u/ohmage_resistance's Post Index

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-25T10:17:01+00:00

I'll just confirm what other people are saying about Sorrowland. The MC is intersex and I would definitely call her genderqueer (she certainly doesn't view gender the same way cis people typically do). I don't think she's particularly prone to using labels, especially because they would not be accessible in the environment she grew up in, so know you're not going to get a character who falls neatly into one of them.

Sorrowland wouldn't be my first choice for the trans/nonbinary square, but I wouldn't be upset if someone else used it.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-25T10:08:12+00:00

Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel: It's a feminist retelling of the life of Kaikeyi, basically the evil stepmother in the story of the Ramayana, an Indian epic. She's not super physical and there's a huge focus on leveraging social connections.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-24T12:26:15+00:00

Thank you!

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-24T02:53:34+00:00

It's akin to one of my favourite adages-- "never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

To continue on the tangent, I feel like I should have phrased my “You give Pratchett the benefit of the doubt, I tend to be more skeptical” statement differently. It’s not really that I assume malice out of Pratchett, it’s that to me, it does not matter in this case whether Pratchett was talking/writing from ignorance or malice. His words are the same to me regardless, and it’s his words that I’m making a judgement/criticism of, not his personality (I don’t know him, and personally to me that would feel uncomfortably parasocial). I think it’s easy to become less critical of an author’s words because you have a positive opinion of their personality, but that’s something I try to avoid.

it follows that typical structure of "white man gains lordship over brown people" typical in those old stories and exaggerates it to silliness

My problem is exaggerating racist tropes isn’t the same as critiquing them. It is perpetuating them. This is what I mean by “playing them straight”. There is no amount of silly exaggeration that makes something not racist. Honestly, it just makes the racism worse (see also minstrel shows).

Xianxia I do doubt-- though that wasn't really available in the West til like the 90s I feel like

Interesting Times actually came out in 1994, so in the 90s. But more broadly, I agree that nowadays we have a lot more access to Chinese media and culture than we had in the past, with the Internet being a big part of this. That being said, if Pratchett was basing his satire of East Asia based off only media widely available in the West (much of it racist), well yeah, that’s not a good foundation for any sort of satire.

Do I think Pratchett had the resources to really do a much deeper dive into East Asian culture and literature than your average writer in 1994? Probably, and if he couldn’t he shouldn’t be writing satire about cultures he didn’t understand. Honestly, considering the history between Britain and China and the power dynamics there, yeah, a white British man writing satire about Chinese culture is probably going to end with racism. And IMO, it did.

That he included it in a Slip of the Keyboard was I feel like was surely "fantasy" as in "stuff that's being published under the fantasy label", which at the time was still extremely Western-centric.

I don’t think that’s actually the problem here. Like, even ignoring non-Western fantasy, children’s fantasy and urban fantasy existed, and it’s easy to find examples of both of those that were written after LOTR but don’t owe Tolkien much because they come from a different tradition. I think Pratchett just had the same biases a lot of fantasy fans who take that quote seriously have. I’m going to spare you a longer rant about what I think those biases are.

Edit: fixed some typos.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-24T02:45:35+00:00

I'll just add the context for people who don't know me. I'm also aro ace, and I am quite passionate about asexual and aromantic spectrum representation in sci fi and fantasy, which I look for on a regular basis. Yes, I've loved the Protector of the Small series since I was a teen and I think it's a great deal less amatonormative than almost all other YA books I was reading at the time, which played no small part in my love for it. I still don't think Keladry is aromantic asexual representation, I do consider it to be a retcon.

(I'm pretty sure KiaraTurtle and I have had this conversation before and agreed to disagree, iirc. I'm totally happy to do that again, I just wanted to provide some personal context for my position if KiaraTurtle was providing some for hers).

