LKH Merry and Anita yuck
Jul. 2nd, 2011 05:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI finished reading the Laurell K Hamilton books. All of them, as far as I can tell. There are no more.
I am quite glad.
This suggests I should have stopped reading them earlier. As does the thing where it took me three days to finish the last one.
How can so much sex be so completely boring?
No, wait, I totally know that one.
The actual plots suck completely. No build up, no clues, no payoff, just about a short story worth of story stirred in with sex with a new man every few chapters.
And they're very short chapters.
It pisses me off that the whole power structure built in to the books makes it all about one royal person at the top with the most personal magic power, and in this case fertility goddess / succubus glowy sex power, and they gather everyone around them. I want to write a book where people gather new powers by making new friends who can do things. And not making the way Merry does it, where she shags someone and they develop magic powers. (Which come to think applies to Anita too.) I found the early concentration on making allies promising, but it's not about negotiating life and politics so everyone ends up in a better situation and able to look after their people and stuff, it's basically about Merry being so good in bed everyone shags her and sends their people to shag her and they all get magic powers and that's what being allies is all about. Anyone who hasn't personally shagged her is just out of luck. The rules remain the same, people just get more powerful within the existing structures. It's about eroticising the Master-servant relationship and trading bad masters for a good mistress. Yuck. Make new story about magic circle with lots of people in. Teams. Crews. Many people. Not just many cocks.
Also I really really miss the Sherlock Holmes style investigation story, rather than the letting things bang into you until the correct bad thing dies noir thing. I know it's difficult to do the investigation thing when you're inventing the culture to be investigated. But what I miss is the basic idea that you can apply brain and achieve knowledge, that problems have solutions and you can act, deliberately, to figure them out. Waiting around trying to survive problems until entropy takes them isn't the same thing at all at all.
And the Anita Blake books are pissing me off because they've ruled out the idea of civilians being worth protecting. They've eliminated the possibility of conscientious objectors. They rule out the idea of it being moral to not want to be food. They make democracy actually metaphysically impossible. It's really ugly. When the werelion Rex doesn't want to be fed on, but the swan king volunteers all his people as food, it's the Rex who is portrayed as acting immorally. Which is deeply fucked up. Because the power in question is not just eating energy, though it does do that, strong enough it can kill. The power is sex, and it has been explicitly textually compared to unwanted sexual contact, magic assisted rape. But that possibility is only brought up so Anita can feel squirmy about it and everyone else can assure her they wanted her before the magic. Even though they're saying this after the magic. And when she feeds on a whole animal group through their king? Does anyone step up and go 'that's okay, unexpected orgasm just brightens our day, oh, car crashes and assorted loss of control problems? noooo problem!' ... not as such, but everyone agrees to bring someone in to kill the guy who wouldn't let his people be fed on. Swap out the guy who protects his people and replace him with a guy who will offer them up. And who is in the wrong there? Well Anita is always in the right, always just fine with god, who does the glowing cross thing so she feels she's still okay, always successfully protecting people, getting more boyfriends, getting all the plot coupons. So the books are saying, hey, Anita is right, offering up your people to be long distance raped is totally the right thing to do! Which is utterly poisonous. Making it so the consequence of not doing that is every vampire in the city dying is just... big ugly lies. Huge ugly lies. Really wrong.
The part where both Merry and Anita 'rescue' people from sexual abuse and make their lives All Better by lots of magic sex and feeding on them and giving them magic powers... it's creepy. It's the bad Master replaced by good Master story again, with even more sex. But good in this context isn't about helping someone get the life they want, it's about having sex involving only as much pain as everyone involved wants, or about making someone love you with magic but that's okay cause you love them back. It's stalker creepy playing with dolls stuff, and the way it keeps on happening seems to say nobody can save themselves or would want to, they're just looking for someone to hurt them right instead of wrong. I mean she saves people and then accumulates them, like she's the only one who can. It didn't used to strike me creepy, but today it does. On the one hand the ones she saves get more powers, on the other hand they only get them through her. They never get their own agenda. They never stand up and have a plan of their own that has nothing to do with her plan and actually works. So it's like they're stronger toys, but only wanting what she wants them to want is yuck. And whenever someone does have objections, or an alternate plan, they turn out to be Horribly Wrong, building up to a big apology (and more sex).
It's not a union of equals. There's not a set of equal minds trying to find a way that works for everyone. There's just swapping bad Master/Mistress for good.
