Today on Book Riot, I analyzed -punk as a genre suffix and some examples and precursors of that.
Plus, on my blog, I posted a detailed analysis of A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
Cinderella Retelling
Here’s my Cinderella retelling: my short story “Saint Emma” on Corporeal. The editors wrote on Instagram: “Grace brings us a Cinderella retelling that centers ableism and classism.” Content note for ableist abuse and language, not graphic though. It’s my first published fiction in almost two years!
I wrote about fairy tales, including Cinderella, on Book Riot last year.
I also like this article that asks: Why is Cinderella so nice?
some final thoughts on ableism in Poor Things
I also found and uploaded my 2010 undergrad essay on Frankenstein.
A reminder: I am not a journalist. I updated my IG profile and my “about me” page on this blog to say that. Sites like Muckrack crawl the web and create profiles for me, but I do not create or maintain profiles like that.
Also, we’re still in a pandemic. I still wear KN95 masks when I go out, especially indoors.
I loved One Day and hated Poor Things.
Here’s some recent work:
The Ableism of Poor Things and The Lobster
One Day on Netflix is a Wonderful Adaptation!
More Thoughts on Ableism in Poor Things and The Lobster
International Women’s Day felt especially hollow this year. CBS Evening News chose to spotlight Barbie (the doll) on that day instead of countless real, international women they could have picked.
TW genocide:
Lina AbiRafeh recently wrote: ‘No “Happy” International Women’s Day While My People Are Dying.”
Please keep telling your representatives that Gaza needs aid and a ceasefire now. In his State of the Union address, Biden mentioned sending more aid to Gaza and pressuring Netanyahu. But it’s hypocritical for Biden to send weapons to Israel simultaneously, enabling the genocide, including mass starvation.
The Last Unicorn
Courtly love in The Last Unicorn
Of course I posted this during the Super Bowl!
Much more importantly, I updated my old 2020 blog post on dehumanization with the following recent examples:
“TW genocide:
More recently, textbook examples of dehumanizing language include “erase Gaza” and “human animals.” Israel’s attacks on Gaza (which the US enables) are absolutely genocide. Jewish Voice for Peace explained why this is genocide months ago.
Thank you to Karrie Higgins, Alice Wong, and Imani Barbarin for posting on IG condemning Selma Blair’s recent hateful, racist, anti-Muslim comments. I listed Blair’s memoir in a 2023 Book Riot article but will never do so from now on.
Book Cover Trends and Slight Fanfic Edit
New today on Book Riot:
Maybe I read too much SFF to generalize their covers like this. One of my favorite fantasy cover artists today is Charlie Bowater. She illustrated beautiful covers for An Enchantment of Ravens, Vespertine, and many more. Many other cover artists use a similar style.
A Spoiler and Trigger Warning for Eleanor Oliphant:
If you think it looks like a romcom, because it was discussed like one when it came out, be warned! Eleanor has PTSD and eventually remembers her trauma of surviving the fire in which her mom killed herself and Eleanor’s little sister. I liked the book. Here are some book club questions from BR. But it was initially misleadingly marketed.
Subtle Update to an Old Fanfic:
I originally published my Doctor Who fanfic “The Veil Between the Worlds” on AO3 between September 29, 2022 and October 15, 2022. However, I edited it slightly on January 23, 2024 to fix a potential plot hole. Now that element is more of a MacGuffin, which is OK, I think. The updated version is on AO3 and Wattpad.
Thanks for reading my old and new work!
My First Post of 2024!
Doctor Who Lost in Time: DELETE! DELETE! DELETE!
More thoughts on Doctor Who: Lost in Time:
In addition to the main episodes and long weekend events, Lost in Time has two shorter events during the week. Surf & Turf lasts about a day, and Enlisted lasts almost two days. When the timer was broken, kerblam boxes came too fast, but the event also ended too early. Both recurring events are so repetitive, I could predict when they’d next be scheduled or even what tasks they’d have in order. Some people describe these as “filler events” because they don’t have any cutscenes. This game works through intermittent reinforcement, only granting rewards sporadically.
So, why would anyone play them? you ask. They enjoy and are in the habit of playing the game, or they need to stock up on the rewards before playing more interesting, future episodes and longer events. After the game was recently recalibrated, I finally collected a lot of gems playing the shorter events.
