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Dienes posted:What's really telling in this one is how defensive Rothfuss is about it. He knows drat well how sexist it is, but he is too in love with it to change it and instead tries to insult the reader preemptively. Then there's the Rothfuss fans who are women who defend him endlessly. There's a bit of an overlap there with Terry Goodkind fans as well.
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Dec 23, 2019 01:30
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Don Gato posted:That's going in the book of grudges! Warhammer dwarfs aren't scottish, they're far northern Englishmen. Mancunians are basically Scottish. Liverpudlian's on the other hand are Irish.
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Dec 23, 2019 01:49
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there wolf posted:Not really. Rice built a pretty complete world with a ton of lore explaining everything you could possibly want to know about her vampires. The thing that struck me most about Meyer, and always comes to mind when people talk about how the books could be better, is the total lack of interest in really expanding the story beyond the two characters falling in love and Bella's fairytale ending. As I've said, I don't really like Rice that much but Twilight is such a poor copy that it makes me appreciate her work a little more. This may be true, but her world building always eventually falls by the wayside so she can wank it for a few hundred pages about how amazing Lestat is. Don't get me wrong, Twilight is dire, but Anne Rice knows how to take something good and run it into the ground so hard it breaks.
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Dec 23, 2019 03:29
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Anita Blake surely has some material for this thread, given the books apparently devolve into one woman's quest to gently caress all the vampires and werewolves.C.M. Kruger posted:Varley also made a big chart about how his centaur aliens that speak in music reproduce: For a second I thought you meant Andalites.
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Dec 23, 2019 03:34
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Anita Blake surely has some material for this thread, given the books apparently devolve into one woman's quest to gently caress all the vampires and werewolves. Werewolves and werepanthers and weretigers and werehyenas and wereswans and... Such a damned shame, I enjoyed reading the first few as pulp shlock from a woman's perspective.
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Dec 23, 2019 04:37
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Sometimes I wonder if that sort of thing happens because an author becomes successful and can write about their fetishes without worrying about effecting sales, or if they discover they've stumbled upon a very specific fanbase and decide to lean into it to keep moving books.
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Dec 23, 2019 04:44
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Crowetron posted:Sometimes I wonder if that sort of thing happens because an author becomes successful and can write about their fetishes without worrying about effecting sales, or if they discover they've stumbled upon a very specific fanbase and decide to lean into it to keep moving books. The happiest marriages are when both happen at once.
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Dec 23, 2019 05:11
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PJOmega posted:Then there's the Rothfuss fans who are women who defend him endlessly. I assume his smell is making them
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Dec 23, 2019 05:29
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Anita Blake surely has some material for this thread, given the books apparently devolve into one woman's quest to gently caress all the vampires and werewolves. Oh, and also she's weirdly obsessive about people's heights. Every character's height is compared with the other characters around them. Like, even characters who barely say or do anything will have their height mentioned. That's obviously not the worst thing about the book, but it stands out because it's so odd and unnecessary.
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Dec 23, 2019 05:35
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Was it on recommendation of this thread that I read the first Merry Gentry book? It was fun trash except for all the monster-loving baiting. Why put that in multiple times if you're not going to go there?
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Dec 23, 2019 06:43
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there wolf posted:Interview came out two years before Hotel Transylvania. I did check before posting that claim about Rice's influence because I knew they came out around the same time. Yarbro had written at least one vampire short story before Interview came out. I think the only influence was that it was easier for her to get a book deal for HT after the success of Interview. There really is zero influence either way in terms of characterization.
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Dec 23, 2019 07:28
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AlbieQuirky posted:Yarbro had written at least one vampire short story before Interview came out. I think the only influence was that it was easier for her to get a book deal for HT after the success of Interview. Before of after Rice wrote her short story that lead to Interview?! Really just loving around at this point. I don' think Yarbo is derivative of Rice, just what you said about publishers probably being a lot more interested in her non-Dracula vampire story after another one had done well. I still consider that kind of publisher filtering to be a part of a book/series' influence; similarities can be coincidental in the creation, but they become important when people are handing out publishing deals based on them.
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Dec 23, 2019 09:28
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there wolf posted:Was it on recommendation of this thread that I read the first Merry Gentry book? It was fun trash except for all the monster-loving baiting. Why put that in multiple times if you're not going to go there? She fucks all her cadre, and ends up with triplets, each of which has three fathers.