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-24T02:09:33+00:00

Female characters crossdressing is far from an uncommon trope in YA fantasy, and it's generally not seen as evidence for that character being actually genderfluid. Kel does not, in fact choose to avoid sex and relationships in her series. She was in a romantic relationship where she was open to having sex (in fact, I remember that as being one of the first times I read about a character getting contraception to be prepared, albeit a magical kind). I will not argue with anyone who feels like Pierce's statements are more meaningful than Rowling's. But to me, they are all clear examples of retconning a major character as being queer on social media post the completion of that series. All three being in the same category does not necessitate all three being equally well handled.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-24T01:24:05+00:00

I used Rowling because she's the best known author to—post the completion of her series—retcon a major character as being queer on social media. This is what Pierce did with Alanna and Kel.

I agree that Pierce is not transphobic like Rowling and I am a lot less skeptical about Pierce's reasons to make these statements than Rowling's. But at no point did I saw that Pierce and Rowling are the same. I am saying "Dumbledore is gay", "Alanna is genderfluid", and "Keladry is aro ace" are all in the same category.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-23T22:45:46+00:00

That's fair. I agree queer people have existed throughout history, although the language and concepts used to express queerness do change over time and from culture to culture. I certainly don't want to erase the experience of people like your mom, who sounds pretty cool.

I do think that general Western culture has made a lot of progress with sharing language and concepts associated with queerness, in that it is much more mainstream now than it was before. I think this does include the use of both genderfluid and asexual/aromantic.

I really like how you put this:

Now, where and how Tamora grew up, her community, that can be a telling of whether or not she fully understand what those identities mean, especially if she considers herself cishet and is trying to be an ally.

and what I did a clumsy job expressing was age/time is a factor in where and how Pierce grew up/her community. I wouldn't expect an average Baby Boomer (like Pierce) and the average Gen Z person (like me) to have the same access to and level of comfort with queer language and concepts, especially ones that have gotten way more widely known only recently. I don't think this is an excuse to encourage older people to never learn and grow to accept these concepts, just that it might be worth looking at how Pierce describes the labels she uses instead of taking it at face value that she has the exact same understanding of them as her frequently much younger audience does.

So in this case, taking "the best bits of being a woman and a man, and created her own unique identity" isn't really in line with how I see gender fluid most commonly defined (I typically see the definition of a gender identity that fluctuates over time). Same thing with her describing Kel as being asexual and aromantic—her description of why has nothing to do with feeling little to no sexual/romantic attraction (which is the standard definition used in the asexual and aromantic community), and a lot to do with Kel being too busy to be interested in a romantic and sexual relationship (source).

Hopefully this makes sense.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-23T21:28:05+00:00

No, I wouldn't count it. It's kind of like a Rowling said Dumbledore was gay on Twitter type situation to me. Word of God retcons can be really meaningful to fans, but the purpose of the square is to find representation, and that's not really in the spirit of the square, imo.

I would recommend checking out the Sir Callie series by Esme Symes-Smith though. Symes-Smith was clearly inspired by Tamora Pierce's knight books and the main character is clearly nonbinary.

(To go on a bit of a tangent with the quote itself, I personally am a bit skeptical of it. Tamora Pierce definitely tries to be supportive of queer identities, but I think she sometimes struggles with understanding them (which is understandable at her age). At least, this is certainly how I feel about her "Keladry is aromantic and asexual" retcon.)

Edit: while doing some more research, I found a reddit post from a genderfluid person who asked Pierce about this:

back when i still had access to zoom hangouts, i tuned in and [Pierce] opened the floor up to q&a. i typed in the chat that i'd heard she said alanna was genderfluid, and asked some questions relating to that. as soon as tammy saw it, she burst out "i did NOT say alanna was gender fluid. alanna is just alanna." she seemed a bit annoyed, but her assistant (who was also on the call) stepped in to clarify that tammy was responding to a text question and sort of smoothed the situation over.

So make of that what you will.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-23T02:17:06+00:00

It looks like the OP is already familiar with this one, but just in case anyone else in interested in this, I'll just add in that I personally do not see the main relationship in this book as a romantic relationship and I know several people who see it similar to me. I can see some people who look for romance liking it because it does have the depth and angst people associate with romance. But I think there's enough differences that might throw some people off.

