shitty YA cheatsheet with Farla – more on Graceling

Farla is a blogger who makes it a thing to dissect a lot of shitty books, many of them shitty YA (insofar that such a thing as “non-shitty YA” exists, which I’m not convinced it does in any appreciable quantity). I’ve been reading her take on The Hunger Games and Graceling, both books that curiously feature emotionally broken “strong” female protagonists, both books that  (witness here a frothing fanboy defending the lack of homosexuality in The Hunger Games) feature unbelievably atrocious world-building, unbelievably idiotic names, and unbelievably terrible writing.

Even by YA standards (and those standards are so very low to begin with) Kristin Cashore can’t fucking write worth one bird dropping.

Since I’ve been reading along I thought I might as well do the meta thing and comment on the commentary. Farla has this irritating habit of equating “third-world” to places of starvation with no electricity–

The fence is supposed to be electrified, but it only rarely is because they only get a few hours of electricity a day. This is the first suggestion this is more third-world than primitive.

–and I imagine it’d blow her mind to realize that some of us have not only electricity (constantly and reliably!) but also plumbing and Internet access), and this kind of third/first-world thing comes up a whole shitting lot in her analyses.  It’s that mindless, casual thing a lot of westerners do and they don’t even think it’s offensive in any way. This is why we want to kick you in the mouths, folks, and laugh as you choke to death on your own teeth. This is also why:

This is all particularly inane given that it’s standard in Western society that you can’t actually force someone into a marriage, there has to be some nominal amount of acceptance

Non-westerners, of course, constantly rape women and marriages aren’t even about nominal amount of acceptance oh fuck you. But, unfortunately for people who like Graceling this doesn’t mean I disagree with her views on Cashore’s steaming pile, so let’s get to that.

 

THE SNOW QUEEN – Joan D. Vinge and the colonialist narrative

The imperious Winter colonists have ruled the planet Tiamat for 150 years, deriving wealth from the slaughter of the sea mers. But soon the galactic stargate will close, isolating Tiamat, and the 150-year reign of the Summer primitives will begin. All is not lost if Arienrhod, the ageless, corrupt Snow Queen, can destroy destiny with an act of genocide. Arienrhod is not without competition as Moon, a young Summer-tribe sibyl, and the nemesis of the Snow Queen, battles to break a conspiracy that spans space.

This is a childhood favorite. Unfortunately, though for the most part it does hold up fairly well–and has been noted for its gorgeous cover art–rereading it again years later does bring to light some… problems.

But it still remains one of my favorite things, a book I know so well that I can review it from memory.

 

lulz of interest

Moritheil has a cousin, one Bobby Banagher, except instead of dicking around with co-opting LGBT discourse this dude co-opts anti-racist discourse instead. No, it’s not just that weeaboos suffer from oppression just like people of color–it’s that white people in general are targets of hurtful comments.

There are sometimes flippant remarks made towards whites on twitter that I find very hurtful. Like whites are privileged or hold down other races, which isn’t true nowadays at all with such things as Affirmative Action, having special scholarships for minorities, welcoming lots of different races into white countries, offering free welfare to poor minorities, donating to other non-White countries like Africa and Brazil, etc. Also there is especially a type of superiority that some American whites feel over Southerners who may don’t have their exact same values. Overall I’d say words that insult whites are words like cracker, hick, etc. Sometimes words like “fundie” also.

[...]

So basically, being called white can’t really be an insult in an English speaking, white dominated society with a successful white history. It’s like insulting a jock because he’s strong, fast, always wins and dates the prom queen. So you can try to find a way to undermine his moral character like calling him bigoted, racist or sexist. And those three things are the main attacks used to insult whites nowadays.

A follow-up occurred on twitter; the dude has since been suspended. Beware, it’s long and chock-full of racism.

Fantasy Faction is a kind of neckbeard den with some of the worst font/color scheme known to man, but they attracted a hilarious self-published dude who flipped his shit after his topic was moved to the “self-published” forum section.

