Paul Rogers is a renowned illustrator and art teacher whose works have appeared everywhere from the New York Times to the U.S. Open. He's also a big fan of Jack Kerouac, and for over a year now, he's been putting his passion to pen.
On the collective artists' blog Drawger, Rogers has been sharing longform illustrated sections of On the Road, featuring gorgeous page-by-page, scene-by-scene illustrations.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Through Rogers' deft artistry and Kerouac's wit, the pages of On the Road have slowly, over the last year and a half, come to life in new ways, prompting us to wonder why the classic work of beat literature has never been updated in comic book form before now.
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Rogers began the project last January. In August, he wrote on the Huffington Post that he'd been inspired by Kerouac's own writing process:
[A] few months ago I was thinking about the legend of Kerouac writing the book on a long scroll of teletype paper in three coffee-soaked-Benzedrine-fueled days. It occurred to me that a long series of drawings that viewers scrolled through online might be something people would enjoy.
Through Rogers' vivid imagery, Kerouac's writing springs to new life, at once exciting and poignant and profound:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
You can, and should, view each of the installments in Rogers' series at the following links:
What do you do if you take a nonconsensual photograph of the wrong New Yorker?
If you're the cohost of this popular Sirius radio show, you instigate a fight and then spend hours unloading an obscene, racist, misogynist invective against the woman in question on Twitter.
The real question is not what happened to make popular Opie and Anthony cohost Anthony Cumia blow a racist gasket all over social media last night, it's why and how he's been allowed to get away with this kind of thing for years without it affecting his job.
Gawker reported late last night that Cumia had basically lost it on his Twitter, where he has over 150,000 followers. Cumia claimed to have caught an unwitting bystander in the frame of his Times Square photo, after which she allegedly started punching him.
So, I'm taking pix in NYC & a black girl who was in frame punched me in the face. I called her a fucking "&$;;-:" cause that's what she WAS!
Strong warning for vile, misogynist, racist language and beliefs in pretty much every tweet from here on out.
OK, first, this photo isn't exactly Cumia "taking pics of NYC" unless he just typically goes around taking pictures of ugly Manhattan scaffolding. She's clearly the focus of the composition, and is being caught impromptu on camera, apparently without her permission:
Secondly, although Cumia seemed to be justly angry that he was assaulted, his tweets immediately took a violent and sustained racist turn. Over a period of many hours, and on into today, he described the woman, repeatedly and continuously, as "savage," as "an animal," and as "it," using a number of profane misogynistic slurs. He also repeatedly stated he hoped she would be shot and killed.
But Cumia didn't just stop there. He went on to apply the violence of the woman who he'd nonconsensually photographed to sweeping statements about black women and black people in general:
It's really open season on white people in this day and age. No recourse. Fight back and you're a racist. The predators know this. Good luck
In the ensuing uproar, Twitter users called for Cumia to be fired, while the media unearthed examples of previous bluntly racist things Cumia has said over the years, often on his own radio show.
On Reddit, where Opie and Anthony has a subreddit of over 7,000 subscribers, distraught fans alternately rallied around Cumia, better known as "Ant," and debated whether the show could survive the media blitz and outrage.
They also discussed how to scour the Web of all further uploads of the show which might make it easier to track down other racist and problematic things Cumia has said in the past. While Cumia's cohost Gregg Hughes has so far been notably silent on the subject, the show's radio sidekick Jim Norton minced no words supporting his colleague:
.@AnthonyCumia is physically assaulted and for some reason, the story is about him reacting angrily on Twitter? People are just dopes.
The news comes just one day after Sirius XM reported an increase in quarterly earnings and a rise in stock value—the worst time imaginable for a PR disaster to hit the company.
But as for Cumia, he seemed completely unfazed by the magnitude of the backlash, retweeting angry responses to Alyssa Rosenberg's piece about the incident in the Washington Post, and continuing to declare that his status as an attack victim trumped all of his subsequent racism in response:
We are living in a strange backward world. Where people support the attacker & the victim is the villain. Enjoy!
He's been nominated for an Emmy and an Annie for his work on Cartoon Network's Adventure Time and his own Clarence. But Skyler Page's career may be at a standstill after a number of colleagues spoke openly on Twitter about claims that he harassed at least one woman in his animation team.
Cartoon Brew is reporting that Cartoon Network has fired Page less than a day after colleagues in the industry came forward on Twitter to publicly allege that he harassed one of their own: Emily Partridge, a storyboard artist who worked with Page while storyboarding Adventure Time.
Comic artist Maré Odomo tweeted the allegation about Page on June 30th without naming Partridge.
Skyler Page, creator of Cartoon Network's "Clarence", is known to grope women without their consent. Don't be left alone in a room with him.
Her tweet came a day after Partridge independently began tweeting about the assault. Both Odomo and Partridge were accused of fabricating the incident; Odomo was additionally accused of libeling Page.
The flurry of accusations leveled at Odomo prompted Partridge to name the assault perpetrator.
okay dudes, this Skyler Page Fiasco everybody is talking about happened to me, you can stop hounding my friends for "proof"
Although Cartoon Network did not return the Daily Dot's request for comment, a representative told Cartoon Brew that "Skyler Page is no longer an employee at Cartoon Network Studios."
Meanwhile, Patrick Harpin, head of story on Clarence, took to Tumblr to urge fans not to take their anger out on the show itself:
I was Head of Story on “Clarence” from the beginning.
Obviously Skyler Page sexually assaulted a female artist at CN. Skyler’s a piece of shit, and CN should give him the boot. Emily Partridge is one bad-ass chick for standing up to a guy who a lot of people wanted to cover up for. Skyler’s asshole behavior (though not yet sexual assault) was the main reason I quit the show more than a year ago.
I can’t imagine how fans of the show are feeling right now. But the reason you like Clarence, in spite of it’s creator, is because the “creator” had very little to do with the show. Despite what it says in the credits, Skyler never wrote a single episode of Clarence. It was created by the writers (me and Spencer Rothbell) and the talented board artists (people like Charlie Gavin, Derek & Diana). We took Skyler’s idea of “a fat dumb kid” and made a character out of it. Skyler mostly “kept the couch from floating away”, and read whatever lines we gave him. There’s been enough victims of Skyler Page, don’t punish the talented crew that actually raised Clarence.
Partridge meanwhile criticized Cartoon Brew, apparently for using her photograph in their article about Page's firing without first seeking her permission.
It's now been more than two months since Amazon and powerful publisher Hachette began an epic standoff over contract renegotiations, in the wake of last year's landmark settlement in favor of Amazon against Apple and traditional publishing's "Big 5." In what is widely perceived as an effort to pressure Hachette to play with its new, more demanding contractual terms, Amazon has been delaying book shipments, stocking fewer books, and removing the pre-order link from Hachette titles, including J.K. Rowling's latest, along with many other Hachette authors.
Because Amazon versus Hachette is just the first of Amazon's renegotiations with each of the Big 5, the publishing industry is taking Hachette's role in the dispute very seriously. But the longer the negotiations go, the longer the siege of Hachette's authors' sales on Amazon. And as the days stretch with no end in sight, the writers themselves are starting to take sides and formally speak out.
The divide between authors seems to be coming down to those who are traditionally published versus those who are self-published, primarily on Amazon. The negotiations aren't just about contractual disputes—they're really about who calls the shots when dictating how books are sold. Many self-published authors have done well by Amazon while thriving in an ebook-heavy market, and are perfectly happy with Amazon's attempt to wrest more control away from traditional publishing. But while there have been some traditionally published winners in the short-term war, most traditional authors aren't too happy with the prospect of giving Amazon more power to further erode the book industry.
Earlier this week, the Daily Dot came into possession of an email from the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), one of the industry's most prominent professional writers' organizations.
Written on SFWA letterhead, the email is from SFWA president Steven Gould, praising a letter that member Douglas Preston has been circulating privately for about a week. Gould states that the SFWA board has decided to endorse Preston's letter and invites other members to join him in co-signing it:
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Preston's letter calls for authors to take a stand against Amazon's strongarming tactics in defense of Hachette. Although names are still being added to the list, current signees include bestselling Hachette authors like David Baldacci and notable names throughout the industry, like Paul Auster, Geraldine Brooks, and Ellen Datlow.
But not everyone is happy with the SFWA president and board for, essentially, aliigning the entirety of the SFWA's membership with Hachette in the fight against Amazon.
Independent self-published author Don Sakers made the astute connection on his website between SFWA's stance now and its recent debate about whether to allow successful self-published authors to join the organization:
For years, SFWA has been castigated in the self-publishing community, particularly by authors who support themselves and their families entirely on income from their self-publishing efforts, yet are unable to join an organization of professional writers. The public acknowledgment that SFWA was considering a change helped to smooth some feathers.
So what does SFWA do? It publicly and officially takes the side of traditional publishing, thereby signaling to independent and self-published writers that SFWA doesn't understand or care to understand their concerns. it's about as clear a message of "You don't belong and aren't welcome" as I've ever seen.
Writer Leah Cutter seconded Sakers' thoughts. "They increasingly don’t represent me as an author," she wrote in comments of the industry blog The Passive Voice. "And they’ve just called their relevance into question again. They don’t get that big name authors have nothing to do with me down here in the trenches."
Hugh Howey, a bona fide self-publishing phenomenon who is staunchly pro-Amazon and pro-self-publishing, issued a petition of his own in response to Preston's. Through a Change.org petition released Thursday directed at supporters of Hachette, Howey put out a call for readers to align themselves with Amazon:
"Stop fighting low prices and fair wages," Howey wrote to the behemoth traditional publisher. Then, he directed his argument at, well, you (emphasis his):
New York Publishing once controlled the book industry. They decided which stories you were allowed to read. They decided which authors were allowed to publish. They charged high prices while withholding less expensive formats. They paid authors as little as possible, usually between 2% and 12.5% of the list price of a book.