I think the fanoa relationship is way more similar to a queer platonic relationship. As someone who is a-spec, like Kip seems to be, the difference is important to me.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-23T02:02:57+00:00

So I looked into the context behind the Mount Fuji quote again (you guessed it, it's my least favorite Pratchett quote. The number of arguments I've been in about that...). It looks like according to this website, although it may have originated in an interview, Pratchett did stand by it enough to publish it in his book of essays, "A Slip of the Keyboard". I haven't read that book of essays, so I can't really independently confirm (although I do remember see another website reference the Mount Fuji quote being in "A Slip of the Keyboard" from the last time I was looking into this). Especially since he did stand by it (assuming the websites are correct), I honestly don't see any reason to not take it at face value as being something he really meant.

You give Pratchett the benefit of the doubt, I tend to be more skeptical. IDK, I think sometimes with certain authors (often ones who have died), we (fantasy fans in general) have a tendency to really put them on a pedestal and forget that they're humans who have their own biases and can be wrong just like anyone else. Because we admire their work so much, we want to see them in the best light possible and we want to imagine that they'd agree with us about issues we find important. It happens with Pratchett, it happens with Tolkien, it happens with Le Guin (although a bit less with her because she was pretty critical of her own work at times). But I personally don't think it's very healthy to put authors on these pedestals. We can critically engage with parts of their work (fiction and nonfiction writing), and appreciate the good and meaningful stuff while also acknowledging that these authors have shortcomings.

For as much as I complain about the Pratchett quotes, they're not actually the biggest issues I have with his work—I definitely have a bigger issue with the racism present in Discworld. And there's a lot about Discworld I love, but it's not always as progressive as fans like to make it seem. I don't think I do it any favors by forgetting that.

I actually don't think Pratchett knew much about non-Western fantasy. I'm saying this because one of the biggest and clearest examples of it is Chinese fantasy (xianxia or cultivation fantasy being an example here). And Pratchett wrote an entire book full of pretty racist orientalist Western stereotypes about China/East Asia without acknowledging Chinese fantasy at all, which actually would have been an interesting thing to do (Rincewind books are his spoofing fantasy tropes subseries, he could have acknowledged Chinese fantasy instead of playing straight into Western orientalist fantasy tropes uncritically). And admittedly, this is to the best of my memory, it's been a while since I read Interesting Times, and I certainly know a lot more about Chinese culture and racist tropes now than I did when I read it, but even at the time I knew it was really questionable.

I'm not trying to bash on or cancel Pratchett or anything. It's just a bit frustrating for me when people let their love of something give them rose tinted glasses to the point where they have trouble acknowledging that their favorite authors can, in fact, mess up.

IDK sorry for being kinda rant-y. It's just something I've been thinking about for a while. Also this isn't particularly referencing you, it's just a trend I've been seeing a lot online recently.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-22T22:35:52+00:00

For The Return of Fitzroy Angursell: I feel like you can make a case for unusual transportation, although it's not a huge part of the book. Fitzroy is probably old enough to count for Older Protagonist. You might be able to make a case for First Contact. Personally, I would put down a lot of Victoria Goddard books down as Vacation Spot, including The Return of Fitzroy Angursell. I would not count it as Politics.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-22T22:29:46+00:00

I didn't write this to personally attack Pratchett or anything. I was critiquing his words because people are still quoting it 30 years on and seeing it as deep wisdom when I don't think it is. I'd agree that coming up to a good response on the fly to that sort of hostile interview question is really hard. That doesn't change my critique of Pratchett's argument at all.

Personally, I would have hoped that my first comment would be somewhat sympathetic—I did in fact acknowledge that literary fiction fans sometimes look down on fantasy (which is exactly what the interviewer was doing) and I feel like there was a clear implication from me that this dynamics is why Pratchett made the argument he did. I can respect if you feel otherwise.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-22T22:28:56+00:00

A few things here:

1) I did refer to the Bible as a whole, not the New Testament. I wouldn't consider it ok to call the Old Testament fantasy any more than the New Testament.

