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rotinaj posted:Did Marion Zimmer Bradley get brought up as a monster yet, because that one loving hurt. Mists of Avalon was for the longest time one of the bigger successes in feminist, female-written fantasy. Yeah I mean I think only her husband could be considered worse than her unless I'm forgetting some axe-murdering fantasy writer
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Sep 2, 2020 02:59
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Pinball posted:Pern as a setting is really interesting, but a lot of what McCaffrey chose to do with it and her homophobia make it pretty awkward. She gave what seemed like a lot of thought to the social structure of the dragons and modeled them after eusocial insects, but then never thought oh, if I say the only dragons that can be ridden by women are the female golds, and that leaves all the female greens to be ridden by men, and the greens will be chased by the blues and the browns that are also ridden by men...
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Sep 2, 2020 03:11
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PetraCore posted:IIRC she added later that women were 'supposed' to be green dragonriders, but that the society of Pern had shifted over time to more and more men doing it which then ended up pushing women out? Unless that's a fandom invention. Really, a lot of problems could be solved by either acknowledging the weird consent issues going on or providing an alternative for people who didn't want to gently caress when their dragons did. Also tbh I always found the 'lower ranked' riders more interesting as potential protagonists than bronze or gold riders, esp because the modeling on eusocial insects means goldriders are stuck in one place a lot. Nono you see the dragons give off powerful swaths of irrisistable horny energy so the people are totally into it and its definitely not basically magical date rape
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Sep 2, 2020 03:16
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Bismuth posted:Nono you see the dragons give off powerful swaths of irrisistable horny energy so the people are totally into it and its definitely not basically magical date rape
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Sep 2, 2020 03:19
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I remember reading Pern and thinking, as a kid, gently caress, if I could have a dragon, any dragon would be awesome! Meanwhile in Pern, only the Super Cool Girls get to have Queen Dragons, and Super Cool Boys get the Bronze. Halfway Cool Boys get Bronze. And the Deltas and Epsilons get blue and green. No one wants blue or green dragons, they all suck. It would have been far more interesting if some blues and greens took off somewhere and started their own colonies. Like wasps or hornets instead of ants.
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Sep 2, 2020 03:20
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ChubbyChecker posted:yeah, if you're not a linguist, pseudo-english names work better than gibberish apostrophe salads A while back my bilingual preschooler started making up new names for herself. They were weird and didn't really resemble any naming paradigm I was familiar with, and few of them have any connection to any language that I can find. Phonologically there are features kind of between Chinese and English. But it is all nonsense; phonologically consistent nonsense though. If I ever write a fantasy novel I am using those names or ones built like them.
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Sep 2, 2020 03:22
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Cowslips Warren posted:I remember reading Pern and thinking, as a kid, gently caress, if I could have a dragon, any dragon would be awesome! Full Pernese communism now! All dragons are valuable!
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Sep 2, 2020 03:23
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I would like to talk a bit about Goodkind's character names. And by talk I mean just list: Richard Rahl Darken Rahl Panis Rahl
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Sep 2, 2020 03:33
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Pinball posted:Another author I got really into that I haven't seen mentioned yet was Mercedes Lackey. Mercedes Lackey’s Wikipedia entry has the most cursed paragraphs ever written in the English language. ”A real self esteem booster” posted:Lackey is active in the ball-jointed doll community. She owns several dolls, many of which she has customized in the likenesses of her characters.
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Sep 2, 2020 03:33
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PetraCore posted:Bronzes and browns might be big and strong and cool and leaders, but it's funny greens and blues get so disrespected because the whole point is you can't fight thread by having one really big and strong dragon, you need a lot of dragons and the small and agile ones are essential to keeping any thread from reaching the ground. Greens and blues are more important than bronzes, because you can still collectively work without a super big strong leader, but a bronze is useless without blues and greens backing him up. Remember that the humans of Pern are the galaxy's stupidest assholes, they definitely got more into the (human) social prestige of having a fancy dragon over actual dragon utility Also 100th reminder that all the weird hosed up sex poo poo was purposfully built into the dragons because theyre human constructs
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Sep 2, 2020 03:45
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:i can't remember what it was called, but there was this one fantasy series whose author openly admitted that he came up with it while tripping his balls off. it was about a civilization where people could take physical attributes from each other, and the one who was taken from would be permanently disabled as long as both parties were alive. each person could only contribute one physical attribute, and each would cause a different disability. the taker had to essentially run hospices for the dozens or more of people who were empowering them. also, all of this poo poo stacked. so the main conflict was between some invading king who had taken so many stats that he had essentially become an invincible living god and a prince who tried to catch up by taking as many as he could get his hands on. That's the Runelords series, the disabled people are called "dedicants" and the only thing I remember about it was that the villain's name was Raj Ahten, and he had like hundreds of dedicants, but the power you got from them sometimes had serious drawbacks. Like if you get strength from one guy, cool, you have the strength of 2 men, but if you got strength from like 20 guys you had to be really careful not to accidentally break your own bones from swinging your sword too hard or whatever. Anyway the one that made you fast was called metabolism, and the protagonist ended up getting like 20 metabolism dedicants (which also seriously limited his lifespan because he's also living 20x faster) to match Raj Ahten in battle and he describes breathing as like sucking honey into your lungs. I guess I remember more than one thing about the books. I think the villain was trying to conquer the world so he could get an army before a race of giant bugs invaded, but I never got to read the third book in the series.
