Musings about fantasy junk
Feb. 20th, 2010 11:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yukieDISCLAIMER: As ever, this is all my own opinion - it is subjective and I know it is not the word of any god. I know there are people out there who love stuff I don't like and it goes the other way 'round too, and if I took issue with that it'd be like getting angry because other people don't like pineapple on pizza. So yeah, this is all my perspective. People are free to like and not-like what they want. Don't evangelize to me and huck shoes at me and I'll leave your shins alone! XD
All kidding aside - this is very IMHO, YMMV, etc.
Okay now that's done with. On with the poindexterity, yo.
***
So I personally found Anne McCaffery to be overrated. Her writing style and characters were not my cuppa tea at all, and there are people who take issue with that. With a capital I.
I'm sorry. or something? I guess I'm SUPPOSED TO apologize according to the evangelical fans. Anyhow.
To me, her worldbuilding's glorious but her characters are lacklustre. I read the Harper trilogy long after I read Mercedes Lackey's Arrows of the Queen, and I remember much more of the latter. And I liked Talia a LOT better. I know that Lackey goes caca cuckoo with the uberangst later in the books so I'll probably avoid those and - yeah. XD;
And now is where people go, 'But Yukie that's essentially the same story model, how come one gets a pass and the other doesn't? And how do you know that Lackey's book will live up to your memory of it, huh huh huh?'
Okay - first off - my memory is not rosy-tinted, so don't apply your own thought patterns to me. XD
Secondly, yes, it is the same basic story model. The protagonists are very similar in that they're both introverted young women who have abusive family members and live in an environment that they really chafe against but feel they can't do much about.
So why the fuck do I like Talia better?
She leaves. She leaves SOONER. Sure, she doesn't run away thinking that she has a grand destiny (she's hoping to get a position as a servant at the royal palace rather than marry at thirteen), but she leaves, on her own, to take this 'lost horse' back to where he came from.
I remember flailing several times at McCaffery for wasting time penising around to really anvil home the point that Menolly's life sucks. Every time outsiders showed up I was like, 'dude dude STOW AWAY please do something' but she really doesn't. In retrospect there is a lot of gender role hinkiness with that (that is, 'good girls wait'), and when you couple that with the idea that she's supposed to be NOT LIKE THOSE OTHER GIRLS, it doesn't wash.
The annoyingness about women perpetuates throughout the books. Menolly's DAD is the major asshole (I'm told - can't remember much about how he was portrayed, which says something I think) but the parent she accuses of trying to deliberately ruin her life by crippling her hand (not so much honey, you'd be useless to everyone in your community if your hand were ded, and also bite me McCaffery for the classism) is her MOM. And there's a lot of annoying waffling about Menolly's upbringing. McCaffery cannot decide whether it was a blessing or a blight, and she doesn't do the logical thing and say it was a little of both.
When your protagonist, who allegedly hated her homelife so bad she doesn't even miss her parents (this is not especially realistic - if she were an adult I could see it, but a young teenager not so much) starts spouting off the kind of affected down-home folksiness that Stephen King affects, it's going to look ridiculous.
Again - why aren't I annoyed with lackey for the depiction of Talia's upbringing? Lackey does lean hard on the angstbutton.
It's like this - to explain the sexism the protags deal with, McCaffery is going 'poor backwater ignorant people', and Lackey is going 'insular xenophobic culture'. At least that was how I perceived it.
The Holderkin are patriarchal as hell, and insular as hell. they live apart from everyone else - it's ALMOST like religious compounds but thankfully I don't recollect Lackey bringing faith into it - it's just cultural traditions. And while Talia's homelife sucked, there are bright spots in there - it's not completely bad. One of her brothers teaches her to read, for example. And when Talia's dealing with the bratty princess - well, she was in charge of all the kids back at home, why would she not know how to handle a squalling kid having a big hissy?
As a side note, the princess is a brat because she's being deliberately spoiled by her nanny on account of conspiracy.
