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rambly ranting about reading
Jan. 10th, 2009 11:59 pmI 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?
( Read more... )
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. ( Read more... ) 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. ( Read more... )
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.
( Read more... )
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. ( Read more... ) 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. ( Read more... )
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.