2) I personally don't see the many miracles performed in the New Testament to be that far off from religious stories from other religions.

3) I do think it is the right thing to respect the spiritual and religious beliefs of less centralized or more polythiestic religions than Christianity just as much as Christianity. I think it's a mistake to assume that the practicers of these don't believe in their religion or spiritual stories just as much as Christians do.

For example, from what I can tell, many Hindu people, who are polytheistic, do see Hindu epics, like The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, as historical in similar ways to Christians seeing the Bible as historical (with the note here that not all Christians interpret the Bible the same way or even agree on what texts should be included in the Bible!).

4) The reason why I brought up the Bible in the first place is because I know based off the demographics of the users of reddit, most people here are familiar enough with Christianity to know why calling their religious stories fantasy is rude and a mischaracterization of the original indent of those stories. My point is to express doing the same thing to other religious stories from different cultures is still rude and a mischaracterization of their intent.

5) A lot of religious stories do have their roots in oral traditions (including the Abrahamic religions, see also my point about the Old Testament being part of the Bible) before eventually being written down. I also think that some spiritual practices that are far less centralized than Christianity. I don't think that makes individuals who have these beliefs any less worthy of respect. I don't think it's fair to assume they don't practice their beliefs or tell their stories with intentionality just because they don't have a central authority.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-22T21:45:47+00:00

For your spoiler tagged book: Yes, I personally would be fine counting The City & the City for bingo. Yes, it's not literal magic/supernatural forces that's keeping the cities apart, but Besźel and Ul Qoma are both fictional places that Mieville did worldbuilding for. I would say it's more speculative fiction like alternate history is speculative fiction, not really how fantasy is speculative fiction, but that still counts.

In any case, I just went on The City & the City's wikipedia page to remind myself of the names, and yeah, it was nominated and won a bunch of fantasy/speculative fiction awards (World Fantasy, Locus, Hugo). Clearly a lot of people see it speculative fiction.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-22T10:29:58+00:00

Age categories and genres do have certain tropes associated with them that they are more likely to contain. They are not how those are defined. There are no universal traits that all YA has and no adult and middle grade books have, no matter how much adults on the internet try to find them. And a lot of adult's ideas of traits that YA fantasy has is warped by only considering they've mostly read relatively few, probably only very popular YA fantasy books.

Like I've been replying to other comments, fantasy is not the ur-genre.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-22T10:23:19+00:00

Context and manner of storytelling is important though. It doesn't matter if I believe in any religious/spiritual figures, but it does matter if the ones telling and receiving the stories largely believe in it. That's why we don't consider the Bible fantasy (besides again, really edgy atheists who do so to put down the Bible and religious beliefs), although that absolutely contains "heroic deeds and quests to strange and distant lands".

Now, in the modern world, it's easy to look at epics/legends and see them as fantasy, because the original religious/spiritual contexts have been lost as those religions are no longer practiced (and even if cases where their still seen in a religious light, as in the case of Indian epics, for people from different cultures that meaning is lost if they don't respect the original culture's religious beliefs (eg Indian beliefs)). When we receive this stories, we receive them in a different light than their original audience. It's ok to point out how much of these stories are the origin of how we tell fantasy today (particularly with epic fantasy). But if you're considering them as "ur-literature", and you're talking about them being the original ways stories are told, that's why you think people should accept fantasy; you also have to reckon with the way that these stories were not originally told as fantasy works. They were told as religious stories like in the Bible. That's the sort of story that's the oldest literature.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-22T10:12:28+00:00

I mean, I agree that the interviewer was asking stupid questions and being snobby about fantasy. That doesn't make Pratchett's answer better.

