Okay. Let's not pretend I'm free of bias, shall we?
I just received an email from an anonymous source using the option that Livejournal affords that says "you can send me email if you want to" (and I will be turning that option off now; if you want to reach me, you can use the website contact form and go through my PA, like everyone else). The author didn't sign their name (hence the "anonymous"), and went out of their way to say that the email address used will be invalid in two weeks. I am not reproducing the entirety of the email here, but as points have been raised that I feel are relevant to certain ongoing discussions, I will be reproducing parts of it. I will note that I have printed fan mail, both in parts and its entirety, on this blog before, and that this is not a change of policy.
In order to fairly address certain points raised by my anonymous correspondent, I will need to provide relationship spoilers for some of my works. This includes all currently published books in my three primary series; the "Velveteen vs." short stories, which are available here; and Sparrow Hill Road, which is not currently available, but is a part of the InCryptid universe. To avoid these spoilers, please do not click the cut-tag or read the comments.
I will be giving Cornkitten your books to read as soon as she's old enough. If she's LGBT, she'll know the joy of strong characters who are like her - and if she's straight/cis, she'll have the invaluable experience of seeing strong characters who are different from her. LGBT people exist in real life; why on earth shouldn't they exist in our fictional worlds?
Representation matters, and I love knowing there's at least one person out there giving representation to people other than straight white cis people (and I say that as a straight white cis woman myself). Your inclusiveness is part of why I love your writing so much. It feels real.
Second of all, thank you. As a straight white guy, thank you for including viewpoints and characters that are different from my own. Partly because I don't read just to experience the same viewpoint I could get by looking in a mirror every day. But more importantly because I love when there are places in fiction for my friends and family. It's wonderful when there are real, developed characters for all the people I love to identify with and see your worlds through. So thank you.
Hmmm. Well, the anon in question is an unmitigated asshat troll, I think we've got that nailed down.
What's weird to me is why it matters what kinds of relationships the characters are engaged in. I'll admit that I'm wired a bit oddly compared to most people I've met but when I'm reading a story, it's for the sake of the story and for the interactions between characters, which has almost nothing to do with who (or if) they're prone to hopping into bed with. A reveal like 'Oh, so-and-so is such-and-such' mostly merits a mild "oh, okay" reaction in most cases. It's a characterization point, cool, but it's not why I'm here if that makes any sense. (Unless the reveal is particularly funny and/or poignant, but the merit is in the handling of the reveal in that case, not the nature. I'm probably just plain weird, I admit.)
All of that said, I like that I'm going to bump up against things in a story-by-Seanan that I don't normally see. And sometimes that challenges my assumptions and (dare I say it) ingrained prejudices, which is extremely healthy!
So, anon can go straight to [afterlife punishment location of choice] and the rest of us can keep enjoying Seanan's excellent storytelling.
I love your QUILTBAG characters and your straight ones too (and The Princess is my absolutely favorite, because she's amazeballs and I cheered aloud at the line about her name-) ... and I love this response too.
auto erotica is down right hilarious!!!! And you are so right, the stores are full of white and straight fic. If you are classified as deviant well wow that category just got a whole lot bigger (as in may take over most of the fantasy/sci category!!!). My 16 yo dd who has developmental delays has listened to the 1st couple of books in the Toby series as audiobooks and she likes them too:) Keep writing because those of us who read and enjoy your books are going to keep on doing so. I do appreciate that you publicly address issues that arise.
You deserve all the cookies in the world for this post, partly for your well thought out response, but also because you took the time to respond to someone who clearly has their head firmly wedged up their arse. I would have gotten as far as 'deviant' and deleted it without replying. I'm really proud of you, right now and always.
I'm technically cis, hetero, and white. I'm also poly and wouldn't turn down certain women, so refer to myself as sapiosexual. Which is horribly pretentious -- but it's the way someone thinks that intrigues me. And I'm one of those who doesn't really worry about another person's sexuality unless I am interested in pursuing them. It just isn't important to me. If it's part of their story, I want to know about it, but they don't have to be just like me.
