rambly ranting about reading
Jan. 10th, 2009 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI finished reading another book which ended up with everyone paired off all m/f and like the marriage was the happy ending. And it particularly annoyed me because every one of these characters had defied their family to go and study at university. A university degree was the thing that was most important to all of them. So why on earth did the book end up with everyone getting married?
Well, no, not everyone, of the six main characters two got married, two were being courted, one stopped being a slave, and one reconciled with his brother. One had spent the book getting over having a crush on a teacher, realising he was a bit useless really. Which is a character arc from ignorance to insight, appropriate for an education story. The weird and slightly creepy bit was when the book ended with a teacher having a crush on her and arranging to teach at that university so he could, well, stalk her, until she noticed him. Except that very last bit was written from his point of view so it was part of the happy ending, that he'd hang around and wait for her while not actually telling her that's what he's doing. Eew. Outside of the six main characters there's four more from the previous book in the series who end up either getting married off screen or having people follow them home or ending up following someone around. When I think about it carefully there's quite as many people don't end up as couples as there are ones that do, but the 'happy ending' portion so completely focuses on the marriages that it just leaves an impression of everyone-marries.
And, okay, on the one hand, they're all busily demonstrating that they can have a career and be famous artists or whatever and also get married. But on the other, what does getting married have to do with a story where getting an education is everyone's goal?
And that wasn't even what I sat down to say. That just sort of irritated me on the side. The main thing was, I've been reading stuff that isn't fanfic for weeks now, and I haven't read a single queer character. Not one. There's not been so much as a crossdressing girl going off to seek her fortune. There's weirdly gender normative stuff going on with non human species actually, there was a bit where people just knew from looking that some griffins were girls and some were boys, without looking at any particular parts that would reveal such data. Griffins apparently can just shine with girl-ness. And the girl griffins are storytellers, artists, and cooks, where the boy griffins fight wars. I only just noticed that. That's depressing. ANYway, I was just noticing, gender distinctions clear and solid, no crossdressing, no use of magic to turn into the other gender even if they're turned into like minerals or plants or something so they can clearly change in many large ways, just male and female and that's that. And absolutely definitely no m/m or f/f couples. Anywhere. And I've read a lot of books lately. Just this month I'm up to a cast of hundreds. And zero percent of them are queer.
Come back fanfic, all is forgiven. I can live without plots and structure and being more than a hundred words long. Just be stories where people like me exist please!
I'm getting an ever increasing urge to go back and write queer versions of a lot of the books on my shelves. Not in the fanfic way, not because I'm reading a couple of characters as subtextually a couple, just because I want to get in there and retool stories to look like *my* world.
Humans happen in wondrous variety! Straight white vaguely English or vaguely American people are not the only ones that get to save the world. They're certainly not the only ones that inhabit the world.
And skin color doesn't just happen in 'white' and 'slightly greenish', and it gets really *annoying* when skin color is only used as an indicator of species. I think there was one brown person in the book I just read, but blurring the recent reading together there's a whole shortage of skin variety unless it's about being non human. Not exactly different species because it's fantasy worlds where everyone can mix together. Although in the one I just put down a mix of vaguely roman empire white skin people and marsh dwelling green skin people is compared directly to a mix of cat, eagle, and human. So is it saying slightly green marsh people are not human? This is the problem. Skin color as species indicator is bad. Everyone be human! But then the griffins are definitely people, so the comparison isn't meant to be a bad thing.
But it's like the dwarves thing. I'm not a person of restricted growth, but I'm reasonably sure that such people are the same species as me. I have started getting this sort of mental twitch every time a dwarf turns up and makes comments about being not human, being a different species rather than just a different culture. I mean it's a good thing that the books are all 'mixin, yaay!' and being very pro diversity in their own way, it's just it does really weird things to actual ordinary people to relabel them as fantasy races.
I really want to write my plot bunny Doctor Who script where the Doctor accidentally gets there a day early for a non human species first contact with humans and is hiding there to witness it and the ship opens and out steps a whole bunch of really short people, possibly lead by that guy from Willow. Representing the human race. Because that should be obvious, but, apparently, not so much. And that's starting to bug me.
