Claire Ryan's Blog

J.K. Rowling is the most powerful author in the world, because she created the most profitable intellectual property of the last decade. It has made her a multi-millionaire and launched her career into the stratosphere, spread to many other mediums and merchandising and all that good stuff, and it’s beloved across the world. (We should all hope to be so successful!)

She is also not to be trusted. Not with your hopes, and not with your heart.

The problem, really, is that Rowling has dropped the ball when it comes to being a responsible author. Remember when she appropriated Native stories about skinwalkers? Remember that shit? I do. I remember her response as well. She treated it like it was no big deal and that, my friends, is Not On.

In the words of Dr. Adrienne Keane, someone far more qualified to comment on this stuff than I:

…it’s not ‘your’ world. It’s our (real) Native world. And skinwalker stories have context, roots, and reality … You can’t just claim and take a living tradition of a marginalised people. That’s straight up colonialism/appropriation.

Yeah. There is a big problem when non-Native people take what they want from Native culture and twist it for the sake of a story. Responsible authors don’t do this because it’s fucking asinine and labels someone as being an ignorant dipshit who did not do their research or talk to Native people. You don’t do this to a culture that’s already been broken, battered, partly erased, and used to discriminate against Native people.

You just don’t.

For the record, this is the reason why Christianity in general is fair game. Christianity is a dominant world religion and a major force in many of the most powerful countries in the world. We can write all the stories about demons and angels that we feel like. Context always matters when it comes to cultural appropriation.

So, I unfollowed J.K. Rowling a while back because of this, and the whole “keeping Johnny Depp on even though he’s an abusive shithead and you are literally the only author who could demand to have him removed and have the studio take you seriously” thing. As far as I’m concerned, any author who pulls this kind of nonsense can’t be trusted and it was only a matter of time before she screwed up again. And lo, here we are.

That’s Dumbledore on the left, played by Jude Law

She said that Dumbledore was canonically gay, and him and Grindelwald were totally into each other. So we were going to see this, right? In Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald? Because that seems like a major plot point and hella important for character development because Grindelwald was a Dark wizard and all that?

If we were, then I wouldn’t be writing this article.

The director, David Yates, said that the sexuality of Dumbledore would not be explicitly explored in FB2, and:

But I think all the fans are aware of that … He had a very intense relationship with Grindelwald when they were young men. They fell in love with each other’s ideas, and ideology and each other.

J.K. Rowling has responded to criticism by dismissing it all as trolling. She’s deflected by saying that gay people just look like people, no need to bring it up.

She was given every possible cookie for saying that Dumbledore was gay, even though it was never referenced in the books and even though NO OTHER LGBT CHARACTERS show up in Harry Potter. She wrote the screenplay for FB2, and even if she hadn’t, she is still J.K. Rowling and her control over her intellectual property gives her unimaginable power. She could have written in proper LGBT representation, and told the studio to suck it up and deal if they had an issue with it.

She didn’t. She just whined and dismissed and deflected, and the director spun some bullshit like somehow gay relationships aren’t worthy of being passionate, or – gasp! – sexual.

You spineless fucking cowards.

It’s 2018, for gods’ sake. I don’t know what the hell else to say. I’ve got no time for someone with that much power who not only won’t use it to push to minority representation, but also dismisses anyone who speaks up. What good is J.K. Rowling if she won’t go to bat for the powerless?

Responsible authors listen to their fans. Responsible authors pay attention when they’re called out. If I had been in her position (which is not bloody likely, because I will never retroactively make a character gay just to drum up publicity), I would have simply said “Trust me. I’m going somewhere with this. There will be a payoff – not in this movie, but definitely in the next one. I’m working on it already. Just please, please, trust me.”

What J.K. Rowling’s fans desperately want is to trust her. Trust that she’s not playing with their emotions. Trust that she didn’t, in fact, toss out this tidbit about Dumbledore being gay just for some headlines. Trust that she will actually write him like the gay character she’s claimed him to be.

Well, she’s shown that she’s not worthy of that trust. She won’t flex her power for their sake. It’s shameful, and disappointing, and it is what it is.

Pin your hopes on authors who listen, because she’s officially ignoring you.

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The post J.K. Rowling is not worthy of your trust appeared first on Raynfall.

So, I accidentally wrote a short story when I should have been working on the last book of the Daemonva trilogy. I’m sure everyone who’s waiting for it is really disappointed right now… all two of you.

Truth be told, I’m not even waiting for this book. I’ve grown to absolutely hate this series. I’ve been bogged down in it so long that I’m utterly sick of it. It’s the reason I can’t move on to any other book that I’d rather write, because my pride is just enough that I won’t just abandon it completely and leave the story unfinished.

The story has to be finished. It has to be. Stories are made to end, and the ending must be a real ending, one that brings closure to the author and reader alike.

