thebettertoloveyouwith:

I find it quite jarring when I see posts on here to the effect of ‘stop hating on the writers, if you have a problem stop watching the show’ for…well, too many reasons to count really, but mostly because that’s basically the worst thing you can possibly say about problematic writing.

To cut a long and boring story short, I studied Creative Writing both at Master’s and Bachelor level at university, so a lot of my irl friends are writers. In our first week of classes, we were told to rewrite famous poems and then edit each other’s work as an ice breaker. We were all so worried about insulting potential new friends that those classes spawned some of the most awful poems I’ve ever heard. The most important lesson that any of us took from the first year of lessons was how important criticism is to the creative process. Over the years we stopped giving a shit about hurting each other’s feelings and scribbled notes all over each other’s work, moving one sentence here and changing this word to that word etc.

The fact of the matter is that we all like to think we’re the next Edgar Allan Poe or J.K. Rowling and our writing is incredibly profound but all it takes is one person to point out a logical fallacy or spelling mistake to reveal just how much work we have left to do. Nobody’s perfect and almost everything can be improved. That’s why critique is important.

We seem to have developed this misconception on tumblr that critiquing something is the same as expressing hatred, when it’s really, really not. It’s a privilege to have a pretty well financed show in a decent time slot. It’s a privilege to have an audience. A decent artist/writer will work damn hard to keep both. Audiences are not under the same kind of volition to keep watching as the writers are to keep them entertained. A viewer can switch off at any point for any reason and it’s incredibly useful to have an insight as to why that’s happening.

Tl;dr, I would rather have 10 people come up to me and say they disliked my writing  because of x, y and z than 100 say they loved it out of concern that they might hurt my feelings. I feel insulted on behalf of screenwriters everywhere that people assume the same is not true of them.

Critique is respectful but honest and more likely to gain attention. Hate has its origins in honesty but loses any chance at getting attention when it throws aside its respect. Saying to somebody that you don’t value their critique and you would rather they stopped watching your show is the same as digging it an early grave, since fewer viewers means the show is less likely to be picked up for later seasons. 

There is nothing wrong with expressing disappointment, irritation or any other negative emotion about how your favourite shows are written. Likewise, there is nothing wrong with expressing it to the writers, so long as you do it respectfully and aren’t an ass about it. If it’s not broken, then they won’t need to fix it. Likewise, if they don’t bother to fix a serious problem and things take a turn for the worse then it’s their own fault for taking their audience for granted.

Even more importantly, the attitude that we should silence any opinion we don’t agree with or remove it forever is, frankly, terrifying for the 21^st century and not something we should be encouraging.

fuckyeahlesbianliterature:

mousesinger:

fuckyeahlesbianliterature:

[snip]

my objection to a lot of lesbian fiction is how it’s all the SAME. Either it’s a coming out story or it totally revolves around tropes connected to the gay community. It’s really easy to feel like you’ve read them all after you have read two or three. I’d like to see more lesbian romance center less around the gay bar and the women’s community center and spoken word poetry nights, and more that borrows from the standard straight romance tropes (forbidden love, thrillers, erotic suspense, etc). It’s all so BLAND. And I’d also like to see more stories that focus on two women but less on gay culture, because gay culture changes and not everyone can identify with it. And I’d love to see good fantasy/science fiction and mystery fiction that has lesbian central characters.

See, this is what I mean, though: if you pick up a handful of book in a genre, you may feel like all of the same, but it may just be a coincidence. For example, my partner just said to me yesterday “Why do they always disfigure the butch one in lesbian books?” because they just read two books in a row where the more masculine woman has a large scar on their face. Personally, I’ve never encountered that in a lesbian book. I also would honestly love to read a lesbian book that focuses on “the women’s community center and spoken word poetry nights”, because I’ve never read one like that, either! But standard romance tropes?

Bella Books has a whole Suspense category, and Bold Strokes has a Intrigue/Thriller section. Here’s a Goodreads list I made of Lesbian Sci Fi. Andi Marquette and Nicola Griffith are very popular authors in that genre. Here’s a Goodreads list of Lesbian Mysteries. Katherine V. Forrest is a really popular author in that genre, as well as Val Mcdermid, Ellen Hart, and Stella Duffy. In fact, there are TONS of lesbian mysteries. It was the genre that really accepted lesbian protagonists first. Check out the Wikipedia page for more. I haven’t read a lot of them myself, but you should be able to gauge by the Goodreads reviews whether one will appeal to you.