unfridged

• I think everyone who plays tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder has had times when the game went a little off the rails, or players made things uncomfortable for others, but these stories, compiled by io9, are absolutely bonkers.
• NEW FEMINIST FREQUENCY VIDEO YEAH. This time it’s all about sexy ladies being offered up as prizes in video games, starting with a perhaps controversial example: Metroid‘s Samus Aran.
• Speaking of Samus, Brianna Wu co-wrote a piece about the potential for the character to be a trans woman (giving both historical evidence and reviewing the reasons why fans need more trans representation). You may know Wu from when she was on the receiving end of GamerGate’s endless cascade of filth, and much the same thing happened to her here, prompting her to write a follow up piece taking geekdom to task. [The Mary Sue]
• At some point I’m going to rewatch Ex Machina and write a blog post detailing exactly why I fell hard for this film, but in the meantime the Nerds of Color have a piece about how there’s a difference between insensitively portraying abuse for shock value, and framing abuse to show how awful it truly is, and how awful the characters perpetrating it are.
• This week in looking critically at Disney: Bitch has a fascinating interview with Walidah Imarisha on the racial politics of Disney animals, and Four Three Film thoroughly breaks down gender representation in animation, and how the limited ways women and girls are designed in mainstream films are insufficient.
• The cast for the upcoming Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is currently entirely white, and this is unacceptable. [The Mary Sue]
• Bitch on Mad Max, action heroes, vulnerability, and compassion.

Image by Nikkie Stinchcombe.