Lost in Time also has a LOT of ads. I used all possible free shortcuts in the game, like automating waypoints and watching ads to double my power. Even the ads glitch and don’t always work. Though I played the video ads, I didn’t actually WATCH them. The advertisers didn’t get their money’s worth from me. I usually read a tab on my phone or computer or a page in a book during the ads. But I hyperfocus and switch tasks, instead of multitasking.
Anyway, I obviously suggest avoiding this game! It’s fun at first, then monotonous, and made my hands and eyes tired. I’m surprised I could play it at all, to be frank. It’s so repetitive, I started to feel like Sisyphus in Greek mythology. I told the development team that instead of a leaderboard, I thought all players should have an equal shot at the rewards.
I also think the upcoming NFT game, Doctor Who: Worlds Apart, which runs on blockchain, sounds like a terrible idea. There are reasons people all around the world use blockchain and crypto, but I don’t want use them or AI writing or art programs.
Hey, speaking of Greek mythology, Percy Jackson on Disney + is great so far.
In 2019 for Book Riot, I reminisced about using the 1990s American Girls computer game to adapt stories unrelated to the AG franchise.
2023 in Review
January
Some Observations on Doctor Who from a New Fan
February
More on Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ableism
more on Lady Chatterley’s Lover and other literature with antisemitic tropes
March
The Parallax View Vs. 2022 Kia Commercial
More Thoughts on the Series A Court of Thorns and Roses and Fantasy in General
The Apotheosis of Paul Atreides
April
May
Subverting Authority and Gender Binaries in Macbeth (slightly edited undergrad essay from 2010)
a new chapter of my OFMD fanfic, Full Circle on AO3
June
Our Favorite Books — That Don’t Exist on Medium
July
I covered Paris Paloma’s great song “labour” on my YouTube (not monetized).
more on Pollyanna and toxic positivity
August
September
October
Some Thoughts on Online Ableism
Free Palestine! Plus, way less importantly, thoughts on fairy tales.
November
Leslie Tate interviewed me! Thank you so much, Leslie!
Updates, Disability Literature and Theory Interview, and Random Thoughts About Doctor Who and OFMD
Why I’m Glad Doctor Who Changed Davros
Book Riot Quiz and Even More on Doctor Who
December
BR Quiz and Even More on Doctor Who
I just published my first quiz for Book Riot:
It was fun to make! Enjoy!
I also blogged about Doctor Who‘s recent decision to depict the villain Davros without facial scars or a wheelchair.
And here are more thoughts about Doctor Who handling disability and race awkwardly and insensitively in the past. I like the diversity and attempts to do better now.
Doctor Who Books on BR and Interview!
New today on Book Riot:
Plus more thoughts on my Medium blog.
Leslie Tate interviewed me recently about my writing influences and more.
I also updated the menu here on my WP site with a current link to my 2018 essay from Monstering Magazine, ‘Ambulatory: How “The Little Mermaid” Shaped My Self-Image With Cerebral Palsy.’
The Original Endings of Fairy Tales
CN: discusses genocide, antisemitism, ableism, and other forms of violence
First, most importantly: Free Palestine. You can sign this petition calling for an immediate ceasefire and contact your representatives too. Israel is an apartheid state, as people much more knowledgeable than I have also said. The Israeli government is committing genocide against Palestine. They gave Gazans no time to evacuate their homes. Malala Yousafzai recommends donating to Anera to provide humanitarian aid to Palestinians. I am against imperialism, including military imperialism. The US and Israel’s governments are defending imperialism, not really defending democracy, because Palestinians are not given equal rights in Israel’s democracy.
Many Jewish people around the world have often spoken out against Zionism and pointed out the huge power imbalance Israel has over all Palestinians. Muslims around the world constantly condemn Hamas and other terrorists. It’s completely wrong to equate Jewish people with the violence of the Israeli government or to equate Muslims with the violence of Hamas. We all need to condemn imperialism, hate crimes, and bigotry wherever they happen.
My latest BR article on fairy tales
I wrote this article and the rest of my blog post weeks ago. Published today on Book Riot:
In this article, I linked my 2022 Medium post on Fairy Tale by Stephen King. I might have forgotten to mention this in the original blog post, but “the gray” (the curse in the book) also affects Dora’s speech (another example of disability). Charlie doesn’t understand her speech when he first meets her. It also affects Princess Leah’s speech. She literally speaks through her horse, and I think it’s the elaborate setup to Charlie joking, “I heard it straight from the horse’s mouth.” Ouch.