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Dec 23, 2019 10:29
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Tiggum posted:That wouldn't even be the main reason for including that series in this thread. I've only read one of them (Kiss the Dead - book 21), but it was basically fascist propaganda. With sex scenes. Now I'm morbidly curious (about the outright fascist propaganda turn). The height thing makes sense because the main character is petite and the first book has a repeated point of it's hard to stare down a vampire when you can't look them in the eye (because vampires can mesmerize) so you end up awkwardly staring at their chest. Which of course the vampire corner of her love triangle always has bared in poet shirts.
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Dec 23, 2019 10:32
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Crowetron posted:Sometimes I wonder if that sort of thing happens because an author becomes successful and can write about their fetishes without worrying about effecting sales, or if they discover they've stumbled upon a very specific fanbase and decide to lean into it to keep moving books. A little of column A, a little of column B. The first few books have a lot of will-they-won't-they between the main character, sexy head vampire, and sexy head werewolf. Ultimately they don't, I want to say until book 3 or 4. Finally she bones down with one or both of them, and she sees her sales spike. Around this time, she splits with her husband, who the werewolf was based on. So his character becomes abusive and controlling so she nopes out and starts boning down on whatever the flavor of the week was, with longer and longer sex scenes. Her book sales keep getting stronger, because some people were onboard for the monster boning, and people who were into the pulp were still fine with the sex scenes. Even if they were getting a bit much. At some point, she started the Meredith Gentry series, about a half faerie, half human who was too buxom to be attractive to most faeries, who is unwillingly thrust into a breeding race with her evil half brother. Whomever had kids first would become the new head of the dark faeries, and the other would be killed. So she gets set up with 9 sexy dark faeries with Deep Tragic Backstories (tm) and after many books gets pregnant with triplets, each of the kiddos having 3 different fathers. Suffice it to say that these were heavier on loving than plot. Most of the above knowledge is from wiki way back when, I think I got 2 books in? I bailed on the Anita Blake series because I careened through them while riding trains bouncing around Europe and got to experience the sex creeping in a microcosm. Whatever book I was on started a non-plot relevant sex scene so I skipped the chapter on my Kindle, only for the sex scene to still be ongoing. I hit skip again and it was continuing but a fourth character had entered the mix. I laughed, closed the file, and never picked up anything else by her. This was 10 or so years ago so some of this may not be accurate. Still was better written than Dresden Files.
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Dec 23, 2019 10:44
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PJOmega posted:She fucks all her cadre, and ends up with triplets, each of which has three fathers. But those guys are all sexy elf dudes with fairly conventional, if variously colored, bodies. Meanwhile the lizard dude, the rock giant, and the guy with tentacles at the crotch she gets into sexy situations with, but ultimately passes on loving. Because who would want to gently caress someone like that, except all the other fairies who do which is a significant plot point in the book, and now we're into weird miscegenation territory and it starts getting uncomfortable... And I know I've put too much thought into this trashy book, but I can't seem to stop.
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Dec 23, 2019 11:07
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there wolf posted:Not really. Rice built a pretty complete world with a ton of lore explaining everything you could possibly want to know about her vampires. The thing that struck me most about Meyer, and always comes to mind when people talk about how the books could be better, is the total lack of interest in really expanding the story beyond the two characters falling in love and Bella's fairytale ending. As I've said, I don't really like Rice that much but Twilight is such a poor copy that it makes me appreciate her work a little more. Meyer has admitted how little thought went into the series. The first book took only 6 months from concept to acceptance for publication and is basically a first draft with a few scenes cut and a few weeks of editing for grammar and spelling; I’ve read the cut scenes and the book somehow dragged even worse and was filled with bad grammar. Because Meyer never expected to write a sequel, literally none of the stuff revealed in the next books existed until she came up with them while writing. What looked in the first book like foreshadowing Jacob becoming a werewolf was actually meant to be a metaphor inspired by Quilleute mythology because there were never going to be any werewolves in the first place. Bella was only immune to Edward’s mind reading originally, which meant she had to find excuses for why Alice and Jasper’s powers worked on her when she made Bella a “shield.” Even when she got editors to help her, it’s clear that she writes by the seat of her pants.
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Dec 23, 2019 17:23
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C.M. Kruger posted:Varley also made a big chart about how his centaur aliens that speak in music reproduce: I have these books and they're so weird they have a special place in my heart, but I've never been able to bring myself to read anything else Varley wrote. Fun fact, all the women in that trilogy are varying shades of gay. The straightest is the one who comes from a lesbian separatist space colony and then she falls for a dude.