On a different train of thought, I added you because you are coming to my local con this October, and I didn't know much about you. Your last line on this post made me want to give you a standing ovation. I have enjoyed your blogging a great deal in the short time I have been reading it, and I love your passion and determination. I'm not big on zombies, so I think I will start reading your October Daye books. Thanks for being you.
I think that the person who wrote that anonymous email is first a coward, and second a bigot. I like your books and your writing. I also have my biases, being bi and poly, but I think that having *any* non-straight characters in a book is really cool. When I was a kid, I never saw anyone like that in YA fiction, what little there was. Seeing it now in the fiction I read makes me happy and feel more included.
I'm glad you responded that you have no plans to change your characters, etc. to please someone who may be offended at non-hetero, non-white, non-male characters. I think we all should get a chance, sometime, and as an author, you get to pick who gets that chance in your books, not some random bigot on the internet.
Anon needs to practice reading comprehension. How did that person read the Newsflesh trilogy and not see the blinding, meteoric rise and terrible, terrible fall of Joe & Lois' relationship?
Sir-or-Madam I-Don't-Wish-To-Start-A-Dialogue can go step on legos barefoot every day for a hundred years.
Your response was far better than the email deserved -- although not better than the subject deserved, as it's an important subject. We'd be better off as a society if all writers of fiction addressed it as well as you do.
I was bothered by something a tad bit different. It seems to me that in the Newsflesh Trilogy Maggie Garcia moves on too quickly to Dave. I get that she's torn and that they never really hook up, but her caginess on the subject of Buffy combined with this relatively quick move on her part make for a picture of a relationship that felt as though it couldn't have been much more than casual pillow friends. I didn't care for the sense of trivialization.
Oh, and Buffy's with whats-his-face through half of Feed. It just kind of--
How often do we see het couples pining for each other, especially women over men, or one person in a het relationship loosing his/her love and absolutely agonizing over it? That second trope usually involves a woman dying and the man becoming a 'tortured hero.' (Gods spare me the saccharine.) That's what the media feeds us by the shovel full.
Your take kind of hurt as the inverse. Shaun is going mad because he loves George so deeply, yet--
What I want to see is an out gay or lesbian character who's in a loving relationship as a heroic main character. It happens so bloody rarely it's sad and they are always secondary/effect characters as with character pictured above left, or your May Daye who gets far too little face time.
I think I must not have gotten the sense of timing right, and for that I am sorry. Buffy and Maggie split up well before Maggie joined After the End Times; there was more than a year between them no longer being a couple and Maggie and Dave starting to flirt. It was absolutely not meant to be trivializing.
If you want to see an out gay character pining desperately for her lost (and maybe found again) love, check out my Velveteen vs. stuff? Victoria is certainly not shy about how much it's killing her not to be with Yelena.
The hell? Didn't we just have this conversation, like, last week? I suppose if we're defining "deviant" as "that which deviates from the prescribed norm of straight/white/cis/vanilla," then sure, your characters are sexual "deviants." But nobody's saying that, obviously.
FWIW, I'm looking at your list recalling almost nothing about those characters' sexuality. Because that's not what I remember about them as characters. The Luidaeg is Sea Witch lady with the wreck of an apartment and awesome superpowers who I really hope doesn't kill Toby like she's agreed to. Buffy is gaudily-costumed tech wizard who can put cameras and microphones in things like hairclips and fabulous belts. January poisons people and is generally narcissistic and unpleasant. The who-are-they-involved-with thing just plain doesn't register with me.
Clearly, what's going on with Hate Mailer here is s/he doesn't like having to acknowledge the existence of non-straight people. That wobbles his/her world view too much. They exist! They're portrayed as normal! Loads of attention isn't called to their sexuality! THEY'RE TAKING OVER!! Erm, no, don't think so.
