
- According to writer and producer Paul Dini, cartoon execs one hundred percent don’t care about getting a female audience. Sigh. [io9]
- Tauriel time! The Mary Sue defends the original character, talking about her importance and her (unfortunate) position in a love triangle.
- Also on the Tauriel bandwagon, Twitch supports the love triangle and discusses how The Hobbit is basically LOTR fan fiction, and why that’s a good thing.
- Zetta Elliott and Ibi Aanu Zoboi discuss the state of black girlhood in children’s literature, the diversity gap, the fridging of Rue in The Hunger Games, among other important topics. [Bitch]
- What happens when you make Bilbo a girl during before-bed story time? You get a really resourceful heroine, that’s what. [The Last Word on Nothing]
- Sociological Images tackles the ongoing body dimorphism in Disney films (specifically the hand sizes of their male and female characters) and, though the piece focuses on a pretty specific example, it brings to mind the time I watched The Little Mermaid as an adult and had a “right, this is where my neuroses stem from” moment when comparing Ariel’s head to waist ratio.
- A propos of nothing, here are some amazing chemical reactions. Anyone know where I can purchase Ammonium dichromate? [Tumblr’s Most Popular Posts]
- Black Girl Dangerous discusses fantasy characters and how they can be reinterpreted in radicalized ways to create narratives for marginalized folks, using The Hunger Games trilogy as a jumping off point.
- The always on point BGD also questions why our current obsession with period dramas skews so white. And pitches some fascinating shows that I want made yesterday.
- s. e. smith discusses those who, either through snobbery or ignorance, look down on fan fiction writing. She talks about the legitimacy of creative retellings, and the gendered source of the dismissal.
- Neo-reactionism, a (slowly) growing fringe movement in the tech community, is all about a return to a pre-French Revolution, monarchic way of life. I’m all for exploring different systems of governance, but could you leave my representative government alone? Also, scientific racism and old-fashioned gender roles? I’ll pass. [TechCrunch]
- I have a roundup of nerdy paper snowflakes over a Quirk Books, and I even include some Klingon for real geek cred.
Image from bluemonkeywriting.tumblr.com.