holyschist: Image of a medieval crocodile from Herodotus, eating a person, with the caption "om nom nom" (Default)
holyschist ([personal profile] holyschist) wrote in [personal profile] tiamatschild 2010-03-23 05:47 pm (UTC)

Oh, yes, suffering as atonement. It is so entrenched in western fiction.

On You Don't Deserve More Stories...one of the things I was thinking about in the queer appropriation discussion was that yes, as a queer person I want most fictional depictions of queer people to be BY queer people. But as a queer reader--well, I read somewhere between 70-150 books a year, I'd guess, and if I want a decent percentage of those to be about queer characters, and I have genre preferences (which I do), there just aren't enough queer writers to write enough books for queer readers, because writing is far slower than reading, and there are far more queer readers with diverse tastes than queer authors to provide books for those tastes.

So as a reader, I want straight writers to try, and to try harder to do well. So there will be MORE BOOKS. Because I am sick of "You already have a few books, why do you want as many choices as straight readers?" But I still want the queer authors' voices to be dominant, argh. I don't know how that works.

Queer YA fantasy, especially non-urban fantasy, basically didn't exist when I was a teenager. And now it does, and about characters who aren't all Suffering For Their Queerness. But there still isn't enough of it! And there's still a lot more about queer boys than queer girls (I suspect because of fannish connections on the part of some YA fantasy authors, but I dunno, really).

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