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nankeen posted:a powerful work of speculative fiction and one that has a lot to say about the sociopolitical context of its creation. though its messages may be challenging to some and a narrow-minded reader may be tempted to dismiss them, i believe that the purpose of art is not to be beautiful, but to speak truth And if you watch the movie, you can hear Robocop say it!
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Sep 2, 2019 18:29
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:From everything I've read the book under review in that article was written by a man who can actually write. A lotta people seem to be trying to do an African game of Thrones, especially after the popularity of Black Panther made literary agents see the money they could get selling that kind of book rights to film studios. Lucasfilm is already working on their version based on a book: https://shadowandact.com/children-o...ney-acquisition
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Sep 3, 2019 03:15
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:From everything I've read the book under review in that article was written by a man who can actually write. Those outcast mutant kids living with the witch were fun. Tracker being weirded out by the kid with a giraffe’s neck is especially hilarious. Overalm the book was confusing to me. It’s like every page has new weird and creative poo poo happening and writeen well, but it’s all bogged down in this constant ‘and then everything was really poo poo and rapey and poo poo-rapey’ tone that has for God knows how long been the standard for fantasy fiction. Really there should be a law against fnatasy where everyone says ‘gently caress’ every other word. It’s the best indicator that this is going to be the same kind of VERY SERIOUS FANTASY that has been the norm since Song of Ice and Fire became a dark horse success.
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Sep 7, 2019 23:09
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Well, with regards to All of That... Something that keeps popping up in Genre Fiction is when authors of fantasy and scifi insist on shoving their weird explicit sexual fantasies into books. Anne McCaffrey did it, god knows Heinlein did it, Phillip K Dick did it. If you close your eyes and throw a dart on a dartboard it would be a lot harder to hit the section of authors that don’t put their creepy and disgusting fetishes into their books then it would be to hit the other way around. So it seems, to me at least, that authors do not write Piss Rape Hyenas scenes because they want to write Even Darker and Gritter fantasy lit, though there seems to be a competition aspect to it — Gurm has his rape fetish scenes, numerous scifi authors have screeds about Why Pedophilia is Good, then Bakker tried to make tentacle rape and male pregnancy a philosophical issue with his concern trolling regarding porn (even as he contributed to it lol) and now we have Piss Rape Hyenas. They’re actively trying to one up each other on the gross factor lol. Like I get that these authors are trying to establish the Grim Dark And Gritty Nature of their stories but there’s an aspect being missed and that is, the porn. These scenes are not just to horrify, they are also to tittilate and masturbate to. The author didn’t write bestiality rape just because they thought it was a scene setting tentpole, they wrote it to be pornographic. That’s not just a scene, it’s porn. Why did he insert explicit bestiality anal rape porn into his story? Well... And that’s just a strange and bizarre part of the genre lit scene these days. Everyone disguises their pornography as Dark And Gritty Literature. I really doubt Bakker would write tentacle rape mpreg if tentacle porn didn’t exist. Even if they aren’t getting off to it themselves they totally know there’s going to be people who jerk off to it. So you know, part of the absolute mess that’s genre lit these days is how these authors keep passing off their gross fetishes as actual writing. But it’s just porn. And they keep trying to pretend its philosophical and deep, but tbh that description of the Piss Rape Hyenas book just sounds like the stupidest edgiest poo poo. Can that really count as a book when it’s just Agony In Pink with the serial numbers filed off? Guess I’m rambling at this point but honestly, it really annoys me how genre authors keep trying to stealth their gross fetish porn past audiences at this point. It’s tired, get a new gimmick Genre Fiction!
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Sep 9, 2019 04:38
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I don't think that the author of three critically acclaimed and prize-winning novels about Jamaican history is suddenly in the company of Heinlein and Bakker now because his new book is fantastic, but that's beside the point because nothing's ever stopped literary authors from being enormous perverts anyway.
Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 05:44 on Sep 9, 2019 |
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Sep 9, 2019 05:40
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The samples of those passages posted hear honestly read like they're intended to be horrific, so I don't think this is a thinly-veiled authorial fetish thing. The impression I'm getting is that this is doing the "fantasy novel that establishes its dark and serious tone via a lot of sexual violence" convention about as well as it can be done, with obvious authorial skill, but that convention is just so goddamn tiresome. I can't imagine getting through a full novel of this poo poo, let alone a series. (Also the "real-world mythological monsters, except now they do their thing by raping!" stuff sounds dire.)