Amazon, in contrast, trusts you to decide what to read, and they strive to keep the price you pay low. They allow all writers to publish on their platform, and they pay authors between 35% and 70% of the list price of the book. . . .
You may have heard that Amazon and Hachette are having a dispute about how books are sold. The details are complex, but the gist is this: Amazon wants to keep e-book prices affordable, and Hachette wants to keep them artificially high. Higher than for the paper edition of the same story. . . .
Major publishers like Hachette have a long history of treating authors and readers poorly. Amazon, on the other hand, has built its reputation on valuing authors and readers dearly. The two companies didn’t simultaneously change directions overnight. . . .
It is fitting that Independence Day is upon us. Amazon has done more to liberate readers and writers than any other entity since Johannes Gutenberg refined the movable type printing press.
Howey's argument sounds rosy, but it neatly sidesteps the grim facts about the ways Amazon has spent years pressuring small publishers to play hardball, using its sizeable revenue from other parts of its retail to drive down prices on ebooks (a tactic known as "predatory pricing"), while establishing a veritable monopoly over the industry that many experts predict will ultimately result in Amazon raising prices dramatically again, once it's gotten the lion's share of the business. In fact, Amazon is already raising its prices in the wake of the anti-trust lawsuit.
As a result, Howey's petition provoked bafflement among many members of the publishing industry:
So Lovecraft, Mieville, Vandermeer and Peake together could never have dreamed up anything half so weird as that petition of Hugh Howey's.
On his blog, media pundit John Scalzi weighed in to advise people that the situation wasn't as cut-and-dry as Howey's petition seemed to indicate:
These businesses and corporations are not your friends. They will seek to extract the maximum benefit from you that they can, and from others with whom they engage in business, consistent with their current set of business goals. This does not make them evil — it makes them business entities (they might also be evil, or might not be, but that’s a different thing). If you’re treating these businesses as friends, you’re likely to get screwed.
Ultimately, although Howey and other self-published authors may see Amazon as the key to liberating authors, it seems as though, at least in the short term, the standoff between Amazon and Hachette is only turning the publishing industry into a house divided against itself.
Tinder may have changed the online dating landscape, but some things have regrettably stayed the same, like the way instruction guides for guys on how to pick up girls on the Internet inevitably feel like skeevy, sleazy perv-manuals.
Not to be outdone, the latest, by an author dubbing himself "Jeff Miles," is so eye-roll-inducing we don't even have to subscribe to know what we're going to get.
"[F]ollow my fool proof strategies and start sleeping with hotter women as soon as TONIGHT."
Oh, joy.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
On his website, Miles is shilling his Tinder pamphlet, dubbed Tinder Code, which purports to be a secret guide with tons of tips for how to turn a swipe-right into a goldmine for guys who just want to get laid. Miles lays out his moment of epiphany like so:
I was getting rejection after rejection and then I finally went on a few dates with this one cute chick and out of nowhere she stopped texting back (no we hadn’t hooked up yet)...
I text her a few weeks later, and that was the night that everything changed for me...
I asked her what I was doing wrong and why she didn’t want to hook up (yes I'm aware how pathetic that sounds)...
Her response is something I’ll never forget and the day my Tinder game changed forever
She said:
"Look, you seem like a really nice guy, but it seemed like you kept wanting to impress me and wanting me to make the move. I swiped right. What more indication do you need that I wanted to hook up?"
...my jaw hit the floor. Reading between the lines on that, she called me out point blank...
I was a pussy.
But it was the best lesson I’ve ever gotten. Not just on Tinder, but with women in general...
Girls want to hook up with you.
Not all of them and not all of the time (unfortunately) but they do.
Great. Just great. Mr. Tinder meets a Tinder date who thinks a passive-aggressive lack of communication is some kind of gender role thing, and now women everywhere have to suffer for it. He meets one woman who couldn't just be like, "I like you, let's shag," and suddenly this dude gets the revelation that—wait for it—all the women on Tinder are secretly asking for it!
But Miles doesn't stop there. Thrill as he entices you with, "The 4 'Tinder Rules' every girl has. Once you know these, you’ll kick yourself with how easy it is for you to get girls on Tinder!"
Marvel as he advises you, "How to take control of the conversation and get her thinking about sleeping with you within the first 3 messages, no matter what you look like." Really? What if you look like the kind of guy who's trying to manipulate people into bed?
Swoon as he offers to teach readers, "3 perfect 'Tinder dates' with the logistics of getting her back to your place built in, that will get her riled up and ready to go back to your place."
Are you feeling seduced yet?
Look, it's no secret Tinder is for simple, quick hookups, and it's true, most of us probably would swipe right on people we want to sleep with. But most of us probably also swipe right on people we're just curious about. Not all of these people are going to make it into the "keeper" pile, or even the "one-night stand" pile. Not all of them should. Turning real people on Tinder into predictors for getting laid makes the Tinder landscape that much more unreliable for people trying to have fun while keeping themselves safe.
Fortunately for most of the women on Tinder, access to the Tinder Code is as skeevy as the Tinder Code itself: The website prompts you to enter your credit card info and email address into a totally unsecure form, at which point you will, so the site claims, be charged a single dollar for access to Miles's book of amazing Tinder tips. The full cost—the remaining $27 plus, we're guessing; a hellish ritual of daily emails from this guy trying to get you to buy more Tinder hacks—comes later, after you've had a chance to try out his moves for yourself.
Sterek shippers in the Teen Wolf fandom just can't seem to catch a break lately. First star Tyler Posey dissed them in an interview. Then heartthrob Dylan O'Brien declares Stiles, one half of the pairing, isn't gay, hard on the heels of the show pairing him up with a new character, Malia, for the fourth season, whose actress declared that Stiles is her "soulmate."
But at least fans of the love of Derek and Stiles can take refuge in the fandom, and fan conventions, right?
Maybe not, according to news surfacing from the fandom. It seems a few Teen Wolf conventions are banning Sterek and all non-canonical (that is, not on-screen) pairings from autograph signings.
Friday, Tumblr user evolmymind shared a surprising turn of events at a Chicago Teen Wolf con run by Creation Entertainment, a longtime professional producer of industry fan conventions. When it came time for Tyler Hoechlin, who plays Derek, to sign her copy of the recently published and popular Sterek Book, he abruptly refused:
When it came time for the end of the con on sunday and we got in line to get our autographs i was ecstatic and nervous for him to sign my Sterek book. I had some other art for him to sign before i gave him the copy and as soon as i took it out and put it on the table he looked happy and sad all at once. As soon as i told him that i would love for him to sign my copy he said “I’m so sorry but I’m not allowed to sign anything sterek related” as soon as he said those words i completely shut down. I think he noticed that i was upset because he continued to apologies and seemed really sincere and sorry that he couldn’t do that for me.
The fandom reacted with confusion and hurt. Then, on Saturday, it happened again:
Tyler couldn't sign my Sterek tshirt. He was SO sorry ! #TeamWolfCon
As fans began to investigate, they realized that more than one upcoming convention had put these restrictions in place.
At least part of the impetus behind the rules seems to be a desire on the part of the convention to sell more official posters for fans to get signed, thereby upping their profit margin for the con.
AUTOGRAPH RULE: To avoid offense, NO FAN ART at all will be allowed to be signed at Creatures of the Night.
— Culture Shock Events (@CultShockEvents) July 5, 2014
@Buffye13 we will have items that you can get signed
— Culture Shock Events (@CultShockEvents) July 5, 2014
The problem is that even though "because we want to make a profit" is actually logical, the cons seem to be eschewing that explanation in favor of going with the "because your gay fanart is offensive and inappropriate" reasoning instead. Apparently cons don't have PR machines.
Australian Con allowed Stydia but not Sterek (bc it isn’t canon.) When ppl complained, they banned everything. What’s logic anyway, right?
When questioned about their decision, one company, Rogue Events, which is producing next weekend's Wolfsbane Con in the U.K., threw both reasons at the users:
@SwancyMonteiro@Darayawastaken it is not official items, therefore it cannot be signed. It is also not appropriate materiel.
The implication, at least on the part of this one con, seems to be that the organizers don't want to make the actors uncomfortable by having fans request that they autograph Sterek and other ship-related material. If true, it would definitely signify a change in the comfort level of the actors regarding their fandom's biggest ship.
Sterek fans have long had a vested interest in making their ship known to the creators and actors of Teen Wolf. For one thing, it's an interaction that the show has encouraged on numerous fronts, both by filming Sterek-y extras to get out the vote for the Teen Choice Awards and other events, and by openly welcoming Sterek and other non-canonical ships as part of what makes Sterek fandom unique. There's even a piece of Sterek fanart hanging in the Teen Wolf fanart gallery, in the hallways of the show's production studio.
It's hard to believe that Sterek is getting a ban when it's arguably one of the most popular things the show has going for it. It's one of the most massively popular ships in all of fandom, with more than 26,000 fics on AO3 alone, and millions of posts on Tumblr and other fannish corners of the Internet. It's currently up for an award at MTV's first Fandom Awards contest. And unlike many other slash ships, the male/male content doesn't phase Teen Wolf, which has a gay showrunner, Jeff Davis, and several queer ships (albeit minor ones) on the show itself.
When the organizers of the Sterek Campaign created the Sterek Book last year, they were able to get copies of it autographed without problem at various cons. Ironically, the book, which was originally giftedto Tyler Hoechlin and other cast members as a token of appreciation, is no longer allowed inside the cons at which Hoechlin is a guest.
