Forgotten days encased in bone and meat

[Forgotten days encased in bone and meat]

st-just asked:

🔥Modern SFF

fallowhearth answered:

So this is probably a very unpopular opinion, but in terms of ‘lesbian space atrocities’ I find the lesbian part to be fairly uninteresting. Can be expanded out also the current trend of queernorm worlds (which I would say is a parallel and only partly overlapping slice of the genre). Perhaps this is my bisexual ambivalence toward monosexuality in general, or maybe it’s specific factors relating to the young age of most protagonists, me not having the same taste in women, or something else. I don’t find them compelling in terms of representation, and most don’t say much about the experience of being queer (some notable exceptions obviously).

Bonus points for Arkady Martine, who if I remember correctly, is one of the few authors I’ve read lately to actually include semi-explicit descriptions of sex between women. I can’t think offhand of any other SFF I’ve read that includes casual fisting? I ended up finding the politics of that series a bit weird (in an interesting way), but props for pushing the envelope.

[st-just]

Honestly the most enveloping-pushing thing (positive) for me about AMCE/ADCP is that after centering the entire series around the romance it just…didn’t work out? For fairly boring and pedestrian reasons rather than some grand tragedy or self-sacrifice or betrayal? That I can’t actually think of another example of off-hand.

[Forgotten days encased in bone and meat]

feelslike1959 asked:

My sister and I were talking about it, so just to ask the expert: would you consider Murderbot a lesbian space atrocity or just lsa adjacent?

Hmm. It’s got some traits in common, but like eh? Depends on how you define ‘adjacent’.

Like it’s very much queer pseudo-dystopian space opera, but the protagonist/character arcs/tone/themes are all wrong, is how I’d put it I guess? So y'know genre is fake, make your own decisions here.

[Forgotten days encased in bone and meat]

Anonymous asked:

hii, do you have any recs like baru cormorrant or tlt but like, mlm or with transmascs? i need unhinged fatally deranged men set on mutually assured destruction so bad. thanks!

Actually wondered about this myself last year - There’s a few recommendations from people in the notes but I haven’t read/can’t really corroborate any of them.

Exception being Shuos Jedao of the Machinaries of Empire by Yoon Ha Lee series, who is a mlm and definitely counts personality-wise and is a deuteragonist with a five-digit body count. He doesn’t exactly have a single romance that’s the anchor of the book that Baru/Tain Hu or Gideon/Harrow, though (he spends the entirety of the first book a ghost inside someone’s head).

Oh! It’s an incredibly different sort of reading experience than Baru/TLT, but if you unhinged fatally deranged men doing unforgivable things out of a confused mixture of love and principle, give Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer a try?

Things with transmasc protagonists at all are pretty fucking thin on the ground, honestly. If you really, really squint Raven Tower by Ann Leckie might count? It’s basically high fantasy Hamlet with a couple added flourishes, and the equivalent of Horatio is a trans guy?

[Forgotten days encased in bone and meat]

Anonymous asked:

Is Gundam The Witch from Mercury the first true Lesbian Space Atrocities anime? It seems like the genre has mostly been a prose fiction phenomenon previously.

Hmm- so like, if the prologue and episode 12 were the entire show, I’d say probably definitely yes. As it is ehh maybe? Will give considered answer when the back half comes out and it’s no longer mostly teenage aristocrats dueling bloodlessly over arranged marriages and corporate mergers.

It’s a matter of narrative emphasis, you know? If Lady Prospera was the protagonist? Absolutely.

(Also I don’t watch nearly enough tv to be able to know whether there are better examples that already exist, I’m afraid)

[Forgotten days encased in bone and meat]

Anonymous asked:

I saw the post proposing "Vrisk-alikes" as another term for LSA, but then, does that mean that PMMM is LSA? Which also brings up the hilarity that LSA almost definitionally exists post-Utena, as "RGU from Anthy's POV" is a LSA story where they're interrogating the empire of gender instead of actual empires. (And then what about Twelve Kingdoms? It's not like She Who Became The Sun is questioning the overarching system, either.)

I mean, haven’t read Homestuck for knowledge of what makes a Vriska remains entirely second-hand,but I don’t really think that tracks?

I mean, Gone Girl sure as hell doesn’t fit into the subgenre at all, right?

And it’s not like Three Seagrass or Kel Cheris or One-Esk/Breq fit the Vriska mold at all, I don’t think?

SwBtS is closer to palace intrigue than thesis on political economy, sure, but it’s still very much interested in legitimacy, and what makes someone a ruler people will follow, I think?

Anyway nah, wouldn’t really say that PMMM fits imo, and have never read/watched/played(?) Twelve Kingdoms.

[Forgotten days encased in bone and meat]

Anonymous asked:

Hrm. Neither Mahit nor Three Seagrass are the ones committing the atrocities in Teixcalaan, though they struggle with levels of complicity, which I guess counts for moral ambiguity.

They’re lesbians in space around atrocities, that’s close enough for government work.