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Dec 23, 2019 18:29
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there wolf posted:But those guys are all sexy elf dudes with fairly conventional, if variously colored, bodies. Meanwhile the lizard dude, the rock giant, and the guy with tentacles at the crotch she gets into sexy situations with, but ultimately passes on loving. Because who would want to gently caress someone like that, except all the other fairies who do which is a significant plot point in the book, and now we're into weird miscegenation territory and it starts getting uncomfortable... And I know I've put too much thought into this trashy book, but I can't seem to stop. I thought tentacle crotch was one of her Retinue That Fucks but it's been a long time and I don't care to go back and check.
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Dec 23, 2019 19:09
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I've been enjoying reading through this thread but I'm on page thirty-something so I'm not up to date with the current topics, but I want to vent. I've been reading the Chtorr series by David Gerrold. The first and second books were not quite what I had expected, maybe a little underwhelming in hindsight but readable. The third book started with an apologetic foreword from the author, the first third is filled with endless pop psychology exposition from multiple characters and then, just when I was wondering whether it was time to give up, quote:In the evenings, we circled and danced. And we slept with each other. [...] Loolie was the most playful of them all. I'd been wrong about her age; she was almost eleven, but so small she still looked like a baby At least I won't have to worry about the next book in the series getting constantly delayed.
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Dec 27, 2019 14:46
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Courtesy of the genre literary criticism thread in TBB, the collision of horse girls and fantasy writing:Fuzzy Mammal posted:
chernobyl kinsman posted:it owns its so good fluffyDeathbringer posted:ah yes, the four genders: man, woman, man but worse, child Antivehicular posted:Yeah, I'm wondering what groups the terms actually apply to, because I feel like "stallions, mares, foals, geldings" seems likely to translate to "cis men, cis women, kids/some uncomfortably infantilized minority, ~everyone else~," and using a term for castrated male horses to apply generally to human gender minorities is a really bad look. TheGreatEvilKing posted:Oh my God, this book is a comedy goldmine. It's been a cringy Joss Whedonfest so far, but I'm only on page 29 and I have to share this passage with you all. TheGreatEvilKing posted:People were asking about the horse genders earlier. I'm gonna post this and then close the loving book because holy poo poo, why? fluffyDeathbringer posted:I feel like I've just invoked a demon I can no longer banish, what the hell lyons
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Dec 28, 2019 03:59
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They repeat the word "trap" too much for it to not be intentionally malicious.
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Dec 28, 2019 04:05
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That is astoundingly awful. I'm almost impressed.
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Dec 28, 2019 04:12
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It's like Schrodinger's TERF. Is it transpositive? Is it regressive? Who the gently caress knows!
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Dec 28, 2019 04:41
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When cis people write queer content... I think it's positive. It's just the dumb product of someone who wants to create some alternate gender system for exoticism, but doesn't actually have any sense of what a non-binary system would be like. And so they just graft some weird complications onto the existing one, throw in a trans person, and call it progressive representation.
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Dec 28, 2019 04:52
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I went looking for more information on that gender system and am amazed I couldn’t find anything. Did find a Wikipedia page about “worst books” though.
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Dec 28, 2019 06:27
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Unfortunately good politics does not always lead to good writing.
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Dec 28, 2019 08:25
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Cat Army 
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The Iron Rose posted:Unfortunately good politics does not always lead to good writing. The politics aren't even good in this case, although I can believe the writer had good intentions. Like I said in the other thread, they're still being gender essentialist, just by conflating gender and stereotyped gender roles ("leaders are men, nurturers are women") instead of conflating gender and physical traits. It's even worse because they decided to use the most common and regressive real-world stereotypes; if they wanted to play with the concept of gender arising from social role vs. biology, they could have at least created a novel social-role divide.
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Dec 28, 2019 10:39
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I loving hated Too Like the Lightening because it's set in a future world where the gender binary is gone and gendered language is considered offensive, but the narrator who's deposition you're reading insists it's important to understand what happened so bear with it. Then the only times it's not totally pointless and irrelevant are when we need to know the protagonist is weak to a display of traditional femininity, when the narrator needs to smugly tell you that although they're describing someone having the physical characteristics of one sex they using the opposite pronouns because they are actually the other gender, and when the narrator needs to call the audience hypocrites for assuming things because he used a gendered term. This passage about a housekeeper that's been described with a deep voice and stubble almost broke me- To Like the Lightening posted:With Chagatai, however, your guess is wrong, Is is not her job which makes me give her the feminine pronoun, despite her testicles and chromosomes. I saw her once when someone threatened her little nephew and the primal savagery with which those thick hands shattered the offender was unmistakably that legendary strength which lionesses, she-wolves, she-bats, she-doves, and all other 'she's' obtain when motherhood berserk them. That strength wins her 'she.'