@TheOrlandoJones careful now....that will get you convention banned! ;)
Some Teen Wolf cons like Howlercon and Bite Con confirmed that they would not be implementing such restrictions. And even at the cons that had banned fanart, some things managed to slip through:
Meanwhile, Hoechlin himself sent waves of panic through the fandom Saturday by responding to a fan's question ("Do you ship Sterek?") with a measured dismissal of the idea that the ship fans believe in so whole-heartedly has anything to do with actual Teen Wolf canon:
You guys do what you wanna do. But to me it’s just like, I see the characters for who they really, actually are in the show, so it’s nothing to do with the work that I do.
Ouch!
While the independent third-party fan conventions ostensibly have nothing to do with the official rhetoric of the show, it doesn't help fans' morale to get two disheartening blows to their ship in the same weekend, from an actor and numerous cons where they would normally expect their ship to be welcome.
Sterek once seemed like slash fandom's best chance for getting a major male/male pairing to become canon on the back of fandom support. Now it seems it's gone the way of nearly every other slash pairing we've seen since time immemorial: hedged bets from actors and creatives, and mishandled convention attempts to quash the pairing.
There's nothing inherently inappropriate or embarrassing about slash. And while this kind of response is all too familiar and misguided, it will, inevitably, only make the fans that much more determined to celebrate their ship in whatever ways they can.
You might be hearing a lot about the new mobile game Let It Goat this week. It's already trended once in the U.S. VentureBeat and Business Insider have breathlessly dubbed it "the next Flappy Bird." Although the game, with its 16-bit graphics and regular goat-bleat soundtrack, is cute, we're not ready to call this one just yet.
For one thing, Let It Goat, a product of mobile game developer SkyVu, is less a Flappy Bird clone than a clone of the infinitely sparklier Web-based Robot Unicorn Attack. Both games involve a four-legged hoofed beast with horns occasionally charging at obstacles and jumping over them, to infinity.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
But where Robot Unicorn Attack is a fluid and endlessly addictive spell of leaping over stars, flying alongside Lisa Frank dolphins, and soaring on rainbows against a backdrop of ridiculously soothing 80's Europop, Let It Goat sort of clomps over spikes, zombies, and other obstacles with an inexorable Flappy Bird-like fatalism.
Another thing: Once you've inevitably impaled yourself on a spike, you're treated to screens like this:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
For all its lowbrow charm, Flappy Bird wasn't actually trying to bombard its users with loud, obnoxious ads and share buttons. But then the makers of Let It Goat—Vine stars Jack Gilinsky and Jack Johnson (Jack and Jack)—aren't actually known for being subtle.
Sure, it's currently Independence Day weekend, but come on: if the goat is named Mounty, why does he have an American flag?
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
We could also ask why the pipes from Super Mario Bros. have become the hallmark of every deliberately glitchy, gimmicky mobile game trying to socially engineer its way to the top of the app downloads, but we suspect we just answered our own question.
Still, there seems to be no shortage of love for the game among those who have downloaded it. With a rating of nearly five stars in both the Apple store and Google Play's store, it's a hit with fans.
"This little goat has no cares in the world as it jumps around spikes and zombies, dies and respawns," wrote player Kiki Young in the Play store yesterday.
We're the first to admit goats are precious creatures, but we're just not feeling it. Call us heartless, but we'd rather take our chances on a no-frills, one-object game like Flappy Bird, which functions as a metaphor for existential despair, than a game that keeps us from our ultimate life goal of watching real-life goats be cute and adorable.
Sorry, but for this game, we're going to have to say: de-bleat.
Congratulations. If you paid attention during YouTuber Brett Domino's last lesson on how to write a pop hit, you should be well on your way to millions of untold riches and incessant earworms by now.
But if you're having trouble making your song rise above the rest of the ubiquitous bubblegum pop songs out there, Domino is back with part two of his manifesto, complete with catchy chorus-writing tips and Auto-Tune at the ready.
The best thing about Domino's lessons is how rooted they are in roughly 85 percent of the pop music you've been mindlessly consuming for the last decade or so. Apart from the fact that these lessons clearly seem to stem straight from the K-Pop Academy of Songwriting, the hit Domino manages to whip up is actually pretty catchy. Cheekily inspired by Iggy Azalea, Domino somehow manages to drop the bass and the names of European cities, and it all works beautifully.
Note to Harry Styles: You have 21 million Twitter followers waiting to launch into an epic meltdown over your every move.
What did you think was going to happen when you favorited a tweet from an adult performer?
Sometimes journalists are called upon to do truly important cultural work. Today #HarryDontLickAnything is a worldwide trend on Twitter, and I’m here to explain why. You might want to make sure you’re sitting down.
@ItzFuckingJess is the Internet handle for an up-and-coming erotic star who does private Skype shows. On her (very NSFW) Twitter account, she has a steady stream of erotic and explicit photos and messages to her 60,000 followers—a number that’s skyrocketing today thanks to a very unexpected source: a member of One Direction.
Last night, apparently just before going offline, Styles favorited a very provocative, extremely not-work-safe tweet that Jess made in May.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Styles’s fav (he’s since unfavorited the tweet) was instantly spotted by the eagle-eyed One Direction fandom, who immediately had a meltdown over it. The fav could have been accidental—after all, as of last night, Styles only had 11 favorites total. But the tweet was made in May, so it would be hard to imagine Styles stumbling across it unless he went looking for it, if you get our drift. And as One Direction fans know, it wouldn't be the first time he's wandered into scandal over this particular anatomical area.
Jess's Twitter was promptly bombarded by shocked and/or delighted 1D fans.
As for Styles, when he realized what had happened, he promptly went into damage control mode, which in proper 1D form meant... favoriting lots of pictures of puppies and kittens.
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Gosh, Harry, even when you're in the middle of a sex scandal, you're just so adorbs.
Then he did the Internet equivalent of conspicuous thumb-twiddling.
And received this cheeky response back from his BFF, UK DJ Nick Grimshaw:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
We're with Grimmy: We saw no evil, honest! But Jess may not be quite ready to let this moment go:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
And who can blame her, really? It's not every day you get noticed by the world's most-wanted pop idol. Hey, it's not a meet-cute based on an unexpected between two quirky personalities.
But it's the Internet. Faving your porn pic is pretty much the next best thing.
From the World Cup to world fame: This 17-year-old, Axelle Despiegelaere, just nabbed a dream L’Oréal campaign thanks to the Internet. Let’s hope it ends well.
The Web is incredibly good at turning unwitting audience members into sex symbols. On June 25, pictures of the teen, who was in the audience during the group meets of the competition, went viral.
Despiegelaere found herself an instant star, with a Facebook fan page of nearly 250,000 likes. She capitalized on her fame, making her own (now-deleted) Facebook page and promoting the news about her new campaign with L’Oréal.
Of course, turning a teenager into a sex object is never an ideal situation. So far, Internet fame is proving rocky for Despiegelaere. She's already offended part of her fanbase with a reference to animal cruelty and “hunting” Americans on her now-deleted Facebook:
No matter how polished her Red Devils cosplay might be, she still is just 17, not a social media expert or a professional public figure. While a major modeling campaign may be a dream come true, it's also a reminder that the Internet doesn't check your ID before it catapults you to stardom—whether or not you're ready.
OK, we're the first to admit: We adored Boyhood. Richard Linklater's latest film is an epic which follows stars Ellar Coltrane and Lorelai Linklater throughout the years from 2002 to 2014—in Coltrane's case, from age 6 to 19. By any standard of filmmaking, it's a tremendous accomplishment.
Still, we can't help but marvel at the tremendous response the film, which has a wide U.S. release next Friday, has drawn in early reviews from its limited release. It's sitting pretty at a 100 percent rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes and a 99 on Metacritic—joining (and in some cases, surpassing) the ranks of such widely beloved and acclaimed classics as Citizen Kane, Pan's Labyrinth, and Schindler's List
Since few things make us more gleeful than watching critics attempt to one-up one another's efforts to deliver the most superlatives for a film they all unabashedly love, we decided to dig through some of the language in those reviews to get a sense of the overwhelming praise behind those numbers. In this case, the fact that we also loved the film just allows us to turn our amusement inward. (To be fair, one Daily Dot staffer did pronounce the film "boring"; we're having a Tree of Life standoff next.)
Along its route to innumerable year-end Top 10 lists and an inevitable slot in the 2022 Sight and Sound list, Boyhood has accrued a truly impressive cadre of breathless, over-the-top reviews. Here are our favorites.
1) "Nothing will ever be this good again." — HitFlix
Boyhood is more than a movie; it is a vibrant, living thing, and it is beautiful, and it is sad, and it is wise, and it is sprawling, and it is intimate, and it is painful, and it is more than any filmmaker could have intended, and, yes… when it comes to trying to capture truth in a way that cannot be argued or denied or even summarized… I am sure that nothing will ever be this good again.
Mason's journey, the journey that every human being must embark upon, becomes a kind of slow-motion miracle. Film, by its very nature, is meant to capture nuggets of time, but Boyhood is all forward momentum and growth. The weight it attains in its last hour is no accident. It's the weight of existence itself.
3) "One of the most extraordinary films in decades" — USA Today
One of the most extraordinary films in decades, this family drama is also one of the most ambitious in scope, having taken more than a decade to shoot. Yet it comes across as effortless and unassuming. Boyhood is an epic masterpiece that seems wholly unconcerned with trying to be one.
Writer-director Linklater couldn't have known where 12 years of shooting this story would lead, following a boy and his family — and the actors who play them — across time. But we are blessed that he did, because it has resulted in an extraordinarily intimate portrait of a life unfolding and an exceptional, unconventional film in which not much else occurs. Never has so little meant more. … It is a credit to Linklater's facility with long-form storytelling that even after nearly three hours, I didn't want the movie to end. … I cannot remember when a film has moved me more or captured so well all the colors and shadings of the personal, yet universal process of becoming.