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Sep 9, 2019 05:56
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Antivehicular posted:The samples of those passages posted hear honestly read like they're intended to be horrific, so I don't think this is a thinly-veiled authorial fetish thing. The impression I'm getting is that this is doing the "fantasy novel that establishes its dark and serious tone via a lot of sexual violence" convention about as well as it can be done, with obvious authorial skill, but that convention is just so goddamn tiresome. I can't imagine getting through a full novel of this poo poo, let alone a series. This is the impression I got as well. The problem is twofold: -The sexual violence is horrifying and unpleasant to read about if you're not mired in the fantasy genre that just makes the book unreadable, regardless of Marlon James' skill -If you have read a lot of fantasy fiction you are desensitized to this crap by countless hack authors who characterize their villains by endless sexual assault. When you are writing scenes that look like they came from the pen of Bakker or Goodkind you're going to get lumped in with the dumpster. Maybe this is unfair, but this is quite literally hack fantasy trope #1, as others have pointed out. We despise Messala because he is a treacherous and arrogant rear end in a top hat who sold Ben-Hur into slavery - we don't need more than that. It's a lazy cop out for authors who are unable or unwilling to put thought into their characterization.
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Sep 9, 2019 06:40
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HIJK posted:Bakker tried to make tentacle rape and male pregnancy a philosophical issue
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Sep 9, 2019 06:47
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Sham bam bamina! posted:nothing's ever stopped literary authors from being enormous perverts anyway. This. I mean, Nobel prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa has a whole book whole book about the sexual escapades of a rich family, including pederasty and getting off to spider sex
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Sep 9, 2019 07:11
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I don't think that the author of three critically acclaimed and prize-winning novels about Jamaican history is suddenly in the company of Heinlein and Bakker now because his new book is fantastic, but that's beside the point because nothing's ever stopped literary authors from being enormous perverts anyway. I see what you mean. My next question then would be, why make the jump from that material to something so turgid? Has he provided any info on why he decided to take his fantasy book in that direction? Antivehicular posted:The samples of those passages posted hear honestly read like they're intended to be horrific, so I don't think this is a thinly-veiled authorial fetish thing. The impression I'm getting is that this is doing the "fantasy novel that establishes its dark and serious tone via a lot of sexual violence" convention about as well as it can be done, with obvious authorial skill, but that convention is just so goddamn tiresome. I can't imagine getting through a full novel of this poo poo, let alone a series. Also a good point, I’d like to know why the author wanted to write that material though. HIJK fucked around with this message at 07:19 on Sep 9, 2019 |
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Sep 9, 2019 07:17
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HIJK posted:I see what you mean. My next question then would be, why make the jump from that material to something so turgid? Has he provided any info on why he decided to take his fantasy book in that direction? Maybe he felt that fantasy was the ideal medium for expressing queer black male sexuality? That's probably the biggest omnipresent theme of Red Leopard Black Wolf. There is not a whole lot of work done in that space in fantasy/sci fi fiction (Samuel Delaney is the only notable who I could name) and James had undeniably left his mark now.
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Sep 9, 2019 08:41
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its like none of you have even read babyfucker
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Sep 9, 2019 10:23
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my bony fealty posted:Maybe he felt that fantasy was the ideal medium for expressing queer black male sexuality? That's probably the biggest omnipresent theme of Red Leopard Black Wolf. There is not a whole lot of work done in that space in fantasy/sci fi fiction (Samuel Delaney is the only notable who I could name) and James had undeniably left his mark now. If that is the case the impression left by the book is that queer black male sexuality is either non-consensual, dictated by money and power relations or tied to violence, abuse and incest. It is possible that this is a product of growing up queer in Jamaica. If it is Marlon James certainly has my sympathy.
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Sep 9, 2019 11:48
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Battle Mad Ronin posted:If that is the case the impression left by the book is that queer black male sexuality is either non-consensual, dictated by money and power relations or tied to violence, abuse and incest. It is possible that this is a product of growing up queer in Jamaica. If it is Marlon James certainly has my sympathy. To expand on this, note that the Leopard is the first man Tracker ever says he loved, but they never bang. That said, it's not just gays but everyone in James' setting who is stuck in the horrific cycle of sexual violence (a lot of women get abused and the princess is explicitly fighting to bring back Incest Matriarchy). Pretty sure his other books tackle queer black people as well.