But I can’t keep being stymied by this monster. Hence, I sort of… stepped back a bit. I was browsing around the Submission Grinder (highly recommended for anyone looking for traditional professional markets) and I spotted a few webzines that interested me. And one of them, well… I read their submission guidelines, read a few posts of what they were looking for, and I got an idea. That idea grew into a short story overnight.

A week of tweaking, editing, sending it to a few trusted friends for feedback, more tweaking, and I submitted it. Me! The writer who’s written maybe three short stories ever! But regardless of whether they accept it or not (and it’s likely not, let’s be honest here), I think I needed to do this. From constraint comes creative catharsis. It pulled me out of my box and out of my own head, and hopefully out of the rut I’ve fallen into over the last year.

So it goes. I’ll have to see what happens next. I joined another writers’ group as well, one specifically for commercial fiction, so at least I’m in good company.

I should be finishing this and I’m not right now. I’m sorry.
Related Posts:

Another story up
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Your daily dose of depression
All Art is Political
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The post Writing outside the box appeared first on Raynfall.

Well, well, well. Take a look at this sorry tale of hubris and nonsense.

The summary: Logan Paul is a popular YouTube star who went to the quite famous Aokigahara forest in Japan, a.k.a. the ‘suicide forest’, to make a video. You can tell how seriously and respectfully he took this venture by the fact that he wore a shitty Toy Story hat while doing it. He found a suicide victim’s body and filmed it and put it up on YouTube.

If, at this point, you’re not leaning back from the screen in disgust, then there is definitely something wrong with you.

A promotional photo of the man in question:

I had never heard of him before today, but apparently his fan base consists mostly of kids and teenagers.

Let’s not get into how immensely hurtful it is to the family of the victim, that their loved one was used in a fucking YouTube video by this asshole to get views. And he did it to get views, make no mistake about it. Someone with a functional moral compass would have deleted the footage. He decided to display it to the world in the worst form of voyeurism imaginable. There is so much to be said about this fact alone, but I’d like to focus on another: that he decided to ‘push boundaries’ (because that is his thing, by all accounts) by walking into a place of suffering and death and treating it with the worst kind of disrespect.

It was gonna be a joke. This was all a joke. Why did it become so real?

He said that after he found the body, and I swear this makes me want to punch his stupid face in. Because this is where it becomes serious to him. Because, up to this point, he was walking through a forest where people routinely go to kill themselves, where it’s enough of a public crisis today that the authorities have put up signs and volunteers try to talk them out of it, and he treated it like a joke.

If no one can tell the difference between you being ‘edgy’ and ‘pushing boundaries’, and you simply being a vile shit-stain with the morals of a week-dead skunk, then you are an abject failure (and also a vile shit-stain etc).

Those who create media and narrative may not be obliged to make the world a better place, but by all the gods, you’ve got a responsibility to not make it any worse. This kind of edgy bullshit makes it worse. He cannot be allowed any excuse; he made the choice at every step to put his ridiculous edginess, if you can call it that, over the humanity and dignity of other people, without their consent. He treated people as disposable props in his own narrative.

I’ve never heard of him before, and now I will never forget him. May the Internet fall on his head for his crimes, and may this ‘edgy’ nonsense someday stop.

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The post Can we stop being so edgy, for gods sake appeared first on Raynfall.

All art is political.

I would venture to say that, even further, art is inescapably political; every single part of it, from conception to production to end product, is imbued with politics and privilege. Our ability to create art is shaped by our political environment just as much as art itself is.

I’m getting into this now because, obviously, of something someone said on Twitter.

A character is not the writer. A narrator is not the writer. A character’s attitudes and opinions may or may not be the writer’s. A narrators attitudes and opinions may or may not be the writer’s.

— Robin Hobb (@robinhobb) December 28, 2017

To be completely fair: I know nothing bad of Robin, and I’ve never read any of her books. But this alone rubs me the wrong way, because I take the view that characters actually are the writer. Narrators are the writer. Everything that plays out in a novel is the writer.

We are the stories we tell, even the make-believe ones.

What I mean by this is that art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and there is nothing inevitable or immutable about how we tell a story. There’s a truly horrible tendency for creators to throw up their hands and disavow all responsibility for the narratives they create, as if every word placed on the page isn’t a conscious choice we make as the story is formed. Consciously or otherwise, everything that gets into a story is on us. Novels, more than anything else, are the product of a single imagination.

Of course, it’s fair to say that we are not our villains; it’s perfectly possible to write a character who likes to kill for fun, for example, and it’s reasonable to assume that the author who produced this villain isn’t a serial killer. But what if the character in question is Christian Gray? Should we consider that E.L. James might honestly believe that BDSM is supposed to be horribly abusive?

Ah, and therein lies the problem.

No, Christian Gray is not E.L. James. But she wrote him into a particular role, and handed him a script, that turned him into an abusive rapist that we were supposed to like. She bears the responsibility–and the rightly deserved criticism–for producing a piece of art that is irredeemably foul, that propagates lies about BDSM, that presents twisted, harmful relationships as desirable. We are not our characters, sure… but we have absolute power over them.