(Honestly one of my bigger annoyances with Desolation Called Peace was how the evils of the Empire were kind of, I don’t, localized to scheming vizier dude? (Which kind of made him my favorite character by default of spite) but idk the presentation of Eight Antidote and the actual Empress (…blanking on name) shaded a bit close to ‘the Tsar is good and just, but misled by evil advisers’ for me.)

(Sorry I feel like I’m missing context to this but if there was a part 1 to this ask I didn’t get it.)

[Forgotten days encased in bone and meat]

80 pages into The Fallen and it’s a really fun read so far, but it is unfortunately suffering from the same issue that kind of plagued The Outside - the mad scientist on a quest to kill the gods with eldritch metaphyics and the sadistic fallen angel on a mad quest for vengeance against the universe are just way more interesting to read about than the actual protagonists.

[Forgotten days encased in bone and meat]

Anonymous asked:

Does the GoT spinoff count as lesbian space atrocities?

Joke answer: It only counts if the lesbians are textual and not just on Ao3

Serious Answer: Still need to watch the back half of the season so, like, provisional answer but - I don’t really think so?

It, hmm, this is probably going to be unsatisfyingly vague and handwavy but - I think it’s kind of core to the subgenre that it’s not just interested in politics (court intrigue, princes and potentates, who will succeed the king?) but political economy? House of the Dragon is about two competing factions of the highest echelons of the military aristocracy fighting over who gets the fancy hat, their support bases and visions vary in terms of like, the specific people involved and the exact authority of Crown versus Lords Paramount, but neither side actually wants to change the social order, or even has any conception that it might be possible to do that.

The legitimacy of the system as a whole is never really interrogated, and it’s certainly never really in question for the protagonists.

…I’m dead tired, hopefully that makes at least a bit of sense/isn’t entirely too precious?

[Forgotten days encased in bone and meat]

Anonymous asked:

So the whole "lesbian space opera war crimes" genre, why are they _all_ lesbians? This took barely a few years to become as tedious, unimaginiative, and overused a cliche as things which the Golden/Silver ages of scifi took decades to run into the ground.

dagny-hashtaggart answered:

I’d say it’s actually more like 75-80%, but the more substantial response to this is that this is a very CinemaSins, “every story that shares any motif with another story is ipso facto bad” view of things. Just seems a very shallow and uninteresting take on what constitutes meaningful originality in fiction.

[st-just]

I actually did wonder about this a while back and the conclusion people on here came to was more or less path dependency, and all the morally problematic Sci Fi/Fantasy MLM live in podcasts.

Anyway in at least one central example (Machinaries of Empire) the lesbian deuteragonist isn't even the main war criminal.

[fallowhearth]

I assume, also, that it's less appealing to write about bisexuals, as for a non-trivial portion of the (both hetero and homo) audience, they will see a bisexual woman and say, behold: a straight woman.

Does lesbian space opera war crimes include Baru? She's arguably the most war crimey but also not in space.

[st-just]

'Space' is usually (okay, 'by me', I have no idea how everyone else means it) just there to signify, like, high concept genre fic yeah. Baru (and C.L. Clarke's The Unbroken, and Tasha Suri's Burning Kingdoms series) definitely counts.

[dagny-hashtaggart]

Yeah, I’d honestly say that both “lesbian” and “space” are negotiable, more like strong tendencies (along with a focus on crunchy realpolitik, which e.g. is very present in Masquerade or Machineries of Empire, not so much the focus in The Locked Tomb). The essential aspects of the genre are probably more along the lines of female protagonists and empire.

[st-just]

I feel like the 'atrocities’ bit is doing some work, too. Like, not everyone needs to be Baru for Fang Runin, but a certain degree of moral ambiguity among your main cast is de rigueur. But otherwise yeah basically.

[Forgotten days encased in bone and meat]

Anonymous asked:

So the whole "lesbian space opera war crimes" genre, why are they _all_ lesbians? This took barely a few years to become as tedious, unimaginiative, and overused a cliche as things which the Golden/Silver ages of scifi took decades to run into the ground.

dagny-hashtaggart answered:

I’d say it’s actually more like 75-80%, but the more substantial response to this is that this is a very CinemaSins, “every story that shares any motif with another story is ipso facto bad” view of things. Just seems a very shallow and uninteresting take on what constitutes meaningful originality in fiction.

[st-just]

I actually did wonder about this a while back and the conclusion people on here came to was more or less path dependency, and all the morally problematic Sci Fi/Fantasy MLM live in podcasts.

Anyway in at least one central example (Machinaries of Empire) the lesbian deuteragonist isn't even the main war criminal.

[fallowhearth]

I assume, also, that it's less appealing to write about bisexuals, as for a non-trivial portion of the (both hetero and homo) audience, they will see a bisexual woman and say, behold: a straight woman.

Does lesbian space opera war crimes include Baru? She's arguably the most war crimey but also not in space.

[st-just]

‘Space’ is usually (okay, 'by me’, I have no idea how everyone else means it) just there to signify, like, high concept genre fic yeah. Baru (and C.L. Clarke’s The Unbroken, and Tasha Suri’s Burning Kingdoms series) definitely counts.