Here’s a good article from 2015 on the origins of “Cinderella.” I think calling her stepsisters the “ugly stepsisters” undermines the message of not judging by appearances.
I recently saw the Grimm tale “Snow White and Rose Red” on a list of fairy tales Disney hasn’t adapted yet. I don’t think it should be adapted–at least not without rewriting it and removing the ableism. Snow White and Rose Red, two sisters, befriend a talking bear and let him stay in their house. The girls later meet a “dwarf,” and they save him several times. He’s always rude and ungrateful to them. The magical bear reappears and kills the dwarf. The bear transforms into a prince and says the dwarf turned him into a bear and stole the prince’s gold.
Fairy tales conflate people with dwarfism and other disabilities with imaginary and often malevolent creatures. This dwarf character is dishonest, greedy, contemptuous, and punished partly for being ungrateful to average-height people who helped him. This story type is sometimes called “The Ungrateful Dwarf.”
I’m not sure where the online rumor that Disney’s Snow White is 14 and the Prince is 31 comes from. It’s not in the movie or the many earlier versions of the story!
Speaking of fairy tales, here are my old Medium blog posts analyzing A Curse So Dark and Lonely, A Court of Thorns and Roses, and a second post on ACOTAR. Both loosely start with Beauty and the Beast retellings.
Beauty by Robin McKinley
I recently read another Beauty and the Beast retelling: Beauty by Robin McKinley from 1978.
I vividly remember sitting in my yard when I was about 9 years old and reading it, then losing or abandoning it. That’s probably why I remembered it and always wanted to finish it.
The writing is beautiful but slow-paced. Disney wasn’t the first to make Belle a bookworm in 1991. Neither was this book, 13 years earlier. Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s 1740 French novel La Belle et la Bête originated Belle’s love of reading. The Beast’s library in McKinley’s novel contains books that haven’t been written yet in Beauty’s time: Robert Browning, Sherlock Holmes, The Once and Future King, etc. This reminds me of Merlin wearing a Victorian top hat in 1000 CE in The Once and Future King. I like intertextuality!
Maybe someone from Disney read this before 1991 and was inspired by a few unique details. There’s also a scene when the Beast tells Beauty he can’t eat with utensils, so she doesn’t use them, either. The food they eat is different, but otherwise, almost identical scenes later appeared in the Disney movies.
The 1991 movie, in turn, may have influenced the 1990s cover art. I once owned the 1993 Harper Trophy paperback. On the cover, Beauty has pale skin, dark brown hair, and dark brown eyes, wears a yellow gown, and sniffs a yellow rose in a Gothic castle. She looks way more like Disney’s Belle than the descriptions of Beauty in the novel. In the book, she has golden-brown hair and brownish hazel eyes.
There are also a lot of mythological references in McKinley’s novel that I never would have understood when I was nine. Beauty compares herself to Persephone, eating pomegranate seeds from Hades in the Underworld. I didn’t even understand the reference to “King Cophetua’s beggar-maid” now, at 34. Alice Munro’s short story “The Beggar Maid” is another reference to the myth.
The Beast’s transformation takes only about a paragraph, which is kind of anticlimactic.
[Doctor Who New Series 1-4 spoilers] On Doctor Who Confidential in interviews, Billie Piper compared her character, Rose Tyler, kissing the Metacrisis Doctor (a half-human duplicate of the Tenth Doctor) to Belle’s reaction at the end of Beauty and the Beast. “It’s him, but it’s not him.” Earlier, Rose had a similar reaction to the Ninth Doctor’s regeneration into the Tenth. In the short “Born Again,” the Doctor eventually convinces her he’s still the same person.
Speaking of TV, I enjoy the new season of Our Flag Means Death. And Reservation Dogs.
In 2021 on BR, I analyzed the legend of The Pied Piper.
Years ago, I blogged about the ableist slur in the song “Life’s for the Living” by Passenger. Passenger rewrote the song and removed the slur in their recent 10th anniversary edition. I try to update my blog (including my old Medium posts) if I learn that musicians more recently apologized for, or removed, slurs in their lyrics.
More recently, I blogged about ableism online and offline. I’m glad Medium does not train AI on our posts. To anyone who still finds my work, even without Twitter, thank you!
Grace Lapointe 