All art is political. All artists carry their political self–their views about the world as it is and as it should be–into the act of creating art. If a reader thinks, somehow, that writing about a serial killer means that the author must be a serial killer, then we can safely dismiss them as being just a bit weird. But if a reader points out that the narrative itself is flawed and propagates harm, then we should sit up and take notice.

You can’t write a story about the Nazis returning in the modern day, and make them the good guys.

You can’t write a story about white people “bringing civilization” to brown people or their in-universe analogues and play it like this was a great idea with no drawbacks.

You might believe wholeheartedly that Nazis are utter scum and colonialism is completely fucked up, but it doesn’t matter. Once you make the choice to tell a certain kind of story, then readers will start asking some very hard questions about your personal motives and opinions. You had the power to write anything, and… look what you did with it.

Look what you did with it.

Why else would you think that story is okay?

Maybe there’s a case to be made for good intentions, or plain ignorance. A white author tries to write a “reverse racism” story, and inadvertently propagates all the same tired old bullshit of actual racism. A male writer writes a slasher horror story where the only girl who survives is the virgin, without once considering the kind of message that sends about female sexuality. Unfortunately, damage is not negated by intentions or ignorance. Those are explanations, but not excuses, and these narratives do cause damage regardless. (How narratives cause harm is a topic for another day.)

We may not embody our characters, but we embody every choice they make, every word they speak, and the sum total of them and the plot and the setting and the novel itself is an expression of us and our politics. If you’re not prepared to receive criticism on that level, then I would suggest that you’re not really prepared to be a professional writer, because such criticism is as much an examination of culture and society as it is of you yourself. And saying “I am not my characters”? That looks like a cop-out to me.

All art is political. Perhaps it’s time we accepted this and gained a better awareness of just what kind of politics we’re putting into our art.

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The post All Art is Political appeared first on Raynfall.

So… let’s talk about derailment. I’ve not been properly active or even been able to write much for just over a year. The third book in the Daemonva trilogy is stalled out. Sometimes, life happens, and movement becomes difficult. I think every writer knows this.

My particular derailment, this time, started last November, when I was doing Nanowrimo. That orange-faced brain-dead shit weasel was elected President of the United States, and the sheer level of fear and anxiety that came pouring out everywhere, from Americans I care about, threw me off-course. I gave up on Nanowrimo, and tried to adjust.

Then, I had a miscarriage in December, and everything stopped. I had no mental space for anything but myself. No narratives could be built from that–or, at least, none I wished to tell as a novel. I tried to adjust again.

I found out I was pregnant in April. I tried to adjust. We moved into a housing co-op in September, into a great, new, stable home with a wonderful community around us. I tried to adjust. One of our dearest friends from college died suddenly. I tried to adjust.

My son was born at the start of December, and, once again, the world moves under my feet. Derailment happens, for better or worse. So now I have to figure out how to be a writer in these new circumstances; how to tell the stories I want to tell, how to finish the current trilogy, and how to move on. I may not succeed at all this, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

There will likely be masses of tea involved.

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The post Derailment appeared first on Raynfall.

So, what I wrote about katanas has basically become the most popular thing I’ve ever published here, and the comments have been mostly random fan-boys telling me that I’m wrong or just flat out insulting me.

What can I say? Sorry you don’t share my sense of humour? I would have thought that an article called “5 Reasons Why Katanas are Stupid” would be taken for the tongue-in-cheek psuedo-listicle it actually is, but apparently a lot of people thought I was being completely serious when I was only being maybe 50% serious at best.

Anyway, from the comments, let’s pick out some pertinent points, fix the grammar and spelling errors, and have at them.

You’re no better, you’re a European longsword fan-boy!

Yes, longsword is my weapon of choice, but I don’t think you can accuse me of being a fan-boy when I’ve said in the article that rapiers are superior to longswords in the average civilian duel.

Another katana advantage: Draw speed. In a hypothetical situation with both swords sheathed, someone skilled in iai *will* get a cut in before the longsword user can draw his/her blade.

My opinion would be that the katana cut is effectively neutered by plate armour, so draw speed is not relevant. You just can’t cut through plate armour with any kind of sword. So the theoretical katana user would get the first cut off, fail to actually do damage, and then we’re back to square one.

As to whether a katana can deliver an effective thrust against plate… I don’t quite know offhand, but my guess would be no. It would have to be incredibly accurate (to hit a gap in the plate) and very forceful, and then it’s a question of attaining effective penetration. The usual katana blade I’ve seen, however, is really fat in the cross-section, and this presents a problem for the possible penetration depth. In the European tradition, knights used half-swording to get their opponent on the ground, and then switched to a rondel dagger to actually do any damage. Rondel daggers are all very thin and straight; hold them in an ice-pick grip for maximum power, while you’ve got your opponent pinned under you, and getting through a gap, and through the mail and the padding under it isn’t so difficult. But in combat, with moving targets, where you can’t apply your full strength and more importantly your full weight to the thrust, with a fat blade? I would put it at a level that’s very close to impossible.

