying point is, even if there’s a book that does all the things a book I like does, only a million times better? It’s still okay for me to like the book I like. Stories are not like fairies: they do not fall down dead every time someone doesn’t believe in them by preferring something “inferior.” Just like I can be friends with more than one person at the same time, even if they have similar personalities or interests or haircuts, I can like two similar books simultaneously.

The other reason hipster-like attitudes are annoying is because sometimes they aren’t really about the movie or the book or the music at all. They’re about making yourself seem superior to other people based on liking a particular story first.

Again: if that’s important to someone, well, who am I to judge? De gustibus non est disputandum. I’ve disliked things for silly reasons and liked them for even sillier ones (like, say, being in Latin). The problem with the way that priority is often expressed is the implicit suggestion of why liking something first (or something similar that came first) is better — because it shows that you like the item in question for itself (whatever that means) and not because you know other people like it.

Taking a snooty tone about enjoying The Hunger Games before the series became popular (guilty as charged) or loudly preferring to stick with Battle Royale because it came first is as obnoxious as using the word “sheeple” without irony. It implies that the speaker believes he or she is the only person in the room capable of thinking independently. Worse, it implies that the people who do like The Hunger Games now that they’ve read the book or enjoyed the movie do so not because, you know, there’s something about the story, plot, characters, visuals, etc. that appealed to them once someone else brought it to their attention but because everyone else enjoyed it, and they wanted to be part of the crowd.

It’s true that it’s a lot easier to get upset by something you dislike when it’s popular, and there are lots of people who don’t seem to realise how bad/trite/hackneyed/etc. it is. But it doesn’t follow that the thing in question isn’t popular for a reason.

For instance, I don’t have the most positive opinion of the Harry Potter or Twilight series. But I understand that other people enjoy them because they like things I don’t. These stories make them feel things and think things and think and feel things, and just because I don’t like those things or don’t think and feel the same things doesn’t mean that all these people are making up what’s going on in their heads or pretending to be fans of those franchises because all their friends are.

So, yes, Battle Royale is on my to-read/see list. But I still like The Hunger Games for a lot of reasons. And it’s okay if you don’t. Or if you do. Or whatever. As long as we both agree to accept that neither position makes either of us inherently superior to the other.

That’s because until relatively recently, I found reading anything more overtly sexual than a chaste kissing scene to be uncomfortable. Ears burning, flip through the pages until it’s finally over, that kind of thing. Also, even after that relatively recent change of heart, I learned it’s extremely easy to write awful kissing scenes. (And they say fanfiction isn’t educational!)

But then somehow I found myself writing not just kissing but a full-on make-out scene into one of the stories I’m working on.

Admittedly, it’s a pretty 14A/T scene. Nobody’s clothes are coming off. Both characters have ulterior motives that have nothing to do with any feelings for one another, and because of that, the narration is somewhat removed from the action, so to speak.

But I wanted to write it for a couple reasons. First, while I was reading someone else’s story, their portrayal of some issues* a female character had to deal with gave me a little insight into one of my own characters, and I wanted to be true to my better understanding of her. Second, it made the story more dynamic, in the same way that it makes a story more dynamic to have your action hero(ine) and the evil henchperson have a fistfight instead of standing there yelling at each other for five minutes.

I don’t know whether I’ll still feel like it’s necessary at the end of the revision process. But right now, I’m happy with the tone I struck. And believe me, the damn story sat on my computer for months and months before I finally got myself to put the make-out stuff on virtual paper.

So, in case you’re in the same position as me — or perhaps are just wondering how I managed it in the end — I present for your edification:

How to Write Your First Make-Out Scene

~in 9 easy steps~

Step 1: Don’t.

Why do you want to write a make-out scene? Psssh, the story’s fine without it. Sexuality is over-rated — and besides, it’s everywhere these days. It would be more original to have a story where nobody touches anyone, ever, am I right? I bet your characters just want to hold hands and gaze into each other’s eyes. That would probably be more meaningful. Also easier to write.

Step 2: Just don’t.

Okay, fine, your characters are hoping to take this a bit further. And maybe nothing short of a major plot twist like, oh, an asteroid crashing between them (or a bee sting infected with alien black oil virus) is going to keep their lips and hands off one another. But that’s your duty as a writer!  This story does skew to the older end of YA, or maybe even adult, but: you are a 24/7 school dance chaperone for fictional characters! Fire up those asteroid cannons!