This quietly gorgeous film—shot on 35 mm film by Lee Daniel and Shane Kelly—lets us feel stuff that many features try to reach, but few celebrate so stirringly: the sweetness and pain of family life, the joy of the now, the evolving wonder of personhood. When Mason is still a tender kid verging perilously on puberty, he asks his dad an urgent question: "There's no, like, real magic in the world, right?" You'll have to see the movie for his father's answer, but I can tell you that "Boyhood" is as real as magic gets.
6) "It's an unassuming masterpiece." — Rolling Stone
... a vital tapestry of growing up like nothing else in cinema. Boyhood makes us feel euphoric about movies, about their mystery, their power, their ability to move us to laughter and tears. It's an unassuming masterpiece.
7) "It looks like a classic already." — The Standard
Here’s a film like no other, the best film released so far this year. … It is an astonishing accomplishment: somehow Linklater has kept his own vision of what film should be, consonant with that of the great masters, intact in mainstream American cinema. Boyhood is not just a genuine epic, not just beautiful and moving, it looks like a classic already.
In order for the gradually unfolding miracle that is Boyhood to come together, a lot of collaborators had to be on the same page over the course of a long and much-interrupted period of time. (Linklater has called it the longest scheduled shoot in film history.) Mason’s epiphany about the ever-renewed “nowness” of the present moment may be hallucinogen-induced, but the audience’s own epiphany has been brought on by something else: the profound, funny, beautiful film we’ve just, to our surprise, spent nearly three hours (or was it 12 years?) inside of. The time just flew by.
With Boyhood, which will stand among his finest work, [Linklater]'s given us a cinema verité illusion of the endless days and nights of growing up, like a time-lapse movie of a flower opening up. It just so happens that this flower is a man.
10) "It's the kind of movie you want to swim in." — The Shiznit
Boyhood is a quite astonishing body of work: an utterly unique and immersive cinematic experience that condenses over a decade of life into three blissful hours. It's the kind of movie you want to swim in.
It may have started out as the world's saddest piece of kid's entertainment, but by the end of the weekend, the DashCon ball pit had become the Tumblr celebrity of the year.
"The greatest irony of DashCon is that they inadvertently created the only fandom that can destroy the Superwholock fandom on Tumblr," wrote Tumblr user mattgorman Monday morning. "The Ball Pit Fandom."
This weekend in Schaumberg, Ill., DashCon went off to fireworks—and not the good kind. The disastrous convention, which had boasted an anticipated crowd of 5,000 but had an actual crowd of anywhere from 500–1,500 people instead. And when those thousand or so unlucky attendees got there, they were hounded for $17,000 from DashCon organizers after the hotel reportedly demanded that the con pay its entire fee upfront. Considering that prices were already high and that the con had initially crowdfunded $4,000 from Tumblr to begin with, fans were none too happy, and Tumblr instantly exploded in controversy over the event. Things got even worse when the con saw multiple guests, including Welcome to Night Vale and Gingerhaze (who had to moderate her own panel because the moderator never appeared), walk out after the con proved unable to pay for their travel and accommodations upfront.
In Night Vale's case, the crew walked before, not after, their panel was to take place. When that happened, the strapped con, unable to issue refunds for those who had paid extra for the Night Vale event, offered attendees, with a straight face, the only thing that seemed appealing at the time:
It's clear that no one on DashCon's organizing team had any PR experience, because if they had, they probably would have spent less time sharing pictures of themselves crying on Twitter and predicted what came next: Tumblr, in the onslaught of intense discussion around whether DashCon was a scam or just incredibly mismanaged, took "an extra hour in the ball pit" and turned it to what is arguably one of the greatest memes in the platform's history.
Amid the endless stream of jokes, fanart, Simpsons references, Portal references, fanmixes, and image macros that online Tumblr denizens created over the weekend, fans who were actually at the con converged on the ball pit, hoping to commemorate what had abruptly become a piece of Tumblr history.
4Chan is takingcredit for the ball pit's demise; having previously gotten into a cross-platform trolling war with Tumblr, it looks as though they decided to infiltrate DashCon and share their, er, $17,000 opinion of Tumblr's users. The culprit appears to be YouTube user Hebe Goldstein, who also trolled attendees by encouraging them to shout, "Free Palestine!" while filming them in the pit.
If that's not enough cross-platform madness for you, the ball pit also racked up multiple Facebook pages, including I peed in the DashCon Ball Pit.
next time you're dealing with someone who's being a dick just say "who peed in your ballpit?"
And now that the infamous ball pit has been taken out, one enterprising individual is trying to sell it on Craigslist:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
"It should just be a running joke for all cons to start providing ball pits," wrote Tumblr user rykitsu on Monday.
While that may not happen, it looks like DashCon organizers are determined to move forward with plans for DashCon 2015. After issuing a tearful apology at the con post-mortem, they announced plans to "learn from [their] mistakes" for next year's con, to the wild enthusiasm of the (admittedly diminished) crowd.
Let's hope that plans for next year include a bigger ball pit.
While it may seem like the "thundering" announcement heard round the world, when you take a step back, Marvel's reveal that Thor is going to be a woman in an upcoming issue isn't quite the revelation many are claiming.
The news, coming to us courtesy of ABC's The View, of all places, was vague to begin with. Although news of the upcoming debut caused plenty of heads scratching because of the choice of venue, the announcement went off well thanks to View hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Jenny McCarthy actually proving they can hold their own when it comes to talking about girls in comics. But if you're looking for Thor to make waves with a groundbreaking changing of the guard, you might not want to celebrate just yet.
Here's what we know so far. The new female Thor will apear in October in a new series, Thor, written by Jason Aaron and illustrated by Russell Dauterman. As you can see in this preview of the cover of the first issue, she means business.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
But what about the old Thor? Marvel's press release tells us that he's no longer able to wield the hammer that gives him his power:
No longer is the classic Thunder God able to hold the mighty hammer, Mjölnir, and a brand new female hero will emerge worthy of the name THOR.
The new Thor's backstory, courtesy of McCarthy, suggests that it's not quite as simple as a changing of the guard.
"The story behind her is that she created herself. She was saved by Thor, and she came down from Earth – followed him – and made herself look like Thor. And now she’s taking over."
So what this all most likely means is that while the "real" Thor is off taking an Asgardian vacation, the new character, whose name we don't yet know, is taking over the job.
This isn't all that groundbreaking. The powers of Thor pass to whoever is deemed worthy of wielding Mjölnir, usually through acts of great bravery and selflessness. In the past, numerous female characters have picked up the great hammer, including Tarene, a.k.a. Thor Girl, and Black Widow.
What is unusual is that the new Thor is headlining a new series. While some readers have speculated that it could be a nice way to transition the Marvel Cinematic Universe to a new character once Chris Hemsworth's contract as Thor is up, we've read too many comics to be anything but skeptical that the new character will take on the role for longer than a few issues. Still, Marvel is insistent that "this new Thor isn't a temporary female substitute," as editor Will Moss stated. "[S]he's now the one and only Thor, and she is worthy!”
Marvel is certainly treating the news as a major shakeup in the world of the Avengers, calling it "one of the most shocking and exciting changes ever to shake one of the “big three” of Captain American, Iron Man and Thor."
Female Thor arrives on the heels of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Agent Peggy Carter getting her own TV spinoff. It's also a possible precursor to the Captain Marvel movie and the Black Widow movie everyone wants. A Female Thor is arguably an even more radical switch for the Avengers franchise—if she sticks around—than a solo Black Widow movie would be. And given that nearly half of Marvel's current readership is female, we're long overdue for another female addition to the team.
So far, the news has sparked equal celebration and outrage among die-hard comic fans. On his Twitter, Ryan Penagos, the executive editor of Marvel's Digital Media branch, smacked down the haters right and left.
“This is not She-Thor. This is not Lady Thor. This is not Thorita. This is THOR." - @jasonaaron
Elsewhere, fans cheered the new reveal. "My 4-yr old boy 'AWESOME!' & I love it too!" wrote comic fan and editor Natalie Ebnet on Twitter, adding, "He loves ALL Superheroes & he's now picking out which of his little girlfriends will be able to dress up as Thor!"
While girls haven't needed this excuse to cosplay Thor before now, it will almost certainly make it that much more fun.
The Ali Forney Center is a non-profit shelter for queer and genderqueer teens in New York City. It's also, thanks to the weekend blowup over DashCon, Tumblr's newest cause célèbre.
Sunday, in the middle of endless jokes about what you can buy with $17,000 (the amount that DashCon's hapless organizers bilked out of its attendees on the spot Friday night after their Schaumberg, Ill., hotel demanded the con pay its entire hosting fee upfront) the new Tumblr 17000dollars broke for a serious call to action:
If they can raise 17k for Dashcon, we can raise 17k for homeless LGBTQ youth.
Recently, the admins of a fan-based Tumblr convention, Dashcon 2014, ran into some trouble. Allegedly, the staff of the hotel that was hosting their convention demanded to be paid 17,000 dollars, or else they would shut down Dashcon. The Dashcon admins responded by asking the community to raise 17,000 dollars by the end of the night — and so they did. The convention went on.
This has upset quite a few people, many of whom have pointed out that Tumblr users united to fundraise for a convention, but not to raise money for other causes. A lot of these posts have specifically referenced poverty, homelessness, and disadvantaged members of the queer community; in particular, many people have talked about homeless LGBTQ youth. Why couldn’t we have raised 17,000 dollars for them?
Well, we can. So let's do it.
The owner of the Tumblr encouraged Tumblr users to fundraise $17,000 for the Ali Forney Center, and set up a donation page on the center's website for that purpose. In just under two days, the campaign has received almost 9,000 notes and reblogs, and has generated around $3,000.
CAN WE JUST TAKE A HOT SECOND TO REALIZE THAT AN ENTIRE BLOG THAT STARTED AS A GIANT DASH CON JOKE TURNED INTO A FUNDRAISER FOR AN ORGANIZATION THAT HELPS HOMELESS LGBTQ YOUTH????
