Musings: What’s Love Got to Do With It

(Sorry about the title, I couldn’t resist.)

Every so often, there pops up on Twitter this one (really annoying) discourse, summed up as “where are all the good f/f books”. Firstly, good is incredibly subjective, but we’re not going to go into that here. What I’m going to talk about actually is emotion socialisation and gender.

“Right,” you say, “but what’s that got to do with this?”

What it has to do is this: a lot of what’s called “good” here revolves around the emotions it evokes. That is, the same tropes show up in m/f, m/m and f/f, and yet f/f is the only one where people ask “where’s the good stuff”. My argument here is that at least some part of this can be attributed to how a book evokes emotions. Particularly, how the emotions it is acceptable in society for men or women to feel translate into relationships.

As ever, I’m not gonna act like I have the answers. This is, instead, some theorising for you to think about.

Musings: Why Do People Read What They Read

Also known as, can I use psychology in an attempt to explain why people don’t read f/f books?

If you follow me on twitter, you will know I have very very little patience for “where is all the f/f” tweets that crop up about once a month. Because it’s there if you look, it’s not like there’s this gaping great hole of no f/f. So the question isn’t so much where are the books as why don’t people read the books. And sure, for some people, the answer is simply laziness. And for others, it’s bigotry (however much they dress it up with but I read m/m books).

But I got bored, so this idea was born. I’m not going to pretend like this post has the answers (it’s psychology, there’s no such thing). I’m not going to pretend like I know if it’s even right. But hey, maybe it’ll make you think a bit.

P.S. I’m using f/f as the example here because that’s the one I know best. But, hopefully, everything that I write in this blog post might also be used to answer the question why don’t people read [insert other descriptor here] books.

Musings: The Role of Language in Worldbuilding

One of my half-year blogging resolutions was to have more on this blog besides reviews, TBRs and wrap-up posts, so that means coming up with things to talk about. We’re starting off with an easy one: the role of language in worldbuilding, or for crying out loud, will you please spare a thought for linguistics.

If you follow me on twitter, you will know I love books which centre language, and books which consider language in their worldbuilding (of which, there are few and far between). And if you’ve read any of my reviews this year, you’ll also know that I’ve talked about language considerations (or lack of) in at least three.

But what I’m going to try do in this post is convince you just why language is as important a part of worldbuilding as any other aspect. (Because this is the real reason half of my undergraduate degree was in linguistics, let’s be real.)