Or they just didn't like having it pointed out to them, like, last week, that non-straight people exist in fiction and that's not likely to change anytime soon.
I wouldn't have made it past the first sentence without going, "Nope, bye now," and sending it to the cornfield.
You're way nicer than I would have been - Entitled fuckwit doing a ding-dong-ditch by e-mail deserves to be ignored, or maybe to be used for flamethrower target practice if you're feeling particularly grumpy today.
Like I said on a previous comment, and on a thread on racism earlier today on Facebook - Different kinds of people make the world more interesting, not scarier.
If this is a duplicate - my apologies. It showed up as unposted so I'm trying again, but it is most definitely a PEBKAC issue.
I loved how you January's wife showed up and it was just normal. A grieving wife. It wasn't an "in your face zomfg teh gayz, see shez gayz, get it, huh, huh" moment, aka wherein someone tries to show how wonderfully inclusive they are by creating a gay character. She wasn't mentioned in the first book with January because it wasn't relevant, it didn't come up, so it wasn't mentioned. That's natural and normal.
And that is how we should do our characters in writing and other entertainment forms. It should just be natural. Like a Benetton ad without the 'forced inclusion' feel to it. The best creators are getting this and it's becoming more normal to see, and I applaud it, laud it, and financially support it whenever I can.
Gay, cis, bi, trans, black, white, and everything in between -- we're all PEOPLE. It's about PEOPLE. And it's refreshing to see it done in a way that is natural feeling -- so that the next generations won't have to make an effort to ensure that everyone is included -- they will grow up to be naturally inclusive because that's just the way the world is, and they see it all the time in their media and their lives.
So thank you for being one of those authors who does that. It's necessary, it's appreciated, and it's done fantastically. I identify as mostly straight with a penchant for ogling lovely breasts from time to time, and I've raised 4 kids who have been taught from a very young age that being yourself is okay -- that SEX is okay and that sexuality may not be black and white. I'm not worried about them -- but I'm worried about the others their age growing up with parents who aren't like that. That's why this is so very necessary. The more it is done and seen in cultural media, the better off our future generations will be.
You make a good point re: kids growing up whose parents are not like that. Books raise some kids. Books are the only teachers about sex and sexuality that a lot of kids GET. We just didn't talk about it in my family. Nothing scarybad was said, and they made sure I knew that gay was no big deal, but nothing outside of what you could find in that Nova special on reproduction was discussed either. I never had a single talk with my parents about pantsfeelings. BOOKS were what defined how I approached my sexuality as a pre-teen. I lucked into a few books that were pretty inclusive for their time and place, and the lessons I learned stuck with me. But there weren't many of those books. And there aren't nearly enough now, even though there are SO MANY more than there were. This is important stuff. It normalizes things that should never have been seen as not-normal in the first place. It helps create a world with space in it for kids who aren't white/straight/cisgendered, and so on, because people will just expect those folks to be there. That's kind of a huge deal.
Just because a troll can spell doesn't mean it's not a troll.
I seriously enjoy your books. I will continue to seriously enjoy your books. I seriously like a lot of your people. I will continue to read as long as you write 'em. And may arthritic gerbils pee on your troll.
As a straight (well, I'm pretty close to the heterosexual end of the scale, enough so that there is rarely a practical difference) white (I think. I look white but can't accurately trace my ancestry back more than one generation) cis (I'm on pretty safe ground here, might be interesting to visit the other side but I have no desire to live there) male (Wait, let me check. Yep, male) I enjoy reading about characters who are different from me. I know enough 'deviants' in real life that it seems odd when they are completely absent from fiction. If everyone was exactly like me, the world would be a boring place, albeit with toxic levels of sarcasm.
On the other hand, as a polyamorous sadomasochist who is wired for consensual power-exchange relationships, I was going to go on a riff about being disappointed and insisting on equal representation. However, there is always the chance that someone would not catch the intended humor and the last thing I want to cause is more ugliness, intentional or otherwise.
