(no subject)

Dear Argos:
When you say 1200-1400 and they instead turn up at 1138?
some of us were planning to still be asleep.

Warhammer: Drachenfels by Jack Yeovil

Warhammer is an irredeemably ablist setting. Visible difference is inevitably a sign of chaos, and warps bodies, minds and morals. The moral model of disability is in full effect and it's damn creepy.

In this particular book there's a poor pitiable mutant who looks like a Dwarf but is only a dwarfed human, who starts becoming more and more mutated, and he ends up killing himself to avoid acting on the impulses he feels. That's the closest the model allows to an honorable mutant. So it's sad becoming a mutant, but also involves the inevitable destruction of self, either by death or moral degeneration.

Plus 'madness' operates very much on the gothic horror mode where you fail your rolls and are lost forever. This is no mental illness, this is the triumph of evil inside the skull. And once again, suicide is the only way out.

Creepy.

So it ought to be really easy to put this on the 'nope' pile. But, actually, not so much easy, because this book has what so many of the books I've been reading lately utterly fail to: Female characters. Half a dozen fully speaking thinking choosing female characters. And a few more when I think hard.

( Read more... )

So only read this if grimdark body parts everywhere becoming the monsters horror is something you're actually looking for. But for what it is it has an interesting number of female characters, doing a variety of things. And the thing with the play and how it's about heroism and the stories about heroes? That it did pretty well.

I'll keep this one to read again later.




... despite having many many objections to the setting.