- For your edification: five books with asexual protagonists. [Tor]
- So open world survival game Rust (which has always randomized what sort of character you end up with) was recently updated to include randomized gender, and there are many, many men who are not happy about it. [Motherboard]
- This is really really cool you guys: “Film dialogue from 2000 screenplays, broken down by age and gender.” [Polygraph]
- “Lots of female television characters were killed off last week.” [Jezebel]
- I wasn’t aware that “free, white, and twenty-one” used to be a common phrase, but it apparently was, and Jezebel charts its progression through classic Hollywood movies.
- Whitewashing Asian characters double feature! Tilda Swinton will be playing the Ancient One in Doctor Strange, who is usually an old Asian man. Scarlett Johansson will still be playing Major Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell, and is clearly not a Japanese woman, despite the producers trying to make her look more Asian. [Angry Asian Man]
- Wonder how the meeting to Asianify Johansson likely went? Watch this video. [Rocket Jump]
- At the very least these incidents are jumpstarting another discussion about Hollywood whitewashing, and the Mary Sue weighs in.
- Buzzfeed has a new show called The Lesbian Princess, and it is funny.
- YA literature can help parents talk to teens about consent. [NPR]
- Since the Wachowskis have officially okayed analyzing their work through a trans lens, let’s do that. [The Mary Sue]
- Are you tired of seeing groups of heroes where the hyper-competent woman is still the sidekick to the less impressive man? So is Vox. They start off with the show The Magicians, but take the time to show just how prevalent that particular trope is, particularly in genre works like Harry Potter and Guardians of the Galaxy.
- Ursula K Le Guin refused to blurb an all-male science fiction anthology, because she’s the best. [Bitch]
- And speaking of the scifi titan, Montreal band Heathers have a new EP out (full disclosure, one of their members is a coworker of mine), and the first track, “Gethen,” is inspired by Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (which, coincidentally, I’m currently reading. Both the novel and song are excellent). [Chart Attack]
Image: The Left Hand of Darkness cover detail
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