And isn't it more interesting to complicate things? Maybe there's a whole underground country full of dwarves, and one comes to study among humans, and then finds that actually there's humans who are just the same height as dwarves, so what's with all the seperatism? Or people who are really tall and skinny having to explain that no really they're not elvish. Possible funny and possible interesting. But no, fantasy book, probable big lines and seperating into boxes.
I liked the book before last because the bloke that was one of the central characters made griffin children and winged horse children and winged human children and they were all people to him. He mixed the cells together and they were all his children. That's interesting. Making fantasy races in your back yard. Relating to them and making society let them in. But then this second book makes a whole continent full of griffins with no human parents and marries off all the griffin children to one of them. There's none of them marrying humans. There's no other humans making griffins or falling in love with griffins. There's just this experimental batch of griffins getting married off to their own kind. Why? They could grow more griffins from cells if they wanted griffin babies. They could grow humans with cat tails or eagle wings. What's with all the marrying? It's weird and a bit boring.
This is not one of my more coherent rants. Okay. So what do I mean...
I read mostly fantasy and science fiction. Humans meeting humans-painted-green or humans-with-funny-foreheads, or possibly meeting actual not very human looking people, is part of what I'm there for. I like it that the universe has wondrous variety. But in a universe of such variety it becomes much *more* important that humans also have all our differences. Otherwise it ends up coding whatever the 'human' crew all have in common, probably including white and hetero, as =human, which leaves all the rest of us as not=human, which is stupid.
Star Trek put some work into this principle, though with areas of fail. I wish more books did. And I *really* wish more fantasy books did. There's a whole second set of traps to fall into, like the deadbrowalking bet, but I'm really sick of invisibility.
So now my head is spinning with better bunnies. At the moment I'm rewriting the Belgariad and Malloreon so the thief prince is secretly born female and still marries the spy lady and the knight in shining armour is actually in love with his king but ends up with the robin hood guy and... well that's as far as I've got so far but it's already much more interesting.
If I polish the origins off and think up a better plot I could even write this stuff.
But it's not like fanfic. It's not because I love the source texts. It's more like patchwork, cause I'm seeing all these holes, and I want to put something better looking in there.
Well, no, not everyone, of the six main characters two got married, two were being courted, one stopped being a slave, and one reconciled with his brother. One had spent the book getting over having a crush on a teacher, realising he was a bit useless really. Which is a character arc from ignorance to insight, appropriate for an education story. The weird and slightly creepy bit was when the book ended with a teacher having a crush on her and arranging to teach at that university so he could, well, stalk her, until she noticed him. Except that very last bit was written from his point of view so it was part of the happy ending, that he'd hang around and wait for her while not actually telling her that's what he's doing. Eew. Outside of the six main characters there's four more from the previous book in the series who end up either getting married off screen or having people follow them home or ending up following someone around. When I think about it carefully there's quite as many people don't end up as couples as there are ones that do, but the 'happy ending' portion so completely focuses on the marriages that it just leaves an impression of everyone-marries.
And, okay, on the one hand, they're all busily demonstrating that they can have a career and be famous artists or whatever and also get married. But on the other, what does getting married have to do with a story where getting an education is everyone's goal?
And that wasn't even what I sat down to say. That just sort of irritated me on the side. The main thing was, I've been reading stuff that isn't fanfic for weeks now, and I haven't read a single queer character. Not one. There's not been so much as a crossdressing girl going off to seek her fortune. There's weirdly gender normative stuff going on with non human species actually, there was a bit where people just knew from looking that some griffins were girls and some were boys, without looking at any particular parts that would reveal such data. Griffins apparently can just shine with girl-ness. And the girl griffins are storytellers, artists, and cooks, where the boy griffins fight wars. I only just noticed that. That's depressing. ANYway, I was just noticing, gender distinctions clear and solid, no crossdressing, no use of magic to turn into the other gender even if they're turned into like minerals or plants or something so they can clearly change in many large ways, just male and female and that's that. And absolutely definitely no m/m or f/f couples. Anywhere. And I've read a lot of books lately. Just this month I'm up to a cast of hundreds. And zero percent of them are queer.
