I wrote an article for The Asexual Agenda which may or may not interest readers, talking about umbrella terminology.

“I am Jesus Christ” and Other Games about Jews | Jacob Geller (video, 40 min) – Jacob diving through obscure games to find any Jewish games at all is actually so relatable.  I do the same for queer media.

Saw | Contrapoints (video, 1:36 hours) – Saw is a 2004 movie about people trapped in a game devised by a serial killer, forced to choose between death and ultra violent suffering.  There is no way I would ever enjoy such a thing myself (that is, a movie), but I appreciate this analysis of what other people might like about it.  Violence is really common in movies, but often it’s couched in terms of justice–violence against people who “deserved” it.  However, in Saw, the character who enacts violence in the name of justice is the villain.

What do we owe the insufferable? | Psychiatry on the margins – Some people with mental illness are challenging to deal with on a personal level.  We can suspend our moral judgment, but that also deprives them of moral agency, treating them like a patient rather than a person.  People with difficult personalities often need help, but even caretakers can find them exhausting, and they end up with lower quality of care.  There are no known solutions.

Heated Rivalry is the romance story I’ve been missing | Council of Geeks (video, 42 min) – This echoes some of the points in my review.  One of my persistent issues with the romance genre is the dilemma between internal and external sources of conflict.  Straight romances frequently have internal sources of conflict.  As a result I often think the relationships are bad, and the characters would be would be better off if they broke up!  M/M romances frequently have external sources of conflict, but this can make the relationship itself boringly perfect.  Heated Rivalry does it differently, the external conflict made internal.