Bite is a short 15-page comic in which the World’s Okayest Dad
realizes that the orphan he created is a Sauntiaq (i.e. “hungry ghost”, “weird vampire”
etc.) and also his responsibility, now.
Warnings for blood, injury, and alluded (not shown) child death.
Rayet and Ashe! Basedt! Comics! Been itching to make them
since GR went down. Please heed the warnings, Basedt is a tonal low for
Moribund and the relationship between Rayet and Ashe is probably the most
complicated one in the story.
What more is there to fear when you’ve already faced governments who have tried for centuries to wipe you out, who have used biological warfare and forced starvation to create apocalypse for your people?
It’s remarkable to consider that many non-Indigenous horror writers depict situations that Indigenous people have already weathered — such as apocalyptic viral outbreaks that decimate whole populations — or use the history of genocidal violence against us to explain why innocent white folks are being haunted today, such as in Stephen King’s It or the 1982 film Poltergeist. In fact, I’m not sure what scares non-Indigenous horror writers and readers more: experiencing variations of what Indigenous folks have already endured for centuries, or the reality that they have built their entire country on literal Indian burial grounds.
Indigenous writers, on the other hand, acknowledge the mundane horror of living in a country that dehumanizes you, weaving the reality of Indigenous life with fiction to scare audiences. In Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow, for example, the apocalyptic event that ends life as we know it — taking out power, internet, phones, satellites, etc. — isn’t even really noticed as an apocalyptic event at first; it’s just another day on a northern rez, where power can go out at any time and internet and phone signals aren’t always available. As Nick, a young Anishinaabe man, points out, “We thought it was kinda funny…The blackout was only two days, but it seemed like some people were already freaking out a little bit. I was just like, ‘Come to the rez, this shit happens all the time!’” Once it becomes apparent that things have changed forever, the protagonist Evan observes that “the milestones he [now] used to mark time were the deaths in the community…as people perished through sickness, mishap, violence or by their own hands.” He notes that northern reserves like his are “familiar with tragedy,” the result of generations of intergenerational trauma and genocide — only now this tragedy is magnified.
Similarly, Jeff Barnaby’s new movie Blood Quantum takes the real-life horror of Indigenous history and plugs it into a zombie horror film. In Barnaby’s film, a zombie virus ravages a non-Indigenous community that borders a reserve; the only thing that saves the Indigenous community from the same fate is their apparent immunity to that virus. The community’s decision to take in non-Native survivors, who may turn into zombies and kill their people, is a fraught one for the film’s characters. Considering the devastation viruses carried by white settlers have historically wrought on Indigenous communities — the 1862 smallpox epidemic is estimated to have cut the First Nations population in what’s now known as British Columbia in half — it’s not hard to understand why.
In her bestselling book The Marrow Thieves, Cherie Dimaline used the real history of residential schools to create a terrifying post-apocalyptic world where Indigenous children are hunted and harvested for their bone marrow. Her latest novel, Empire of Wild, similarly uses the Métis tale of the Rogarou to tell a story of religion and resource extraction. The Rogarou was originally a story told to young Indigenous children, particularly girls, to keep them from the roads near the edge of their communities, where white men would pick them up and they’d end up missing or murdered. They scared their children in an attempt to keep them alive.
i can‘t remember the name of my favorite poem but it has this quote in it that’s like “if you pretend to love enough people you will never go hungry” and its about where this person was when Elliott smith died and at the end of it he opens up a fortune cookie and it says something bad and he doesn’t tell anyone about it for a whole year
something a little different today! gravehouse is an interactive story i made for my coding final, about exploring a familiar haunted house.click here to play! (if you’re on mobile, you may have to select to view the desktop version in your browser.)
[ID: A screenshot of the script of Fun Home the musical. Small Alison sings, “I can see all of Pennsylvania” and then Alison says, “Caption: Every so often there was a rare moment of perfect balance when I soared above him.” END ID]
Rating: Great Read Genre: Short story, Romance, High School, Fantasy, Coming Out Representation: -Transmasc protagonist -Gay protagonist -Jewish protagonist -Mentally ill protagonist (Depression) -Transmasc love interest -Diverse supporting cast Note: No sexually explicit content Trigger warnings: Transphobic bullying, misgendering, suicidal ideation
“Avi Cantor Has Six Months to Live” - or so says the bathroom mirror at his school. The story begins with Avi discovering this eyeliner pencil message, along with the rest of his class, who endlessly riff on how Avi will die. Cancer, Ebola, the black plague? As if the bullying weren’t bad enough, Avi has another problem: no one should know his name is Avi. He’s trans, and not out to anyone yet. So who wrote the message?
