Some quick thoughts on being a responsible reviewer:

It is kind of bananas how old the Phantom Project is. I started it in 2007 and could have had toddlers twice between then and now. (I didn't, though, because I'm crochety and I don't have enough love in my entire body to deal with more than one other human being and some cats in my life.) I've reviewed 140 Phantom-related pieces of media since then, and have at least that many more still waiting on my shelf/Kindle/secret porn folder for the future. And I like to think that I've gotten better at it in all that time. In fact, I know I have - there are some old reviews that make me actively cringe at my own writing these days, and a few I downright disagree with now. (Not that I'm taking them down, because darn it, I am my own little slice of academic history in action now.)

But there's "I was not as good a writer then" cringing, and there's "oh, shit, I have grown as a person and realize that was actually offensive" cringing, and while I can rest assured that most of the internet will ignore or quietly grumble to themselves about the first, the second matters a lot more. So today, a little older and wiser, I went through my archives and edited any references to "gypsies" to use the term "Romani" instead.

We talk about "gypsies", a group of people consistently demonized and fabulized in European myth and history right up to the present day, in Phantom-related lit all the time. They, like the Persians, were present in order to provide an element of exotic occultism and mystery in Leroux's novel, and the motif has been repeated through countless descendents of that novel in various ways, most often in connection with a carnival and/or the origin of the Phantom himself. Leroux's book especially is a period piece from a time of staggeringly rampant racism against Romani people, and it along with all the other materials using the word that I run into in this project are still quoted faithfully where applicable. The word is widely considered an ethnic slur now, but it's one that a lot of these materials use.

However, I was also using it as a casual word to describe Romani people in my reviews, without realizing that it was offensive to people of those ethnic groups, and only recently realized how totally not okay that was. So, I won't be doing that anymore, and have removed old places where I did. If any Romani person read those reviews and was hurt or offended, I hope you'll accept my sincere apologies and promise to never do that again.

And now, I will head off to work on a review and hope to do better in the future. I can't time travel to whack my dumbass younger self upside the head with awareness of major social issues, but I can at least take responsibility for fixing her mistakes and hope to not repeat them.

(Of course, another part of being a responsible reviewer would be actually, you know, reviewing things on motherfucking time, but let me try to improve one step at a time here.)