Look, I Know We’re All Tickled That The Gävle Goat Has Been Pecked Apart By Birds, But As Far As Omens

By Donna White 

From Mammals of Britain & Europe, illustrated by Richard Orr.

Fungi collected on a fall weekend of mushroom walks led by John Michelotti of Catskill Fungi

Nick Night

Hereafter by Grady Frederick

by NataliaDrepina 

We did it boys. We did it.

There is no easy way out of learning to be literate when it comes to fiction.

You cannot say "An author is never what they write".

You cannot say "An author is always what they write".

Authors who are completely normal people with healthy understandings of every dark topic in our work can write extremely fucked up shit about topics including bigotry, rape, you name it. If you think writing about those topics at all is "glorifying" it, then you will falsely believe those authors are horrible people.

But horrible people can actually be authors - and sometimes they hide their horribleness in ways you can't recognize. Sometimes they don't - sometimes they are just fully and openly bigoted.

But if you can't tell the difference between "A story that has fucked up shit in it because those things fit the mood, motifs, message, or genre" vs "A story with fucked up shit in it because the author thinks those things are morally good", you are going to fucking struggle in life and you will in fact be very susceptible to bigoted propaganda.

And no, I won't sit here and say it's always easy to tell the difference. But with practice, you can in fact tell the difference between a story where the author is writing about the main character being ravaged and raped in a sexy way because it's a safe way to explore that fantasy, VS, an author who clearly just thinks women should be raped and subjugated because that's their actual worldview.

That can involve examining the individual piece of media, other things that author has written, who the author is, etc.