I am not a small press or even self published. M. R. Mathias’ books are PUBLISHED by Michael Robb Mathias Jr. and should be treated no differently that any big named publishers title. WHY? Because I do my job as a publisher too. Please quit sending my posts into the self published/small press thread. My titles are neither. I have 92k twitter followers @DahgMahn and 10 titles in their genre bestselling list. There is nothing self pubbed, or small, about books written by M. R. Mathias.

Twitter follow-up.

It looks like Laurell K. Hamilton is blowing up–again–in true Anne Rice style.

Why will they hate you? So many reasons, here are just a few.

They may hate you for the color of your skin, your sexual orientation, that you’re prettier than they are, that you’re uglier than they are… that you write better than they ever will, that you have a happy family & they don’t, that your married & they want to be, that you’re single & they want to be, you have kids, you don’t have kids, you have a bigger house than they do, better job, no job, a lot of money… getting more sex than they are . . . The list goes on forever.

Yes, a straight white woman born and bred in the United States of White Supremacists can certainly teach us a lot about how being hated for any of these things is precisely like being hated for the color of one’s skin or one’s sexual orientation. I imagine her Amazon average for her latest plotless sex scene must’ve gotten to her. Anyway, some other writer or whoever chimed in.

 

TENDER MORSELS – rapetoberfest and bears

Tender Morsels is a dark and vivid story, set in two worlds and worrying at the border between them. Liga lives modestly in her own personal heaven, a world given to her in exchange for her earthly life. Her two daughters grow up in this soft place, protected from the violence that once harmed their mother. But the real world cannot be denied forever—magicked men and wild bears break down the borders of Liga’s refuge. Now, having known Heaven, how will these three women survive in a world where beauty and brutality lie side by side?

RAPE AND CHILD ABUSE TRIGGER WARNING

This is a complicated book. It’s about surviving abuse, about love, about recovery, about being women. It’s also quite a flawed book in many ways, and goes on for many pages too long.

 

links links links also let’s oppress weeaboos

The Biyuti Collective has a wonderful post On Manners, Etiquette and the White Man’s Rules.

It is important that so many white people use standards of etiquette to judge how civilized and human some people are. It is important that within the last ten years there is an incident like this in Canada. That children of colour are being held to and judged on some arbitrary white standard of etiquette. That they are being shamed and policed.

[...]

I have trouble eating with a knife and fork. I’m always awkward with them and often end up creating a mess. I never use them. I’m a pro with a spoon and a fork. With chopsticks, even. Knife and fork? Clumsy, awkward, and just not the best utensils for the sorts of things that I eat.

The “cutlery controversy” in Canada incident is referenced.

The boy’s mother pursued a formal apology, reporting that, in a telephone conversation with school principal Normand Bergeron, he had told her “Madame, you are in Canada. Here in Canada you should eat the way Canadians eat.”^[3]

The story first appeared in the West Island Chronicle. According to the Montreal-area newspaper, “When (the boy’s mother) questioned Bergeron about punishing students for their table habits, she says he replied that, ‘If your son eats like a pig he has to go to another table because this is the way we do it and how we’re going to do it every time.’”

[...]

“I don’t necessarily want students to eat with one hand or with only one instrument, I want them to eat intelligently at the table … I want them to eat correctly with respect for others who are eating with them. That’s all I ask. Personally, I don’t have any problems with it, but it is not the way you see people eat every day. I have never seen somebody eat with a spoon and a fork at the same time.”

It doesn’t need to be reiterated of that this is racist as fuck, and disgusting. And have you ever considered how inefficient it is to eat many dishes with a fork and knife? Stupid even, and inefficient? The spoon-and-fork way is both superior and more decorous: it’s neat and lets you gather up all the things you want to gather up. It lets you clean the plate. If occidentals want to find dirty primitives to sneer at, they need only to look into a mirror.

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz guest-posted Decolonizing as an SF Writer at Kate Elliot’s blog.

