Guy Fawkes Day Linkdump

Well, it was either that or US election day linkdump. And since everybody and his dog is already talking about the US election, I thought that Guy deserves some of the spotlight, especially now that he has morphed into an accidental anti-capitalist icon.

The 2012 World Fantasy Awards have been given out this weekend. Jo Walton’s Among Others missed making a clean sweep of all major genre awards, but then Lavie Tidhar’s Osama is a worthy winner and one who probably wouldn’t have won in a popular vote award.

At Femmedia, M. Keep explains why Anastasia Steele from Fifty Shades of Grey may not be a particularly good character but is still not a Mary Sue.

I’ve discussed the misuse of the term “Mary Sue” before, but this quote from the post by M. Keep sums up the issue very well:

A Mary Sue isn’t just code for ‘A character I don’t like’ or ‘A female character that annoys me and doesn’t live up to my expectations for female characters.’

At Slate, Tom Scocca complains about newspaper and magazine articles apparently confusing Mad Men with reality. The article mostly reads like a “Help, people are making pop culture references I don’t get” complaint, though there is an interesting nugget of information in there, namely that Mad Men has come to define the image of the early 1960s in the popular imagination. I guess it’s because the early 1960s are something of a forgotten half-decade, not as cool and revolutionary as the late 1960s (when I hear the word “Sixties” I think of miniskirts, hippies and psychedelia. I bet you do, too), but rather a continuation of the 1950s. And since there is no general image of the early 1960s, people have quickly latched onto the pop cultural image provided by Mad Men. Interestingly, the article also suggests that Don Draper may be a male Mary Sue. And indeed, he would probably score pretty high on those Mary Sue Litmus tests.