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Sep 9, 2019 14:27
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So something that never gets mentioned in discussions of Black Leopard Red Wolf (that I've seen) is the relationship between Tracker and Mossi. I'd go as far to say that this, along with Tracker's children (and they eventually merge together), is the main plot of the book - more important than The Leopard, more important than chasing the kid ("The child is dead. There is nothing left to know."), more important than cum spiders. I understand why this is overlooked because in terms of word count and pages it takes up far less than all the awful poo poo. Why? Because Tracker is reluctant to write about it, because it's incredibly painful for him. Like everything else in his world it eventually goes to poo poo, leaving him a hollowed-out revenant. But for a while he was happy and had true consensual love in a world determined to allow neither. Whether that makes all of the violence and death have any more "point" in the narrative is up to the reader to decide. "Nobody loves no one," says the Leopard, which Tracker too adopts. This is clearly just as much bullshit as anything else in the story. Tracker knows it, too, but it's easier to pretend you never loved something than confront the pain of losing it.
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Sep 9, 2019 15:40
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my bony fealty posted:Maybe he felt that fantasy was the ideal medium for expressing queer black male sexuality?
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Sep 11, 2019 03:59
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Flesnolk posted:The only thing fantasy is the ideal medium for is sucking. Just like your posts!
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Sep 11, 2019 06:16
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HIJK posted:Well, with regards to All of That... As much as I like to mock the CONTENT WARNINGS that read like a list of tags straight off sad panda. I do kinda prefer know what I'm getting into at the outset and judge if the premise seems interesting enough to warrant the author subjecting me to their fetishes.
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Sep 11, 2019 19:09
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HIJK posted:Guess I’m rambling at this point but honestly, it really annoys me how genre authors keep trying to stealth their gross fetish porn past audiences at this point. It’s tired, get a new gimmick Genre Fiction! Lol if you think that's a problem with only genre fiction. Pretty much all fiction has that issue.
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Sep 11, 2019 19:12
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ShinsoBEAM! posted:As much as I like to mock the CONTENT WARNINGS that read like a list of tags straight off sad panda. I do kinda prefer know what I'm getting into at the outset and judge if the premise seems interesting enough to warrant the author subjecting me to their fetishes. Agreed very hard. Good Reads is a decent resource for getting the lowdown on what kind of story and controversial content there might be but you really have to stretch sometimes to find out what the heck the actual story is about for certain books. Kchama posted:Lol if you think that's a problem with only genre fiction. Pretty much all fiction has that issue. I never said it was the only problem with genre fiction. I left out the bad prose, the inability of many genre writers to tell a story, the endless imitation of Tolkien and 60s scifi authors, etc. There’s also plenty of weird gross sex stuff in Serious Literature but this is the Genre Books thread where we take critical looks at fantasy and scifi and weird fiction. Actually if there was a thread to critique Serious Literature that might be kind of fun! But anyway: The rape fetish stuff was just the topic that came up with the Piss Rape Hyenas. Like regular fiction has plenty of explicit imagery but Ya Ya Sisterhood doesn’t have consecutive pages of gay men being subjected to bestiality anal rape that ends in pregnancy with a side helping of pedophilic rape. If you arranged a dart board with “bestiality” “anal rape” “PIV rape” “tentacle rape” “The Chapter That Talks About Why Raping Children Should Be a Human Right” “forced pregnancy male and/or female victim” “pregnancy kink” “virginity kink “author’s pretentious blog posts about what s/he thinks of porn inserted as character’s smugly lecturing others” then you could throw three darts at this board and find a genre book that fits any configuration you land on. Yeah, authors are perverts and they write bad horrific porn all the time. But this is the genre fiction thread, and we’re talking about the unique foibles of genre authors. And it turns out they’re into some very weird and gross poo poo. 
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Sep 11, 2019 20:35
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Ryu Murakami loves putting baby dicks in his mouth
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Sep 11, 2019 23:09
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Sep 12, 2019 00:33
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Sham bam bamina! posted:
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Sep 12, 2019 01:47
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hits bong Is it not a more sublime exploration of the fantastic to transform the mundane pornography of the average literary work into the most lurid transgressions imaginable
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Sep 12, 2019 02:55
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https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/10/how-fanfiction-improves-writing/599197/ This explains...a lot.