Step 3: What about ellipses?

Can we still do that?

“And as the sirens blared, we leaned in closer until our lips met.

                         *                           *                         *

‘Wow,’ I said, three hours later. ‘That sure was some fun making out we did three hours ago. But right now, we’re in the middle of an action scene!’ POW POW BLAM KABOOM!”

Step 4: Accept that your story needs this scene.

*sigh* My story needs this scene.

Step 5: Aaaaaaagh!

Aaaaaaaagh!

Step 6: Worry you’re doing it wrong

What if the scene is too explicit for your target audience? What if it’s not explicit enough? What if you accidentally write about something and for some reason you are the only person in the world who thinks it’s attractive and then everyone’s like, “This make-out scene’s so gross!” and then you’re like, Huh?, and then everyone’s all like, “Actually, YOU are gross and we’re going to laugh at you FOREVER and you fail at sexy!”? Oh my god, what if you have to type the word “sexy”????

Step 7: Invent pre-emptive excuses

“What’s that you asked? Why did I write about my character doing that weird thing when she…? Oh, uh, ha ha! That was the whole point of the scene. That my character is a freak. Which is what I was going for. She’s a weirdo. Who doesn’t know how to make out properly. Ha ha. Did I say freak already? Because that’s what she is. IN A TOTALLY INTENTIONAL FASHION THAT DOES NOT AT ALL REFLECT ANY PREFERENCE OR EXPERIENCES OF THE AUTHOR.”

Step 8: Write the damn scene.

As it turns out, the word “sexy” didn’t have to appear even once.

Step 9: Then write a blog entry about it.

YOU’RE WELCOME.

* Specifically, if you’re interested, the writer showed how this character dealt with the experience of being slut-shamed. How it influenced my writing is a whole ‘nother blog entry, but basically, it made me think very carefully about how I was going to portray female sexuality in my story.

One of my female protagonists does not have the capacity for intimacy, emotional or physical, necessary to be comfortable expressing her sexuality. That being the case, I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t making my female protagonists across-the-board indifferent toward or suppressive of their own sexual feelings and accidentally saying something about the kind of woman who “deserves” to be a main character in a story.

More importantly — especially because I’m still not sure I achieved my above goal — reading this other story made me realize that I was limiting who my main characters could be because I wasn’t comfortable writing about characters with more sexual experience than me. Which was stupid, because I write all the time about characters with more experience than me in all sorts of things. Why not sex? So I spent a long time considering what sort of person this other character was and what decisions she might have made in her life before getting to this point.

Oops, I guess this kind of already turned into a whole ‘nother blog entry. Sorry.

So, if you don’t want to read the rest of this entry, here’s the bottom line: I am enjoying The Good Wife SO HARD.

The Good Wife is the story of Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), who is not so much the titular character as the protagonist who has a complicated relationship with the designation of the title. Is she a good wife? Is she just good? Are either of those things what she wants to be? Are they what she can afford to be? Can she afford not to be them?

The event that spurs Alicia’s struggle with this title is the conviction of her State’s Attorney husband, Peter (Chris Noth) for corruption and related sexual indiscretions. To support their two kids, she goes back to work as a defense attorney for the firm headed by one of her old law-school buddies, Will (Josh Charles) and his legal partner Diane (Christine Baranski). There, she finds herself working with their in-house investigator, Kalinda (Archie Panjabi) and competing with fresh-out-of-law-school up-and-comer Cary (Matt Czuchry).

That there is a large cast of mains, and I’m not even counting the other recurring characters, like Peter’s mother Jackie, the recurring Chicago judges, or the new State’s Attorney, but there isn’t a single one whose onscreen appearances I dread. They’re all interesting. They all surprise me with both their bad sides and their good sides. Just when I think Will Gardner’s a great guy or Jackie Florrick is annoying or Diane Lockhart’s a b*tch, they do something completely unexpected but not at all inconsistent to make me change my mind. And I love, love, love how the episodes sometimes show the characters doing bad things for the right reasons and good ones for the wrong ones.

(And here is where I also chime in to mention that if there’s not a single character I dread seeing onscreen, it’s in part because the show is shot in New York, where they can pack it full of amazing actors and actresses, each of whom is worth the price of admission.)

