ugh, romance books
May. 21st, 2015 07:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethhave finished the fantasy book with the magic sex slave.
that was really very super rubbish.
the blurb on the back said that a sex therapist who has gone right off sex after hearing her patients go on about it accidentally summons this dude under an enchantment where he has to have sex with his owner, and then they figure out if love can break the curse.
and pretty quickly the terms of the curse breaking are defined as not having sex with the supernaturally hot guy for the whole month he's summoned for.
so, okay. treat each other as people. that'll work out.
only then it turns out the definition of 'sex' is so narrow that the only act the curse breaking requires them to refrain from is one some people never get around to anyway. like, sex is not just inserting that one part into that one place, all the rest is sex, really they should have lost on the curse breaking from like a quarter of the way through the book. there was a lot of sex.
and also reading each other stories and feeding each other, that being the treat each other as people part.
but she was totally super empty as a character.
Like, she likes reading, especially romances. and she has a super smart job of helping people, right, except we're only told that, she never actually helps people.
She goes into the office often, but only to sigh and ignore people and think about the dude she could be having sex with right then.
at which point I kind of a lot don't care if she gets her happily ever after? I mean, I'm not saying a therapist can't take a month off for personal stuff, but they have to, you know, take the month off, not turn up and ignore their clients.
The people she's supposedly helping exist as a collection of problems the reader isn't meant to sympathise with. I mean, the main conversation we hear is someone complaining the neighbour's dog fancies her. They're punchlines, not people.
And then there's this one dude who is every awful cliche about mental illness, the creepy stalker dude who breaks in to her home and her office and then turns up at work again. And in a book that gave any kind of damn about her profession, she'd be able to do something about that, help him maybe, or at least accurately assess him. But no. Her professional opinion early on is that he's just slightly creepy, not dangerous, so then she's vastly wrong about that, and when he turns up at her office to try and hurt her she does nothing and just gets rescued. I don't know what a therapist would do about such a disturbed person, but I can't imagine that the only thing they would do is be creeped out and wait for their big supernatural boyfriend to turn up and reassure them. So then she doesn't do her job, doesn't give any indication of caring about her job, doesn't even slightly care, and then her patient/client exists mostly to give summoned guy someone to beat the shit out of. And then the police shoot him dead. Because that's how mentally ill people are dealt with in a therapist's office. Ugh.
So no, she isn't a therapist, she's a romance novel heroine kept as blank as possible so the reader can imagine their way into the story.
Also it's not her job that put her off sex, it's that one creepy guy in college she had really bad sex with that one time. She's nearly thirty, and that's the only time she tried sex. She hasn't even enjoyed herself.
Given her job, her lack of understanding of the basics of herself seems... awkward.
But then supernatural summoned boyfriend beats up aging creepy college boyfriend, who they meet randomly in a bar. It's not like she seeks him out, the plot puts him there, totally not her idea. :eyeroll: So I can see the fantasy there, I can see what's meant to be appealing, but really? Ten years dwelling on how awful that one sexual experience was, and then a cathartic beating up in a bar? That is not a fantasy that appeals to me. I don't want to imagine myself in that one. That's epic boring.
Also, if you want to beat up college guy, go cave Buffy and beat up college guy. You don't need to wait ten years for the hotter model and get him to do it.
The stuff that had happened to supernatural summoned dude was so epically awful there wasn't a hint of a sliver of light in it. Everything was terrible always. He wasn't choosing his new beloved over his old life, he was just really grateful to not be beaten every morning, or kept immobile in the dark for hundreds of years at a stretch. That will never be romantic.
So basically the book blurb wasn't very promising, and the story it describes is rather better than the one that was actually inside the book.
But I think that's basically because it's from very outside my genre. I mean, if you're just looking for a romance novel with some time travelling dude to beat up that creepy guy from work and that creepy guy from college and then choose you instead of a life of fortune and glory, tada, it hits those beats. It's just from where I'm standing that's a creepy sort of fantasy I can entirely live without.
that was really very super rubbish.
the blurb on the back said that a sex therapist who has gone right off sex after hearing her patients go on about it accidentally summons this dude under an enchantment where he has to have sex with his owner, and then they figure out if love can break the curse.
and pretty quickly the terms of the curse breaking are defined as not having sex with the supernaturally hot guy for the whole month he's summoned for.
so, okay. treat each other as people. that'll work out.
only then it turns out the definition of 'sex' is so narrow that the only act the curse breaking requires them to refrain from is one some people never get around to anyway. like, sex is not just inserting that one part into that one place, all the rest is sex, really they should have lost on the curse breaking from like a quarter of the way through the book. there was a lot of sex.
and also reading each other stories and feeding each other, that being the treat each other as people part.
but she was totally super empty as a character.