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Sep 2, 2020 04:01
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Flared Basic Bitch posted:Mercedes Lackey’s Wikipedia entry has the most cursed paragraphs ever written in the English language. at least filk is just nerdier folk music, and isn't molesting children Wikipedia article on Marion Zimmer Bradley posted:In 2014, her daughter, Moira Greyland, accused her of sexual abuse from the age of 3 to 12. In an email to The Guardian, Greyland said that she had not spoken out before because:[15] Edit: I read Runelords! I am convinced there is a group of novels published between the late '90s and early-mid 00s that got popular solely off of their cool as hell cover art, check this poo poo out  
rotinaj fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Sep 2, 2020 |
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Sep 2, 2020 04:02
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rotinaj posted:Did Marion Zimmer Bradley get brought up as a monster yet, because that one loving hurt. Mists of Avalon was for the longest time one of the bigger successes in feminist, female-written fantasy. Last Chance U is crazy this season.
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Sep 2, 2020 04:05
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Pinball posted:Pern as a setting is really interesting, but a lot of what McCaffrey chose to do with it and her homophobia make it pretty awkward. She gave what seemed like a lot of thought to the social structure of the dragons and modeled them after eusocial insects, but then never thought oh, if I say the only dragons that can be ridden by women are the female golds, and that leaves all the female greens to be ridden by men, and the greens will be chased by the blues and the browns that are also ridden by men... 90% sure there was a VERY minor character that was a gay male on a blue, but it's hard to remember because I read that as a kid and it could have been some fanfic online instead. But yeah holy poo poo I totally forgot about the homophobia, and especially the rape. It's a shame because having an army of space dragons trained to kill alien spores while the totally not a termite queen is the top dog was like crack for my preteen brain. And I ate up all the "Canon Is Sacred" poo poo too, not realizing how it basically put everyone into a really gross little box. The green dragons were basically dumb sluts and the riders that were made to ride them were clearly stand ins for what she considered "regular" women, and that's not even getting into the male green riders. It's like a wormhole of otherisms. gently caress, there goes my childhood. I do also remember a footnote where all riders were basically raceless and only came in tans because the white and black people hosed and blended together to basically eliminate race in Pernese society. To my dumb kid brain that was so liberal and freeing.
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Sep 2, 2020 04:10
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The only Pern book I ever read was the one that explained how they originally colonized the planet. I didn't know what the Pern series was and them ending up with castles and dragons at the end made me surprised as gently caress. It just seemed so abrupt.
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Sep 2, 2020 04:30
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extra row of teeth posted:90% sure there was a VERY minor character that was a gay male on a blue, but it's hard to remember because I read that as a kid and it could have been some fanfic online instead. But yeah holy poo poo I totally forgot about the homophobia, and especially the rape. It's a shame because having an army of space dragons trained to kill alien spores while the totally not a termite queen is the top dog was like crack for my preteen brain. And I ate up all the "Canon Is Sacred" poo poo too, not realizing how it basically put everyone into a really gross little box. The green dragons were basically dumb sluts and the riders that were made to ride them were clearly stand ins for what she considered "regular" women, and that's not even getting into the male green riders. It's like a wormhole of otherisms. gently caress, there goes my childhood. A space colonized society where everyone is mixed race could be done well, but only if you're willing to actually do it.