A katana is no match for the speed, reach and point control of a rapier. However, will one or two thrusts be enough to stop a samurai (fired up on adrenaline) before his swing connects and does catastrophic damage?

 

Whether a rapier would actually stop a samurai with a katana is something else entirely. The answer to that is twofold. Rapiers are not designed to be used against armour, even lamellar armour. A samurai in armour would likely destroy a rapier duelist because the duelist just can’t hurt them. Same for the longsword user in plate. (It was a civilian weapon, after all.) But if we’re looking at just the swords, on equal footing, meaning everyone in regular clothes? I’d still give it to the rapier. It’s not just faster; it’s got a much greater reach, and superior protection in the hand guard and its defensive tactics. It’s designed for the wielder to avoid being hit at all, so the lunge is long, the hand guard is huge, and the stance leans backwards.

A rapier can disengage and strike at higher speed, from outside the katana’s range, with better defensive capabilities, and that’s a lot to overcome on the part of the katana wielder.

The longsword in this situation is tricky as well, but there’s always the option of taking the first few hits to get inside the rapier’s effective measure, and going to half-swording. It’s probably very risky, but it’s an option at least. The katana, as far as I know, doesn’t have an equivalent to half-swording.

But that’s just how it is with specialization. A rapier is rubbish on a battlefield, and its ability to cut is laughable. You’ll always trade off some functionality in one area and accept that, in some situations, your blade is no better than a paperweight. Just goes to show there is no such thing as a perfect sword.

Rapiers are designed for thrusting and that’s the ONLY thing they can do, since you can’t expect to block or parry with it unless you’re up against another rapier… Against any other ancient weapon; the rapier is biting the dust.

Rapiers are fast and terrifyingly precise. Rapier sword play is based on avoidance and reach. All that adds up to the rapier duelist being able to land a hit on a longsword or katana fighter long before they can get a strike in return. (Fun fact: you can parry and block a longsword or katana with a 16th century steel rapier. Source: the Academie Duello Open Floor Night every Friday.)

I think the best counter to the argument that rapiers were terrible weapons and useless against anything but another rapier is the fact that they were the the civilian weapon of choice for such a long time. If longswords or katanas were superior single combat blades, all else being equal, then we would have seen a very different evolution of sword design in the 16th-17th centuries in Europe. After all, why would someone choose an inferior sword to defend themselves? We have to assume that actual swordfighters of the time were not stupid, and the rapier endured for so long because it worked well in its proper context against other swords of the same era.

If you think a rapier duelist can defeat an armored opponent, and write a post of 3 paragraphs trying to defend this incredibly stupid opinion, you should not make another post about fighting ever again.

I don’t think that. You’re just bad at reading comprehension. I wrote an entire other article on the rapier, in case you’re interested, that specifically says rapiers were crap against armoured opponents.

I love ALL swords, and as such here’s a less BS debate from someone who isn’t clearly biased. Enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDkoj932YFo

I’m just including this for the laughs. Go watch the video, it’s pretty stupid.

[Insert long comment about me being a horrible person and racist against non-white culture]

Yeah, I don’t know what to make of it either. Apparently at least one commenter was driven to nausea because I had the sheer temerity to speak about katanas without fawning all over them. Said commenter also accused me of cowardice(?), hypocrisy(??), and being entitled(???), and said I hurt their feelings. Fan-boys, huh?

[Insert long comment of useful criticism, but from the faulty premise that I’m attempting to be completely serious]

I’m just going to link to it if anyone is interested, because good commenters are hard to find and should be appreciated.

Your somewhat misguided comment that katanas were made from “crap materials” is an uneducated lie and not true at all.

No, it’s absolutely true. Katanas were made from the best possible steel that could be produced from really shitty base materials. The Japanese had to get really good at working their iron supplies to produce quality steel, and hence I said, in the damn article, “the end result was a fine sword made from some of the purest steel in the ancient world, but the whole process was long and backbreaking”.

“Katanas are specialized at cutting; longswords are good all-rounders,” is not true.

*looks at a katana*

*looks at a longsword*

So, like, have you got another explanation as to why katanas are better at cutting than a longsword, worse at thrusting than a longsword or a rapier, and longswords have half-swording techniques that are not available to either a katana or a rapier?

For gods sake, people. Saying that a sword can’t do a particular thing isn’t the same as saying that a sword isn’t as good at a particular thing than other swords. I know katanas can execute thrusts. I also know that their very design means thrusting is a little more difficult and cutting is a little easier. There is a good reason why the average sword across history looks like a longsword, and not a katana. That design is a a pretty good trade-off in terms of the physics of cut and thrust.

I hope this has been a useful and informative follow-up, and that any fan-boys reading might do me the courtesy of reading what I actually wrote instead of making up some reactionary bullshit and responding as if I’m a five-year-old with ADHD. As always, comments are open but I will remove or edit them as and when I feel like it if I think you’re an asshole.