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Oct 2, 2019 00:18
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Not really surprised. Half the ppl who write any genre fiction professionally probably wrote fanfics in high school. And the generation before that were writing in their mimeographed fanzines. The fact that that famous author was writing dbz fanfics in grad school is a bit lol though
Ccs fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Oct 2, 2019 |
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Oct 2, 2019 02:08
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crazy that writing for an insular, artistically conservative, and incestuous clique prepares people to write for an insular, artistically conservative, and incestuous clique
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Oct 2, 2019 03:08
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theres nothing wrong with genre fiction, it just has different goals than more literary fiction or w/e
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Oct 2, 2019 03:26
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A human heart posted:listen up bitch: i eat the dog poo poo and i enjoy it, and eating the dog poo poo is actually good to me
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Oct 2, 2019 04:12
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Sampatrick posted:theres nothing wrong with genre fiction, it just has different goals than more literary fiction or w/e I wasn't aware that abandoning all creativity while supposedly writing about the fantastical counted as a goal.
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Oct 2, 2019 06:12
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I wasn't aware that abandoning all creativity while supposedly writing about the fantastical counted as a goal. David Eddings' author bio said that he wrote the Belgariad to 'explore philosophical questions about the genre'. Those questions mostly concerned how much money he could get people to pay him and how little effort he could put into the task.
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Oct 2, 2019 06:22
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/10/how-fanfiction-improves-writing/599197/ they still can’t loving spell “fanfiction” ffs e: I haven’t read Jemisin does she have any dog on gay human bestiality rape in her stories? HIJK fucked around with this message at 06:27 on Oct 2, 2019 |
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Oct 2, 2019 06:23
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No her big thing is to create a setting where people have magic superpowers that lead to them sometimes wiping out entire towns completely by accident, then portraying them as unfairly repressed and trying to make them a metaphor for the treatment of black people in the U.S.
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Oct 2, 2019 11:08
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The_White_Crane posted:No her big thing is to create a setting where people have magic superpowers that lead to them sometimes wiping out entire towns completely by accident, then portraying them as unfairly repressed and trying to make them a metaphor for the treatment of black people in the U.S. Is she the one that I heard about a while ago, writing about the people who cause earthquakes or whatever and shockingly, the culture they grow up in is somewhat concerned about people who are like walking bombs? And that's uh.. the same as what was done to slaves? I thought that sounded extremely stupid.
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Oct 2, 2019 14:29
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pseudanonymous posted:Is she the one that I heard about a while ago, writing about the people who cause earthquakes or whatever and shockingly, the culture they grow up in is somewhat concerned about people who are like walking bombs? And that's uh.. the same as what was done to slaves? I thought that sounded extremely stupid. Yes. She also includes gay tragedy so the lady protagonist can get three ways with two dudes.
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Oct 2, 2019 14:38
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The_White_Crane posted:No her big thing is to create a setting where people have magic superpowers that lead to them sometimes wiping out entire towns completely by accident, then portraying them as unfairly repressed and trying to make them a metaphor for the treatment of black people in the U.S. Why do people keep trying to do this (badly) when X-Men exists and already did it (badly)?
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Oct 2, 2019 14:41
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Why do people keep trying to do this (badly) when X-Men exists and already did it (badly)? It sells I guess? I think it's some weird thing where it's like "well we want to deal with the issues of misogyny or racism in a way that makes the people who are the victims represented, but we also want to empower them and not just make them victims" .... so let's give them insane superpowers yet somehow they are still oppressed! It sort of made sense in the X-men. It's weird that people don't understand that people like Maya Angelou and many others have been writing about the effects of slavery and misogyny for many years without needing to resort to "they can cause earthquakes and are therefore an actual danger" in order to empower the characters they write about.
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Oct 2, 2019 15:15
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lol y'all just can't help yourselves from saying a woman of color's chosen method of exploring her heritage and oppression is invalid can you
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Oct 2, 2019 15:21
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I wasn't aware that abandoning all creativity while supposedly writing about the fantastical counted as a goal. The goal of genre fiction is to be an enjoyable read not to be an incredible artistic expression lmao
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Oct 2, 2019 15:33
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my bony fealty posted:lol y'all just can't help yourselves from saying a woman of color's chosen method of exploring her heritage and oppression is invalid can you Oh is she a PoC, I guess that means her work can't be critically analyzed in any way shape or form. Please update the op to note that we can only discuss the genre fiction of white males.
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Oct 2, 2019 15:47
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