oh hey it's the book I got so distracted looking at that I got locked in the library I was working in at the time and set off the burglar alarm trying to leave! the full book is on the internet archive and it's truly gorgeous archive.org/details/jean...
archive.org
Jeanne d'Arc
[4], 83, [1] p. : 37 x 31 cm
![A drawing of me standing outside with a man hugging me and kissing my neck. Caption: I work as a flower delivery driver and about a year ago I brought an arrangement to a house in [city redacted] and there was a man at home alone and he asked me to come inside and leave the flowers on the table, they were for his mother. When we got back outside he asked me to wait because he wanted to give me a tip. I thought about just leaving but didn’t. He brought out two dollars, pulled me into his arms, and kissed my neck. It was wet and soft. I know it could have been so much worse — I had just been inside his house — but it was an unpleasant reminder of what my body means in the world, what people might assume and want when they see me. I say I use she/her in the way a car or a boat does, and I’m trying to be funny but I also kind of mean a solidarity with these pretty, desirable, genderless objects who have no say in how they’re percieved. I don’t know. At least I get to be the one to tell you this story.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:gbqcu2vqitvku3cri6rim74x/bafkreidx7tqu2eq4twq5u5qjr3j2fmb2jdlnj3vdidrjmwug7ucwwt43b4)
![There is a likeability crisis in much contemporary queer sff. Authors are unwilling to make their characters look bad, and it compromises the integrity of the story. I don’t think this is the result of individual authors’ incompetence. The state of the publishing industry and the social media ecosystem around genre fiction has refigured the reader as, primarily, a customer, and the customer is always right.
If Yamamoto had written a highly entertaining and optimistic crime novel with a cast of highly flawed marginalized people who the reader is expected to root for even as they hurt each other, themselves, and the people around them—if they took seriously the premise of they story they did in fact write—it may have been more difficult to market. It may have received more negative Goodreads reviews from the kind of people who don’t like Wuthering Heights because it’s just a bunch of terrible people treating each other terribly. But oh my god. Who cares. Those people can go read a book that isn’t about people who steal things for a living and send each other to jail.
Expecting authors to honour the gravity of their own concepts is not in conflict with appreciating fun, escapist genre fiction. Why are the “let people enjoy things [and don’t say anything negative about the things they enjoy]” crew the only ones who deserve to enjoy anything?](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:strlttkrhhtvmkbnj26nkhi3/bafkreigivbxigzdatiptqgbfbb7glpnt6vv7yomfajyzz4mkrhkzwyf6wm)