Love. Pride. Positivity.
Check out my side tags for my art, my hedgehog, and quick links to common tags I use.
My main fandoms are Overwatch, Marvel, LotR, Pokemon/Legend of Zelda/Nintendo.
My Battletag is HanzosNipple; message me if you want to play, or say hi if you run into me!
(Since queer representation remains relatively scarce in this genre, note that while many of these books DO discuss queer themes at length — and that all contain at least one queer character — a few do not revolve around said character(s) and/or are not centered around queer themes.)
In addition, goodreads.com has shelves for just about everything; one look at its Queer, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender ones can uncover some of the many books I couldn’t fit on this one post!
all i’m saying is if an all-girls school crashed on the island in lord of the flies then they would’ve been off the island in a week
lord of the flies doesnt show the base human condition, it shows the base privileged straight white male condition, incredibly when i point this out people get kind of annoyed
Might I direct you to Beauty Queens by Libba Bray, a YA novel in which a plane full of teen beauty pageant contestants crashes on a deserted island. Instead of descending into violent savagery, the girls are able to work together and become more truly themselves than they could in the patriarchal world outside. They repurpose the tools of beauty into tools of survival (and some of them work to keep up their appearances too, because that’s what makes them feel happy, while others decide they’re done with all the pressure to be a certain sort of beautiful.) They fight against evil corporations. Beauty Queens is enthusiastically feminist. (Never fear, the feminism is intersectional, exploring issues of race and sexuality as well as gender.) Also, this book is HILARIOUS, not to mention surprisingly exciting!
Amazing rec!
I also want to add, although it’s pretty commonly misinterpreted (I’m looking at you, high school English teachers) as being about the human condition, the point that LotF is trying to make is that young, privileged boys were awful. It was written in direct response to a popular series of ‘Robinson and Crusoe’ type of books where they’re all super civilised and whatever. And William Golding read it and was like “this is bullshit, did you even go to boarding school? They’re goddamn savages.”
So he wrote Lord of the Flies.
As someone who went to boarding school (albeit in 21st century USA), I can confirm that we were goddamn savages.
And the boys were worse.
The Lord of the Flies is one of those books that’s articulating a very specific criticism, but is deliberately misrepresented by the literary establishment as a commentary on some alleged “universal human condition” so that it can be held up as great literature without having to engage with that criticism.
The great thing about the Odyssey is that while the Iliad is about the deeds and despair of war– Hector and Andromache’s bittersweet farewell on the walls of Troy, Achilles longing to eat Hector’s flesh like a dog on the battlefield, Priam reminding Achilles of his own father and convincing him to return Hector’s body, Helen wondering if her brothers abandoned her out of hatred, not knowing they were killed– the Iliad is peaks and chasms, a landscape of extremes, but the Odyssey is gray. The Odyssey is the aftermath, when everything is covered in dust, when the price of famous and infamous deeds is revealed, when the hero simply wants to go home, and cannot. When the dead regret their choices in life. When you finally do return and find that nothing was static or caught out of time when you were gone, and few remember you. When you are one of a handful of survivors, the rest of your companions dead. When you’ve endured the worst horrors, yet in the end you are thwarted by mortal and immortal pettiness. When a man hailed as a hero becomes nothing more than a murderer of maids.
