(Of course the comments affected in these threads are perfectly banal attempts to discuss queer imagery, because it's always the queer community taking damage from this bullshit.)

One of the delights of this piece was getting to talk to two OG JAFF novelists, Reynolds and Pamela Aidan, that I first read on the Republic of Pemberley and the Derbyshire Writers Guild back in 1998. It was such a throwback. And they're both still publishing JAFF novels regularly for loyal readers.

i am right there with you haha. thank you! i'm so happy you enjoyed it!

For Fansplaining I wrote about Jane Austen fic, aka JAFF, and how a moderating decision 30 years ago set the tone for an entire fan culture of genre-shaming and gatekeeping around content. Also don't forget Fansplaining is currently having a six-month sale with 50% off! Subscribe, read, and share!

(okay just one more note: of all post-war horror genres the pure slasher is probably the genre that sticks closest to the "defeat the monster to restore the status quo" briefing, but it's also arguably the one where we find the most subversion of its own established status-quo-enforcing tropes.)

sorry to babble but this is one of my favorite topics haha. i could go on about horror and fear of the other but i'm sure you get it.

...embrace villainy and monstrosity. (be gay do crimes!) and often depictions of villainy and monstrosity are inherently queer-coded. and there are feminist and queer readings of many superficially misogynistic and queerphobic texts. the subtext of horror is often more important than the surface.

—classic "torch-bearing peasant" works of horror undercut their own narratives by holding a great deal of sympathy for the monster. this is also why horror is such a huge part of queer culture, because queerness has historically been villainized so often that queer people have learned to...

so obviously most classic Universal Monsters-esque horror is like this, yes, but beyond that surface it gets very complicated. nearly all modern horror fans recognize these themes as problematic othering, but also revealing these subconscious fears helps us overcome them; plus many—

you should be able to! I believe this should give you a discounted rate for the next six months after your current subscription ends, at whichever level you choose. 🙏

It's spooky season so i'm bringing back this post from when I ordered one vintage sepia-toned tarot deck, the author dead-ass slipped a bunch of FREAKY PUMPKIN HEADS into my deck, and i was so creeped out i bought a completely different vintage sepia-toned tarot deck in order to exorcise the first 😭

i don't think people are objecting so much to his doing different things with adaptations—that's one of his strengths to me. It's that horror is all about embracing otherness, deviance, and societal subversion by embracing monstrosity, so a director saying "how can we love a monster" misses the mark

(I also think this is why he sticks so closely to adapting Stephen King, because King has actually mastered the art of doing dysfunctional loving family sagas that *are* also pure horror, and MF gets to amplify the lightness of those stories without losing too much darkness.)

(Every time I have made this argument in the past, I have been eviscerated for it, and also been personally roasted by Mike Flanagan in a Mike Flanagan project, lol, but I believe it continues to be true.)

My very longstanding opinion of MF is that he is not actually writing horror but rather using the aesthetics of horror for what he would rather write instead, which is dysfunctional but loving epic literary family sagas. This impulse always undermines his darkest projects bc he's *not doing horror.*