Can ballet exist without hurting women?

Couples develop their own private languages and verbal tics! (So do families.) (So do friends.) (But this article is about couples.)

Friends featured lesbians and mocked them; does one of those things cancel out the other?

An interview with amazing Saga artist slash genius Fiona Staples.

Treat aromantic and asexual adults like adults!

Grace Lavery points out that misnaming and misgendering students and colleagues are not acceptable scholarly practices, nor are they covered by the principle of academic freedom.

Monsters, possession, and how we interact with pregnant people.

What do various philosophies tell us about the ethics of Chidi being swole?

Louie CK now claims that black people have supported him after he admitted to masturbating in front of women without their consent. Hannah Giorgis explores his phantom alliance with black fans.

I’m not sure I’m convinced by this defense of the hanging scene in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, but I do love to watch Angelica Jade Bastien do her thing. I strongly recommend clicking on the links within the piece, as they go to several thoughtful critiques of the scene in question. (I’m still not planning to watch the show.)

Vulture also has a good piece about a Romanoffs episode about false accusations of inappropriate behavior, written by Matthew Weiner, who has been accused of harassment.

On Ada Byron’s childhood, and co-parenting with Byron.

“I don’t wan to toughen up. I want the world to soften.” On fan mail from stalkers.

Happy weekend, my friends! I am having guests over for dinner tomorrow, which is VERY frightening, so please pray for me that it goes okay and I don’t spill wine on anyone or run out of topics to talk about. For your weekends I wish peacefulness and joy!

The post A very belated links round-up appeared first on Reading the End.

My favorite thing about Saga is the relative tininess of its stakes by contrast with the hugeness of its scope. The story is about a world called Landfall that has been at war with its moon, Wreath, for as long as anybody can remember. Though the two planets are no longer directly at war with each other, they have spread their conflict across all the known planets, forcing the entire universe to take sides. Marko and Alana fought on opposite sides of this battle in their lives, before falling in love and getting married. When their baby is born, interested parties on both sides of the interplanetary conflict hire mercenaries to track them down (and presumably kill them).

Typically, I’d be out as soon as I heard “interplanetary conflict”, but the thing Vaughn has done here that I love is to make the comic all about finding a home. Alana and Marko and baby Hazel are searching for an Ithaca that may not even exist: a quiet place in the universe where Hazel can grow up untouched by the war that has torn apart so many lives.

In particular, I would love to call out the fact that Hazel is not (and please Brian Vaughn let’s keep it that way) any kind of Chosen One. Her birth hasn’t been foretold, she doesn’t have magical powers, and apart from being the product of two races that don’t tend to intermingle, there appears to be nothing special about her at all. I strongly strongly hope that persists. It’s one of the things that keeps the stakes of this story feeling urgent but small, as opposed to urgent and global.

Vaughn is also managing the trick of making Marko and Alana’s opponents interesting(ish) in their own right. The Will and his Lying Cat (a large cat that knows and says so if you lie in front of it) are among the bounty hunters who have been hired to track and kill Marko and Alana. So far so dull, but then he gets a subsidiary motivation that has the potential to be interesting, and for his mission, he teams up with Marko’s former fiancee and a little psychic girl he rescued from slavery, and they… Well, I do not know what their deal is going to be just yet. But I do know that I am a sucker for a team of unlikely allies.

Fiona Staples’s art is fantastic — detailed and weird without feeling overcrowded. She also hand-letters the narration of the story by Hazel (speaking from some undetermined point in the future), which is very very cool. I can’t say enough about her. Below is an example of just one of the many awesome things that Fiona Staples does.

I love knowing that Vaughn has an endgame in mind for this comic, and I can’t wait to see what it shakes out to be. Check it out!

Position statement: Hawkeye should have won at least one of the Eisners that Saga won this past year. Hawkeye is easily as good as Saga but probably better. My growing affection for Saga has in no way swayed me on this point.

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