Ummm, wait...so all the gay and lesbian relationships are "deviant sexuality" but Georgia and Shaun are not??? Did he/she miss the part where they were brother and sister, in name and upbringing if not biology? Sounds like "deviant sexuality" is just code for "I don't like gay people." (For the record, I don't have a problem with gay relationships, nor with George and Shaun. If you're consenting adults, not hurting other people, you're good to go in my book.)
I think my response to that would be, "You are not my audience." And, y'know, it is hugely entitled for someone to assume that they must automatically be your audience. If they do not like books with GBLT characters... well... there's a WHOLE lot of fiction out there for them. There is not so much for us who are GBLT. There just isn't. This strikes me as being somewhat similar to the complaints in YA a year or so back that there were "too many" books about girl characters being published, and the poor little boys couldn't identify with them -- and thus, said poor little boys were being left out of reading and therefore it was harming literacy amongst teen boys. Yeah, I don't even.
It also reminds me of the complaint to Bioware about the bisexual characters (which David Gaider responded to brilliantly in his Open Letter to Straight White Males) -- I'm sure you have seen this, but if you haven't, the love interest characters in the Dragon Age 2 video game are all canonically bisexual. Some fans took exception to this and were pissed/squicked that, OMG, a MAN character FLIRTED with them. Somehow, even though their characters had access to all the game romances that were available, this was discriminating against straight men. No, I can't make this shit up.
Fuck people like this. You have plenty of readers who are ECSTATIC to read your work, with all its GBLT characters galore... and love the work more for it!
Yeah, that's the part that always confuses me. It's like...ninety percent of the work out there is written for straight whiteness. Why is the other ten percent so threatening?
Yeeep. What stupidity. Yeah, this is someone who wants to cling to a mental model where everybody's white and straight.
Admittedly, I do think the Luidaeg and Elizabeth Ryan counts as a spotlight romance that wasn't hetero. But I LOVED IT and am thrilled it got a Hugo nomination and it was fantastic.
Yeah, if I didn't like what you wrote, I'd stop reading it. Instead of gleefully reading it, discussing it with my junior husband who's also a big fan, and buying extra copies to give to a woman I have a major crush on.
God, what unmitigated cluelessness. I'm . . . I'm totally confused as to why they read you at all, if this sort of thing upsets them so much.
As I said in comments to the last entry, what you do is important. The fact that there are people in comments here telling you that they plan on giving their small people your books when they are old enough is evidence that you are Doing It Right. You are making the world better by helping some people feel stronger and less alone and helping others feel less alienated and threatened and making some just feel happy and warm. And I'm actually really sorry for Anon that they aren't able to feel like a part of that, because it is a very good thing.
It's just sad, is what it is. What a tiny world they must see.
grumpy
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June 24 2013, 17:18:59 UTC 4 years ago
Representation matters, and I love knowing there's at least one person out there giving representation to people other than straight white cis people (and I say that as a straight white cis woman myself). Your inclusiveness is part of why I love your writing so much. It feels real.
tl;dr You are awesome and that person is a butt.
June 25 2013, 15:30:20 UTC 4 years ago
THIS IS WHY CORNKITTY IS BEST.
June 24 2013, 17:32:46 UTC 4 years ago
Because I'm not going to.
Good. You continuing to be amazing is the best response.
June 25 2013, 15:30:48 UTC 4 years ago
June 24 2013, 17:43:08 UTC 4 years ago Edited: June 24 2013, 17:48:06 UTC
Second of all, thank you. As a straight white guy, thank you for including viewpoints and characters that are different from my own. Partly because I don't read just to experience the same viewpoint I could get by looking in a mirror every day. But more importantly because I love when there are places in fiction for my friends and family. It's wonderful when there are real, developed characters for all the people I love to identify with and see your worlds through. So thank you.