The way bullying is handled in either book differs vastly. McCaffery seems to have dealt with bullies herself and was probably told by her parents that the bullies were jealous of her, because that's EXACTLY how the Mean Girls show up in the Harper books. Menolly is talented so they are jealous, end of story. Classism comes into it briefly, but it's barely touched upon, and honestly these are the most lackluster bullies in EVER because all they do is taunt and they can't even spread a decent rumour. I got the feeling - and I still have it - that McCaffery is getting in retrospective digs at her own bullies. That kind of pinged my embarrassment squick.
Talia gets bullied to fuck also, and - yeah, it's over the top, but the way the bullies go after her and WHY they do made a lot of sense to my teenage brain and still does. She too is a n00b who doesn't know much about the culture she's starting to become a part of, and the bullies take full advantage of that. They take advantage of her twitch about boys and dig at her fear of being an outsider. 'No one's gonna believe you if you tell them' is a common refrain, and oh, for someone like me, that fucking rang true, because IT IS THE CASE A LOT. It can't be that bad, you're just exaggerating, he/she wouldn't do that, blah bleh bah bleh blah. Hell - Lackey actually dives right in and deals with the subject of abusive hazing, and while that was fucking over the top - shit like that does happen.
Lackey is melodramatic as hell but I never found myself doubting the story. I kept falling out of McCaffery's narrative and going, '...uh...?' whenever I did because I couldn't put my finger on WHY I suddenly felt such antipathy toward not only the protagonist but a ton of the other characters too.
I think I know why now. it's in how the bullies do their shit and why. REASON is important when it comes to bullies, even if it's 'just cuz'. 'They're jealous' is a story told to bullied kids so they feel better about everything (and will shut up and endure it and not rock the boat by proving that ignoring doesn't work - yes, I am bitter). Because that came up, and because in reality it is so rarely the reason or the only reason for harassment? Menolly's mean girls never seemed to escalate things. They stayed sort of baseline snipefight weaksauce rumour flounce (and annoyed me because - goddamn do I hate the EVERY OTHER GIRL IS DUMB model and it started to go there for me). Conversely when Talia didn't say anything the bullies picking on HER escalated to the extent that yeah the morons almost killed her. They figured they could get away with more and more shit because she was not saying a goddamn thing. That - yeah. That happens. If you ignore them they get worse. If you go for help and get none, they get worse.
Lackey's bullies are more of a jock frat than anything and while I think she probably got picked on as a kid too I never got the feeling this was vicarious revenge. Why? Because Talia doesn't always have a snappy comeback. She doesn't get to cut the rumours off cold and prove every doubter wrong. Menolly always lucks out when it comes to bullies, and anyone who picks on her is depicted as being shallow, classist (um McCaffery you are a fucking hypocrite), or just mean. Talia on the other hand is profoundly UNLUCKY when it comes to her bullies. Her mindset was like mine. "Fuck fuck FUCK these are popular kids and I'm this little n3wb, no one;s going to even CARE, maybe if I avoid the shit out of them aaahhh fuck D:"
While I found the bullies' practically gaslighting Talia in Lackey's book a bit 'j'buh?' (the vanishing-ink notes) it didn't topple outside the realm of plausibility for me.
The other big difference between the books is how the intelligent animals are handled. Now, this brings me to my beef about McCaffery - she assumes too much. You cannot just assume that your readers will have read every book that came before and know how the world works. If she explained in the Harper books how dragons can make you psychic, I couldn't find that part. It seriously looked to me as if Menolly just up and sprouted a bunch of new powers out of the blue to make her cooler (see also: Anita Blake). I had to be told by a friend that it's the dragons' mental mojo causing psychic abilities to awaken in people. Which - the hell, McCaffery. The hell. You have a character who is new to all this and thus because of that you have a excuse to 'splain things - and even expand upon WHY the psychic mojo links happen! But you squandered it!
Talia's latent psychic talent happens when she gets concussed by the jocks pitching her into a river in winter. She clonks her head on the ice. XD cliche, but it was plausible to me. And it was an explanation. It wasn't just kinda THERE with the expectation that you-the-loyal-reader would know things already.
Anyway back to the animals - Pernese dragons and their counterparts the little lizards are psychic. The lizards are at least semi sentient. So it pissed me off badly when they started out being treated as intelligent creatures who are okay with this little guitar-playing girl because she did them a favour (saving the little gold one's eggs from being rolled out to sea by the tide coming in - and fuck that was another thing, the DRAGON COLOURS THING - I DID NOT KNOW THAT because SHE DID NOT EXPLAIN GOD DAMMIT sorry), but they're relegated to cute little sidekick creatures and almost totally forgotten about until they're needed' plotwise or they need to do something cute like singing along when Menolly plays the gee-tar.