[Forgotten days encased in bone and meat]

Anonymous asked:

pls, do you have recommendations of books with protagonists similar to Taylor? Morally grey characters that have good intentions but keep descending into darker and darker depths to achieve their goals

Okay so, like, yes but this depends on your definition of ‘morally gray’.

Like Baru Cormorant (the eponymous protagonist of Seth Dickinson’s Masquerade series) is what you’re asking for to a tee, and to a lesser degree so is Fang Runin from R. F. Kuang’s Poppy War, but both are really just incredibly less morally upright and outwardly heroic than Taylor. So, you know, fair warning.

Oh! There’s Yoon Ha Lee’s Machinaries of Empire series, though for one of the deuteragonist mostly goes through the slippery slope before the series even begins.

Definitely know way more answers here, but they’re escaping me at the moment, sorry.

Anyway technically speaking an entirely correct answer here is Code Geas, so lets go with that.

[Forgotten days encased in bone and meat]

yoursincalendricalheresy asked:

Hello! I found your blog scrolling through the Baru cormorant tag in the daze following reading the final chapter of Tyrant. You seem cool and we seem to have about the same taste in books (lesbians committing atrocities while having complex feelings about imperialism). I see Baru and TLT and often A Memory Called Empire rec’d together but very rarely Ninefox Gambit which is too bad because it really does deserve to be included in the category of disaster lesbians and imperialism. Anyway, just wanted to say hi and also ask if you had any recommendations of things to read which scratch the same itch as these books?

Oh, thank you! And congrats on the excellent taste!

Okay, other recs! (writing on a break so sorry for lack of description)

Ancillary Justice/Imperial Radch - you’ve probably already read it, but basically the progenitor of the whole, like, sub-genre, so probably worth a try if you haven’t. Honestly never quite fell in love with the series the way a lot of people did, and thematically a bit muddled imo, but still a very fun read.

The Poppy War Trilogy - set in obvious fantasy China during what’s socially the fantasy 19th century but with weirdly primitive tech and some magic. So, if you feel like Baru was too soft-hearted and had too many moral qualms stopping her from doing what was necessary to fight imperial, oh boy is Fang Runin the protagonist for you! (Okay the books are honestly pretty uneven and luxuriate in describing various atrocities a bit much, and Rin is theoretically textually straight, but if you need an anti-imperialist girlboss committing war crimes hit this is the series for you)

The Unbroken - Fantasy Algeria/Egypt after colonization by the fantasy-French, about a colonial auxiliary soldier whose returning to her homeland for the first time since she was adopted/conscripted as a child and the princess there to quell a rebellion to gain enough political capital to take the throne despite being disabled (and also make things better for the natives) who she ends up serving in the household of. Of the ‘historically accurate racism and colonialism, but patriarchy and homophobia aren’t really things’ school of worldbuilding. Touraine is a great protagonist, but also very frustrating in that she’s got the skillset of Gideon but keeps trying to be Baru.

The Jasmine Throne - Fantasy-India, about one of the last surviving acolytes of a massacred priesthood devoted to the primordial demons who once almost conquered the continent (theoretically) and the imperial princess sent by her brother to rot in that conquered city after she refuses to burn herself alive as she was expected to. (The subgenre’s just full to bursting with princesses and not-quite-knights, isn’t it?). Clashing loyalties, terrifying mystical powers, intrigue and rebellion, you know the drill. Very good and a sequel’s coming out soonish, I think?

Monstress - I don’t know if you read comics at all, but if you do read Monstress. If you don’t, also read Monstress. (Do not read Monstress if you’ve got any sort of weak stomach in either a metaphorical or literal sense. There’s a lot, and it’s all lovingly illustrated)

That’s all just off the top of my head, will probably reblog this with more recs at some point after my brain stews a bit more.

[Forgotten days encased in bone and meat]

Starting Fireheart Tiger because it was on the Hugo nominee list and I’ve been meaning to give de Boudard a try for a while, and it seems I have entirely accidentally stumbled into yet another book about imperialism and lesbians.

[Forgotten days encased in bone and meat]

[horrorlesbians]

not to be a bitch but when i, someone who will be 23 this year, post about wanting more lesbians in media i don’t want to be told to watch children’s cartoons

[official-kircheis]

#in these parts you’re gonna get 20 books about evil wlw doing imperialism

@st-just help op out will you?

[st-just]

I mean on request sure but I’m assuming OP was being rhetorical.

[Forgotten days encased in bone and meat]

geekspren asked:

randomly stumbled on your lesbian space atrocities tag recently and I must say, superb taste all around. Lovin the vibe your blog has. Also nice to see another human being who’s actually read Monstress, as I’ve been telling my friends about it for years, but none have picked it up yet

Oh, thank you! Much appreciated, enjoy the constant stream of consciousness that should really be 3-4 distinct sideblogs.

And I know, right? I swear, I got into Monstress after a guy I know irl pitched it to me (on the basis of me saying the only comic I read was Saga, IIRC). I was really incredibly annoyed to find out that he hadn’t read past the first volume, when I came up for air having gotten up and wanted to talk to someone about it.

But hey, what else is tumblr for?

(I mean in fairness it’s a pretty hard sell. And that first issue does not ease you in, either).