Full disclosure: I haven't seen CURSED because I'm not particularly keen to give money to Frank Miller. (Which is a separate discussion.) However, there's one thing about the reception for it that deeply bugs me.

The book came out what, last October? And for the Netflix adaptation to be out already, it would have had to be greenlit before publication. It's being hailed as "fresh", "exciting", an "artful female perspective" of the Arthur legend from... Thomas Wheeler and Frank Miller.

But, and maybe this is just me... I feel like a *lot* of female SFF authors had the same exact idea when they were like. 12? 13? Centering a warrior girl in the Arthur mythos? How many stories did we have about Morgan Le Fay's secret daughter, or Guinevere drawing Excalibur?

Lord knows I did stuff like that all the time. I walked out of Spider-man and immediately started drawing "what if Mary Jane ALSO got bit by the special spider" (it was not great.) But those ideas always got dismissed as self-indulgent self-insert fanfic... coming from girls.

This isn't to say that you can't like Cursed, of course! But it really, really bugs me to see it hailed as something revolutionary when "what if a girl drew Excalibur" was a) imagined by many, many young girls, and b) treated as a joke when it came from them.

I ALSO HAVE STRONG FEELINGS ABOUT THIS

Someone else put it best (they're locked so I won't tag them) in that it feels like they skimmed a YA Fantasy Wiki to write the story and boy did they lean into the "ethnically ambiguous protag" checkbox https://twitter.com/ElleOnWords/status/1284920231039766529?s=20

Anyway there are a lot of authors engaging with the King Arthur mythos with innovation and ingenuity, so when the big "girl-power" revamp comes from the guy behind Sin City, I just get... very tired.