Emily Edwards: You know how white women love true crime? True crime to white men is easter egg media…True crime instills in white women […] the myth that hypervigilance can save you. That if you’re always on the lookout for, like, the murderer who is [going to] bring you into his van […] that if you notice him, you won’t be that person. But easter egg media to white dudes also instills hypervigilance but the worst thing you have to worry about is someone thinking you don’t get a Star Wars reference […] I think that’s one of the reasons people hate spoilers so much now on like twitter and things like that. I don’t care. I love spoilers. Personally, because I was not allowed to read comic books, watch Star Wars, like anything when I was a kid […] just flat out anything that’s referenced in [Ready Player One] I was not allowed to experience, so I love spoilers because I don’t know what is f*cking happening in a movie unless someone tells me what is happening. And also, I love spoilers because I’m a writer and I like to see how things build on top of one another. So, I enjoy watching how writers put together a story in order to build to this huge climax like End Game-level sh*t, where, like, these huge catastrophic things are happening. I never would have known and I like watching how it gets built to be there. It’s awesome.
Thom Dunn: I love watching all those pieces come together. […] If a story is completely contingent upon the surprise of the spoiler and if it’s just a surprise that’s just a surprise or a just a twist that’s just a twist, then it’s f*cking meaningless anyway. There’s no value in that. [So if] I go into something knowing, like, ‘I know that this is how it ends,’ I [still] don’t know how we’re gonna get there, [that actually] helps me almost turn my brain off […and] know what to focus on.”
[…]
EE: But I also feel like there’s a purity aspect to it too where, like, there’s a large chunk of geek media people who want to be ‘the first’ to experience something and also if there’s spoilers and you’re not also the first person to discover the easter egg it gets into this really weird MRA aspect…
–18:27 Fuckbois of Literature podcast, 40: Ready Player One – Thom Dunn
A vampire and werewolf fall in love. This book was hilarious. One of the best reads of the year for me.
The sexual politics of…anatomy. Fascinating stuff but I wish the book had delved into the racism and bias of these works that it didn’t even really touch on. Like, in one racist depiction it describes it as a “tableau” but doesn’t address that the demonic figure has been replaced by a black person/racist stereotype (see screenshot). Call it out at least. What’s more the book doesn’t even mention figures like Sarah Baartmaan (called the “Black Venus”) whose literal body was on display. A couple of white women whose bodies were preserved like dolls are mentioned though.
Will we still love her when she is no longer young and beautiful?
This book should be in conversations with ones like, for example, #OwnVoices. The lines in the sand for what you can and can’t do were blurred with this stunt and I think we’re missing opportunities to define (if we even need to define? maybe reinforce, rather?) who and what an “author” is. What Laura Albert did was most wrong, in my view. What Knoop went through was not OK. Yet, like Knoop, I still don’t think we have the precise language to talk about it. But we need to continue to try.
I learned a little. Very introductory but a good global smattering. Would be a good buy for a teen in your life. The art was sometimes too basic and stiff to be a point of interest for me.
This is a master class. A textbook. A syllabus. It was comforting to read and so enlightening to see all the exercises the author uses in class. I haven’t seen a book on creativity/a book that sparked my creativity like this in a long while.
Panda (Duh) 