It's creepy.
No more reading this stuff.
I am quite glad.
This suggests I should have stopped reading them earlier. As does the thing where it took me three days to finish the last one.
How can so much sex be so completely boring?
No, wait, I totally know that one.
The actual plots suck completely. No build up, no clues, no payoff, just about a short story worth of story stirred in with sex with a new man every few chapters.
And they're very short chapters.
It pisses me off that the whole power structure built in to the books makes it all about one royal person at the top with the most personal magic power, and in this case fertility goddess / succubus glowy sex power, and they gather everyone around them. I want to write a book where people gather new powers by making new friends who can do things. And not making the way Merry does it, where she shags someone and they develop magic powers. (Which come to think applies to Anita too.) I found the early concentration on making allies promising, but it's not about negotiating life and politics so everyone ends up in a better situation and able to look after their people and stuff, it's basically about Merry being so good in bed everyone shags her and sends their people to shag her and they all get magic powers and that's what being allies is all about. Anyone who hasn't personally shagged her is just out of luck. The rules remain the same, people just get more powerful within the existing structures. It's about eroticising the Master-servant relationship and trading bad masters for a good mistress. Yuck. Make new story about magic circle with lots of people in. Teams. Crews. Many people. Not just many cocks.
Also I really really miss the Sherlock Holmes style investigation story, rather than the letting things bang into you until the correct bad thing dies noir thing. I know it's difficult to do the investigation thing when you're inventing the culture to be investigated. But what I miss is the basic idea that you can apply brain and achieve knowledge, that problems have solutions and you can act, deliberately, to figure them out. Waiting around trying to survive problems until entropy takes them isn't the same thing at all at all.
And the Anita Blake books are pissing me off because they've ruled out the idea of civilians being worth protecting. They've eliminated the possibility of conscientious objectors. They rule out the idea of it being moral to not want to be food. They make democracy actually metaphysically impossible. It's really ugly. When the werelion Rex doesn't want to be fed on, but the swan king volunteers all his people as food, it's the Rex who is portrayed as acting immorally. Which is deeply fucked up. Because the power in question is not just eating energy, though it does do that, strong enough it can kill. The power is sex, and it has been explicitly textually compared to unwanted sexual contact, magic assisted rape. But that possibility is only brought up so Anita can feel squirmy about it and everyone else can assure her they wanted her before the magic. Even though they're saying this after the magic. And when she feeds on a whole animal group through their king? Does anyone step up and go 'that's okay, unexpected orgasm just brightens our day, oh, car crashes and assorted loss of control problems? noooo problem!' ... not as such, but everyone agrees to bring someone in to kill the guy who wouldn't let his people be fed on. Swap out the guy who protects his people and replace him with a guy who will offer them up. And who is in the wrong there? Well Anita is always in the right, always just fine with god, who does the glowing cross thing so she feels she's still okay, always successfully protecting people, getting more boyfriends, getting all the plot coupons. So the books are saying, hey, Anita is right, offering up your people to be long distance raped is totally the right thing to do! Which is utterly poisonous. Making it so the consequence of not doing that is every vampire in the city dying is just... big ugly lies. Huge ugly lies. Really wrong.
The part where both Merry and Anita 'rescue' people from sexual abuse and make their lives All Better by lots of magic sex and feeding on them and giving them magic powers... it's creepy. It's the bad Master replaced by good Master story again, with even more sex. But good in this context isn't about helping someone get the life they want, it's about having sex involving only as much pain as everyone involved wants, or about making someone love you with magic but that's okay cause you love them back. It's stalker creepy playing with dolls stuff, and the way it keeps on happening seems to say nobody can save themselves or would want to, they're just looking for someone to hurt them right instead of wrong. I mean she saves people and then accumulates them, like she's the only one who can. It didn't used to strike me creepy, but today it does. On the one hand the ones she saves get more powers, on the other hand they only get them through her. They never get their own agenda. They never stand up and have a plan of their own that has nothing to do with her plan and actually works. So it's like they're stronger toys, but only wanting what she wants them to want is yuck. And whenever someone does have objections, or an alternate plan, they turn out to be Horribly Wrong, building up to a big apology (and more sex).
It's not a union of equals. There's not a set of equal minds trying to find a way that works for everyone. There's just swapping bad Master/Mistress for good.
It's creepy.
No more reading this stuff.