I was like, what.
Compare this to Lackey's Companion horses, who are ALSO intelligent creatures and are thus treated with respect. I cannot recall any time when Rolan was treated as a cute sidekick creature. Both Menolly and Talia get tapped by their companion-creatures as 'my homeskillet', but Rolan never gets relegated to tweeness. Maybe this is because he is a bigass horse and not a cute little lizardragon, but even so - it seemed to me profoundly disrespectful to the lizards!
So - yeah. That was a huge one for me. And I like dragons AND horses equally. While Pernese dragons being genetically engineered bugged me at first, I started to like them after a while, and thus was extremely annoyed to see the lizards sidelined until they were needed to do something cute or they were being used as a vehicle to advance the plot and pull Menolly into the main action when there was no other reason for her to possibly be there. Talia on the other hand gets pulled into the middle of things through association, through her Empathy, and through the Heralds being a big family to one another. It never felt forced.
But - gahd! Be respectful to intelligent creatures! I mean, yes, magical girls' sidekicks do get to be comic relief often (witness Kero and his pancakes), but they're never just shunted off to the side until something cute has to happen. They're a constant presence in their peoples' lives.
I dunno. I am not really interested in reading further in the Arrows trilogy because I don't wanna see Talia getting kicked around like crazy as most of Lackey's heroes end up being, but I did like the first book. I think if I read it again I would giggle at the cheez a bit more, and I suspect that if I'd read the Pern books earlier on i might have related better to Menolly but I doubt I would have done so for long - after all, someone who always wins against bullies would have struck me as a lucky stiff and pissed me right off. XD I know that how I relate to characters has changed a ton over time, but I'm still more sympathetic toward Talia because her world felt more THERE to me. She's the newb and I was seeing all this stuff and discovering it through her, and McCaffery never invoked that same sense of wonder in me. I couldn't feel the ZOMGCOOL! of the protag.
Anyhow, I don;'t know how to end this formally so I'll just end it. If people want to correct me on book details, they can feel free but for christ's sakes don't snap at me pl0x. I'm not saying McCaffery sucks and should expire, I'm saying I don't like hr writing very much. This is possibly because the Pern books were hyped all to shit for me, but - I just never was able to connect with the characters. I liked the world and the dragons much more. So yeah. I, personally, didn't like to books as much as some others, and I found that Menolly started to approach Sue territory. She was an Author's Darling, basically. She's nowhere near as bad as Anita Blake but - when a character ALWAYS has something to say and ALWAYS is able to prove the haters wrong to the point where they just look stupid, my suspension of disbelief stops suspending.
I don't just call any character a sue or stu either, and I'm not a misogynist who hates any woman with talent (both are accusations I've had thrown at me - hilariously by sexist little brats too) in a book either. I liked Talia, didn't I? XD And I adore Meg Murry and Vicky Austin and Aerith and Yuna and Cimorene and Usagi and Co. and Kayo and Fuyumine Naoto and for fuck's sake people I'm not a misogynist. I don't LIKE misogynists (or misandrists and if someone is one they are usually the other too, deep down), sexism pisses me off as much as any other bullshit judgmental fuckery, and - yeah. Sniff me arse. I don't throw tantrums when people say the Valdemar books are melodramatic and batshit because dude, MELODRAMA YES. And they do, from the summaries I've read, get batshit. I don't have tantrums when people point out the issues with Saiyuki or DOGS. Why do people take it so damn personally when someone doesn't like what they do? "you're a moron for liking it" is bullshit, yes, but all I'm saying is the Pern books were not my cup of tea. If that bothers someone, their being bothered isn't my problem.
Pern evangelizers are as bad as Whedon evangelizers and Twilight evangelizers. XD; it's good to be ENTHUSED but don't yell in my ears!
All kidding aside - this is very IMHO, YMMV, etc.
Okay now that's done with. On with the poindexterity, yo.
