Author: JennyTrout

In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone has still not learned her lesson about buying Cheez-Its to keep in her office. She will also recap every episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer with an eye to the following themes:

1. Sex is the real villain of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe.
2. Giles is totally in love with Buffy.
3. Joyce is a fucking terrible parent.
4. Willow’s magic is utterly useless (this one won’t be an issue until season 2, when she gets a chance to become a witch)
5. Xander is a textbook Nice Guy.
6. The show isn’t as feminist as people claim.
7. All the monsters look like wieners.
8. If ambivalence to possible danger were an Olympic sport, Team Sunnydale would take the gold.
9. Angel is a dick.
10. Harmony is the strongest female character on the show.
11. Team sports are portrayed in an extremely negative light.
12. Some of this shit is racist as fuck.
13. Science and technology are not to be trusted.
14. Mental illness is stigmatized.
15. Only Willow can use a computer.
16. Buffy’s strength is flexible at the plot’s convenience.
17. Cheap laughs and desperate grabs at plot plausibility are made through Xenophobia.
18. Oz is the Anti-Xander
19. Spike is capable of love despite his lack of soul
20. Don’t freaking tell me the vampires don’t need to breathe because they’re constantly out of frickin’ breath.
21. The foreshadowing on this show is freaking amazing.
22. Smoking is evil.
23. Despite praise for its positive portrayal of non-straight sexualities, some of this shit is homophobic as fuck.
24. How do these kids know all these outdated references, anyway?
25. Technology is used inconsistently as per its convenience in the script.
26. Sunnydale residents are no longer shocked by supernatural attacks.
27. Casual rape dismissal/victim blaming a-go-go
28. Snyder believes Buffy is a demon or other evil entity.

Have I missed any that were added in past recaps? Let me know in the comments.  Even though I might forget that you mentioned it.

WARNING: Some people have mentioned they’re watching along with me, and that’s awesome, but I’ve seen the entire series already and I’ll probably mention things that happen in later seasons. So… you know, take that under consideration, if you’re a person who can’t enjoy something if you know future details about it. 

CW: RAPE, SUICIDE

Keeping up with my free Wattpad horror serial, The Afflicted? Chapter eighteen is available for your reading pleasure. Or displeasure. Or ambivalence, really. It’s free, so I got nothing to lose.

Hey everybody! Occasionally, I’ll let another author jump in and take over the blog, and today it’s Cecilia London, one of my very favorite Twitter people! She’s here to talk about her books, Dissident and Conscience, why she feels they would appeal to Trout Nation (she’s not wrong), a hot guy to google, and how poisoned turkey influences her writing process.

So now I’m going to turn it over to Cecelia!

---

 

First off, thanks to Jenny for having me. I’m hoping that maybe some of you have heard my name before…if not, then read on, because I’ve got some hot sex, angsty drama, not-so-unrealistic dystopias, witty dialogue, well-developed side characters, a sexy but sensitive alpha hero, and a smartass heroine to share with you.

Welcome, welcome, one and all, back to the nightmare tragedy that is this book.

Before we get started, I’ve got a link to share, courtesy of someone on Twitter who I’m so so sorry, I can’t remember your name. If you sent this to me, feel free to speak up in the comments and be like, “I SENT YOU THAT, YOU UNFEELING BITCH!”

In her article “Women, Know Your Place!”, writer Tracy Kuhn posits that criticism of E.L. James comes not from a place of rational thinking, but unbridled misogyny for misogyny’s sake:

Her books have turned everyone into a literary critic. Her readers (predominantly female) are called stupid or desperate. Her writing is picked apart, sentence by sentence. She’s torn apart on social media. It’s not bullying of course, it’s for our own good and it doesn’t count in this case because hey, most of us doing the attacking are women who are defending other women, so you can’t touch us. To do so would be to condone abuse, you animal!

Meanwhile we carry on going to see films and read books and watch television programmes that subliminally give out really damaging messages about women and use rape scenes again and again to move a plot forward, but again, who cares about those?

I’m sharing this article, this passage in particular, because it highlights a new resistance I’m seeing to criticism of media created and consumed by women. I’ve had a few vocal objectors on Twitter come to me with this very argument: how can you criticize Fifty Shades if you’re not criticizing everything else? Or if you’re consuming media that’s problematic in the first place? I find this attitude fairly comical; it’s like saying that you can’t know if you dislike broccoli until you’ve eaten every piece of broccoli ever grown. Or, you can’t say you dislike broccoli if you’re eating something that has broccoli in it, even if you pick it out and push it to the side.

All media is problematic and rife with anti-feminist messages, because all life is problematic and rife with anti-feminist messages. To suggest that E.L. James is being unfairly attacked simply because she wrote something women enjoy, and that her critics have no place in shaming her unless they somehow consume and dissect all media while at the same time shunning all media, leaves us with a catch-22 in which all criticism is effectively silenced in the name of haphazardly defined feminism.

This isn’t a new approach to silencing critics, and it came as no surprise to me that the last lines of the article read:

Have a look at yourselves before you make that next witty comment. And be nicer to each other.

Feminism Tip: your argument is fairly destroyed when you call upon other women to Be Nice, as the very concept of Be Nice is an ages old silencing technique brandished almost solely against women.

With that out of the way, onto the recap!