Yesterday truly felt like the first day of spring. I got up early enough to go out into the world and everybody I interacted with was cheerful! And happy! The weather was beautiful! I ate my favorite sandwich in the world! I went to go see The Huntsman: Winter’s War! It was perfectly serviceable! Solid, solid day.
Links
- Richard Kim shares his experience of being a terrified young gay kid in the eighties who found hope in Prince’s music.
- The Washington Post’s always fantastic Robin Givhan remembers Prince’s style.
- Audrey at Autostraddle celebrates Prince’s expression of a sense of androgyny that expands beyond “women who wear men’s clothes.”
- AMC is screening Purple Rain in theaters until April 28th in tribute.
Aja Romano on how Hamilton is fanfic.
Kayti Burt talks about how TV networks fail in their attempts to reach out to fandom.
Melissa McCarthy’s comedic career is successful and singular—why isn’t her success treated as the success it is?
This profile on Johnny Weir, Tara Lipinski, and their work covering figure skating is way more interesting than I thought it would be! It covers their careers, the low popularity of figure skating at the moment, and the effort the two are putting into making it more visible and accessible.
Aja Romano breaks down Larry Stylinson, the One Direction conspiracy theory that may never die.
Queer ladies finally make into Once Upon a Time, as Ruby and Dorothy share true love’s kiss. Adorable. Also: nice try, Once Upon a Time, I’m still not picking you back up again.
Foz Meadows contemplates how cars and anything with wheels are seen as naturally attractive to little boys, proposing, instead, that it might be because cars and anything with wheels are never actively marketed for girls, with the stereotypical traits that implies. It’s a thoughtful piece on gendered toys.
The amazing Emily Nussbaum won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism! The AV Club rounded up some of her articles to show why.
Oh, of course, Zack Snyder’s DC Cinematic Murderverse included a Robin with a two-handed battle axe. To murder people with.
Jane Caro points out how terrified our culture is about feminizing men and boys.
Here are the nominees for the 2016 Eisner Awards.
Jessica Lachenal at The Mary Sue crushes it by taking Hollywood to task for “Orientalism, Whitewashing, and Erasure.”
Similarly, Leah Schnelbach at Tor.com asks, “Why Are We Still White-Washing Characters?”
Carrie Fisher hated a line in Star Wars so much it motivated her to become a writer. Carrie Fisher is amazing.
Nathan Rabin covers the most recent Fantastic Four film for My World of Flops, and it’s a surprisingly even-handed evaluation of the film.
DC’s restructure of Vertigo resulted in the departure of Shelly Bond, a well-respected editor. A lot of people consider this shady, because DC continues to employ noted harasser Eddie Berganza, whose behavior is so bad that DC won’t hire women for his office.
The finances of American political parties is weirdly fascinating to me, so have this article about how the GOP is terrified that a Trump nomination means that lower-level races won’t get any money because their traditional fundraisers might refuse to raise funds for Trump.
If we pay enough attention—not just to these women, but to our own snap responses to their stories, the ones that turned their tragedies to “scandals” and still tempt us to ignore the inconvenient truths those tragedies expose—we can learn how to act differently in the future. When the next woman comes along with a story that we do not want to hear, we will know how to listen to her.
Meredith Talusan writes about “Eve,” a pseudonymous trans woman who has been out only on social media for the last two decades, but is lately feeling the pull to connect her two public faces.
Acquisitions
Books
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Films
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I shall never watch Once upon a Time for ideological reasons as well as that when I did start watching it on Netflix I got unbelievably bored. BUT, do you read Lily Sparks’s recaps of it at tv.com? They are a national treasure. Each Monday morning or whatever day it is that’s the day after the show airs, I eagerly await her recaps. She’s salty af about SwanQueen.
Great links as always!!