Just when I’d stopped expecting any depth from The Mary Sue… This.

Originally shared by The Mary Sue

On why the story of a robot overcoming society’s programming feels so compelling — and some ideas for how we could make our robot stories even better.

Originally shared by Mary Robinette Kowal

There are some things you need to understand about yourself and about how community works, before you approach a reader and truly, before you even start the project in which you plan to represent a marginalized community. It’s good, and important, to want…

Via Rita de Heer, a powerful piece about a man’s experience of becoming aware of others’ emotions for the first time when in his 40s.

Originally shared by John Sanders (Sandwolf)

I don’t proclaim to have Autism or Asperger to any level, but I have often wondered about many of the points discussed in the article.  Which help me be a good story tell and which prevent me from telling my stories.

Via Daniel Swensen, who got it from Lisa Cohen.

Pop culture seems to have got halfway away from the Damsel In Distress trope, making female characters competent – but not competent enough to save themselves. That’s still the man’s job, even though he’s less competent than they are.

I (and Daniel and Lisa) deliberately set out to subvert this, by making competent women protagonists who save themselves – and, sometimes, the men – and defeat the villains.

Originally shared by Susan Stone

Saladin Ahmed talks about what it’s like to grow up reading – and loving – a literature that at the same time excludes or villainizes people like you; and then to begin writing your own version of that literature with a different voice, and telling stories that have not been told.

(1 hour 11 minutes; includes readings and Q&A)

Interesting, and it ties into our discussions about “noblebright” stories, C. J. Brightley.

Originally shared by The Mary Sue

Captain America not only navigates masculinity, but he completely subverts and ultimately rejects our contemporary conceptions of what it means to be a man, thereby creating a new kind of masculinity that demands self-inquiry, emotional empathy, and innate goodness.

Via Lisa Cohen. Yes, the data backs up the common complaints: men get more lines than women in most films (even in some films where a woman is the main character), and older women don’t get as many roles.

Originally shared by Abigail Markov

For the lovers of data:

“Lately, Hollywood has been taking so much shit for rampant sexism and racism. The prevailing theme: white men dominate movie roles.

But it’s all rhetoric and no data, which gets us nowhere in terms of having an informed discussion. How many movies are actually about men? What changes by genre, era, or box-office revenue? What circumstances generate more diversity?

To begin answering these questions, we Googled our way to 8,000 screenplays and matched each character’s lines to an actor. From there, we compiled the number of lines for male and female characters across roughly 2,000 films, arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever.”

http://polygraph.cool/films/

Representation -> Identification -> Expectation of Consequences -> Self-efficacy.