A friend of mine asked for good retellings of fairy stories for a D&D campaign she's working on this week, and I dove headlong with great glee into T. Kingfisher's short stories. (Well, and her novels, but the short stories are easier to link, and I like people to buy her books if they get a taste from the stories.) Which got me thinking about witches in stories, both hers and Terry Pratchett's which are clearly influenced. My character in the campaign I'm in with my friend is an older woman in service to Death, and she's a little sillier than the archetype of those witches, but not so far unlike them.

Except that she doesn't have a settled, single place she lives. I wrote her as a traveler, someone who gets itchy if she's still too long, partly to explain why she was happy living on the road with an adventuring party, and partly...

...well. Partly because I don't get to set down roots. I've lived in Austin seven years, and I lived in northern Virginia for eight, and aside from that I've never been in a city for more than three or four at a stretch. And I'm set to be moving again in a year or two, because that's how this job goes. My dad was a military brat, and his feet got itchy, I think; but more than that, in the world I live in and the world I grew up in in North America, you move to go where the jobs are. I remember starting a in high school history course and my teacher asked how many of us were born in Georgia, and perhaps two people in a twenty-odd person class raised their hands. (I'd lived in Georgia two years then.)

I think some of the magical realism from those characterizations of witches and witchcraft comes from being part of the earth of a specific place, of being born somewhere and knowing it in your bones and so forth, and drawing the kind of power that comes from knowing many people for a very, very long time, being a known quantity in your community. But, well. Migration patterns across hundreds of miles have been common in many families for a long time in North America. Immigrant narratives are a huge part of our national mythos--if I recall rightly, about half of white Americans descend from immigrants who arrived after 1850--and even if you only look at patterns of movement within North America, well, my ancestors are Irish Catholics; if you look at Irish-American history, there's an awful lot of movement across the northern borders, and there's an awful lot of moving around the continent to move to... well... where the jobs are. Military jobs, construction jobs, labor jobs. If you broaden your sights from white people history, you see things like the Great Migration out of the South for African-American families towards the West and North. Of course you do see the centuries-old pattern of migration from rural centers to the cities, or (again in America) the westward migration of Anglo settlers, and those have worked their ways into stories. But migration patterns from areas of similar population density? Don't see that, much.

I don't know; I'm just thinking about roots and where people come from. And it strikes me that I don't see much in the way of that archetype of older women in any other context. (I mean, they're not precisely thick on the ground. But.)

I think the only place I've seen those migratory patterns commented on within fantasy is Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and then only in passing. Funny, that.

I am in the process of porting a very long piece I wrote about James Damore's bad science for Medium to a new DW-for-my-pro-science-writing that I can link people to a little more comfortably, because I am straight up more comfortable on DW than on Medium.

But also, it is suuuuper long and the HTML is suuuuuper boring and I made one mistake I need to fix to feel good about myself and uuuuugh I'll feel better when I'm done but

aaaauuuuuuuuuugh

…because I’m still reading through a bunch of tabs my on my laptop, and I figured other folks might like the links.

You know, it bothers me how almost all the female monsters are either ~*~sexy~*~ or mothers sometimes. At least, almost all the ones we see in fiction, especially media that are in any way visual. Female monsters are so often vampires or succubi or sirens, luring men in with their temptations and their beauty and, well, their consumability.
 
And if you don’t get that in your female monsters, you get female monsters who are all caught up in the monstrous mother archetypes: Echidna birthing all the familiar Greek monsters from her mating with Typhon, or Tiamat and her own chaotic brood, or Gaea making the Hekatonchires walk, or Grendel’s mother. Mothers of demons and mothers of hives and mothers of, you know, the real threat: dangerous not because of who and what they are, but what they can create.

No.

Make me a Gorgon, who lives alone with my immortal sisters and turns any man who sees me to stone with a glance; make me a Diana of the hunt, who tears anyone who sexualizes me to death by the hands of their own hounds with a thought; make me a Sekhmet, my leonine face spattered in blood as I rule over the wars of my river people. Make me scary in my aspects of being inhuman and untouchable.

Let me be the Fates or the Norns or the wise women who carelessly card the wool of your fate between my clever fingers. Let me be Baba Yaga, riding her chicken-footed house through the forests, who knows mysteries and visits places no other person might find; or a Sphinx, sitting in judgement and waiting to devour the foolish or the glib of tongue and slow of wit. Let me be Eris who sows chaos and fear as casually as a twisted, lovely smile, my face unremarkable as my flattering and barbed words drop from between my plain lips. Let me be a banshee, whose face is all but forgotten in the horrified attention that mortals pay to the sounds of my mouth. Let me be feared for my knowledge and my words.

Make of me a Medea, so terrible in my insulted fury that I will destroy everything you might have loved, if you are foolish enough to cross me. Make of me a Demeter, stalking the world in grief and rage, ripping the life and fertility from the world in my rage over my stolen daughter. Make of me a Maenad, blood dripping from my slack-wide jaws as I race with my sisters in ecstatic, terrible joy to hunt and rend and tear everything before me. Make me terrifying in my anger and my destruction.

Let me be a She-Hulk who is not beautiful, who does not stand in a leotard, whose breasts quake under the rippling power of my broad shoulders and deep muscle and widened, bonified face. Let me be Ammit, my crocodile jaws gaping over my crouched haunches as I judge the living and the dead and delight in swallowing the souls of the unworthy. Let me be the Crommyonian Sow, roaming the countryside and consuming anything I find in my path. Let me be a mermaid, sinuous spine slipping through the waters as I bare my needle-like teeth and devour the unwary. Let me be a fire-breathing chimera, an ungainly assortment of bodies and patchwork creatures, who should not move, let alone terrorize cities. Let me be ugly, a creature defined by the predatory power coiled within my body, and not by the daintiness and desires of men.

Let me be monstrous.

"Dumbledore is ace/aro. Discuss."

Yeah, this is all Jessee's fault. The conversation turned to Dumbledore as a source of gay/queer representation on Crone Island last week, and they pinged me when they moved the conversation to a new channel with that particular summary. They were pretty accurate when they said I would have some thoughts on the topic.

( Here's most of what I had to say. I started with discussing Dumbledore as gay representation, transitioned into discussing representation of marginalized groups in fiction more generally, and wound up talking generally about ace character portrayal in mainstream fiction. )