Right away, “Avi Cantor Has Six Months to Live” goes unexpected places, starting the moment Avi meets Ian. Ian is athletic and gets along okay at school, unlike Avi. But like Avi, he’s trans, too, and willing to out himself to convince Avi to be his friend. From there, the two of them are inseparable. But the problem remains: is Avi really going to die in six months? And how could anyone possibly know something like that?
This story takes turns that I never saw coming. “Avi Cantor” juggles not only romance, high school, and mental illness, but also magic and Jewish mythology - yet the narrative doesn’t feel crowded. There is still plenty of room for Avi’s Jewish and trans identity to take starring roles amid the magic, mayhem, and plain old strangeness. It is a magical, scary world, but Avi and Ian take it in stride - and so does the reader.
Avi’s Jewishness and the Jewishness of the story as a whole were particularly well crafted, especially as elements in conversation with each other. Avi is not particularly close to his heritage, whereas the story itself is, and the Jewishness of the narrative in turn brings Avi into his culture. Although it’s outside of my expertise to make any definitive statements, one can see a common thread between “Avi Cantor” and Jewish storytelling tradition. The central conflict, that Avi has six months to live and must find a way to prevent the inevitable, rings of folklore, but especially Jewish folklore. Certain doom is a common theme in Jewish literature and scripture - take the stories of Esther and Joseph, which both center around the theme of surviving against the odds by using one’s wits.
However, “Avi Cantor” doesn’t feel like scripture in tone - there is something more folktale-like about it. Because I don’t have a background in Jewish folklore, I went poking about, and sure enough, the theme carries through. Certain doom, survival, and finally a subversion of power that gets the main character their happy ending, whether that’s finding their way home again after a long absence, rising in the ranks in a foreign land, or winning a bargain with a loophole, all are themes that carry through the centuries. Unfortunately, in talking about a short story like “Avi Cantor,” it would be too much of a spoiler for me to complete the comparison. For the purposes of this review, the question “How is Avi Cantor like a Jewish folk hero?” will have to remain unanswered. Suffice to say, he approaches problems in much the same way, and in the end, the seemingly insurmountable odds turn overwhelmingly in his favor.
Magic plays a role in “Avi Cantor,” too, and the form which magic takes is dream visions - which also follows the precedent of scripture. There are more allusions to Jewish history, thought, and mythology, too, some of them even more overt, but again, naming them all would spoil the story. The important thing to take away is that “Avi Cantor” is made better by the fact that it is not alone. For a story about being trans (as well as about a lot of other things), having that story come in a familiar form as part of a lineage of Jewish literary practice places transgender Jewish people firmly within their heritage, not as transgressors of it.
There are further depths to plumb with “Avi Cantor,” but you can only get away with so much literary analysis before people start questioning whether you’re a reviewer or an academic in a trench coat and sunglasses. The long and short: go read this short story. “Avi Cantor” will affect your understanding of what short fiction can do. Plus, the story is free to read online, with the author’s blessing.
"There’s also a pronounced lack of female werewolves in popular culture. Their near absence in literature and film is explained away by various fancies: they’re sterile, an aberration, or—most galling of all—they don’t even exist.
Their omission from popular culture does one thing very effectively: It prevents us, and men especially, from being confronted by hairy, ugly, uncontrollable women. Shapeshifting women in fantasy stories tend to transform into animals that we consider feminine, such as cats or birds, which are pretty and dainty, and occasionally slick and wicked serpents. But because the werewolf represents traits that are accepted as masculine—strength, large size, violence, and hirsutism—we tend to think of the werewolf as being naturally male. The female werewolf is disturbing because she entirely breaks the rules of femininity."
![[ID: A screenshot of the script of Fun Home the musical. Small Alison sings, “I can see all of Pennsylvania” and then Alison says, “Caption: Every so often there was a rare moment of perfect balance when I soared above him.” END ID]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/d35a986beadad6448ec40fd2c1a6f3bd/tumblr_ns9n5bmsbo1qi8mkfo1_400.jpg)