Related Posts:

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The post A Follow-up to That Article About Katanas appeared first on Raynfall.

There is a moment, during Wonder Woman, when Diana and Steve are rushing through one of the trenches on the front lines, and Diana stops to speak with a distraught woman who begs for her help. Steve tries to pull her with him, saying they need to keep going and this is not what they’re here for. Diana says no, this is what I’m here for.

She throws off her cloak, and steps out onto the battlefield. She walks with conviction, with determination; with the unstoppable force of a superhero who intends to deliver justice. She drives back the enemy, and liberates the innocent.

It was at that point that the friend who was with me in the cinema started crying. She didn’t stop until the end of the movie. I managed to hold it together until I left the theatre and then, then I cried my eyes out. We had to go get a drink and talk and just take some time to process everything, and recover from the emotional impact.

I was not prepared to see Wonder Woman.

Let the ass-kicking begin.

The best I can do here is try to explain why this movie is so deeply important, and why it affected us so. Let it be understood, however, that I’m speaking only for white women. Gal Gadot is white, and Wonder Woman will never have the same significance for women of colour who are still waiting for their superhero movie. Plus, the movie has the usual Hollywood stink of not really having any significant black characters with speaking parts… but saying Hollywood is racist is a bit like saying Ireland is a bit rainy. So bear in mind: this movie is far from perfect. No spoilers, mostly.

Waiting for Wonder Woman

I’ve been essentially boycotting most superhero movies for, oh, a few years now. If it was a big summer blockbuster with a single white male superhero with a shitty brown haircut, I did not go to see it. Why bother? I’d lost interest in those stories, being retold over and over with slightly different witty dialogue. Even the rare superhero movie with a woman in it was difficult to watch, because it was always, always clear that said woman (and there was usually only one woman) was there for the male gaze. She had her part, and she also had to look sexy to straight men. And she was sidelined, underused, and lacked character development.

There were glimmers of hope. I watched Thor, because Chris Hemsworth with his shirt off was so blatantly playing to the female gaze, and because René Russo is incredible, and because Natalie Portman did an okay job even though I can’t stand her. I watched Guardians of the Galaxy, the first and the second, because I like Gamora and Nebula so much. I watched some movies and I was still frustrated and annoyed because I kept asking, when will it be my turn? Why should I keep having to settle for whatever scraps Hollywood deems suitable to throw my way, in movies that clearly aren’t made for me?

So I haven’t seen any Spider-Man movie since the first time it was rebooted. I stopped watching anything to do with Batman since The Dark Knight – and, for what it’s worth, I think Christopher Nolan is horribly overrated as a director. I’ve seen no new Superman movies after Superman Returns in 2006. I’ve ignored all the X-Men movies after X-2 in 2003. I’ve missed dozens of other movies, including ones that everyone agrees are pretty good, because I just got tired of being ignored. Those movies aren’t for me, I thought. They’re made to appeal to a male audience. Why bother?

Why bother…

So I waited. We all waited. Rumors of this female superhero or that one getting her own movie never panned out. Hollywood constantly seemed to have issues with the very thought that a woman could carry a big summer blockbuster. DC had sexist issues all over, and Marvel were better in general but just couldn’t seem to commit to anything even though they had Scarlet Witch, Black Widow, Gamora, and a whole bunch of recognizable X-Women. I have to say, when I heard Spider-Man was getting yet another reboot, I just about gave up. I was never going to see the superhero movie I really wanted.

But what did I want? Honestly, I just wanted a movie with a woman as the main character, being heroic, without being treated as a sex object by the camera, without having her gender used against her in cheap ways. I wanted to see myself on the screen. I wanted a movie without the sting of disappointment that comes from suddenly having sexism leap out at you and remind you that your gender is still treated as the Other, and this space – of superheroes, of fantastic powers, of extraordinary people doing great things – this space is not for you, and it never will be.

When you’ve given up all hope, you tend not to have very high expectations. You’re just waiting for that crushing disappointment to hit you again, so you watch very carefully, and guard your heart. But when you’ve been waiting for something so long, and suddenly it arrives literally out of nowhere, well… it’s overwhelming. It’s hard to handle without cracking up and crying.

Wonder Woman got amazing reviews, and I didn’t dare get my hopes up. Still, I booked tickets for me and my friend. We had to go. Gotta get those box office numbers, and maybe we’ll see more female-led superhero movies. It was probably going to be okay, we thought.

We were not prepared.

Wonder Woman starts on Themiscyra, among the Amazons; women of every size and shape and color, living and working and fighting together. General Antiope (Robin Wright) is the old, scarred, battle-hardened warrior with fearsome fighting skills. Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielson) is regal and commanding and wise.

Every scene was shot for their character. I kept waiting for that shot, that I’ve seen so often before, where the camera swings around in an unnatural way and I’m suddenly and harshly reminded that no matter how good or interesting or powerful a female character is, it means nothing unless they’re also sexually appealing to straight men. But there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that presented this island paradise full of women as sexual objects. They were portrayed as real people.