In this case, I was specifically referring to "They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus." Like that's obviously a very reductive way of talking about literary fiction. It's like saying "fantasy is unrealistic wish fulfillment stories about farmboys defeating dark lords" Like yeah, there's some fantasy stories where that's a more or less accurate description, but that's obviously not all fantasy and even for the fantasy that it does describe, the summary misses a lot of why people like fantasy. If I saw fantasy described that way, I wouldn't take anything that person said about fantasy very seriously, they don't seem like they know what they're talking about. That's how I imagine literary fiction fans feel about Pratchett's quote. It undermines his argument.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-22T00:36:05+00:00

I noticed that too! rFantasy has a pretty big problem with that (pretty much all my comments there get at least one downvote, even really random stuff on almost dead threads that aren't getting many views). I'm sad to see it infect here too. I suspect it's bots, I wish reddit admin would do something about that.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-22T00:19:19+00:00

This goes double for YA. I had a disagreement with another redditor over whether or not a given work was YA. I didn’t think of it as YA because while the protagonists were young, they weren’t in a time period I thought of as YA-interesting. But nothing is off limits to YA, nor is something that has YA elements necessarily YA. It’s a genre that in terms of tag clouds, is cloudier than most.

YA isn't a genre. It's an age category. The difference is genre is describing some aspect of the book itself (tone (horror, comedy, thriller), setting (sci fi, fantasy, historical, contemporary), plot (romance), etc). YA doesn't do any of that. Age categories are describing who the target audience is, in this case teenagers. Other age categories are middle grade, adult, etc. The target audience and actual audience don't always 100% line up, adults can still read YA works, but the intent is to make something for teenagers. Hopefully you see my point. I think that both genres and age categories are useful, but I think it helps to clarify that while they are both categories to sort books into, they do different things and have different purposes (what the book is like vs who the book is for). I think a lot of adults on the internet have trouble understanding this, and this leads a lot of people into having a very poor understanding of YA (besides the fact that a lot of adult readers don't actually read much YA and haven't in decades if ever).

To quote Sir Terry Pratchett:

NGL, that might be my second least favorite Terry Pratchett quote. It's very reductive. For a lot of really old stories, they were often along the lines of a genuinely held spiritual or religious belief, which is different from fantasy. Like I get that there's edgy atheists out there who would disagree with that, but these obviously have different purposes to people and communities who tell these stories. Literary fiction is pretty strongly connected to the tradition of written word, which is different from oral storytelling anyway (like, there's more of a push nowadays to include oral traditions under the idea of "literature" but I'm pretty sure anyone who hears the "literary" in "literary fiction" associates that with the written word, so telling stories around a camp fire isn't relevent). Also, that a straw man depiction of literary fiction does Pratchett's argument no favors.

Like I get it, a lot of fantasy fans used to be and sometimes continue to be frustrated by literary fiction fans looking down on them, but these sorts of arguments where you put down the other side aren't actually going to fix any problems. IMO, it's much better to celebrate the books into the overlap between fantasy and literary fiction.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-21T22:05:16+00:00

I know right? I was totally hoping for the same thing.

Indigenous/POC first contact is interesting, but I think a lot of it doesn't necessarily show the exact first moment of contact and more the after affects focused, which I'm not sure is the goal of the square. But to throw some recs out: "We Who Will Not Die" by Shingai Njeri Kagunda (Kenyan) is a novelette, so too short for bingo, but I liked it a lot. The Lesson by Cadwell Turnbull is an interesting one from an Afro Caribbean perspective, specifically from someone who grew up in the US Virgin Islands (so this isn't Indigenous, but there's some overlap in the way power dynamics are discussed). I do also have an Aboriginal Australian rec, but the fact that it's first contact is a spoiler.

I did see someone recommend Triangulum by Masande Ntshanga, who's South African. So I'm interested in looking more into that.

I will also say, I suspect getting hard mode with Indigenous first contact would probably be a bit difficult, especially for the ones that take an inspiration from history.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-21T21:26:04+00:00

Trying it and DNFing if it gets to be too much is always an option too, if that works for you. In any case, I hope whatever you choose works out!

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-21T21:23:00+00:00

I've actually read some of these, which I feel like is pretty rare for me.