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Sep 2, 2020 04:32
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Manzoon posted:I would like to talk a bit about Goodkind's character names. And by talk I mean just list: Panis Rahl still makes me chuckle. Goodkind does not seem to be the kind of person who would put intentional jokes in his work, so he has to be unaware of what it sounds like. Look at this man, he doesn't look like he's ever laughed at anything short of a poor person being beaten by police  Flared Basic Bitch posted:Mercedes Lackey’s Wikipedia entry has the most cursed paragraphs ever written in the English language. At the Anime Convention I work at, they have a doll section and every time I go past it I get creeped out. Realistic looking dolls always freak me out. twistedmentat fucked around with this message at 04:38 on Sep 2, 2020 |
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Sep 2, 2020 04:34
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PetraCore posted:Funny how she never mentioned this to any of the cover artists and everyone just ended up white... Not to defend her because you're completely right, but the artists in the older books NEVER got the dragons right either. With the exception of one or two that looked vaguely like a Pernese dragon, they were always stock medieval dragons. Pern dragons have leathery skin instead of scales, compound eyes, and giraffe-like ossicones (horn nubs). IIRC Pern had a different sky and stuff too but the settings were drawn all wrong too. I don't know if it's because of a product of the era, but if she really cared about her canon she should have been loving fuming over that and not gay people riding red dragons or whatever.
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Sep 2, 2020 05:16
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I accidentally got an idiot high school friend into objectivism by lending him my copy of the first sword of truth novel Sorry Eric, I was an idiot edgy 14 year old I didn’t realize you’d take it so serious
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Sep 2, 2020 06:13
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PetraCore posted:Funny how she never mentioned this to any of the cover artists and everyone just ended up white... I've actually been writing a book, mostly because I was pretty sure I'd get quarantined and probably die from the Covid so i figured at least maybe I can leave a bad sci-fi novel behind, and i figured that yea, a space faring human society would probably have a lot of mixed race people in it. Maybe not entirely, but i've made it pretty clear that white people are basically a curious minority in their empire. Plus I figured that this would mean that names would become fairly worldly, like my main character's name is William Mohammad Frey. I also figured that people going on an colonizing the galaxy would probably become vegetarian or even vegan because fruits and vegetables are way more efficient to cart around than meat. Though I have a different faction of humans who do maintain racial purity, but its because their religion says Humans are Gods perfect creation and therefor must remain as they are created, so people of certain racial groups can only have children from within their racial group. Other than that there isn't any racism in there, or so they like to act, but oddly all the people in charge are white. But they're not racist, they're very clear on that.
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Sep 2, 2020 07:12
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Bismuth posted:Also 100th reminder that all the weird hosed up sex poo poo was purposfully built into the dragons because theyre human constructs  They just made a bunch of little flying lizards that were already there bigger and more telepathic dont blame me for knowing i was trapped camping for two weeks with only one book and it was the pern origin story, i have suffered edit: upon reflection i think the humans made the telepathic bonding gender selective for Reasons. which means we both are mostly right. I do remember humans getting hornt because their little lizards were hornt tho. Lysistrata fucked around with this message at 07:36 on Sep 2, 2020 |
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Sep 2, 2020 07:32
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rotinaj posted:Terry Goodkind had one book in his series where the Hero carves the most beautiful statues ever and they are unveiled in the capital city of Communism Land. This instantly spurs the poor to revolt and overthrow Communism. Also over 50% of the female characters are whores and/or bdsm dominatrixes. When the bad guy Emperor takes over the temple of sorceresses he takes control of their minds and turns them into army communal property. The author has his madonna figure that is the only woman good enough for the hero but he is surrounded by “impure” women. A lot of the novels are Richard Raul redeeming the dominatrixes and they become his personal bodyguard. The amount of time he put into explaining the intense torture used in his books is more than a little creepy. I think one of the worst scenes in the book is when the heroine takes over an army. A merchant is passing by and is carrying some of the other heroes. She does not know this and orders the merchant killed for security reasons. He had done nothing wrong but he had seen the army. She only lets him live when she finds out the merchant has the equivalent of the congressional Medal of Honor and saved the nation once. I believe that is the same book where she uses brilliant military strategy and she and the entire army strip naked and attack the enemy at night coated in white powder to make the enemy think they were ghosts. Oh, and one of the books is dedicated to the intelligence community. I am guessing he is pro-waterboarding?