In fact, the more I think about it, the more sure I am that the reason the characters on The Good Wife come across as decent human beings  is because the cast and crew on The Good Wife are amazing at establishing characters’ motivations and interested in doing so.

Yes, Cary can be a sycophantic dick, but it’s hard to hate him when you can understand his fear that he’s going to lose his dream job because his only competitor is old friends with their boss. Kalinda can be abrupt, cold, and self-serving, but how can you not feel for her when you see how quickly and unjustly people would walk all over her if she let them? Teenaged Zack Florrick means well, but he’s naive enough to think he knows everything, and that leads him to make mistakes. And disgraced Peter really does love his wife and kids.

(This show is the kind where I want to keep going to explain how every single character in the recurring cast of about two dozen is awesome, even the antagonists I sincerely hope fail because I want Alicia to come out on top. I even like the accused murderer with whom Alicia clashes in one episode. I would be happy to see any of the guest performers again!)

Characters aside, hands down what draws me most to this show aren’t the overarching subplots of whether Peter will succeed in his bid to regain his former, not-in-jail position or what Alicia will choose to do regarding her romantic life. In fact, I gotta admit, if those plots didn’t come with a hefty dose of Alan Cumming as image manager Eli Gold and scenes of Alicia trying to balance her personal happiness with what’s best for her kids/scenes that mix the law case and the interpersonal stuff, respectively, I wouldn’t be quite so interested.

No, what I really can’t get enough of are wonderful scenes of Alicia and Kalinda going off together to investigate, I dunno, plot stuff. Solving mysteries and whatever. I don’t really care. As brilliant as all the characters on this show are, they are the most brilliant, and it’s so much fun to watch them together, finding clues about the cases and each other and slowly getting to be friends.

Yes, despite my panegyric, there are things about The Good Wife I don’t like: I wasn’t too keen on the season 1 finale with its cheapest cliffhanger ending ever. Usually the show understand that if your answers are good, they’re more interesting than the questions. Even when I do have a sense of where a plotline is going, I don’t care. I’m not wondering “What’s going to happen when Grace confronts Alicia?” or “Who murdered that guy, for real?” I’m watching because it’s such a delight to see the way the writers and performers carry it out. But when they try to draw tension from actual plot questions (so far, just the show’s major romantic triangle, which also makes me sad, a little, because for once in the entire history of my television watching, I liked the dynamic between two of the characters better when they were friends), I find myself unengaged.

Also, I’m on the fence about how one of the things Alicia can do better than anyone else is relate to people. On one hand, it sets off warning bells for me when a story goes, “You know what this woman is good at? Feelings!” On the other, the story carefully sets up the point so that a lot of the baggage that makes this convention annoying is gone:
1) It’s clear that this isn’t some innate lady power, but instead comes from the fact that life just punched Alicia in the kidneys, hard, so unlike most of her colleagues, she gets what it’s like to be on the lower rung of life’s ladder;
2) it’s presented not as some consolation prize for failing to be gifted in other lawyer-type-areas but as a weapon Alicia has in her arsenal as well as her courtroom skills, tenacity, etc., something that works with them to make them even more valuable; and
3) the show is very aware of the possible problems. Alicia confronts her bosses about having to handhold people instead of argue in court in scenes that seem to be asking, “How do you deal with this, if you’re a woman who happens to be good at the kinds of things women are stereotypically good at? ”
So, yeah, that other hand does have a lot going for it, but unfortunately, those warning bells are pretty loud. I guess I can only wait and see where the show takes it.

Anyway, who am I kidding? I’m so excited for the next season that it’s all I can do not to plunk down the (not in budget) cash for the next set of DVDs before I even finish my dissertation. It’s the only TV show I’ve watched where the acting/writing commentary on the DVD special features held any interest for me — for the first time in my life, I have watched an episode, immediately re-watched it with commentary on, and been sorry there wasn’t an alternate commentary track with different performers’ thoughts so I could watch it again. And there you are.