"I can't really spare much, but this is a very worthy cause," wrote one anonymous donor on the center's website.
"I never had to worry about being thrown out for being the queer transgender person I am, but I know this is not the case for many. Thanks for turning the disaster of Dashcon into something positive."
"[T]his is admittedly a giant dashcon joke blog," the Tumblr's owner responded in a later update, "but I figure if you’ve got a chance to make something good happen for people who need it, you ought to do it."
When it's not crowdfunding to change the world, 17000dollars is one of many joke blogs that sprang up over the weekend in the wake of an endless sea of hilarity surrounding DashCon's misadventures, including the now-infamous ball pit. Though we can't say it's not exactly a useful blog. After all, now that we know that $17,000 can buy us 895 miniature violins, we have a renewed purpose in life.
We also have a renewed respect for the Tumblr community's ability to turn just about anything into an opportunity for social justice.
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl label is a prime example of something that, in ostensibly encouraging readers to critique the way women are portrayed in narratives, becomes in practice something that actually encourages misogyny instead.
When Jerry Spinelli’s young-adult novel Stargirl was released in 2000, it received instant critical acclaim. The titular stargirl’s freewheeling hippie lifestyle (she changes her name every few years, because she can) make a big impact on the story's protagonist, a boy trying to find his place in high school and in life.
Of course he’s drawn to her nonconformist ways, her unconventional wisdom and beauty; and in the end, as she leads her high school in a conga line out the door and into the night only to mysteriously disappear, she has miraculously imbued upon all her classmates the ability to accept each other as they are. She leaves the boy's life as she enters: the Mary Poppins of coming-of-age narratives and mystical revelations.
Stargirl was a bestseller, an award-winner, and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. In 2007, author Jerry Spinelli released a sequel, Love, Stargirl. That same year, film critic Nathan Rabin published a review of Elizabethtown in which he coined the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl:
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.
The phrase seems like it's been circulating in the pop-culture imagination for much longer than seven years, hasn't it? At once, it was an immediately recognizable and useful way of discussing a trope that was so ubiquitous across the miles of creative mediums that even to give it a label was to explode discussion about it. The concept of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, apart from being a description of a specific kind of winsome sweetheart delivered to an audience on a fall-in-love-with-me platter, was a deep stab at the basic mechanisms through which we tell stories.
Stargirl is a book often cited as an example of YA fiction at its best. To defenders of the book, Stargirl is a complex and nuanced character who does have a life outside of the main character's fantasy of her. Bringing her up during a discussion of the manic pixie trope often provokes heated arguments. After all, is a female character who has all the traits of the dreaded MPDG automatically a failure, even if she has only one primary plot function?
Today, in Salon, Rabin has written a lengthy apology for ever coining the term "manic pixie" to begin with. He writes in bemusement of the way the term took off and grew into a monster beyond anything he'd ever imagined.
"The archetype of the free-spirited life-lover who cheers up a male sad-sack had existed in the culture for ages," he writes. "But by giving an idea a name and a fuzzy definition, you apparently also give it power. And in my case, that power spun out of control."
Then Rabin iterates how using the term has essentially become as much of a cliche as the thing it's describing:
At the film site The Dissolve, where I am a staff writer, my editor has gently discouraged me from using the phrase Manic Pixie Dream Girl in my writing, less because using a phrase I coined reeks of self-congratulation, but because in 2014 calling a character a Manic Pixie Dream Girl is nearly as much of a cliché as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope.
Rabin goes on to talk about how he feels the trope has not only outlived its usefulness but actively become a symbol of harm.
In an interview with Vulture, “Ruby Sparks” writer-star Zoe Kazan answered a question about whether her character was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl by asserting: “I think it’s basically misogynist.” In a later interview, when once again confronted with the dreaded MPDG label, Kazan continued, “I don’t like that term… I think it’s turned into this unstoppable monster where people use it to describe things that don’t really fall under that rubric.
Here’s the thing: I completely agree with Kazan. And at this point in my life, I honestly hate the term too. I feel deeply weird, if not downright ashamed, at having created a cliche that has been trotted out again and again in an infinite internet feedback loop. I understand how someone could read The A.V. Club list of Manic Pixie Dream Girls and be offended by the assertion that a character they deeply love and have an enduring affection for, whether it’s Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall or Katherine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby,” is nothing more than a representation of a sexist trope or some sad dude’s regressive fantasy.
There's so much noise around the label at this point that even very deliberate subversions of it, like Paper Towns and 500 Days of Summer, are often billed as straightforward iterations of the trope by people who seem more content to point and laugh at a quirky girl character than listen to the quirky girl's message about how she's not just your stereotypical mystical male fantasy. The dark side of the Manic Pixie is that it carries the default assumptions that the writer, actress, and audience who together create that character ultimately intend for her to be no more than a vehicle for a man's emotional breakthrough or a catalyst for a man's self-actualization.
The difficulty is that while Rabin and other writers might have recognized how harmful those assumptions are, plenty of other writers and Hollywood moguls haven't. We may not live in a world where, as John Greenput it, "boys can save girls by being romantically interested in them," but we do live in a reality where Hollywood actively teaches screenwriters not to pass the Bechdel Test because of the pervasive and false belief that men only want to see movies about other men, and that if a female character is onscreen, she, too, must be all about the man.
This contrast between reality and our general acceptance of the perpetual mythmaking machine of Hollywood is what can lead to a complex character like Annie Hall existing as a paradox. She stands, to much critical acclaim, against a backdrop of decades of films in which Woody Allen's autobiographical stunted man-children bumble their way towards happiness thanks to the shared insights and romantic love of the women around them. Regardless of how rich and complex these female characters supposedly are, they are all, ultimately, filmed through a man's POV and rendered as servants to narratives which continually turn them into catalysts for a man's personal journey rather than people with their own lives and narrative concerns that we get to follow and partake in.
What the MPDG label delivered best, then and now, is a still-necessary discussion of the ways women are used to further plots that are all about men, the way the dreams and goals and aspirations of women are sidelined to help develop the prioritized narratives of their male counterparts, and the way, ultimately, these kinds of stories ultimately turn women into unwitting token male fantasies rather than people, again and again.
Rabin's callout of the way the trope has been stretched to its limits and then pushed beyond those limits into a concept that actually hurts women is probably long overdue. It's all too easy to use the label to malign every pink-haired waifling who comes along without really thinking about the purpose of the trope and how harmful it is. But if we retire the Manic Pixie Dream Girl from popular rhetoric, let's make sure we replace it with something equally pointed at calling out sexist narratives that only allow female characters to exist for the benefit of male protagonists.
It might be summer, but the CW, the network responsible for some of the biggest fandoms around, including Supernatural andThe Vampire Diaries, isn't taking a break. In fact, this week on Twitter, CW executives, or at least the people who run their social media accounts, have been getting thoroughly schooled in the ways of fandom and social media—and the dangers of inviting fans to talk back.
#AskSupernatural Any show recs for new shows to watch, since I won't bother with this one anymore?
On Tuesday, the network launched a series of Twitter hashtags for various shows, inviting fans to submit questions to be answered by the casts and crews at San Diego Comic Con. After a deluge of responses, the network eventually deleted all but two of the open requests:
Among the hashtags whose official announcements were deleted are #AskTVD, #AskTheOriginals, and #AskSupernatural. Particularly in the case of Supernatural, the CW's ploy backfired; thousands of fans who were angry and upset with the network deluged the #AskSupernatural hashtag for days with snark, challenges, and critical questions, which seemed to far outnumber more innocent questions about the show's narrative.
So many fans joined in that #AskSupernatural trended worldwide on Tuesday and then again on Wednesday, and shows no sign of stopping today. Numerous fans compared it to the equally ill-fated #AskRobinThicke:
The vast majority of SPN fans joined in to criticize the show's oft-noted ongoing issues: cyclical plots, problematic tropes, and above all the sustained refusal to give Dean and Castiel, or "Destiel," an explicitly acknowledged romance.
#AskSupernatural when will we get something other than "one bro has issues, other wastes season trying to save him, Cas in angel wars"
Most of the constant refrain of criticism stemmed from SPN's status as the whitest, manliest, straightest show ever to have inexplicably cultivated a fandom that is its demographic polar opposite. But in between the social justice and ship-related concerns were more practical questions about the plot of the show itself:
Fans were also quick to respond to the CW's deletion of the original invitation to use the hashtag, though there's no indication that it was due to the nature of the questions and not simply the overwhelming number of responses:
Deleting #AskSupernatural doesn't change the sexist, racist, homophobic tendencies of SPN. I love SPN, but there's stupid shit in the show.
Yikes! Looks like the CW can't catch a break. It's a good thing we love their shows so much. And after all, they do say disagreement is the highest form of respect.
Kamala Khan has enraptured the world as many times as she's saved it. Now, the plucky Pakistani-American teen who made history as the new Ms Marvel, comics' first ever lead Muslim superhero, is getting a rare sixth printing—and heralding a new era of diversity in comics.
Although the world of comics occupies an increasingly large part of the pop cultural domain—last year the industry did about $800 million in sales—the number of people who actually buy comics is relatively small. Most comics only average about 3,000 copies per printing; with Kamala now on her sixth printing, she's headed towards a whopping 20,000 print copies sold.
Still, to put things in perspective, sixth printings are major milestones in the world of comics. Spider-Man Issue #583, the one with President Obama on the cover, only made it to a fifth printing despite making international headlines. Kamala now joins an elite lineup of bestselling comics that have performed beyond all expectations.
