Thayet is incredibly feminine and beautiful, and still strong and independent. She becomes the queen for goodness sakes.

Yeah, I was cross because um there are lots of strong female characters (including as the baddies!) across her many books, and while many of the main protagonists are perhaps a little in this trope, not all are (and Kel, from the Protector of the Small series, actively struggles with this, because although she’s…

It’s also frustrating that the author of this article didn’t do a full look at the Alanna series. There are so many other characters in the book besides Alanna. Thayet is incredibly feminine and beautiful, and still strong and independent. She becomes the queen for goodness sakes. 

I think it’s more of a “girl does boy things = good” sort of criticism. But that’s ignoring the rest of Tamora Pierce’s work, which at a cursory search, seems to work at inclusivity (feel free to disagree with me, I’ve really only deeply read the one series).

Yeah there definitely are, but it was nice to have when I was young. I still love the magic that took a color depending on who cast it!

Same here, I looooved those! Which is why I’m unreasonably angry that the author brought the series up as an example of a problematic princess trope without any explanation!

I had a really hard time discerning the ~point~ of this article. The title suggest that Improper Princesses are a problem, the conclusion just talks about how Beauty is different from the rest of them (which I don’t entirely agree with, having read a lot of IP books in my day). Is it just a literary critique and…

ME TOO. My friend and I bought the series together and read it to. pieces. Looking back, there are some...cringy bits...but overall I think it was refreshing to have a series like that to read in the early 1990s.

Respectfully, I think this essay might be stronger if, instead of trying to contrast the McKinley book, you tried to compare how each work tries to tell a feminist tale, and whether or not each does or does not fall short on the merits, or is Of Its Time. Because while I don’t know McKinley’s book, I do know there’s…

Then in 1980, there was Tamora Pierce’s Alanna: The First Adventure about a girl who disguises herself as a boy and takes her brother’s place in knight school.

I know this will sound strange, but until a friend of mine shared Allie Brosch’s strip about her own depression and the hell you go through trying to get loved ones to understand, I can’t say that I fully grasped the concept of my friend’s day to day existence with depression. I’m ashamed to say that it took me so…

It's a tough pig to fuck. It's very hard to explain depression to someone who hasn't experienced it. Also, I'm too proud to ever ask for help, but come on people, I'm literally beating you over the head with how not okay i am, can't anyone take the hint?!

One of the things that hit me really hard with this episode was the dinner table seen when her aunt says “You can tell me if something is wrong, you know that right?” (or something similar) and Ashley says “I have been telling you something is wrong, over and over again.”

Yara doesn’t make the same demand as Sansa because, unlike Sansa who has an army outside the city gates and a brother who can give the thumbs up, she has absolutely no leverage. Yara made her bargain for independence with Dany, the bloodthirsty tyrant they’ve just liberated themselves from.

HBO was willing to pony up all the money the show needed to made right. The network wanted to finance full length seasons. It was Weiss and Benioff who’d come down with a massive case of senioritis and decided to phone it in so that they could move on to other projects like Confederacy and Star Wars. I thought this…

I wasn’t mad at the finale. Just disappointed and confused. They rushed through things so fast, it was like “wait. What?” A lot of things seemed odd. In a hyper masculine and militaristic culture that values physical strength, Bran, the teenage cripple, who talks in riddles and spends his days by a tree living in the…

Yeah, I’m definitely not saying the signs weren’t there. And taking Jeorah and Missandei out definitely contributed, but it’s still a stretch to get from there to mass civilian toasting. I will say #DemThrones has been incredibly entertaining tonight though, so there is that.

I just check out #DemThrones to gauge the reaction. It’s much more fun and upbeat than book readers/super fans judging every tiny detail

Nice to see Zack Snyder had some input for this season

I wonder. After a while, I started to think she’s really “breaking the wheel” like she said she wanted to. Burn King’s Landing to ash & start over. Or maybe abdicate & there just ARE no more kings/queens. Otherwise, I’m struggling with making sense of the unnecessary destruction. I mean, long after it was clear the…