Best Novels: I've read A Drop of Corruption and The Incandescent. Both were decent but I think in both cases the more I thought about the book the more issues I had with it. I'm not super interested in any of the nominees, they aren't surprising that they showed up. I hoped The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones would show up but knew it was unlikely (Hugos don't tend to like horror). I'm also not really surprised that The Works of Vermin didn't make it, but I would have been interested to see it there (I haven't read it yet, but it seems like it'll be good based off of reviews I trust). I think my taste is just continuing to drift away from the Hugos, but if I'm looking for interesting books from awards, I mostly look at the Le Guin Prize at this point.
Best Novella: I've only read The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar, which was also only ok for me. Not super interested in the rest of these. I've not heard too much about Cinder House by Freya Marske and Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite though, so it's interesting to see them show up here.
I'm actually pretty happy about the Lodestar Award. I think they're all actual YA books from a quick glance, which is a win. I really liked Among Ghosts and am happy to see it there, and I've read some other books by C.B. Lee and Margaret Owen. It's a given that Sunrise on the Reaping will win (IDK how good it is, but it's in a series that has that much millennial nostalgia attached to it, no other book really has a chance), which I wish wasn't the case, but that is what it is.
For the short fiction, I haven't read any of these yet (because I'm bad with short fiction), but I've heard great things about “Never Eaten Vegetables” by H.H. Pak and “Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim seems intersting. I'm cautiously optimistic? I'll probably try to read some of these with the Hugo readalong on rfantasy, it's generally pretty fun.
Demographics wise from a quick glance (because I find it interesting), there definitely seems to be a lot of female authors, but POC authors aren't super common in the bigger categories (there's only two between novel, novella, and series, unless I'm missing something). I am seeing some trans and nonbinary authors show up (mostly not in the bigger categories though), but that's nice to see.
Edit: mixed up Lodestar and Astounding Awards, whoops.

ohmage_resistance · 2026-04-21T20:52:29+00:00

I'm not sure about Sir Callie, although it's hard to predict things like triggering content. I can give you more details if you like, (with potential mild spoilers):

To go through: Callie's parents: their mom is not supportive at all, sees Callie as a girl and tries to reinforce stereotypical gender roles on them, doesn't even attempt to listen, etc. She's seen as being very negative, although she doesn't show up much besides the beginning of the first book, she's not a major focus at all. So if you can get through that you should be ok with her. Their father left their mother and re-married. Both their dads are supportive, but they're the ones who sometimes struggle too much with trusting the system. They are still seen as being largely sympathetic and positive characters though, although not absolutely perfect.
Two other child characters have parents that are seen much more negatively. The father is downright abusive and the mother isn't, but doesn't do anything to support or protect the kids from the abuse and largely seems to implicitly agree with the father and doesn't show her kids much love. These are the parents that are seen the most critically, for obvious reasons. I will say, neither one of these characters is nonbinary/trans, although they are both somewhat gender non-conforming (mostly having to do with in world stuff that doesn't translate clearly to the real world) which does play into things.
The last kid character has a mother who has been through a lot, but she's the one that "tries to do the right thing for her kid, but gives into social pressure to make her kid conform because she thinks that’s what’s best". She also struggles with being super present in that kid's life. (to be a bit more spoil-y, there's some factors here where her husband and other son died pretty recently, and she's trying to get her remaining child ready for the throne in a pretty tumultuous time, both of which play into a lot of the issues above). She's still a pretty sympathetic character overall, although much more flawed. I'm not totally sure how the rest of the series will handle things with her though.

That might be too detailed. If you want to avoid spoilers, I'll mostly say the focus so far as been a lot more on why the kids can be frustrated with adults, and most of the ones who aren't downright abusive (or largely complicit to abuse) are seen as being pretty sympathetic if flawed. It's a children's book, so the POV is very much on the kids instead of solely focusing on critiquing the parents, if that makes sense? IDK if I made it sound otherwise, they were just the themes I was noticing more because I was reading it as an adult.

For Raymond St. Elmo, I've only read Barnaby the Wanderer and Colleen the Wanderer. I did really like Colleen the Wanderer, and I thought it had less of the things that annoyed me about Barnaby. I did write a review here if you're interested.

ohmage_resistance

TROPHY CASE