June 25 2013, 15:31:02 UTC 4 years ago
June 24 2013, 17:49:29 UTC 4 years ago
What's weird to me is why it matters what kinds of relationships the characters are engaged in. I'll admit that I'm wired a bit oddly compared to most people I've met but when I'm reading a story, it's for the sake of the story and for the interactions between characters, which has almost nothing to do with who (or if) they're prone to hopping into bed with. A reveal like 'Oh, so-and-so is such-and-such' mostly merits a mild "oh, okay" reaction in most cases. It's a characterization point, cool, but it's not why I'm here if that makes any sense. (Unless the reveal is particularly funny and/or poignant, but the merit is in the handling of the reveal in that case, not the nature. I'm probably just plain weird, I admit.)
All of that said, I like that I'm going to bump up against things in a story-by-Seanan that I don't normally see. And sometimes that challenges my assumptions and (dare I say it) ingrained prejudices, which is extremely healthy!
So, anon can go straight to [afterlife punishment location of choice] and the rest of us can keep enjoying Seanan's excellent storytelling.
June 25 2013, 15:31:51 UTC 4 years ago
June 24 2013, 17:53:39 UTC 4 years ago
You have never written Tybalt as bringing me cookies and staying for the night.
Bias!
Sylvia
June 25 2013, 15:32:02 UTC 4 years ago
June 24 2013, 18:00:07 UTC 4 years ago
... and I love this response too.
Keep on with your bad self. :)
June 25 2013, 15:32:19 UTC 4 years ago
June 24 2013, 18:51:36 UTC 4 years ago
BECAUSE THE FUTURE IS FABULOUS! Set phasers to STUNNING!
June 25 2013, 04:24:28 UTC 4 years ago
:)
4 years ago
4 years ago
4 years ago
June 24 2013, 19:10:29 UTC 4 years ago
Keep writing because those of us who read and enjoy your books are going to keep on doing so.
I do appreciate that you publicly address issues that arise.
June 25 2013, 15:32:47 UTC 4 years ago
June 24 2013, 21:09:17 UTC 4 years ago
June 25 2013, 15:33:05 UTC 4 years ago
June 24 2013, 22:29:54 UTC 4 years ago
On a different train of thought, I added you because you are coming to my local con this October, and I didn't know much about you. Your last line on this post made me want to give you a standing ovation. I have enjoyed your blogging a great deal in the short time I have been reading it, and I love your passion and determination. I'm not big on zombies, so I think I will start reading your October Daye books. Thanks for being you.
June 25 2013, 15:33:27 UTC 4 years ago
4 years ago
June 24 2013, 23:41:05 UTC 4 years ago
I'm glad you responded that you have no plans to change your characters, etc. to please someone who may be offended at non-hetero, non-white, non-male characters. I think we all should get a chance, sometime, and as an author, you get to pick who gets that chance in your books, not some random bigot on the internet.
*hugs*
June 25 2013, 15:37:12 UTC 4 years ago
June 25 2013, 00:41:50 UTC 4 years ago
June 25 2013, 15:37:26 UTC 4 years ago
4 years ago
June 25 2013, 02:01:07 UTC 4 years ago
Your response was far better than the email deserved -- although not better than the subject deserved, as it's an important subject. We'd be better off as a society if all writers of fiction addressed it as well as you do.
June 25 2013, 15:37:46 UTC 4 years ago
ALL THE LOVE.
June 25 2013, 04:21:42 UTC 4 years ago
I guess?
I, for one, love that your stuff is diverse. I made a mess of squeaky noises and did a little dance when I learned that the princess was a transwoman.
Keep on keeping on.
June 25 2013, 15:37:58 UTC 4 years ago
June 25 2013, 07:06:45 UTC 4 years ago
I think you gave this person way too much time and consideration but well put. :)
June 25 2013, 15:38:08 UTC 4 years ago
June 25 2013, 13:10:59 UTC 4 years ago Edited: June 25 2013, 13:24:34 UTC
Not to complain. This is meant as an observation.