Once Steve Traynor showed up (that’s Chris Pine), I was worried that he’d take control of the narrative. I was still waiting for that moment, when Diana would be shoved to the side, and a man would start directing her story. It never came. She chose to leave the island, and never once handed narrative control over to anyone.

On the boat from Themiscyra, there’s a wonderful little scene where Diana and Steve get talking about sex. I was waiting for that moment, when it turns out that Diana fulfills the “What is this thing you call love” trope, seeing as she grew up on an island without men and the sexist assumption of no men equals no sex is so horribly ingrained. It never came. With a single throwaway line, she adverts the trope, and hard. “I’ve read all twelve volumes of Cleo’s treatises on body and pleasure,” she says. “She concluded that men are essential for procreation, but for pleasure, unnecessary.”

I wanted to stand up and cheer when I heard that line. Diana didn’t just advert a sexist trope; she explicitly shattered the sexist assumption of women not being sexual beings in their own right. Women can handle their own pleasure. Women have their own sexual agency. Women have no need of men.

And then Diana walked out on the front lines, through no man’s land (notice the symbolism?) and I swear I was with her in every step. I was with her in every sword swing. She fought her way through with the wrath of an angry goddess, never once being shown off for the gratification of straight men in the audience, and every scene seemed to shout “this is for you! All for you! This is your power fantasy, enjoy every second of it!” I was with her, and I did.

I know a lot of people like to disparage inclusivity as political correctness run amok (cue the ignorant bleating of “but what if the story REQUIRES a white male protagonist?!” Answer: your lack of imagination is showing). But this is what inclusivity means. It means that I felt like I belonged. I kept waiting for Wonder Woman to betray me, as so many movies have done before, and it… didn’t. I got to see myself as a superhero – THE superhero, the center around which all else revolves, the nexus of power and narrative. My gender was not used in cheap ways to appeal to men.

I didn’t have to suffer the sting of knowing that, well, Black Widow is a major part of the plot in Avengers, but she’s constantly put into outfits that show off her tits and ass, and her fighting style puts a lot of emphasis on wrapping her legs around her opponent, and she’s one of the least powerful of the team. I didn’t have to put up with Gamora playing second fiddle to yet another brown-haired white guy clone with a Snarky-Everyman personality. I didn’t have to sit through a damn sausage fest with one token woman, a la Captain America. Every other superhero movie might be for the gratification and gaze of men above all else, but this one… this one’s for me. This one says that I can be a superhero too.

I don’t want to make it seem like the movie can’t be criticized. I’m normally the first to slam bad writing, and this one has some really terribly weak parts that get right up my nose in retrospect. It’s got Issues, especially when it comes to race. But I have to be honest here: Wonder Woman is so significant, so deeply personal, that I can’t write that critique. My mind goes back to Diana on the battlefield, and that slow, indomitable walk of power, and I start to choke up all over again. Thankfully, there have been some excellent critiques written, one of the best of which (in my opinion) is this one – My Soul Looks Back and Wonders: A Critical Examination of the Wonder Woman Movie. (There have also been critiques that talk about how Diana wasn’t portrayed sexily enough, and those particular critics can fuck off forever.)

So, in short: Wonder Woman made me cry, completely unexpectedly, and I loved it enough to go see it twice. It may even make me forgive DC for the bullshit sexism they’ve perpetrated over the years – and don’t think I’m not asking myself how the hell they managed to get Wonder Woman so very right, considering their track record. Go see if you haven’t already. It’s pretty good, if you’re a man, and if you’re a woman, it might just make you happy-cry too.

The 3D is utter rubbish, but I don’t think you need me to tell you that.

Related Posts:

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Fifty Shades of Crap
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The post Waiting for Wonder Woman appeared first on Raynfall.

Let’s play a game, shall we? What is the better sword in a fight: longsword, katana, or rapier?

My post about katanas has gotten some pretty interesting discussion, and it seems that my point that a rapier would defeat both a katana and a longsword in single combat is a bit contentious. I maintain that this shouldn’t be a controversial stance at all. I think that when we look at history, it’s clear that the rapier was the weapon of choice for the duel.

Let’s compare the three swords.

Reach

I mentioned this before, but a katana is relatively short compared to a longsword. Rapiers are only a little bit longer than a longsword. Their relative difference in reach, however, is pretty significant due to the style in which they are wielded. The rapier’s long, fast, single-handed lunge has a much better reach than either the longsword or the katana.

Speed

The longsword isn’t exactly known for being fast, but the katana definitely known for the iaijutsu quick-draw. So how would it fare against a rapier? Well, as an opener, this could definitely be effective, but a rapier is much faster during a fight. That fine point control makes for a brutally quick disengage and lunge.

