So it seems I'm writing a SV story in which your soulmate's name is written on your skin. Clark/Lex of course. Any suggestions for what should be in it? I have a few ideas, but I seek further inspiration.

Evan Wright, Generation Kill: A depressing book about men who mainly joined the Marines because they think it’ll make them men, or don’t have anything more promising to do, and end up going to war in Iraq. The war they go to is dumb, though they don’t care about the whys; they’re both wastefully oversupplied and tragically short on a few crucial things (including batteries for the night vision goggles that can be the difference between life and death). They’re glancingly led and mostly lost in the fog of war, once the war starts. They kill, and sometimes they know they killed civilians and sometimes they just hope it was hostiles, and they tell themselves it’s us or them. It’s just layer on layer of pointless, bloody waste.

Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: Genocide and America’s lack of response to it from the Turks killing the Kurds onwards (with not much about the Holocaust—while it’s the point of comparison, it’s also almost unaddressable on its own terms in this book). Power argues that American policy has in fact been a success, in that American policy has been to ignore genocides whenever possible. She documents that the same arguments always pop up—we don’t know for sure what’s going on, we couldn’t do anything anyway, if we intervened we’d make it worse—and argues that in many cases more aggressive policies could have done some good. That’s the weakest part of the book, in part because there’s so little evidence of any strong power taking military or military-lite action and actually stopping a genocide. (For some instances, she argues, economic threats could’ve worked, or even un-carried-out threats of military action, but again she doesn’t have much to go on.) As a catalog of unredressed atrocities treated as problems of political management, it’s depressing in a completely different way than Generation Kill, although that book possibly works as an argument against her proposal for more aggressive actions.

Katherine Larsen & Lynn S. Zubernis, Fangasm: Supernatural Fangirls: It took me a while to read this, because of my own intense and unresolved issues surrounding fan-actor contact; it’s a very personal account of the journey to admit one’s fandom; stop or at least limit the shame that women often feel for liking something for ourselves; and also set appropriate boundaries on conduct related to a show produced by other human beings who might seem knowable and even known to thousands of strangers, but have lives of their own. Fangasm is fundamentally about the difficulties of managing relationships that are only metaphorically “negotiated,” and in fact are created out of constant bumping up against one another with not enough repeat players on the fan side (at least). It’s all culture and norms, except no one really agrees on what the culture or norms are. The authors are very positive about fangirl desires, while also acknowledging the dark side of any human community; this all made it impossible for them to write the “official” book they thought they were writing for a while. They offer a pretty biting criticism of “TPTB’s” attempts to control fannish engagement: “Never mind that they are in the business of selling passion and sex and desire. Never mind that they cast impossibly pretty people in their television shows and films. Never mind that they often mount (yeah, pun intended there) over-the-top ad campaigns that emphasize sexual subtext over plot. They don’t seem to have a problem with any of this, but they do seem to have a problem with fans acknowledging it, indulging in it, and celebrating it.”

Especially just after rewatching The Real Ghostbusters and the humiliating treatment of female fans, I was left less forgiving of the “creative” side of the show’s production than the authors are—they’re extremely positive about the good nature of everyone they meet and interview, which I have no doubt is true, but they don’t discuss the thoughts of writers/showrunners other than Kripke and they touch on issues of race and homosexuality but not gender as such. Instead, they endorse the narrative that TPTB forced Bela and Ruby on the creative team, which helped account for the negative reaction to those characters from fandom. Yeah, but misogyny also played a role (and I apply that judgment to the creative team and to fandom), and I wished the authors had addressed that more, though they do focus a lot on the internalized misogyny/devaluing of women’s interests that is related to fannish shame.