I was bothered by something a tad bit different. It seems to me that in the Newsflesh Trilogy Maggie Garcia moves on too quickly to Dave. I get that she's torn and that they never really hook up, but her caginess on the subject of Buffy combined with this relatively quick move on her part make for a picture of a relationship that felt as though it couldn't have been much more than casual pillow friends. I didn't care for the sense of trivialization.
Oh, and Buffy's with whats-his-face through half of Feed. It just kind of--
How often do we see het couples pining for each other, especially women over men, or one person in a het relationship loosing his/her love and absolutely agonizing over it? That second trope usually involves a woman dying and the man becoming a 'tortured hero.' (Gods spare me the saccharine.) That's what the media feeds us by the shovel full.
Your take kind of hurt as the inverse. Shaun is going mad because he loves George so deeply, yet--
What I want to see is an out gay or lesbian character who's in a loving relationship as a heroic main character. It happens so bloody rarely it's sad and they are always secondary/effect characters as with character pictured above left, or your May Daye who gets far too little face time.
Give us more!
June 25 2013, 15:40:03 UTC 4 years ago
If you want to see an out gay character pining desperately for her lost (and maybe found again) love, check out my Velveteen vs. stuff? Victoria is certainly not shy about how much it's killing her not to be with Yelena.
June 25 2013, 13:29:21 UTC 4 years ago Edited: June 25 2013, 13:29:58 UTC
FWIW, I'm looking at your list recalling almost nothing about those characters' sexuality. Because that's not what I remember about them as characters. The Luidaeg is Sea Witch lady with the wreck of an apartment and awesome superpowers who I really hope doesn't kill Toby like she's agreed to. Buffy is gaudily-costumed tech wizard who can put cameras and microphones in things like hairclips and fabulous belts. January poisons people and is generally narcissistic and unpleasant. The who-are-they-involved-with thing just plain doesn't register with me.
Clearly, what's going on with Hate Mailer here is s/he doesn't like having to acknowledge the existence of non-straight people. That wobbles his/her world view too much. They exist! They're portrayed as normal! Loads of attention isn't called to their sexuality! THEY'RE TAKING OVER!! Erm, no, don't think so.
Or they just didn't like having it pointed out to them, like, last week, that non-straight people exist in fiction and that's not likely to change anytime soon.
I wouldn't have made it past the first sentence without going, "Nope, bye now," and sending it to the cornfield.
June 25 2013, 15:41:59 UTC 4 years ago
Mmmm, cornfield.
June 25 2013, 16:02:14 UTC 4 years ago
You're way nicer than I would have been - Entitled fuckwit doing a ding-dong-ditch by e-mail deserves to be ignored, or maybe to be used for flamethrower target practice if you're feeling particularly grumpy today.
Like I said on a previous comment, and on a thread on racism earlier today on Facebook - Different kinds of people make the world more interesting, not scarier.
July 28 2013, 16:58:07 UTC 3 years ago
June 25 2013, 16:37:44 UTC 4 years ago
I loved how you January's wife showed up and it was just normal. A grieving wife. It wasn't an "in your face zomfg teh gayz, see shez gayz, get it, huh, huh" moment, aka wherein someone tries to show how wonderfully inclusive they are by creating a gay character. She wasn't mentioned in the first book with January because it wasn't relevant, it didn't come up, so it wasn't mentioned. That's natural and normal.
And that is how we should do our characters in writing and other entertainment forms. It should just be natural. Like a Benetton ad without the 'forced inclusion' feel to it. The best creators are getting this and it's becoming more normal to see, and I applaud it, laud it, and financially support it whenever I can.
Gay, cis, bi, trans, black, white, and everything in between -- we're all PEOPLE. It's about PEOPLE. And it's refreshing to see it done in a way that is natural feeling -- so that the next generations won't have to make an effort to ensure that everyone is included -- they will grow up to be naturally inclusive because that's just the way the world is, and they see it all the time in their media and their lives.
