As you all may have heard, Google plans to shut down Google Plus in April of this year, forcing its users to migrate to places like MeWe and other social media platforms. However, PulpRev-affiliated people had pleanty of good discussions on Google Plus, and I would hate to see them be lost to the ether.
Thus, I have archived a few of those discussions, and linked them below.
First is Jeffro Johnson’s scathing episode-by-episode critique of the Netflix series Iron Fist:
Jeffro also writes a defense of my novella Sword & Flower after a Superversive blogger critiques it harshly. (I’m cool with both of them, so don’t worry about it.)
Next is Misha Burnett on modern romance. Further commentary by him on the rejection of romance in modern media can be found here.
Also, an addendum from Misha, taken from a recent MeWe thread:
I have a theory about this that I posted on G+ once, but now I can’t find it to link it here.
I think that both men and women tend to respond to the trope of a man overcoming hardship as part of the courtship of a woman. It’s an old trope–men want a woman who is worth killing dragons for, and women want a man who will slay a dragon for her.
The problem comes when the objection is raised that it’s sexist for a man to be the dragon killer and the woman to be beneficiary of the dracocide.
Because if you have a woman who is better at killing dragons than the man, but the audience wants the romantic angle of the man fighting his way through adversity to win the woman, how do you have both?
You do it by making the woman herself the adversity to be overcome. Basically, the man proves himself worthy of the woman by putting up with her emotional (and sometimes physical) abuse.
The princess is,herself, the dragon. And you can’t have the man actually defeat the princess/dragon (as Petruchio tames Katherina) because that would be misogynist. Instead, the man simply endures an arbitrary amount of abuse until such time as the woman falls in love with him, overcome by his masculine masochism and spinelessness.
Good work. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like that comments get archived because there were some good discussions there.
“You know, I’ve taken a hard look at your literary movement and I’ve come to the conclusion that its only real problem is that it is not my literary movement. Other than that… well, I was going to say it’s pretty good. But actually it just sucks, y’all. Time to throw in the towel. Seriously.”
I kind of miss the Superversive Vs. PulpRev arguments. I’m still not convinced there’s much different between the two.
Yeah, it’s a shame about the comments. They were pretty good.
I don’t think there is much different either…more a matter of genre vs. theme or something along those lines. 🙂