BONUS: This entry was written before I started watching season 2. So here are ten things about season 2 that make me continue to love this show.
1. They have a throwaway joke parodying War Horse. And though it’s just five seconds of screen time, they use an actual puppet of a cow designed in the same style as the Joey puppets of the stage production.
2. They understand that when you zoom in on a digital photo, the image gets blurrier and blurrier.
3. Their online viral videos and social networking stuff look like actual online viral videos and social networking stuff.
4. THINGS COME BACK. Things that Alicia and others did in shows all the way back to the very first episode of the series keep coming back to pay off in organic, logical ways.
5. On a related note, nobody gets a break on the bad things they do just because they were bada$$ or fun to watch.
6. On a related related note, nobody gets cut off — no matter how badly characters behave and how much it comes back to bite them in the butt, the audience still sympathizes with why they did what they did.
7. PEOPLE COME BACK. The show doesn’t forget about secondary or even tertiary characters. I’d forgotten about the fiscally solvent divorce attorney at Alicia’s firm — the writers didn’t, and they show how he reacts to the company shake-up, again, in an organic, logical way.
8. Michael J. Fox! Yes, it’s a blow to the childhood to see him play Not-Marty-McFly-or-Alex-Keaton. But he and his character are both awesome! I hope #7 applies!
9. All the episodes of season 1 have one-word titles. All the episodes of season 2 have two-word titles. This means either the showrunners plan to stop before too many seasons result in jumping the shark, or they secretly love Victorian-style titles (“Episode 181, 203: In Which Alicia, Kalinda, and Cary are Called Upon to Prepare a Defense for a Thorough Ruffian; or, the Price of Integrity”). Either way, I’m down!
10. They mention one Jewish holiday — and it’s Yom Kippur! Portrayed correctly! Their Jews act like the Jews I know, not the Jews who celebrate Chanukah on TV in order to add some variety to the Christmas special

Yes, it’s April Fool’s Day. No, this isn’t a joke.

This is me writing about what I’ve come to think is one of the most common problematically expressed artistic criticisms on the Internet: the vilifying of Twilight fans manifested in everything from the Star Alliance to the “Still a better love story than Twilight” meme*.

To be clear: do I think Twilight is sexist? Yes. I also find it poorly written and boring.

(And do I think is George Takei awesome? Yes, yes, a million times, yes!)

But here’s what else I think. The enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. Delegitimizing the fantasies of thousands of women and girls by dismissing them as TwiMoms or Twihards and doing so in the name of feminist ideals is not feminism. It’s still sexism.

A lot of the time, Twilight-bashing gets conflated with Twihard-bashing. It seems obvious, right? Here is this awful series with so many horrible messages and WTF sparkling vampires — clearly anyone defending it or who, Nosferatu-forbid, actually enjoys it, is stupid, pathetic, and/or sexist themselves.

There are tons of great reasons why one might not want readers to absorb many of the themes in Twilight. But there are also problems with telling them that there’s something wrong with them for finding the series appealing, no matter how ideologically offensive it is.

First of all, telling anyone that what appeals to them is stupid or wrong is demeaning, not empowering. Even if I one-hundred-percent believe that someone’s else’s fantasy is harmful to them, that it teaches them to assimilate unhealthy ideas, and that it equips them with poor models for living their life, bashing them for having that fantasy doesn’t magically take away all these negative messages. It just adds another on top of it all: what you like is wrong. You’re so inferior that you don’t even know what’s bad for you — and, one might conclude, any bad consequences are partly your fault.

The major inconsistency with treating Twihards in particular as “the enemy” is that most commentators rightly criticize Twilight‘s positive portrayal of controlling romantic partners and its implicit suggestion that “getting a man” should be the only important thing in a woman’s life. These commentators — again, rightly — see this message as misogynist. But what’s equally misogynistic is fighting these messages so strongly only in media with a strong female fanbase and ignoring what really should be the problem: a broader culture of abuse.

For instance, we should be coming down just as hard and just as loud on fans of stories that romanticize the qualities of abusers. It is equally horrible to tell guys to imagine themselves as douchebags as it is to tell girls to imagine themselves as victims. Yet few anti-Twilight movements suggest that punch-a-bad-guy-bed-the-hot-chick action flicks or treat-everyone-like-shit-then-meet-the-girl-who-finally-sees-your-hidden-heart dramas are just as harmful as meet-a-hottie-let-him-rescue-you romances.

