(no subject)

Reading through shelves and shelves of really old fiction is making me much more forgiving of some of the newer fiction that I would previously have decided I didn't like.

I mean, when the comparison is books where you can go the entire book without seeing a woman, or books where women exist only for sex, a book with a female protagonist is already in a whole different league.

... mind you, a lot of the urban fantasy / paranormal romance I gave up on also made her be there just for sex. Bit of a labelling problem there, since I'm fine with that in appropriately labelled fanfic. Though actually there's always the assumed context with fic, because we know from canon all the other wonderful things they do, so it's different.



I really, really, really, need to sit down and write some fiction. I keep complaining about the same things, I should go fix them.

Except some of them seem to have colonised my brain so I'll sit down and invent a matrilineal matriarchal society full of amazing women and then end up with a plot outline about the men.

Need more practice. Or just to change a lot of pronouns.

Choice

It just occurred to me what bugged me about the women in the... last half dozen books I read by several different male authors.

Women as prizes are never women who choose between different options.

It's obvious once I've seen it. But when I was reading it was all from a male point of view and the most that happens is they compete for a woman but then something happens to take one out of the running and the other mourns for a while and then claims his default prize. It's never like in romances where there's the nice guy and the dangerous guy and a woman has actual opinions on both of them.

Women as prizes happen in the exact quantity required, exist long enough to prove they're worthy of their guy, and then just fade into the background.

It's creepy.

Now I have a sudden urge to rewrite something a bit more Pride & Prejudice... except I've not read that in a really long time and I'm not even sure I mean that one. So it's not my sort of rewrite that I'd be good at. Boo.

But also I was reading about the roles of women historically and how marriage was more about wealth and power than about love and it just struck me again how duty gets devalued by the romantic love narrative. I mean Romeo & Juliet is a tragedy because they die, but also because their stupid hormonal messing around gets other people killed. And yet there's a lot of people under the ridiculous impression it's romantic. Also any story where the lord runs off with the servant girl. It's all very well as far as it goes, it elevates the servant girl's social chances and is a much better gig than just getting the attention without the marriage, but there's a reason that a good aristocrat cares about his wife's wealth. Aristos are the boss of a really large number of people. They need money to maintain their estates, which means employing and feeding a whole lot of people, as well as doing things necessary to the community and being a good landlord. Yes there's not much guarantee they'll be good lords, but if they're good, they need the money for their people. Like reading the word Lord etymologically derives from Loaf Warden. There's the dude with enough bread for everyone. Marrying poor is bad not just for him but for potentially really large swathes of the country. That's not happily ever after, that's not romance, that's just ignoring duty for personal desire.

And yet that's a really difficult point to push, given how uphill it is against current standards.

Checking out someone's prospects is just trying to ensure neither the married couple nor their children will starve. And when a family was pretty much a business organisation, say with farming or weaving or any other thing, the extended family would be relying on strong marriages to keep everyone in eating.

Leaving all that behind, say to ride off on horseback somewhere, would be a bit like leaving with the company car, still on hire purchase, belonging to the company formed with relatives, and never seen again while not a breath of payment comes back.

Doing that for romance just means burning through your assets twice as fast, with more mouths to feed.

And if they're only your assets as part of a complex web of family investments, well, that's just rude.



So I don't get what's so wrong about going looking for a good investment prospect, seeing as you want to continue to eat without taking more than you return in food off the family table.



And the kind of fantasy adventure novel where the prince goes undercover and comes back with some pretty young woman who is at best trained to run a family business the size of an inn or a smallholding... it's like promoting the secretary to CEO because true love, it's really unlikely to work out well for tens of thousands of people.

... promoting the personal assistant to CEO because she's been running the company really well for years anyway is just a good investment.



But choosing the prince because he's a prince has a lot of drawbacks too. I mean, politics involves actual backstabbing. And if the kingdom falls apart you know who they'll blame, fairly or otherwise. And the new girl at court has absolutely no useful contacts.

If you're looking for a good place to raise children it's a hell of a gamble.



So 'romance' in fantasy novels is frequently a series of very poor choices, creepily presented as destiny with an ongoing lack of apparent choice.

I dislike it.

(no subject)

Plot bunny: magic road trip with expy Amanda and Vala, maybe Parker but she'd usually be part of a set and I'm less familiar with her canon.
Purpose to go steal some magic books left in a now inaccessible tower.
Mage rumoured to have been working on new spells, hence the tower being declared out of bounds, because that can leave the magic equivalent of nuclear waste.
Turns out the mage left a book dedicated to the Steal spells.
Theme of story is ethics of theft, like Highlander the Raven should have been:
when if ever is it right to steal.

Since one of the spells is Steal Youth you get a whole tangent about how youth gets stolen in a more mundane way, and if it's ever okay to do as you were done to, or steal it back.

Drawbacks: That's got to touch on some dark stuff.