Defense

It has been suggested that rapiers could not defend effectively against other swords of the same historical period. Personally I think this is nonsense, if only because the Academie Duello Open Floor every Friday shows that proper steel rapiers are fine defensive weapons in their own right! Rapier swordplay emphasizes avoidance; it was a civilian weapon after all, and used by people who typically didn’t wear armor in their daily lives. Steel weapons were not just for show, and, despite what Hollywood would like you to believe, one sword isn’t going to cut through another.

Damage

Here’s the one area where the rapier just doesn’t measure up. It’s important to note that both the longsword and the katana were upper-class military weapons whose chief purpose was to kill effectively and efficiently. This isn’t surprising as their evolution was driven by the needs of professional soldiers engaged in warfare.

But rapiers were not intended for the battlefield. They were developed specifically for civilian use, for self-defense and for dueling, with the intention of wounding rather than killing outright. Rapier duels could still end in death, and many were deadly, but duels were usually decided by first blood, or by one fighter becoming exhausted or conceding. A rapier will strike first, and win the duel if the conditions allow it. But there is a world of difference between being stabbed by a rapier and taking a Mordhau to the face. Being stabbed by a rapier is survivable.

Conclusion

In the original post, I said the following:

Let’s be honest here, if we’re talking one-on-one duels, a samurai with a katana and a knight with a longsword are both going to get their asses kicked by the same person – someone who had the foresight to bring a sword heavily designed for dueling to the fight, i.e. a rapier.

Swords are only as good as how well they fit their purpose, and I think it’s clear that rapiers excel in their specific context. Are they the greatest swords ever, guaranteed to beat all the rest? No. But as long as everyone is obsessed with this one-upmanship of comparing one blade to another, it’s worth pointing out that rapiers really are the best choice in single combat if the objective is to simply beat the other fighter, not kill them. They have all the advantages to avoid being hit and to wear down an opponent. Longswords and katanas were designed to kill, with the assumption (in the case of the longsword anyway) that its wielder would be wearing enough armor to take a few hits along the way.

Something else that I had to mention in the comments of the other post is this: if the swordfighters of the 16th century had found that a longsword or katana type weapon was more effective in single combat, don’t you think they’d have used that instead of wasting decades on refining their rapier techniques? I think it’s a safe assumption that the rapier endured for so long (and eventually evolved into the smallsword etc) because it really was that damn good.

So let’s not take a crap all over rapiers, my friends. Remember, there is no such thing as a perfect sword, but there is such a thing as the perfect sword for the situation at hand.

(Image credit: Danelli Armouries. Go check out their swept hilt rapiers. Try not to drool.)

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The post In Defense of the Rapier appeared first on Raynfall.

So… have you heard about the raging dumpster fire that is the newest comic iteration of Captain America? If not, you can go here for the short version, plus a little more context on why it’s a dumpster fire etc etc. Very long story short, Captain America is now a Nazi.

I think I’ve said all I want to say about the very concept of turning a character like Steve Rogers into a Nazi. But I’ve seen some reactions to it and I’m alternatively annoyed and enraged, especially by the writer of this abomination, Nick Spencer.

It’s entertainment, it doesn’t matter!

No. NO. All art is political, whether you want it to be or not, because nothing is created in a vacuum. Narratives matter, wherever they’re told, and if you don’t think that, you’re a goddamn idiot. Our whole world is created and controlled by the stories we tell and re-tell.

Maybe Cap’s just a comic book character to you. Maybe he doesn’t matter to you. Stop being such a fucking narcissist and accept that he means something to a lot of people, even if you’re not one of them.

They’ll just retcon it back to normal later.

Really? This is an admission that those assholes at Marvel decided to ruin one of their best characters for the worst kind of greed. This is an admission from them that all the emotional attachment that the fans have for Captain America doesn’t mean shit, because they’ll throw it all away on a moment’s notice to drum up some controversial publicity.

This makes Marvel look like the worst kind of corporate whores.

Why don’t you give it a chance?

Why the actual fuck would I? I don’t have to entertain every single what-if as a valid plot. I’m a writer, for Athena’s sake, I know the structure of good narrative. I know some stories should not be written because they are, at their very core, a betrayal of the audience. I’m not obliged to give such stories a chance.

I don’t care if such stories are told well. As an alternative example: the new Ghost in the Shell movie. I’ve been reliably informed that it has stunning visuals and a great soundtrack and it’s pretty watchable. I will still – STILL – call it a shit movie and I refuse to watch it, because no fancy graphics or music can change the fact that making Major Kusanagi a white woman is unforgivable. Doing that one thing is enough to rip out a part of who the character of Motoko Kusanagi is, leaving nothing but a shallow clone carrying a name she doesn’t deserve. I will not have my love of the original manga tainted by an imposter.

Hollywood pulls shit like this every other week so I’m growing pretty numb to it, frankly, but that doesn’t make it any less of a crime.