So thank you for being one of those authors who does that. It's necessary, it's appreciated, and it's done fantastically. I identify as mostly straight with a penchant for ogling lovely breasts from time to time, and I've raised 4 kids who have been taught from a very young age that being yourself is okay -- that SEX is okay and that sexuality may not be black and white. I'm not worried about them -- but I'm worried about the others their age growing up with parents who aren't like that. That's why this is so very necessary. The more it is done and seen in cultural media, the better off our future generations will be.
Kudos. Keep it up.
June 27 2013, 11:02:59 UTC 4 years ago
3 years ago
June 25 2013, 21:09:46 UTC 4 years ago
Just because a troll can spell doesn't mean it's not a troll.
I seriously enjoy your books. I will continue to seriously enjoy your books. I seriously like a lot of your people. I will continue to read as long as you write 'em. And may arthritic gerbils pee on your troll.
July 28 2013, 16:58:55 UTC 3 years ago
So true.
June 26 2013, 03:49:31 UTC 4 years ago
On the other hand, as a polyamorous sadomasochist who is wired for consensual power-exchange relationships, I was going to go on a riff about being disappointed and insisting on equal representation. However, there is always the chance that someone would not catch the intended humor and the last thing I want to cause is more ugliness, intentional or otherwise.
July 24 2013, 20:58:14 UTC 3 years ago
3 years ago
June 26 2013, 09:26:18 UTC 4 years ago
July 28 2013, 16:59:42 UTC 3 years ago
June 26 2013, 09:47:12 UTC 4 years ago
I think my response to that would be, "You are not my audience." And, y'know, it is hugely entitled for someone to assume that they must automatically be your audience. If they do not like books with GBLT characters... well... there's a WHOLE lot of fiction out there for them. There is not so much for us who are GBLT. There just isn't. This strikes me as being somewhat similar to the complaints in YA a year or so back that there were "too many" books about girl characters being published, and the poor little boys couldn't identify with them -- and thus, said poor little boys were being left out of reading and therefore it was harming literacy amongst teen boys. Yeah, I don't even.
It also reminds me of the complaint to Bioware about the bisexual characters (which David Gaider responded to brilliantly in his Open Letter to Straight White Males) -- I'm sure you have seen this, but if you haven't, the love interest characters in the Dragon Age 2 video game are all canonically bisexual. Some fans took exception to this and were pissed/squicked that, OMG, a MAN character FLIRTED with them. Somehow, even though their characters had access to all the game romances that were available, this was discriminating against straight men. No, I can't make this shit up.
Fuck people like this. You have plenty of readers who are ECSTATIC to read your work, with all its GBLT characters galore... and love the work more for it!
July 28 2013, 17:00:24 UTC 3 years ago
Yet somehow it is.
June 27 2013, 02:49:54 UTC 4 years ago
Admittedly, I do think the Luidaeg and Elizabeth Ryan counts as a spotlight romance that wasn't hetero. But I LOVED IT and am thrilled it got a Hugo nomination and it was fantastic.
Yeah, if I didn't like what you wrote, I'd stop reading it. Instead of gleefully reading it, discussing it with my junior husband who's also a big fan, and buying extra copies to give to a woman I have a major crush on.
July 28 2013, 17:00:51 UTC 3 years ago
<3
June 27 2013, 10:55:01 UTC 4 years ago
As I said in comments to the last entry, what you do is important. The fact that there are people in comments here telling you that they plan on giving their small people your books when they are old enough is evidence that you are Doing It Right. You are making the world better by helping some people feel stronger and less alone and helping others feel less alienated and threatened and making some just feel happy and warm. And I'm actually really sorry for Anon that they aren't able to feel like a part of that, because it is a very good thing.
It's just sad, is what it is. What a tiny world they must see.
July 28 2013, 17:01:09 UTC 3 years ago
Love to you.
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