dear the internet

Imagine that, for a variety of reasons, you are planning to continue to watch a show whose misogyny and isms make you sad and angry.

Now imagine that you can have a palate cleanser after every episode - anything in the world! (Except for Legend of Korra because it still isn't here whyyyyyy.) Old stuff, new stuff, movies, anime, live-action tv, specific episodes of a thing, anything at all. What would you watch to give yourself joy again?

(Sadly women-kicking-ass vids don't work, because when I'm feeling sad and angry at narrative misogyny they often feel like a lie: I watch them thinking not about the characters' moments of awesome, of which there are many, but about the characters' final fates on their shows or their reception in fandom or their creators' dismissal of them or whatever. This is the problem with watching "I'm Your Man" when sad, too.)

drive by vid rec

Guys guys I just watched bironic's Star Trek DS9 vid Born Too Late, which she made for kink_bingo for the prompt historical roleplay, and it is amazing. I clapped and cheered and went "aww" and enjoyed all the ways that Star Trek enjoys its historical roleplay: the way they power-walk in period dress, and the sadness that comes from playing those roles and then having to leave them, and the joy in recreating moments of the past, and the joy that comes from touching the past, and the things the crew learns from it, and the amazing sexiness that is Benjamin Sisko singing. *hugs vid*

top one hundred speculative fiction works: short list for editing

Using the general principle I mentioned in the long list poll, I've combined some works into single line items on this list - wherever a book and the series containing it both made the cut, I picked the version that included more works (e.g. The Hainish Cycle rather than Four Ways to Forgiveness and The Dispossessed as two separate items), and whenever there were two works where one was based on the other and they contained the same characters I combined those (e.g. Firefly and Serenity, The Never-Ending Story book and film). If you see instances where I combined things and shouldn't have, or didn't combine things and should have, please let me know in comments. Ditto if you see any typoes, misattributed works, etc. They'll be turned into a ranked-choice poll in a bit.

( Here's the short list as it stands now )

I don't know everything on this list, obviously, but just glancing at it here are some impressions I got:

1) There seem to be a lot more things created by women on this short list than the NPR one, probably partly because of the inclusion of YA and children's lit and partly because of the segment of fandom nominating/taking the poll.

2) There are some more creators of color than on the NPR short list, partly due to the fact that there's some anime and manga on the list, and partly due to the fact that hello, Samuel Delany totally belongs here.

3) There's a lot of what's often dismissed as "low culture" - like, looking at the movies, there are a lot of "classics" (Blade Runner, Alien, etc) but there are also things like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Labyrinth and Spaceballs.