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Sep 2, 2020 07:50
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Bismuth posted:Wasnt a lot of the homophobia stuff after her son took over? I heard the series got a lot more chud-flavored after that actually in this case the woman was the homophobic chud one from the start i can't believe how dumb i was in the 90s to have been excited about the bare existence of the idea of queer people in a dragon book that my teen self failed to realize that the author had written all the queer men as nasty catty queens, and also same with all the women who weren't the very special tiny psychic tameable-prize protagonist (who WAS a nasty catty queen but got properly tamed through a strong firm man properly loving her)
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Sep 2, 2020 09:14
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Xenocides posted:I think one of the worst scenes in the book is when the heroine takes over an army. A merchant is passing by and is carrying some of the other heroes. She does not know this and orders the merchant killed for security reasons. He had done nothing wrong but he had seen the army. She only lets him live when she finds out the merchant has the equivalent of the congressional Medal of Honor and saved the nation once. I believe that is the same book where she uses brilliant military strategy and she and the entire army strip naked and attack the enemy at night coated in white powder to make the enemy think they were ghosts. Also the guys in the army are all hard as gently caress because Kahlan or whatever her name was is so loving hot dudes just can't not get wood when she's around. Like why do you need to include this poo poo in the book? If you just said "They stripped naked and painted themselves like ghosts to freak out the enemy" that would be enough, but nope, gotta remind everyone that you're OC Waifu is hot as gently caress. As I said, I've been writing a book and reading a lot of guides on how to write, and I find the lessons of "what does it add to the story" "Does this need to be there?" and "Not everything has to be explained" very helpful.
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Sep 2, 2020 09:30
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SoR Blaze posted:That's the Runelords series, the disabled people are called "dedicants" and the only thing I remember about it was that the villain's name was Raj Ahten, and he had like hundreds of dedicants, but the power you got from them sometimes had serious drawbacks. Like if you get strength from one guy, cool, you have the strength of 2 men, but if you got strength from like 20 guys you had to be really careful not to accidentally break your own bones from swinging your sword too hard or whatever. Written by David Farland. First couple of books were great, had some great action scenes that were more super heroics than anything else and ramped up the action until the interesting bad guy had towers full of ppl hes maimed to turn intl superman. Then the good guy just gets earth powers for some reason and beats him. The series then turns into books about fighting giant beetles and deteriorates from then until the author holds hostage the latest book about the hero's son or whatever until more fans buys his writing help seminars
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Sep 2, 2020 09:43
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CynCyanide posted:Sure, it's a fun murder mystery. The protagonist is a computer nerd college professor who writes a lovely scifi novel called "Bimbos of the Death Sun" which I think was his publisher's idea? He goes to his local science fiction convention to promote it and also gawk at computers with the other turbo-nerds. Anyway, the corpse was a big name scifi author who wrote a Conan-esque series and pisses off everyone around him. It has a sequel called "Zombies of the Gene Pool." nice
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Sep 2, 2020 09:59
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rotinaj posted:at least filk is just nerdier folk music, and isn't molesting children fucken lol at the darrel k sweet covers he's truly the king of lovely fantasy covers at least larry elmore could draw t&a
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Sep 2, 2020 10:09
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I want to contribute, I do... I want to present Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. This is a Speculative Fiction novel focused on two Teenage... well, fucks. A focus of the novel is on Oryx, who was sold into child slavery and sex trade. However, she says that it wasn't bad, and makes fun of the genitalia of the Photographer, and tells the protagonist that it wasn't wrong. I honestly have not found a worse book to read, and unfortunately there was a Trilogy? But no matter, the author insisted that it is Speculative Fiction, not Sci Fi. Do not listen to the Audiobook of this.
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Sep 2, 2020 10:27
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I forgot about Terry Goodkind until this thread. I read the first few in high school because a friend loved them and I found them - fine? Then after uni I found the next couple on a clearance sale and brought them. I honestly could not believe how obvious the objectivist stuff was (probably because I hadn't encountered Ayn Rand in high school) and just how "perfect" Richard Rahl was in everything. Oh yeah - the friend that introduced me to them is a massive libertarian nowadays even though I am sure he has only worked in jobs paid for the US tax-payer (military though - the one things taxes are okay for I guess). Anyway - I don't think anyone mentioned how Eddings he wrote a standard hero's journey series and then followed it up with a huge power fantasy series as the sequel - then did the exact same thing for his next two series.