Many of these titles are genre classics and major issues in their respective franchises, including a number of prestigious Marvel titles:
-Wolverine, 1982 -The New Mutants, Marvel graphic novel (1982) -Essential Spider-Man, Vol. 1 (1996) -Amazing Spider-Man, Vol. 1 (1998) -Annihilation: Conquest, Book 2 (2007) -Avengers vs X-Men #1 (2012)
Image Comics also has a roster of best-selling titles to make the sixth-printing milestone, including the first issue of Matt Fraction's The Sex Criminals and most issues of The Walking Dead. Other comics to get the lauded sixth printing include classics like Vertigo's Absolute Sandman as well as acclaimed translated titles like Dark Horse's Blacksad.
Of course, each of these comics feature men as the lead characters. Although female superheroes (and occasionally villains) have always been popular, they don't see the kind of mass popularity that their male counterparts have. At NewKadia, which sells back-issue comics series, Wonder Woman currently clocks in at #20, coming in behind arguably less culturally iconic male superheroes like Thor and Daredevil. After Wonder Woman, only Lois Lane and Archie vintage sweethearts Betty and Veronica appear in the top 100 sellers under their own titles.
That Ms Marvel is getting a sixth printing speaks to the increasing diversity of comics fandom as well as the growing number of women and supporters of multi-cultural storylines who are entering the fold. The announcement comes on the heels of veteran anti-hero Harley Quinn getting a fifth printing of the first issue of her new series, as the second issue sells out on its second print run. Meanwhile, the popular Saga, known for its diverse character ensemble and strong female characters, has sold out and gone into at least one reprint for every issue; Issue No. 1 is currently on its fifth printing.
Marvel has made little fanfare of the sixth printing, but then it doesn't have to; Kamala has been a hot topic ever since her debut. And it's no wonder, given that she's basically a walking, squeeing fangirl meta-commentary on the franchise of which she is a part:
Hopefully, with nearly half of self-identified comic fans claiming to be women, there will be many more milestones like this one for Kamala and her sisters, and new introductions of other diverse superheroes, for all of us to enjoy.
How do you deal with a fandom that just won't stop liking things you'd rather they didn't?
If you're one of the countless producers out there with unpopular shows, you might think having a loud fandom is a good thing. But over the years, we've seen behavior from both showrunners and fans of major slash pairings that would suggest that navigating a slash fandom is a complicated and incendiary mine field.
Slash pairings, or queer relationships, are generally the controversial ones, particularly in onscreen stories. While straight pairings between characters are typically fair game in Hollywood, queer relationships are still atypical, especially if they involve main characters. But that hasn't stopped fans from rooting for queer pairings in slash fandoms. The increasing visibilty of slash fandom, and the popularity of slash shipping, often puts fandom squarely at odds with a century of the celluloid closet.
Prior to Tumblr, slash, much like fandom itself, flew under the radar, only surfacing in the occasional awkward question from fans at conventions. Tumblr changed all that. When Teen Wolf arrived on the scene in 2011, it enjoyed a healthy first two seasons with slash ship Sterek getting constant nods from showrunner Jeff Davis and the cast and crew. Later, thanks to the renewed boost that Tumblr gave to slash fan favorite Supernatural, the show saw ratings actually increase over Seasons 8 and 9. It's almost unheard of for a show in its waning years, but slash fandom on Tumblr is a mighty vehicle. Last year, seven of the top 10 most-reblogged actors of 2013 played characters who are primarily associated with being one half of a major slash ship. And of the top 10 most-reblogged television shows, six are known for having at least one major slash pairing (or "bromance" in the case of Skins.) Coming in at No. 11 was Merlin, a show that went off the air at the end of 2012, but still continues to enjoy a major fandom following, solely because of the popularity of Arthur/Merlin as a slash pairing.
But with all of the new attention that Tumblr has brought to slash fandom, it's also gotten easier to recognize recurring patterns in the way the showrunners and creatives—dubbed "The Powers That Be", or TPTB by fandom—deal with slash fans and pairings. Tumblr users coined the word "queerbaiting" in large part to more concretely discuss the way that shows like Sherlock and Once Upon a Time often entice their massive slash fanbases by teasing queer relationships on and off the show despite having no intention of making those queer relationships come to fruition. Yet queerbaiting doesn't quite explain the repeated full cycle of how these shows ultimately find themselves embroiled in tussles with a fandom that feels led on and betrayed by a show's initial dalliance with and ultimate retreat from slash fans.
Teen Wolf once seemed like slash fandom's best hope for a slash pairing to be integrated into the main storyline purely because the fandom loved it so much. Davis himself tweeted that it was a possibility, and welcomed overtures from the fandom like Cookies For Sterek, while MTV hosted a slash-friendly fanfic contest and named Sterek one of its nominees for Ship of the Year in its first annual Fandom Awards. But as the show kept going and pressure from the fandom to make Sterek happen grew greater, Stiles and Derek interacted less on the show, and members of the cast and crew began to speak out against Sterek and how not-gay Stiles and Derek are.
Last season, Derek got a female love interest; last month, fans were treated to an interview with actress Shelley Hennig where her recently introduced character Malia was discussed as a potential "mate for life" for Stiles. And earlier this month, Tyler Hoechlin, who plays Derek, tentatively dismissed the ship as irrelevant to anything happening on the show.
Inevitably, these developments have sent some fans heading for the hills. After the Hennig interview, Tumblr user raisesomehale comforted fellow broken-hearted Sterek fan with language that is, by now, universally familiar to anyone who's ever shipped Sterek, or Swanqueen, or Johnlock, or Destiel, or Merthur, or...
Oh honey no, please don’t cry! I know exactly how you feel, cheated, am I right? Invalidated and manipulated and maybe even a little humiliated for having our hopes be raised and praised so many times by a crew who - in reality, wanted to erase what we love the moment it got too “big” for them?
I understand. I do.
But do you know what makes everything so much better?
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
The image raisesomehale references above shows a sample blacklist and whitelist for the popular Tumblr extension XKit, which helps Tumblr users filter out unwanted content—in this case, anything related to Teen Wolf that's not also related to Sterek. It's a snarky representation of how polarized the Sterek fandom is by now to the Teen Wolf fandom in general.
How did it come to this?
Though it may sound extreme, what's happening in the Teen Wolf fandom at the moment is all-too-familiar. Inevitably, the bait-and-switch of TPTB that get in over their heads courting a slash fan following before abandoning it leads to the crushed hopes of many fans. And it's not just TV shows that fall into this game: Asian and European pop bands do it, too. From One Direction to J-pop bands, there's been many wink-wink-nod publicity stunts. The result is an advance-and-retreat that leads to frustration for both creators and the fans.
So, for the uninitiated, here's a step-by-step guide to the rise and inevitable fall of slash fandoms.
1) Introduce two characters (or bandmates) with especially compelling chemistry. Once you've realized that fans are really enjoying their character/bandmate interaction, film them interacting even more to generate interest.
At a glance, it's pretty easy to see why fans ship Swanqueen:
"I can see how people have come to appreciate the Destiel pairing because damn, those two characters have so much chemistry with one another." - Mark Oshiro, on Season 5, Ep 3 of Supernatural
"I like everything about Nino"— Satoshi Ohno, one half of the J-pop pairing Ohmiya from the popular, longrunning boy band ARASHI, from the May 2010 issue of Potato. Ohmiya is such a well-known boy band pairing in Japan that it's frequently singled out in photoshoots like this one from the July 2014 issue of TV Life magazine:
2) Recognizing that you're sitting on a goldmine of potential fans for this one pairing, court the fandom by both acknowledging the existence of the ship and embracing the fans who ship it.
Here's Jeff Davis, the showrunner of Teen Wolf, speaking to E-Online about Sterek's popularity in the summer of 2012:
There's always a lot of fun to be had with characters who seemingly despise each other and then have to work together to survive. In a funny way, that's how a lot of romantic comedies begin. The two leads always start out absolutely hating each other until they find their common ground.
The popular J-pop pairing Akame (Akanishi Jin and Kamenashi Kazuya) from the band KAT-TUN is rather infamous for the number of photoshoots they've done posed in bed together:
In general, Misha Collins has remained less condemning than the rest of the cast and crew of Supernatural of the idea of fans shipping his character, Castiel, with Jensen Ackles' character Dean Winchester:
There are too many examples of this on Supernatural to mention for both the Wincest and Destiel ships, but the show's attitude toward Wincest fans has been especially derisive. In one episode that was inexplicably nominated for a GLAAD award for positive representation, two characters who are Sam/Dean fanboys are revealed in the final episode to be Sam/Dean shippers who roleplay as the brothers in a mirror of their own real-life queer relationship. Though the show attempts to paint the fanboys as noble heroes, the actual brothers Winchester are, of course, grossed out by the fact that their characters are being shipped together.
This is only a smattering of the endless, wearying canonical references to the slash ship of John/Sherlock in the BBC show Sherlock, which despite being only nine episodes long packs more instances of queerbaiting per capita than any other show we follow:
With bands, this step is complicated, both because bandmates often interact with each other in ways that encourage the shipping, at least initially, and because fans—even without encouragement from deliberately staged photoshoots—read into everything anyway. Witness One Direction's Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, who in the early days of the band frequently commented on their own close friendship, and occasionally on their popularity as a ship:
3) Once you realize that fans have latched on to the ship as the primary reason they're watching the show or band, start to distance yourself from the pairing and issue denials.
Contrast Jeff Davis' upbeat attitude and tone toward Sterek shippers in 2012 to his drastically different attitude and tone just a year later:
[I]f you don’t feel it’s worth watching anymore all you have to do is stop... I know that there are a lot of fans out there who have their own ideas of where the story should go, but the truth is no show is written by the fans.
SPN shippers have fared little better. This was Jensen Ackles' controversial response last year to a fan's attempts to ask about Dean possibly being bisexual:
I'm gonna pretend like I don't know what the question was. — Jensen Ackles, NJ Con, 2013
The writers of Once Upon a Time have issued similar distancing statements about their show's major femslash pairing, Regina/Emma, better known as "Swanqueen." This happened most notably at last year's San Diego Comic-Con, where they swore the subtext was purely unintentional and seemed to dismiss it as a serious possibility based on the characters' respective backstories.
