Beyond Selidor

Welcome to what I hope will become a regular feature here: weekly posts of links to wonderful things. There are no criteria for inclusion: the links will just be things that have caught my eye in any given week, but I'm trying to focus on positive and/or thought-provoking material from a diverse range of perspectives. This is all part of my goal of collaborative and community-building writing for this year.

It was a great week for SFF podcasts. I particularly enjoyed Amal El-Mohtar and Natalie Luhrs on Rocket Talk with Justin Landon, talking about all things blogging and reviewing.

Fangirl Happy Hour is a new project by Ana of The Book Smugglers and Renay of Ladybusiness. Their second podcast is on sex and romance in science fiction, nominations for the Hugo Awards and The Very Best of Kate Elliott (which has rocketed to the top of my wishlist).

Renay also wrote a fabulous, heartfelt post about being betrayed by stories that the rest of your community has universally praised. Read the comments too.

A. Merc Rustad's short story 'How To Become A Robot In 12 Easy Steps' is something I didn't realise I'd been wanting until now. Almost anything I could say here will be a spoiler, but I feel I should provide a content warning for depictions of depression.

Amal El-Mohtar's short story 'The Truth About Owls' hurt my heart in the best possible way.

No Award is not a new blog, but it is new to me, and is a breath of fresh air. I'm often frustrated by the US-centrism of the online conversation on media and social justice, so I'm thrilled to find a blog by a pair of Australians tackling these issues from an Australian perspective.

Finally, I really appreciated Foz Meadows' epic blog post on Teen Wolf. I don't agree with all her conclusions, but I am particularly happy about her comments on Scott McCall, whose gentleness, kindness and adoration of powerful women goes against all the usual stereotypes about boys raised by single mothers.

I hope you all have fabulous weekends. Since Eurovision is officially upon us, why not generate your own Eurovision song title?

This is a mirror of a post on my Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.

Further to my Buffy post, I was wondering about something I noticed in a recent fanfic search. This wasn't even strictly a Buffy phenomenon, since I encountered the same thing on a link journey started by Teen Wolf/Supernatural fic rec by thelxiepia.

I do not get the appeal of 'all human' AUs based on supernatural canons.

I mean, I am obsessed with stories of non-human characters interacting with humans. Vampires, angels, demons, gods, cyborgs, even zombies if done well. The only one that usually doesn't appeal is werewolves, and I've made an exception there for Teen Wolf because it's just so cute. The point is, I like the stories that arise when non-human beings have some kind of relationship with humans. I don't even exclusively mean the My Supernatural Boyfriend subgenre, although that can be fantastic. I just love the kinds of questions these character interactions open up: explorations of what it means to be human, whether human emotions and thought patterns are an exclusively human phenomenon, whether love (not just in the romantic sense) between a human and a non-human brings the non-human closer to humanity or makes the human monstrous, whether human morality is exclusively a product of human mortality. Etc. And it just seems to me that all-human AUs take all these things away.

So, my question, born of genuine curiosity rather than exasperation, is why? What are people wanting to explore when they write or read these AUs?