Fourth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

btw feel free to suggest/nominate post titles

Post about fandom! Or whatever! Whether it's a rave about some obscure series, or an essay dissecting every last reason why some internet-famous author should rethink their career, someone will probably read it at some point! We also just chat about life.

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

Comments

Re: BOOKS - Mercedes Lackey

[(Anonymous)]

Her books feel like junk food: not that much quality but sometimes fun.

I've just started (re-started) Brightly Burning and find her teen protagonists fairly obnoxious in terms of how much teenage angst / woe is me for I am misunderstood and thus abused air they seem to have. Her adult protags are better but sometimes still a bit childish.

Spoilers: Vanyel is weird because he sort of has a good reason and sort of doesn't. I get the bit about his parents being homophobic, but it sort of doesn't quite come across so apart from Jervis beating the crap out of him excessively, it's very 'woe is me I have been microaggressed against.' And this published back when slash was the sort of thing you warned for!

Re: BOOKS - Mercedes Lackey

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, exactly, junk food. I've only read some of her fairy tale romance retellings, which have the woe-is-me protagonist built-in from their source. I like them for plane rides, but I otherwise don't go out of my way to track them down.

Re: BOOKS - Mercedes Lackey

[(Anonymous)]

I love her Obsidian Trilogy with James Mallory, but wonder if it's James Mallory that made the difference. (To be fair, I love the way they did elves for worldbuilding, and I love the Wild Magic / High Magick distinction they wrote. It's to a significant extent the difference between Druid-and-Paladin divine magic and arcane magic, but the focus on consent was interesting to me.)

Lackey is interesting to me because she does pretty well as a writer but also does a number of things that theoretically shouldn't work, including the stereotypical "protagonist looks into mirror" and long lines of "tell not show" with protagonist introspection while nothing is happening. Theoretically, that's bad writing, but it works and she has her fanbase, so I think the lesson I take away from that and Twilight is really that people over-obsess about writing quality as though it makes or breaks success but I think in today's content-saturated world, marketing matters more.

Which is maybe very cynical of me, but the other entailment of the 'Lackey writes crap' theory IMO is that writers active especially in the 70s-90s had shitty writing until Tumblr and American MFAs and Creative Writing degrees happened and then lo the people who read in darkness hath seen a great light, which just seems really self-centred tripe to me.

I don't think we got smarter and discovered The Correct Way To Write, I just think the market changed and expectations changed. Harlequinns and Mills & Boons and dinosaur porn being successful shows that it's not about technical skill.

Which okay, is quite an aside but it's been on my mind since wondering why Larry Dixon et al were so weird to me when I read their books and I think Lackey is very dated as a writer so.

Yeah she does a lot of the woe-is-me protagonist thing which feels YA but she's not marketing to YA so I find it strange. Because I struggle to consider the parents she writes abusive, even though she keeps having her characters talk about abusive parents.

Distant parents who don't show love overtly, who "don't care about what the protagonist wants" (news flash: we're supposed to think negatively of Lavan's parents moving from their village to the city without caring that Lavan wanted to stay behind in the village, and we're supposed to think negatively of the fact they are actively trying to get their son into some profession or other instead of letting him idle around or go riding into the countryside!), or who basically have expectations of their children.

It feels like the sort of thing the gendie crowd today loves, because your parents have to be 100% supportive and shower you with demonstrations of love, or they're abusive. It just feels very sheltered and "wow you have never grown up with Asian parents before."

And this got ranty, whoops.