But Hydra isn’t really the Nazis, they’ve been around longer than–

Shut up. They’ve been Nazi analogues for decades. The Red Skull, Cap’s arch-nemesis, is a goddamn Nazi. Captain America was created to fight the Nazis. You can retcon the comic continuity all you like but you can’t erase the actual history of how Hydra have been written, likely since before you were born.

So… the thing that is making me unreasonably angry about all this is the reaction from Nick Spencer. Before I properly marshall my thoughts, let me say this much: if I were a less articulate individual, this part would consist entirely of swearing and calling him every insult I know in every language I know. But let’s move beyond that and see if I can describe just why I’m so angry.

The first reason is that I could spend five minutes with Scrivener open and only the use of my nose to type, and I could come up with a better premise for a Captain America story. Making the Cap a Nazi (excuse me, a fake in-universe even-worse-version of the Nazis) is the laziest, most idiotic bad-fan-fiction premise I’ve ever heard.

The second reason is that Spencer is a reactionary man-child who can’t seem to take any criticism without whining, and who put a bunch of villains called the Bombshells into Captain America: Sam Wilson #17 who talk and act like liberal activists. And they’re throwing grenades at a Marvel Universe copy of Ann Coulter. I can’t even describe how utterly bullshit that is.

The third, and maybe the biggest reason, is that doing this is the most tone-deaf nonsense I’ve ever witnessed in modern comics. Neo-Nazis are on the rise across the world. The US elected a dyed-in-the-wool, endorsed-by-the-KKK racist to the White House. The spectre of fascism and bigotry and hate crime is hanging over a lot of people’s heads. And you’d think, maybe, that the people who are afraid of whether they’ll live to see the next US president be elected might want some kind of symbol that truth, justice and freedom still mean something in America.

They don’t get that. They get Captain America, the Nazi. And Spencer defends it because he’s got his vision, and he wants to tell a particular story, and fuck the fans who aren’t on board with that story because they’re not edgy enough. He’s even doubled down on this bullshit by making Magneto, the Holocaust survivor, affiliated with Hydra.

What I despise about all this is the contempt, and disrespect, that Nick Spencer shows towards the fans of Captain America. Marvel as well, of course, but he’s the writer. This is on his shoulders.

There is a thing, in fan fiction, where writers will break the canon sideways for the sake of a story. This is dangerous because the fans, the audience, have expectations that the canon will be followed, and a major break is often more than they’re willing to accept. If the writer is going to go there, then they’re asking for a degree of trust. “Read this,” they say. “I know it doesn’t look good now, but I promise you, it’ll be worth it. You just have to trust me.”

That trust doesn’t come easy. It has to be earned. Write the story well, prove you know what you’re doing, and most importantly, be humble in response to the fandom’s concerns, and you get even more leeway the next time around. And the gods alone help you if you don’t respect it, if you think it’s a given. A fan fiction community will turn on a writer who abuses their trust, or treats their concerns with contempt, in a heartbeat.

Much of comics is paid fan fiction, at this point. Maybe, just maybe, I could accept that this could be a story worth telling; that it’s highlighting a greater truth, that America has always had a core of racism, and pretending it was somehow pure and just is a lie. But Spencer is showing that he hasn’t got the chops or the attitude to pull it off. He’s treated the audience badly, he’s earned nothing, and he’s like every other butt-hurt writer I’ve seen who gets flamed to hell and back for their arrogance. All signs point to this being a bullshit hack job to drum up comic sales. Whatever worth it holds is more than likely accidental.

In conclusion…

Honestly, I don’t know if I even have a conclusion. I’m just pissed off. It’s one thing to punch down, when you’re telling a story, but it’s something else to completely shatter the fans’ trust, spit on their love for a character, and mock them for being angry about it.

It’s cruel and asinine. It shows that a writer is unworthy of the audience they’ve been given.

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The post Respect Your Audience appeared first on Raynfall.

That’s all I have to say. The work is flawed.

By ‘work’, I mean my current novel, which is Book 3 of the Daemonva trilogy. By ‘flawed’, I mean that it has issues; deep, glaring issues that make me want to take it outside and burn it. It is flawed, and I can’t see a way out of that right now.

I can handle continuity errors. Years of running table-top roleplaying games has long since taught me to logic my way around whatever knots a group of players got themselves into. You learn how to roll with it and how to make the pieces fit, after the fact. This isn’t about continuity, though there is a part of that there.

The problem, if I can lay a finger on it, is that it doesn’t… flow. It doesn’t line up in my head and execute like a computer program, one scene after the other. What I’m trying to achieve doesn’t work, the way a program doesn’t work once you’ve set it in motion because something, somewhere, is broken.

I’m aware that reducing my writing to computer code is bizarre, and frankly I don’t care. My brain works in mysterious ways.

So I need to puzzle my way through it, or it’ll never be fixed. I can’t publish it as is. I have to honor the story, as it was told, as it needs to be finished. I’m going radio-silent until The Call of Aven-Ra is complete.

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The Rules of Excellent Exposition: A Guide
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The White Saviour Narrative
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The post The work is flawed appeared first on Raynfall.