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Sep 2, 2020 11:07
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Pinball posted:Pern as a setting is really interesting, but a lot of what McCaffrey chose to do with it and her homophobia make it pretty awkward. She gave what seemed like a lot of thought to the social structure of the dragons and modeled them after eusocial insects, but then never thought oh, if I say the only dragons that can be ridden by women are the female golds, and that leaves all the female greens to be ridden by men, and the greens will be chased by the blues and the browns that are also ridden by men... was it mackaffery or mercedes lackey who had huge meltdowns online about their ip, like completely cuckoo? Manzoon posted:I would like to talk a bit about Goodkind's character names. And by talk I mean just list: lmao panis rahl is a great name
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Sep 2, 2020 12:07
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rotinaj posted:Did Marion Zimmer Bradley get brought up as a monster yet, because that one loving hurt. Mists of Avalon was for the longest time one of the bigger successes in feminist, female-written fantasy. Mists of Avalon has a scene where there is this giant orgy where Artus and Morrigan gently caress and it describes a young girl crying as she is raped by an old man, just in a random aside among descriptions of who else is participating in the orgy. Why did this ever come as a surprise? Anyway, Trudi Canavan hasn't been mentioned and I feel her The Black Magician trilogy deserves a mention. The plot starts relatively harmless, oppressed orphan is found to have powerful magic, enters wizarding school, politics happen, people try to use her, there's an evil dude who uses black magic. Then the black magic guy becomes her teacher, they fall in love (did I mention he's about twice her age at least? Don't worry, she's very mature for her age!), black magic is actually cool and good, the entire town donates blood for a black magic ritual to save the world, teacher guy dies, girl is pregnant, not sure if she's still underage at that point but probably yes, what the everloving gently caress did I just read? Bonus points for the Gay Magician. He's gay, you know? He's very gay. In his own viewpoint chapters he thinks about how gay he is about every second page. In other chapters, every time he enters a room, the viewpoint character pauses to think about how he's heard that this guy is gay. I don't think he has any other personality traits.
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Sep 2, 2020 12:29
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"He gayly opened the door which swung open in a gayish manner to reveal the gay scene within. The gay gayed "Gay!" as the gayosity engayed him."
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Sep 2, 2020 13:51
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Ninurta posted:I want to contribute, I do... I want to present Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. This is a Speculative Fiction novel focused on two Teenage... well, fucks. A focus of the novel is on Oryx, who was sold into child slavery and sex trade. However, she says that it wasn't bad, and makes fun of the genitalia of the Photographer, and tells the protagonist that it wasn't wrong. I honestly have not found a worse book to read, and unfortunately there was a Trilogy? But no matter, the author insisted that it is Speculative Fiction, not Sci Fi. Do not listen to the Audiobook of this. I think The Handmaid's Tale and Robber Bride were her only real good books. The sequel to the Handmaid's Tale was pure poo poo though. Oh the evil Aunt Lydia has been secretly good all along! Also, the daughters of the main characters never end up in sexual slavery because one is raised elsewhere and the other decides to become an Aunt. Because that is something you can choose to do. Just...not have kids and become a sexless Aunt. Now, other girls end up as Wives or Handmaids but overall we don't care about them because they're bitches to the daughters. Seriously reads like a poo poo fanfic.
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Sep 2, 2020 14:43
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Oryx and Crake is a really really good book that will probably turn out to be quite prescient, but yeah, I can't think of much way to defend the sexual details of that book. The male characters are really never shown to be good people though, in all fairness. It really is just a strange lurid detail.
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Sep 2, 2020 16:04
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Some years back I was in a bookstore looking over the fantasy section, and next to a Salvatore book called like "Lots of Orcs" or something, was a series called "Queen of the Orcs". It was about this woman whose life sucked, and all she wanted to do was blow this one orc. Then she did! Good series.
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Sep 2, 2020 16:24
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Soapy_Bumslap posted:Some years back I was in a bookstore looking over the fantasy section, and next to a Salvatore book called like "Lots of Orcs" or something, was a series called "Queen of the Orcs". Yeah Orcs are sexy now, glad writers are catching up
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Sep 2, 2020 16:25
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Now?!? Buddy Grishnack was the original sexy orc
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Sep 2, 2020 16:30
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Pinball posted:Another author I got really into that I haven't seen mentioned yet was Mercedes Lackey. Behold, the most angsty protagonist to ever angst. I...I...remember this book. The cover, it sat on the shelves of the hobby shop I was working in college forever and I never read it but the image welded into my brain and I jumped back in time when I saw it now. Never knew what it was all about but fantasy MLP fanfic sounds lit. 
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Sep 2, 2020 17:08
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While not necessarily books, I always found the early-mid 90's what I can describe as EDGELORD 3000 comics about hyper sexy women as protagonists or side characters like Lady Death, Darkness, or Witchblade a bit cringe even as a horny teenager. I dunno what people feel about those comics but I cannot help but to feel a bit  now remembering them.The storylines were, iirc, fanfiction-y (like Lady Death is cursed by Satan and now has to kill everyone on earth) at best. The Darkness had something about mafia and demons, Witchblade was, idk, she was a model or something but now had an alien artifact on her hand fought other boob people or bad dudes. Boob Sephiroth  I watched enough Hentai to know where this is going.jpeg 
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Sep 2, 2020 17:23
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Lol Witchblade is written by David Wohl, probably not the same David Wohl that gave us Jacob though. But in my mind it is. Comics like that in the 90s I honestly thought just existed as pinup art, there was nothing else but then i found out there were stories to justify it which made it worse.
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Sep 2, 2020 17:38
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