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Dec 28, 2019 15:52
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The legendary strength of... bats.
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Dec 28, 2019 16:06
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Well known figure of maternal fury, Batman.
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Dec 28, 2019 16:09
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You can always tell when they try to create a new gender system, and their only point of origin is the bog standard binary. Not that other systems don't have their own issues (third gender systems are often just transwomen being shoved into some 'other' category), but they're out there and exist.
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Dec 28, 2019 16:16
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Pastry of the Year posted:The legendary strength of... bats. copy con benis.bat @echo off cls :aaa echo Pastry of the Year is a stupid moron with an ugly face and a big butt and their butt smells and... echo they like to kiss their own butt. goto aaa ^Z
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Dec 28, 2019 16:19
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there wolf posted:This passage about a housekeeper that's been described with a deep voice and stubble almost broke me- "I'm not assigning a gender to this person based on their job or body! That would be bigoted. I'm assigning a gender to this person based on my own biases about their behavior in a single incident, which is totally reasonable."
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Dec 29, 2019 01:55
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Antivehicular posted:"I'm not assigning a gender to this person based on their job or body! That would be bigoted. I'm assigning a gender to this person based on my own biases about their behavior in a single incident, which is totally reasonable." I mean the narrator's a fuckin (bigoted, among other things) lunatic who is trying very hard to convince you otherwise and obviously failing-- whether that works for you is one thing and i know it falls flat for some readers, but at the very least, that's not accidental
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Dec 29, 2019 11:25
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Yeah, the narrator being ever so slightly unreliable is a key point in that book. I think the last time I read something with a less reliable narrator was An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears, and that had four of them (good book, not for the squeamish, early-modern experimental medicine features at a rather disturbing level of detail). Groke has a new favorite as of 11:38 on Dec 29, 2019 |
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Dec 29, 2019 11:34
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I read a book (Your Truth or Mine) that tried to advertise itself as "A couple have to reevaluate how they see each other when a harsh truth comes out about one of them that causes a domino effect" that implied that the wife would have her own terrible secret that would unveil as her husbands infidelity did, but it turned out to be just "The wife finds out that her husband is an rear end in a top hat who has a history of abusive behaviour and violence to other people and comes to terms with the fact that her entire relationship was just normalised because her own father was trash unbeknownst to her because her mother tried to protect her feelings toward him, it's just that he didn't do THIS murder." It was advertised as Mr and Mrs Smith, but in truth turned out to be Rose Madder. However, it did have a satisfying ending where the wife sends the evidence exonerating her husband to the police so he doesn't go to jail for a murder he didn't commit, but at the same time she goes her own way and just fucks off leaving him to wallow in his own shittiness. I appreciate that she severed. The book wasn't bad, but it was a different type of story than the blurb promised so I just spent the story being annoyed at how unlikeable the husband was despite the wife realising that being the point of the story. The biggest secret the wife has is "She's seeing a therapist and is afraid of how her husband will see her if he finds out because she already knows he's kind of an rear end about mental health issues" BioEnchanted has a new favorite as of 11:39 on Dec 29, 2019 |
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Dec 29, 2019 11:36
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neongrey posted:I mean the narrator's a fuckin (bigoted, among other things) lunatic who is trying very hard to convince you otherwise and obviously failing-- whether that works for you is one thing and i know it falls flat for some readers, but at the very least, that's not accidental I actually asked in the book barn if it was worth continuing with for several reasons, and they brought up that is was supposed to be an unreliable narrator. Even then the interjections from whoever he's telling the story too came off as someone trying really hard not to think along gendered lines and failing, rather than someone coming from a background that doesn't observe them dealing with someone who does.
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Dec 29, 2019 12:24
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PJOmega posted:She fucks all her cadre, and ends up with triplets, each of which has three fathers. That's gonna make birthdays complicated.
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Dec 29, 2019 13:56
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there wolf posted:I actually asked in the book barn if it was worth continuing with for several reasons, and they brought up that is was supposed to be an unreliable narrator. Even then the interjections from whoever he's telling the story too came off as someone trying really hard not to think along gendered lines and failing, rather than someone coming from a background that doesn't observe them dealing with someone who does. That's a major plot point, fwiw. But if you're not feeling it you're not feeling it, and I can't blame you at all for that. It's just a favourite of mine so the urge to get defensive is what it is, lol
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Dec 29, 2019 14:54
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