Now I could be real fancy and do the same thing I did for the villains, using all kinds of nuanced criteria, calculated factors, and science theory. But fuck it, I’m just going with my heart. After all, that’s what the princesses did, right? From bottom to top: Princess Aurora She only has seventeen minutes of screen time. And she spends that either in a trance or dancing with owls and other vermin. Maybe that’s why Maleficent gets all the reviews, because it’s so easy to overshadow the protagonist. Pocahontas If it wasn’t for Aurora being such a piece of cardboard, she would get the award for worst. She’s preachy,…
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The Best Books I Read in 2016
The Only Pirate at the Party by Lindsey Stirling & Brooke S. Passey (original review) It’s funny. It’s light-hearted. It’s not too long. It’s poignant. It’s like Felicia Day’s book. And it’s full of her voice both tragic and comic. Grim at times, cheery at most. This is not the Kim Kardashian, Tina Fey, or even the Mindy Kaling. This isn’t the girl who made it (not yet, at least). This is the girl still hacking at that creativity mountain with a pick-axe. Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner (original review) A fascinating slice of nostalgia for anyone who played…
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The Books I Read: November – December 2016
Rejected Princesses: Tales of History’s Boldest Heroines, Hellions, and Heretics by David Porath I fell in love with this book immediately, which has never happened to me before. I am not an early adopter, and it’s the onus of every book to entice me. Of course, by the time I know that, I’m usually victim to time sink fallacy. But look at this cover. It looks like all the books in the old Disney movies. You know, like in Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty where a live-action book opens at the beginning and closes at “the end”. Now I have a book like that. I can look like I’m reading an…
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Reprise: A Disney Princess Adventure
So today is the premiere of what I was working on writing-wise for the past year/year-and-a-half. Behold! Reprise by Eric J. Juneau A Frozen/Tangled/The Little Mermaid crossover Three princesses. Three curses. One adventure. Rapunzel’s magic hair spontaneously grows back, Ariel regains her mermaid tail, and winter returns to Arendelle. One year after their most meaningful trials and triumphs, something has taken away what they worked so hard to gain. As they leave the safety of their own kingdoms, fate is about to drive these strangers together across oceans, over mountains, into the depths of the sea, and even through the river of time itself. But will their differences stop them…
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Princess Peach in Punch-Out? Preposterous!
I just saw on Punch-Out!! – Did You Know Gaming? (relevant section) that Princess Peach was planned to be in Wii Punch-Out. That fired all kinds of neurons in my brain, since it’s been thinking about women and stories and video games. It can’t be denied that there are a lot of video games out there that are unkind towards women. There are lots of games with good women too — well-rounded characters that exist beyond a simple goal to be obtained. Princess Peach is not one of them. She has a presence in nearly every Mario game, but when she’s not a simple option for Mario Kart or placeholder,…
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Cinderella’s Ending is Bullshit
Am I the only one who realizes that the ending to Cinderella is bullshit? I’m talking about the Disney movie. There’s no way that shit would hold up in any court. You know what happens? Cinderella is the last person in the kingdom. Lady Tremaine trips the bumbling assistant. He stumbles and the glass slipper goes crashing into a million, billion pieces. That should be the end of the story. We can’t try the slipper on anyone else. But then Cinderella says everything’s all right. “You see, I have the other one.” And they put it on her and it fits and happily ever after. How do they know she…
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Update
Do you know what I’m writing now? Outlines. You know what for? Fan fiction. Know what it’s about? Disney princesses. You know why? I don’t. It just seems to be where my brain wants to go right now. And I’m going to let it, because the short stories have been a disaster lately, and I have nothing to right. When I look at my list of potential story ideas, I just see a bunch of dead ends. Cool concepts, but nothing really fleshed out. Nothing that says “This is something that could appear in Clarkesworld or Asimov’s”. It’s just goofy shit that’s not fun to write. I don’t even feel…