Like, she likes reading, especially romances. and she has a super smart job of helping people, right, except we're only told that, she never actually helps people.
She goes into the office often, but only to sigh and ignore people and think about the dude she could be having sex with right then.
at which point I kind of a lot don't care if she gets her happily ever after? I mean, I'm not saying a therapist can't take a month off for personal stuff, but they have to, you know, take the month off, not turn up and ignore their clients.
The people she's supposedly helping exist as a collection of problems the reader isn't meant to sympathise with. I mean, the main conversation we hear is someone complaining the neighbour's dog fancies her. They're punchlines, not people.
And then there's this one dude who is every awful cliche about mental illness, the creepy stalker dude who breaks in to her home and her office and then turns up at work again. And in a book that gave any kind of damn about her profession, she'd be able to do something about that, help him maybe, or at least accurately assess him. But no. Her professional opinion early on is that he's just slightly creepy, not dangerous, so then she's vastly wrong about that, and when he turns up at her office to try and hurt her she does nothing and just gets rescued. I don't know what a therapist would do about such a disturbed person, but I can't imagine that the only thing they would do is be creeped out and wait for their big supernatural boyfriend to turn up and reassure them. So then she doesn't do her job, doesn't give any indication of caring about her job, doesn't even slightly care, and then her patient/client exists mostly to give summoned guy someone to beat the shit out of. And then the police shoot him dead. Because that's how mentally ill people are dealt with in a therapist's office. Ugh.
So no, she isn't a therapist, she's a romance novel heroine kept as blank as possible so the reader can imagine their way into the story.
Also it's not her job that put her off sex, it's that one creepy guy in college she had really bad sex with that one time. She's nearly thirty, and that's the only time she tried sex. She hasn't even enjoyed herself.
Given her job, her lack of understanding of the basics of herself seems... awkward.
But then supernatural summoned boyfriend beats up aging creepy college boyfriend, who they meet randomly in a bar. It's not like she seeks him out, the plot puts him there, totally not her idea. :eyeroll: So I can see the fantasy there, I can see what's meant to be appealing, but really? Ten years dwelling on how awful that one sexual experience was, and then a cathartic beating up in a bar? That is not a fantasy that appeals to me. I don't want to imagine myself in that one. That's epic boring.
Also, if you want to beat up college guy, go cave Buffy and beat up college guy. You don't need to wait ten years for the hotter model and get him to do it.
The stuff that had happened to supernatural summoned dude was so epically awful there wasn't a hint of a sliver of light in it. Everything was terrible always. He wasn't choosing his new beloved over his old life, he was just really grateful to not be beaten every morning, or kept immobile in the dark for hundreds of years at a stretch. That will never be romantic.
So basically the book blurb wasn't very promising, and the story it describes is rather better than the one that was actually inside the book.
But I think that's basically because it's from very outside my genre. I mean, if you're just looking for a romance novel with some time travelling dude to beat up that creepy guy from work and that creepy guy from college and then choose you instead of a life of fortune and glory, tada, it hits those beats. It's just from where I'm standing that's a creepy sort of fantasy I can entirely live without.
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no subject
Date: 2015-05-26 01:45 pm (UTC)OTOH ran into a series of urban fantasy about a lesbian blacksmith? Haven't read that one either but sounds uh... like at least someone was trying! So that's good.
no subject
Date: 2015-05-27 04:32 pm (UTC)lesbian blacksmith does indeed sound more promising. nice image.
no subject
Date: 2015-05-27 05:46 pm (UTC)warning: this is not a rec (or indeed a dis), I never read any of it.
no subject
Date: 2015-05-25 09:45 pm (UTC)All of the Dark Hunter novels are like that.
Every Single Book.
All of the women are really kind of disturbingly bad at things they're supposedly good at and if they aren't virgins they're almost virginal due to not perfect sex. And all of the men are beaten, betrayed, and need to be 'tamed'.
Drives me nuts because I kid you not, the plot behind the tripe is a deeply original twist on gods, weres, and vampires that I really dug but you can only push so far through it all before you're not sure if the story is worth it.
no subject
Date: 2015-05-27 04:30 pm (UTC)Too much urban fantasy uses these really interesting mechanics for really dodgy empty romance tropes.
if the labelling on paranormal romance was consistent it would be handy, to avoid it.