In the course of this journey, I have been told that I need to learn English better. That I can’t possibly grasp the nuances of the English language the way a native English speaker does and that I will never be published as an SF writer.

And then, there are people who say that because I write in English, my narrative is contaminated and no longer true to the culture I come from.

---

People who follow me on twitter may have been watching a particular exchange yesterday. I now feel that it is necessary to clarify some things, since people appear to misunderstand me about a very crucial matter–to wit, that I’m an advocate of some strange form of feminism that is an all-human, encompassing movement in which the rights and identities of weeaboos, otherkin, furries, fandom, geeks, nerds and their ilk must be respected and campaigned for. Now I’ll say, and dispel this misconception once and for all, that I do not give even one single shit about the fake oppression and the martyr complexes enjoyed by weeaboos, otherkin, furries, fandom, geeks, nerds and such ilk.

You might think this is not a thing which requires clarification. So did I! Well, both you and I are wrong.

 

CLAYMORE – beheading the patriarchy and embracing sisters-at-arms

The latest (as of writing) chapter of the manga Claymore finally gets around to solving what I’ve always thought of as Claymore’s biggest problem: that its female warriors have been experimented on, and made into monster-hybrids, by an organization run by men; that this same organization has forever been making the orphan girls they raise fight monsters, hunt down each other, and die for a cause disguised as the protection of humanity.

This is Miria, one of the titular “Claymores,” holding up the head of Rimuto, chief of the enigmatic organization, before an audience of wounded and recuperating warriors (all female). They, naturally, are breaking into applause. This death is public; this is an execution, justice, vindication.

But there’s no narrative of a hurt woman lashing out at the man who’s damaged her. She doesn’t feel damaged by the organization’s training, and has no feelings about any of the men who run it. Miria beheads Rimuto in perfect calm: this is merely the removal of an obstacle, symbolically powerful–see the applause–but, at a personal level, insignificant. Miria is not motivated by men. She has never been: what motivates her is wanting to make the world better for her comrades at arms (all female), the warriors-in-training (all girls), and unravel the organization’s plot.

 

CLAYMORE – sex, bodies, and monsters

Disclaimer: by writing this I’m not endorsing Claymore as a work of high sophistication. It just happens to be a thing with a particular fixation, and being a visual medium it lends itself very well to this analysis.

Claymore is a story about monsters. It is obsessed with the female monstrosity; it is obsessed with the edge between the monstrous and the human the female protagonists walk; it is obsessed with control and, despite featuring characters who for the most part express no sexual desire, it’s a manga which is visually and deeply fixated on sex.

 

SILENTLY AND VERY FAST – Catherynne M Valente

Fantastist Catherynne M. Valente takes on the folklore of artificial intelligence in this brand new, original novella of technology, identity, and an uncertain mechanized future. Neva is dreaming. But she is not alone. A mysterious machine entity called Elefsis haunts her and the members of her family, back through the generations to her great-great grandmother-a gifted computer programmer who changed the world. Together Neva and Elefsis navigate their history and their future, an uneasy, unwilling symbiote. But what they discover in their dreamworld might change them forever . . .

As far as books I review, this one is unusual in that–far from having nothing to say–is a book of which I don’t have anything to say. Not because it’s hollow, but because its subject matter and the way it engages with it are not things I’m familiar with. I didn’t realize one of the story-fragments is about Alan Turing! That’s how clueless I am about this sort of thing.

 

links round-up! Waters Rising and stuff

Links, man, links. The first is from Keep Your Bridges Burning, a critique of The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, that punching bag which everyone should join in punching until it’s bloody. Neil Gaiman is basically like Joss Whedon: a rich white straight man everyone praises as the champion of minorities, but who’s actually racist and pretty sexist, and also:

Like, in this one, I remember the character Judy- who appears in the deeply problematic 24 Hours section- to be pretty sympathetic, and actually kind of a fashion root. But on re-reading this comic today and yesterday, she actually is kind of a paper-thin dyke stereotype dressed up as something more complicated, who is immediately killed off. She hits her girlfriend and then dies.