We can condemn the sexist messages in Twilight without condemning or patronizing the women and girls who find them interesting, entertaining, or even enticing. Because, frankly, if one of the problems with Twilight is how denies female characters agency, assuming that its readers also lack that agency to decide what’s best for themselves and run their own lives is the same kind of problem, not a solution.

The other main reason I find a lot of online anti-Twilight sentiment problematic is because often emphasizing the poor quality of Twilight winds up masking the faults of other works, especially in memes and arguments that compare Twilight to other popular stories. The series held up as great alternatives to Twilight also contain elements of sexism. I love Harry Potter and Star Trek as much as the next nerd — I admit I’ve never been a big Star Wars or Lord of the Rings fan, but I’d still rather watch or read those stories a hundred times than pick up anything related to Twilight again — but seriously? Not a single one of these guys** passes the Bechdel test. Hermione, Uhura, Leia, and Eowyn are more positive female role models than Bella, but each still has issues.

The Harry Potter series, for example, has major problems with a good mother=good woman/bad mother=bad woman dichotomy and with random unconscious things like Hermione naturally doing all the cooking, packing, and cleaning while the Trio are on the run, despite the fact that Harry is canonically a good cook and Hermione is canonically a bad one. The Star Wars original trilogy famously has almost no female characters who are not either sex workers or forced to dress as sex workers at some point in the story. The presence of Uhura, Rand, and Chapel on the Enterprise is a great first step, but please don’t tell me being space telephone operators, secretaries, and nurses is the epitome of the convention-smashing roles for females in speculative fiction.

For goodness’ sakes, just look at the ratio of male to female characters in each of these stories. Eowyn is nice, but in the 9-person-strong Fellowship of the Ring, how many are women? Hint: zero. (I guess that’s not so much a hint as the answer. But that’s not even taking into account the other sausage-fest main characters like Gandalf, Gollum, and Sauron.) If one of your characters is “the” woman, the story can do more work toward gender equality.

Okay, fine, you might want to say here, maybe there are problems with these other stories too. But isn’t Twilight just so much worse? Isn’t glorifying abusive relationships several steps below any of the problems these other stories have? After all, Hermione may be problematic, but she’s still smart and capable. Uhura is still brave and competent. Leia is still a heroine. Eowyn still kicks butt.  Let’s protest stories like Twilight — stories without these redeeming qualities — first.

And really, I would like to argue this properly, but since I’m already waxing long, let’s just consider an analogy. You live in an apartment plagued by ants, cockroaches, and rats. Do you really, really announce a united insect front against the rats, or do you just acknowledge that maybe the rats, being a bigger and worse problem, merit your full attention at the moment, but that doesn’t mean the ants and cockroaches are welcome either? Does pretending the ants and cockroaches are OK for now actually help the overall health problem of vermin in your living space?

Because sexism is a health problem. A mental health and hygiene problem for our society, one that worsens other social illnesses like racism, homophobia, classism, etc.

So, sure: maybe friends worry when friends read Twilight. But friends don’t let friends hate on Twilight without thinking hard about the reasons why.

* Although running a close second is “Har har, Justin Bieber’s stupid, he looks like a girl, and I bet he’s gay!!!” I am not a fan of Justin Bieber’s music either, but: people who don’t like him, you need better ways to make fun of him than questioning his gender presentation or sexuality. Because if he did get mistaken for a girl? If he were gay? THAT WOULD BE TOTALLY OKAY. And using those things as insults is NOT okay.

** I know, as soon as I said that, half of you racked your brains and came up with one or two lines that might qualify. I know I did as I was typing it. But how hard are you thinking to come up with an example? How many examples would you be able to come up with if the genders were reversed (named male characters talking about something that isn’t a female character)? Right: STILL. A. PROBLEM.

Me as Costello, Dave as Abbott, and Natalie as the awesome stage manager.

Why?

Because. (He’s centrefield.)

P. S. No, this doesn’t count as the end of hiatus.

So I thought I could handle recovering from this virus, doing physiotherapy, writing the first draft of my thesis, putting together some short stories, planning my flagship treasure hunt for the summer, taking online courses in cryptography and game theory, playing ice hockey, and keeping up with this blog all at the same time, but it turns out I was wrong. I will be back with sixguns a-blazing by or on APRIL 1, 2012. Until then, if you need sixguns, WARNING: you may be a character in an old-timey Western.

See you soon!