And then there was that time Louis Tomlinson, one half of the One Direction pairing "Larry Stylinson," called the millions of zealotous fans who believe he's in a relationship with bandmate Harry Styles "delusional." Because their belief affects his real life instead of just his character, he's certainly within his rights to clarify the reality of the situation, but his efforts backfired. The disbelieving fanbase refused to accept his declaration and decided that One Direction's much-loathed "Management" must have made the tweet to throw the fandom off the scent of Harry and Louis' epic love.
Desperate to quash the interest in the pairing, split up the two people in it, hoping that by giving them other romantic interests, the shipping enthusiasm will die down.
Larry Stylinson is unfortunately a familiar scenario within bandom. As shipping bandmates gets out of control, often bands will physically separate the two focal point band members to dissuade fans from shipping them. A frequent complaint within the One Direction fandom is that Harry and Louis, who used to be positioned next to each other in nearly every photo op, are hardly ever framed together anymore, either onstage or off. This is a tactic routinely used when shipping gets out of control in Asian boy bands.
TV producers often don't react much better. Supernatural, Once Upon a Time, and Teen Wolf have all followed similar tactics in their most recent seasons, with the two halves of each of their respective slash ships spending less and less time onscreen together.
Stargate: Atlantis enjoyed decent ratings and a stolidly middle-aged fanbase that had supported the franchise for over a decade. It also had a major cult following within slash fandom because of the popularity of the slash pairing of John Shepard and Rodney McKay, a.k.a. McShep. McShep fans helped give the series a longer life and solid DVD sales into its fifth season. But unexpectedly, the show was canceled, not because ratings were poor, but because producers wanted to "broaden" the franchise's "core fanbase."
In other words, since the fanbase was too middle-aged, too female, and too prone to writing slashfic, the whole show had to go. The fanbase was so upset at SGA's cancellation that Stargate: Universe, intended to be its younger, hotter sibling, crashed and burned in its first season. The franchise hasn't been back on the air since.
And Destiel and Sterek fans have seen the two halves of their OTP getting less and less screen time together in recent seasons as a result of their respective show's ambivalence about the pairings.
At this year's JibCon, Ackles spoke at length about how refreshing he found the lack of a Dean-and-Castiel storyline, solely because he felt the Destiel ship had "gotten a little out of proportion."
"They didn't have much of a friendship in Season 9," he said. It's all part of the pattern.
#AskSupernatural Do you keep Dean and Cas apart without it making any sense because you can't deal with their chemistry?
When this tactic of separation only seems to make the shippers in the fandom that much more united in opposition to the narrative, introduce a new, blindingly heteronormative romantic relationship for one or both members of the gay ship in question. Have the narrative insist that this new person is the real OTP of that person, the one true soulmate they were meant to be with.
Teen Wolf isn't the only show trying desperately to distract shippers with a new romantic "mate for life." Last month, Once Upon a Time's Lana Parilla, who plays the Queen (one half of Swanqueen) called new character Robin Hood her "soulmate," to the chagrin of loyal Swanqueen shippers, who have always gotten a tremendous amount of support from both Parilla and Jennifer Morrison, who plays Emma, the other half of the pairing. The show has spent much of the last season hammering home the idea that the two halves of Swanqueen each have found their true love in other, male characters.
Early in Season 9, SPN fans similarly balked at news that the angel Castiel was about to lose his virginity (sort of; it's complicated) with a random female love interest, a move that alarmed fans who saw the episode as a wasted opportunity for more queer representation. Now, in Season 10, we have spoilers indicating that Dean will have a new love interest on the show as well. (And no, it's not Cas.) While Dean has always been a ladies' man, he's spent recent seasons with other things on his mind. The timing is striking many fans as suspect, and related to the show's efforts to downplay Destiel:
#AskSupernatural why does Dean get a love interest NOW after so many seasons of celibacy? Are the heterosexual writers panicking bc destiel?
5) Watch the sizeable chunk of the fandom you once tried to court walk away in droves.
Last year, after the controversial Comic-Con dismissal of Swanqueen as a pairing, the podqueen fandom podcast on Tumblr decided to close up shop:
While the canon status of a ship is no barrier to shipping it, we mostly don’t feel comfortable promoting and supporting a show whose cast and actors can’t treat a f/f ship as just one of many options for the show - they hold up every interaction between m/f characters as canon intent of potential romance, but not the far richer material between Regina & Emma. [Showrunner Adam Horowitz] has shown on twitter that their idea of catering to the LGBTQ audience will (by implication) be no more than a token character at some nebulous point in the future. All these things in conjunction make it problematic to endorse the show any longer.
Once Upon a Time isn't the only show to lose viewers because of its refusal to give the slashers what they wanted. As it progressed from teasing the bromance to giving its main characters other romantic relationships, Hawaii Five O lost ratings from a record 20 million viewers in its first season and was ultimately moved to the Friday night death slot for its fourth and fifth seasons. Slash fandom was in all likelihood only a tiny part of the show's viewership, but losing all those fans after they walked away during Season 2 certainly didn't help.
Currently, Teen Wolf fandom is undergoing a similar mass walk-out. "I'm no longer watching the show and I'm not recommending it to anyone anymore," an anonymous ex-viewer wrote to Tumblr user sterekallaround near the end of Season 3, prompted by sterekallaround's own rant about the show's refusal to acknowledge Sterek as a serious pairing. "I can't support a show that queerbaits the mess out of people for ratings."
As for Supernatural, well...
#AskSupernatural Are you going to continue pushing Cas out of the bros' story until all of us Misha fans finally bail on the show?
Ultimately, not all of the steps in this ongoing pattern apply to every show with a popular queer pairing. Some shows with deliberate subtext, like Smallville,House, and Merlin, arguably ran with their respective queer subtexts until the very end, and benefited accordingly from strong slash fandoms throughout their life on air. In Merlin's case, the fandom has given the show a second life on Tumblr well after its final season. None of these shows engaged in the deliberate tease-and-repudiation of slash shipping that has come to be associated with claims of queerbaiting.
On the flip side, there are a host of emerging narratives that have given characters complex sexualities and courted fandoms in the process: Spartacus had a main queer pairing that felt very much informed by slash tropes, while the recent Penny Dreadful has won fandom acclaim in part because of its laidback approach to sexuality. Despite being two very different kinds of stories, Welcome to Night Vale and House of Cards both queered their main characters gradually, even relatively late into the narrative—in Night Vale's case, well after it had an established fandom.
Night Vale, so far, is the only series with a major fandom whose creators recognized the developing popularity of a slash pairing and then decided to make that pairing happen on the show. That it did so without much fanfare is perhaps a testament to its ability to function, as a podcast, independent of the rules of Hollywood, where gay characters are still controversial and often censored.
Once Upon a Time writer Jane Espenson, who created the popular gay web series Husbands, spoke at New York Comic Con in 2012 about the difficulty of getting studio approval to create queer characters on shows she's worked on in the past, namely Buffy. Until Hollywood is less inclined to censor queer relationships, fandom's eagerness to campaign for slash ships becoming canon seems likely to continue.
In the meantime, all we can do is hope that the next creators who find themselves with a hit slash ship on their hands take some time to learn from the mistakes of all those who came before them—and wound up alienating fans they initially wanted to embrace.
Never let it be said that fans don't have the work ethic of professionals. A team of more than 250 Sailor Moon fans have spent the last 10 months creating an epic animated love song to the beloved magical girl anime.
Moon Animate Make Up was formed last year on Tumblr with one goal: to re-create an entire episode of the original Sailor Moon using only fan-drawn animation. The project involves fans recreating Episode 38 of the show in one- to 10-second segments, each done in the artist's own personal animation style.
Part of the charm of the project is that it clearly accepted artists of all talent and experience ranges, from beginners to industry pros. "I animated it in the style of Bob’s Burgers since I am a trainee animator on that show!" wrote artist Ashley Armstrong about her segment of the project two months ago. The effect of seeing so many disparate styles joined together is a bit jarring, but it also serves as a fantastic overview of just how talented the artists of fandom are.
The project also underscores how beloved Sailor Moon is, both in its original form and in its much-hailed return this year as a reboot series.
The Moon Animate project also seems to be loosely affiliated with another Tumblr-based animation project based on the popular Officer and Mr. Truffles Tumblr fanart meme. That project has proven much more controversial so far; perhaps the success of this crowdsourced animation project will ease the minds of Tumblr fans.
In case the troupe decides to issue more fan animations, you can follow Moon Animate on Facebook or Tumblr.
WisCon is known as the oldest feminist science fiction and fantasy (SFF) convention in the world, but its handling of harassment incidents has sparked controversy in the sci-fi blogosphere.
Editor Jim Frenkel left his longtime position at Tor Books a year ago amid allegations he harassed 2013 WisCon attendee Elise Matthesen, who spoke out publicly about the incident. Matthesen and at least one other attendee filed reports to WisCon about Frenkel's alleged harassment. This year, after losing one of the women's complaints (and misplacing the other's after the fact), WisCon not only allowed Frenkel to return to the May convention over numerous protests but permitted him to volunteer at the con’s hospitality suite.
Despite otherwise glowing reports of this year's WisCon, a wave of public alarm over Frenkel’s return has grown among attendees. After the con, WisCon issued multipleapologies, then set up a formal investigation into the Frenkel's 2013 incident, as well as another involving a convention volunteer who allegedly engaged in nonsexual harassment of an attendee. On Friday, WisCon "provisionally" banned Frenkel from the con for the four years in a public statement:
WisCon will (provisionally) not allow Jim Frenkel to return for a period of four years (until after WisCon 42 in 2018). This is 'provisional' because if Jim Frenkel chooses to present substantive, grounded evidence of behavioral and attitude improvement between the end of WisCon 39 in 2015 and the end of the four-year provisional period, WisCon will entertain that evidence. We will also take into account any reports of continued problematic behavior.