YES THANK YOU

Fatihah Iman wrote a really rad post about the Bechdel Paradise of a Muslim woman’s life.

When I am older, my network of female friends will become my Auntie Network. Grown Muslim men live in awe of the power of the Auntie Network, and I have never met an Arab or Muslim woman who didn’t have one – a vast, highly organised web of female friends to whom she turns whenever she has a need, great or small.

This is the strength of Muslim women. It’s a strength deeply rooted in collectivism, based not on the power of the individual but the combined power of a group working as one. It’s a strength built on the ability to call for backup at a moment’s notice, and THAT is rooted in a female-only social environment that nurtures and strengthens intimate friendships between women. Missing that out of a novel about Muslim women is hugely dis-empowering, because it erases a major source of our power.

More people have weighed in on the Bakker thing: Foz Meadows and Larry. Yes, Bakker himself showed up for both firing squads and brought his fanboys. Naturally. Bakker also makes a bid for pity by using his daughter as a velcro vest. It isn’t very effective.

4) Do you think I have deserved the demeaning, in some cases, dehumanizing, things that have been said of me? What should I tell my daughter when she reads strangers telling me I should die, that I’m more worthless than excrement, and so on and so forth?

One might wonder just why he might let his daughter know about all this. Is it some kind of dinner conversation piece? “Family, Internet strangers have said mean things about yours truly! WHAT IS TO BE DONE?”

Dear Author reviews are generally pretty staid, but they’ve got this one up for some astounding thing, a novel with moments like:

“The pleasure’s all mine, beautiful.” It was easy to see that the sweet talk and silver tongue was a family trait.

Jacob bristled, even though he knew his brother didn’t mean anything by the endearment. “Do I need to say ‘Tag’?” Jacob growled, irritably. “Tag” had always been the code word that the McCoy brothers used to alert the others that a particular female had been honed in on and weeded out of the herd for his own personal delectation.

She also reviewed the first book of the same series.

Lots of people have been reviewing Sheri Tepper’s Waters Rising, the Talking Horse novel. With the tentacle hentai or something and this moment:

“Oh, mares,” said Blue**, shaking his head. “They always have to be whinnied into it. Or . . . subdued.”

“Why, Blue,” cried Abasio in an outraged voice. “That’s rape.”

Blue snorted. “I have long observed that human people do not care what they do in front of livestock, and believe me, what some humans do during mating makes horses look absolutely . . . gentle by comparison.” He stalked away and stood, front legs crossed, nose up, facing the sea.

“Isn’t Abasio your friend?” the Sea King asked him.

“Friends do not call their friends rapists,” said the horse without turning around.

What the fuck.

 

more on THRONE OF THE CRESCENT MOON and the omnipresent male gaze

It is quotespam time, because this book turns out to be a very fine example of how omnipresent the male gaze is, how insidious it is even without delving fap-first into tight superheroine costumes and Hollywood actresses running full-tilt in stiletto heels while being chased by sexually threatening serial killers.

Cry Me a River, Cry Me a Sea

Shall we start off with a little number-crunching? There are twenty-four (24) instances of the word “tears” in the text of Throne of the Crescent Moon.

Six (6) belong to Raseed; two (2) belong to Adoulla, one (1) to a bit character (a boy). I believe one belongs to Miri. One instance of “wept” is done by Adoulla. This leaves fourteen (14) instances of “tears” being associated with Zamia, the Feisty Lion-Shifting Teenage Barbarian who loses her unique power when on the rag but whom we are meant to believe is a Strong Female Character. This means that, yes, she cries. A lot. Statistically she performs 58% of the weeping in the book. Most of the occasions where she sheds tears are done–importantly–before men. With regards to Miri, she also “sniffed” and “wiped away a tear.” In a different scene, there’s a mention of her speaking “tearfully” to Adoulla.

There are 9 instances of “sniff” or “sniffle.” Three are associated with crying (as opposed to sniffing for smells); all three (3) are, again, the sniffing and sniffling of tearful women.