Come back fanfic, all is forgiven. I can live without plots and structure and being more than a hundred words long. Just be stories where people like me exist please!
I'm getting an ever increasing urge to go back and write queer versions of a lot of the books on my shelves. Not in the fanfic way, not because I'm reading a couple of characters as subtextually a couple, just because I want to get in there and retool stories to look like *my* world.
Humans happen in wondrous variety! Straight white vaguely English or vaguely American people are not the only ones that get to save the world. They're certainly not the only ones that inhabit the world.
And skin color doesn't just happen in 'white' and 'slightly greenish', and it gets really *annoying* when skin color is only used as an indicator of species. I think there was one brown person in the book I just read, but blurring the recent reading together there's a whole shortage of skin variety unless it's about being non human. Not exactly different species because it's fantasy worlds where everyone can mix together. Although in the one I just put down a mix of vaguely roman empire white skin people and marsh dwelling green skin people is compared directly to a mix of cat, eagle, and human. So is it saying slightly green marsh people are not human? This is the problem. Skin color as species indicator is bad. Everyone be human! But then the griffins are definitely people, so the comparison isn't meant to be a bad thing.
But it's like the dwarves thing. I'm not a person of restricted growth, but I'm reasonably sure that such people are the same species as me. I have started getting this sort of mental twitch every time a dwarf turns up and makes comments about being not human, being a different species rather than just a different culture. I mean it's a good thing that the books are all 'mixin, yaay!' and being very pro diversity in their own way, it's just it does really weird things to actual ordinary people to relabel them as fantasy races.
I really want to write my plot bunny Doctor Who script where the Doctor accidentally gets there a day early for a non human species first contact with humans and is hiding there to witness it and the ship opens and out steps a whole bunch of really short people, possibly lead by that guy from Willow. Representing the human race. Because that should be obvious, but, apparently, not so much. And that's starting to bug me.
And isn't it more interesting to complicate things? Maybe there's a whole underground country full of dwarves, and one comes to study among humans, and then finds that actually there's humans who are just the same height as dwarves, so what's with all the seperatism? Or people who are really tall and skinny having to explain that no really they're not elvish. Possible funny and possible interesting. But no, fantasy book, probable big lines and seperating into boxes.
I liked the book before last because the bloke that was one of the central characters made griffin children and winged horse children and winged human children and they were all people to him. He mixed the cells together and they were all his children. That's interesting. Making fantasy races in your back yard. Relating to them and making society let them in. But then this second book makes a whole continent full of griffins with no human parents and marries off all the griffin children to one of them. There's none of them marrying humans. There's no other humans making griffins or falling in love with griffins. There's just this experimental batch of griffins getting married off to their own kind. Why? They could grow more griffins from cells if they wanted griffin babies. They could grow humans with cat tails or eagle wings. What's with all the marrying? It's weird and a bit boring.
This is not one of my more coherent rants. Okay. So what do I mean...
I read mostly fantasy and science fiction. Humans meeting humans-painted-green or humans-with-funny-foreheads, or possibly meeting actual not very human looking people, is part of what I'm there for. I like it that the universe has wondrous variety. But in a universe of such variety it becomes much *more* important that humans also have all our differences. Otherwise it ends up coding whatever the 'human' crew all have in common, probably including white and hetero, as =human, which leaves all the rest of us as not=human, which is stupid.
Star Trek put some work into this principle, though with areas of fail. I wish more books did. And I *really* wish more fantasy books did. There's a whole second set of traps to fall into, like the deadbrowalking bet, but I'm really sick of invisibility.
So now my head is spinning with better bunnies. At the moment I'm rewriting the Belgariad and Malloreon so the thief prince is secretly born female and still marries the spy lady and the knight in shining armour is actually in love with his king but ends up with the robin hood guy and... well that's as far as I've got so far but it's already much more interesting.
If I polish the origins off and think up a better plot I could even write this stuff.
But it's not like fanfic. It's not because I love the source texts. It's more like patchwork, cause I'm seeing all these holes, and I want to put something better looking in there.