probablynotbees

I've been putting a bit more time into the non-mobile Pokemon games over the last few days due to the release of Champions, and I have some thoughts about the state of the franchise's current and recent games (mobile and console) that I wanted to get down.

Overall, I think the Pokemon Company has fumbled repeatedly in the Switch era, to the point where my expectations for new content are quite low.

Given those low expectations, I've been pleasantly surprised by Champions. My initial reaction to its release was "oh this is a lazy cash grab to sell microtransactions," given the marketing description of the game as "free-to-start". But it's actually quite light on microtransactions and pretty fun to play, with dynamic and well-balanced battles. Since Scarlet/Violet ranked battles are coming to an end, I suspect the actual drive behind creating Champions is to bring the Pokemon PVP scene onto a single platform that persists without being tied to a recent game release. I also appreciate the efforts with Champions to level the playing field and reduce the amount of grinding required to have a PVP-ready team.

As for everything else ... ( Read more... )

Brief side note following on from my discussion of misgendering beyond the binary in Translation State by Ann Leckie:

The way Qven, an individual from a genderless culture, seeks to "have gender" after talking to individuals from a gendered culture also demonstrates cultural exchange in a way I wish more sci fi and fantasy played with.

When cultures come into contact with each other, they naturally influence each other and share ideas, including ideas about gender. In our world, our global history of colonization and the violent imposition of European cisnormativity have complicated and often sabotaged any idea of open, equal cultural exchange around gender.

But in SFF, this doesn't have to be the case, and it can be interesting to explore how a culture with different gender norms (often with no concept of gender at all) reacts to encountering a society with gender norms closer to what's familiar to the reader and writer. ( Read more... )

I have some thoughts about this essay:

should I start smoking?
or, the commodification and enshittification of community
Erin Nystrom
Mar 15, 2026

The fact that community is becoming a wellness trend—often with an aesthetic and hefty price tag—is very telling to me. Very exposing of the larger game at play here. Because upon hearing “loneliness kills”, the impulse wasn’t to rebuild the free, accessible infrastructure of community, and ask why we’re all too exhausted and automized to connect. It was to commodify connection—sell us Community as a product: friendship coaches, curated community memberships, networking events with entry fees, apps that gamify making friends.

An extremely apt paragraph that points at an issue that haunts our society far beyond the wellness industry: the attempt to respond to a harmful paradigm by adjusting the paradigm -- often by absorbing the criticism into the paradigm -- rather than breaking it.

However, I do think this essay started to go downhill near the end. Honestly, it started to fall into the same trap it purported to reveal: perceiving the commercialized "self care" version of an activity as the only one that exists.( Read more... )

Expanding on the discussion in my old tumblr post (now crossposted to Dreamwidth) about the essay I wrote in undergrad contrasting the gender-agnostic Radchaai in Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch series with the monogendered Gethen in The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, especially these paragraphs:

(My professor showed us an interview where Leckie talks about using she/her as a gender-neutral pronoun to push back against the idea of masculine-neutral as default, which I think works quite well. Referring to everyone as "they" wouldn't have so thoroughly emphasized the difference between English and Radchaai, since we're used to "they" as indeterminate-gender. Using "she" as neutral/indeterminate gender registers as strange to the English-speaking reader in a way that parallels how the Radchaai come off to in-universe cultures that do have gendered markers; you see this in Provenance and Translation State especially, since they have non-Radchaai narrators -- though I couldn't discuss that in my essay since I hadn't read those books yet; Translation State wouldn't even come out for a few more years.)

On the other hand (the right hand of darkness?), there's never any suggestion in the Imperial Radch series that anyone's gender is wrong, just that it's not important enough to merit another set of pronouns. You can have whatever gender you want, under the Rachaai; they just don't care. They'll oppress you for a thousand other things -- citizenship, ethnicity, class, lineage, whatever -- but gender? Not important enough to discriminate over. Radchaai society isn't monogendered, like the Gethen; nor is it fully genderless. Rather, it's gender-disregarding. Gender-agnostic, if you will.

The first sentence of that last paragraph isn't *completely* true. In Translation State, the second of two later books that follow the main Ancillary trilogy but portray non-Radchaai perspectives, a character is told that they're doing gender wrong -- by wanting to have a gender at all.( Read more... )

[Crossposting an older post from my book tumblr,

sagareads, since I'd be sad to lose it if tumblr explodes.]

felixmarques asked:

Is your essay on The Left Hand of Darkness vs Ancillary Justice available somewhere?

Afraid not -- it was for a class, and I'm not really comfortable sharing it online. I'm happy to go into a bit more detail, though. It's an essay that started out with me just writing down something that fascinated me about Ancillary Justice as if I were telling a friend about it.

Putting it under the cut because I'm sure I'm going to run long even just casually paraphrasing it. (Honestly, I have to edit my expository writing for concision, usually, rather than struggling to reach a word count.)

Also quick prefacing note: I haven't read either of these books in many years, and I don't have copies at hand, so any quotes or specific details are from memory.

Content warnings for, uh ... a sort of inverted sci fi transphobia / intersex discrimination in my analysis of The Left Hand of Darkness, and also mentions at the end of rape and colonialism. And I discuss the association of violence, especially sexual violence, with masculinity.

( Read more... )

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Recent Entries

Pokemon franchise Switch era & its many disappointments

Gender & cultural exchange in sci fi

Musing on an essay: the commodification and enshittification of community

"I want to have gender": misgendering beyond the binary in the Imperial Radch books

Ancillary Justice & The Left Hand of Darkness: gender roles in nonbinary science fiction

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