Weird Aspects of Cosplay

I was just getting used to cosplay.  Cosplay isn't just dressing up; it isn't just putting on makeup, and trying to look like a favourite character from a book, a game, a movie, or a comic.  Cosplayers take their avocation very seriously.

I was startled by how some cosplays stretched the character, and sometimes the actual scene they were trying to represent.  Can you imagine a female Superman?  A female Flash?  A mellow Harley Quinn?  All of these seemed to be reasonable at some level.

But m more I'm seeing a totally nude cosplay.  Wait a minute; what is left of the character if you take away the entire costume??  Suppose you take the character Tifa Lockhart, and submit a photograph of her completely nude?  Without even her characteristic suspenders?  The very universe should howl in protest.

There's a lot of nudity on DeviantArt; the site tolerates a lot of weirdness, and nudity is one of the least objectionable of those.  I'm just saying that if someone is playing the role of some character from the popular media, one is

Centered Paragraphs?

I'm just reading a story with a weird characteristic: every paragraph is centered!

What kind of weirdo would do that?  I suppose I should not impute peculiar motives to new authors, but hey, they ought to take the trouble to set out their stories in a professional way.  Sometimes I get the feeling that kids write stories for their high school magazines in a certain way that passes for 'creative' when they're in school, and continue to write the same way professionally.

Quite honestly, I have to stop thinking that LGBTQRSV++ authors writing e-books are professionals, exactly.  I can honestly say this because when I wrote my first story for Smashwords, I was far from being a professional, except in the sense that my grammar and syntax might have been fairly good.  I had to fix up almost every story at least once, and re-upload it.  And I did not feel comfortable letting any of my friends look at my writing, precisely because I was on the queer spectrum myself.

Pets: What are they thinking?

I'm babysitting the pets of a friend.  When I was growing up, we had a dog, and a cat, too.  But I never was really close with them.  But I find my friend's pets utterly fascinating!

From time to time, they need to be sent outside, to take care of calls of nature.  Usually I do it by the clock, but sometimes they want to go out a little earlier, and I find the process where they let me know "Out, quickly!" amazing, and amusing.  Then, of course, I want them to come back in.  (If they stay outside, they feel that they have to bark at all sorts of imaginary enemies, which is considered bad form.). So I call out to them, and they stand all the way at the back fence, and stare at me, as though I'm out of my mind!

It's an interesting adventure, me trying to get them to understand what I'm thinking, and them trying to get me to understand what they're thinking.

I often think that it would awesome if they and I could actually converse.  In fact, I once read a book called 'The magnificent Wilf,' in which there was a dog who could speak to its owners telepathically.  I have thought about this a long time, and I have changed my mind; what's neat about this particular set of pets is precisely the communication problem!  If they could talk, after a while it would get boring.  Struggling to be understood is interesting to me (maybe not to them).  When they can't make me understand, it's just business as usual, because their whole lives have been spent with humans who only have the merest inkling of what is needed.

Clueless Woman

A couple of days ago, I was reading a story about a clueless grad student, who is set up with a beautiful highschool teacher.  Most of the reviews on Amazon were negative; I believe mostly because grad students are an unfamiliar type for readers of lesfic.  It's hard for a typical person to understand how much tunnel vision is lurking in the confused brain of a PhD student.  I found the story really believable,  so I rated it high, and gave it a polite review. 

It turned out that the book I had read was actually a prequel.  The next book had been written first, and after it had been written, the author seems to have smoothed out the harshness of the MC.  In the book I'm reading now, the MC is an asshole.  She's a two-timing wretch with no conscience, and the sanitized prequel manages to downplay this.  So now I must get on  GoodReads  and humble myself, and explain how it was that I was fooled, and to make it clear that not all graduate students are two-timing bitches.

Kay the Gullible

Stories With Fighting

In my distant youth, I attended a class in self-defence for a few months.  It might be said that fighting is like riding a bicycle, but I can't remember a thing from that class!  But I have written a few stories that involve the heroine engaging in combat, of one sort or another.

Helen and Sharon, for instance, involves both unarmed fighting—Helen showing the director what she could do—as well as sword fighting.  In Alexandra, Jane has an encounter on the beach with troops from 'Bernia'.  In Prisoner(!) Maia fights with the sword on several occasions; also in Jana, which I have not published yet, but which has been serialized right in this Blog.  How did I do all this?  Pretending.  I have read a good many books about hand-to-hand combat, enough to have a few (theoretical) ideas about how it should go!  You might not know, but Alexandra is set in the distant future, in a colonized planet.  This does not enter the story directly, except that there are vague references to Earth culture, and artifacts that are clearly ancient, and with Earth technology, now lost.  The culture on that planet has reverted to early 19^th century science, and they fight with rifles, crossbows, and swords.

In Jane, or at least Jane - The Early Years, Jane and Heather learn Karate, to make a Scorpia video.

Well, I just wanted to make clear that I was writing about violence under false pretences, and not with any personal knowledge.

Kay

Framing Her Face

Here's another rant.

I've been reading so many instances where, when an author describes a girl getting ready for an occasion, or arriving for a date, or whatever, they make a point of describing how "two strands have been separated from her updo, to hang down to frame her face."

Really?  Is this so important as to be remarked upon?  Is is such a travesty for a girl to not frame her face that an author would heap insults and ridicule on her?  I began to read up about this, and it appears that using two "tendrils" to frame a woman's face became popular around the year 2000, and now any woman who looks in her mirror is not quite satisfied unless there are two strands, one of the left, and one on the right, that narrow her face a little.  I believe that women with a narrow face don't feel that the 'framing' is unnecessary; at this point, the two strands are sort of their own thing.

Listen, any authors out there, who're reading this.  Some girls look perfectly fine with their faces framed by their ears.

Authors would do better to focus on how interesting the girl's manicured nails are!  This sort of thing brings out how much the author has gotten carried away with her story, and the sort of trivialities that she is preoccupied with.

Maybe the author wants to emphasize that she's 'regular people', with the same silly concerns as her readers.  It annoys me just as much as minute descriptions of the height of the heels one girl wears, so as not to be too much taller than her date.  Or how many sequins her gown has.  The women I have hung out with, even if totally girly, and even if they do calculate the lengths of their hemlines, so that they're visible under their coats, don't bring up those sorts of issues in girl talk!  Oh God, am I getting old?  I'm also put off by the elaborate patterns girls have their nails done up with, probably with stick-ons, or something like that.  I didn't like the style of painting their fingernails with that little arc of white at the tip, to begin with.  Now these stick-on styles are just weird.

Kate, noticing her wrinkles ...