In other words, though he’s banned for four years, if Frenkel exhibits good behavior, he could be back after a year, which isn’t much of a ban at all—at least if the WisCon community and SFF blogosphere’s reaction is any indication.
This approach seems to be unacceptable to the vast majority of WisCon-goers past, present, and potential who have commented in response. As Dreamwidth user Erik wrote:
"[W]hat is the point of quoting any particular length of time for his exclusion? It seems to boil down to "he's banned until he proves he can be a better person." Which is fine I guess, but a: leaves his victims (both those two whose reports you've been specifically considering and whomever else who may not have reported him for things he may have done) unsure from year to year whether he will be back, and b: "acting nice for a while until it blows over" is a well-known and well-documented tactic of serial abusers."
WisCon’s decision has sparked so much outrage that it’s now reportedly working on a new clarification to amend to its previous statement, to be posted some time Monday.
Meanwhile, Jacquelyn Gill, the chair of the Harassment Policy Committee, posted a lengthy explanation and clarification on her own Dreamwidth blog. However, critics of her explanation point out she evinced no consideration of the repeated claims of alleged harassment made against Frenkel by numerous women in the community (outlined below). Nor did Gill seem to have an understanding of the precedent for these kinds of situations at other SFF cons—most notably, ReaderCon, which saw its entire board resign in 2012 over backlash due to its mishandling of an established incident of harassment.
Gill’s response exacerbated the community’s agitation with the decision, spawning numerous reaction posts from around the Internet, and an especially critical response from members who feel that cons like WisCon should have learned from ReaderCon's mistakes. Most of all, many believe the response from the con should have been harsher.
Here’s the rundown of events that led to what may well be WisCon’s biggest crisis in recent memory.
The Early Years: "Everyone in the community knew"
The ‘90s – 2000s: Numerous anecdotal reports abound of Frenkel allegedly exhibiting inappropriate or unprofessional behavior towards women, dating back to the mid-’90s. (Editors' note: We have refrained from linking to some of these first-hand accounts at the request of the women involved.)
2002: Blogger Stephanie Zvan claims to have had a “creepy” conversation with Frenkel in which he inappropriately tried to discuss her sexual activities with her while they were both attending WorldCon.
2008: In an otherwise nostalgic look back at high-profile conventions he’s attended over the years, Frenkel, in the eyes of his critics, seems to dismiss a con roommate’s sexual harassment:
"Sharon, my roommate, left the convention on Saturday. She’d gone to the zoo across the street from the con hotel, the Chase Park Plaza...and at one point while she was walking around the zoo looking at the animals, some guy...well, a guy apparently placed a hand on her shapely bottom. This was extremely upsetting to her, so much so that she decided then and there that this trip had been a horrible mistake, and she had to leave—NOW. Which put me in a quandary, because I really couldn’t afford to pay for the room all by myself."
2009: Writer Mikki Kendall reports that the first time she met Frenkel at WisCon, he allegedly harassed her by “spen[ding] the whole time staring at & talking to my breasts.” On the blog site the Angry Black Woman, Kendall recounted the incident in further detail, complete with a photo of Frenkel interacting with her.
2010: Feminist sci-fi/fantasy author Jim Hines reports that numerous people made official complaints about harassment from Frenkel after a blog post he made compiling a list of anti-harassment resources within the SFF community.
2013: WisCon 37
May 2013: During WisCon 37, writer Lauren Jankowski, attending her first convention ever, claims she experienced “one of the worst experiences of harassment/bullying.” Writer Elise Matthesen also says she was harassed by the same perpetrator at WisCon 37.
Jankowski later describes her harassment experience as follows:
Does a man have to actually physically abuse a woman for WisCon to get its act together!? Frenkel tossed a book at me!
June 2013: Matthesen makes a public post about how to file a harassment claim, citing her own experience at WisCon 37 (the 2013 WisCon) by a Tor editor, crossposted to numerous blog sites as a guest post.
Writer Mary Robinette Kowal verifies that she fielded another complaint from another writer about the same editor, without naming his name.
Matthesen’s friend Sigrid Ellis reveals the alleged perpetrator to be Jim Frenkel. Numerous commenters on the blog post in question (hosted by John Scalzi) speak out to say they have been aware of “the Frenkel Problem” going back “decades.” K. Tempest Bradford comments on Twitter that Tor executives have long been aware of Frenkel’s harassment problems. “Everyone in the community knew about this guy,” writes Lyda Morehouse on her blog.
July 2013: Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden announces that Frenkel is no longer associated with Tor Books.
An unrelated harassment claim is made against another WisCon attendee, F.J. Bergmann, who allegedly harassed attendee Rose Lemberg during her book reading because of her Russian immigrant status. Lemberg’s account is corroborated by multiple attendees.
Summer 2013: A few months after her own experience of harassment at WisCon 37, Jankowski files a complaint against Frenkel with the WisCon safety team.
2014: WisCon 38
April 2014: WisCon reportedly intends for Frenkel to appear on multiple panels at WisCon 38. Concern about Frenkel’s attendance circulates on WisCom’s private Convention Commitee mailing list.
After hearing directly from Zvan, Matthesen, Kendall and others who are concerned about Frenkel being on programming, WisCon pulls his panel appearances but allows him to volunteer.
May 2014: At WisCon 38, Bergmann and Frenkel are both allowed to volunteer, Bergmann at the registration desk, Frenkel at the hospitality suite.
A large amount of alarm circulates the SFF blogosphere about Frenkel’s attendance:
So, Frenkel told me in person that by coming to WisCon he was asserting his innocence and nice guy status
WisCon issues a statement that it is aware of concerns about Frenkel’s attendance.
While attending WisCon 38, Jankowski learns that her complaint against Frenkel was misplaced. She is also told, in error, that Matthesen requested that Frenkel not be banned from the con. Jankowski claims WisCon staff told her this was why he was allowed to return. Matthesen contacts Jankowski and denies that she ever asked for Frenkel not to be banned.
June 2014: WisCon issued an additional statement about ongoing attempts to revise its harassment policies and safety standards. It mentions the creation of a member advocate position, a harassment policy subcommittee, a safety committee with a full-time chair, and a harassment policy committee. Later it adds two additional subcommittees specifically to investigate claims against two specific individuals, Frenkel and Bergmann.
Matthesen requests a copy of her original harassment report against Frenkel and is told WisCon has lost it, although WisCon later claims to have electronic copies of harassment reports from that year on.
Early July 2014: Harassment subcommittees are formed to deal with the harassment allegations against Frenkel and Bergmann separately.
July 18, 2014: WisCon announces its decision concerning Frenkel. The statement contains confusing wording that seems to indicate that although the ban is in effect for four years, if Frenkel “chooses to present substantive, grounded evidence of behavioral and attitude improvement,” he might be allowed back as early as 2016. Conversely, he might also be banned past the initial four-year period if his behavior does not show signs of improvement.
After WisCon’s announcement, numerous authors and organizations begin to speak out about the WisCon decision, including:
Literary magazine Crossed Genres, which states in a formal announcement that it will not be returning to WisCon.
Writer Genevieve Valentine, who engages in a lengthy Twitter discussion about the issue:
It's not the job of a convention to rehabilitate a serial harasser. It's their job to offer the greatest possible safety to attendees.
Kate Nepveu, a longtime WisCon attendee and creator of Con or Bust, which works to send underprivileged attendees to WisCon and other cons each year. Nepveu also volunteers on the Safety Committee that was created after an incident in 2012 that saw the entire ReaderCon board resign after the con’s initial failure to deal with a similar report of harassment.
I cannot, in good conscience, support Wiscon with my money and my presence after this. Nor do I think I could enjoy myself if I went. As far as I’m concerned, this is a con that sets a toxic, dangerous narrative of redemption above the safety of its attendees, that provides a serial harasser with more recourse in terms of a process of appeal than it provides the people he has harassed.
I am not here for that. I’m here for Elise Matthesen and Lauren Jankowski. That’s why, come next May, I won’t be there.
This is by no means the first controversy WisCon has endured in recent years over decisions that con attendees felt didn’t live up to their expectations of the convention as a radical feminist space. In 2010, WisCon came under fire for inviting writer Elizabeth Moon to be a guest of honor despite a blog post that Moon made which many felt to be Islamophobic in nature. (Comments, which Moon later deleted, can be seen here.) WisCon at first defended its decision, thenlater rescinded the invitation after a long period of public controversy.
Additionally, WisCon has received criticism for failing to encourage multiculturalism and contributions from diverse attendees:
@WisCon36 @ribbonknight I HAVE repeatedly submitted panel suggestions over the years. Some details in comments here: http://t.co/p94DFrOh
Among writers who stated that they would still be attending WisCon in the future was Kendall, who spoke cynically about her perspective that she’d never considered WisCon a “safe space” to begin with:
I have had it driven home over and over again that feminist space is not safe space. And yes, I’ve chosen to keep going anyway, while fighting all those battles to make WisCon a better space. Not safe…just better...
I don’t object so much to the possible presence of Frenkel at the hotel, as I do to WisCon not stating definitively that his behavior (which let us all be honest isn’t all that unusual at cons) is unacceptable. If a feminist sci-fi con has a problem stating that a pattern of persistent inappropriate behavior will not be tolerated, then aside from panel topics what makes it more feminist than any other?
Until WisCon formally clarifies its previous statement about the parameters of the ban, its community members will continue to be confused and frustrated. But if the ban proves to be just lip-service, then its very probable that the maelstrom of outrage over the con's decision has only just begun.
Correction: An earlier version of this article spelled misspelled Matthesen's name. We regret the error.