***
So I personally found Anne McCaffery to be overrated. Her writing style and characters were not my cuppa tea at all, and there are people who take issue with that. With a capital I.
I'm sorry. or something? I guess I'm SUPPOSED TO apologize according to the evangelical fans. Anyhow.
To me, her worldbuilding's glorious but her characters are lacklustre. I read the Harper trilogy long after I read Mercedes Lackey's Arrows of the Queen, and I remember much more of the latter. And I liked Talia a LOT better. I know that Lackey goes caca cuckoo with the uberangst later in the books so I'll probably avoid those and - yeah. XD;
And now is where people go, 'But Yukie that's essentially the same story model, how come one gets a pass and the other doesn't? And how do you know that Lackey's book will live up to your memory of it, huh huh huh?'
Okay - first off - my memory is not rosy-tinted, so don't apply your own thought patterns to me. XD
Secondly, yes, it is the same basic story model. The protagonists are very similar in that they're both introverted young women who have abusive family members and live in an environment that they really chafe against but feel they can't do much about.
So why the fuck do I like Talia better?
She leaves. She leaves SOONER. Sure, she doesn't run away thinking that she has a grand destiny (she's hoping to get a position as a servant at the royal palace rather than marry at thirteen), but she leaves, on her own, to take this 'lost horse' back to where he came from.
I remember flailing several times at McCaffery for wasting time penising around to really anvil home the point that Menolly's life sucks. Every time outsiders showed up I was like, 'dude dude STOW AWAY please do something' but she really doesn't. In retrospect there is a lot of gender role hinkiness with that (that is, 'good girls wait'), and when you couple that with the idea that she's supposed to be NOT LIKE THOSE OTHER GIRLS, it doesn't wash.
The annoyingness about women perpetuates throughout the books. Menolly's DAD is the major asshole (I'm told - can't remember much about how he was portrayed, which says something I think) but the parent she accuses of trying to deliberately ruin her life by crippling her hand (not so much honey, you'd be useless to everyone in your community if your hand were ded, and also bite me McCaffery for the classism) is her MOM. And there's a lot of annoying waffling about Menolly's upbringing. McCaffery cannot decide whether it was a blessing or a blight, and she doesn't do the logical thing and say it was a little of both.
When your protagonist, who allegedly hated her homelife so bad she doesn't even miss her parents (this is not especially realistic - if she were an adult I could see it, but a young teenager not so much) starts spouting off the kind of affected down-home folksiness that Stephen King affects, it's going to look ridiculous.
Again - why aren't I annoyed with lackey for the depiction of Talia's upbringing? Lackey does lean hard on the angstbutton.
It's like this - to explain the sexism the protags deal with, McCaffery is going 'poor backwater ignorant people', and Lackey is going 'insular xenophobic culture'. At least that was how I perceived it.
The Holderkin are patriarchal as hell, and insular as hell. they live apart from everyone else - it's ALMOST like religious compounds but thankfully I don't recollect Lackey bringing faith into it - it's just cultural traditions. And while Talia's homelife sucked, there are bright spots in there - it's not completely bad. One of her brothers teaches her to read, for example. And when Talia's dealing with the bratty princess - well, she was in charge of all the kids back at home, why would she not know how to handle a squalling kid having a big hissy?
As a side note, the princess is a brat because she's being deliberately spoiled by her nanny on account of conspiracy.
The way bullying is handled in either book differs vastly. McCaffery seems to have dealt with bullies herself and was probably told by her parents that the bullies were jealous of her, because that's EXACTLY how the Mean Girls show up in the Harper books. Menolly is talented so they are jealous, end of story. Classism comes into it briefly, but it's barely touched upon, and honestly these are the most lackluster bullies in EVER because all they do is taunt and they can't even spread a decent rumour. I got the feeling - and I still have it - that McCaffery is getting in retrospective digs at her own bullies. That kind of pinged my embarrassment squick.
Talia gets bullied to fuck also, and - yeah, it's over the top, but the way the bullies go after her and WHY they do made a lot of sense to my teenage brain and still does. She too is a n00b who doesn't know much about the culture she's starting to become a part of, and the bullies take full advantage of that. They take advantage of her twitch about boys and dig at her fear of being an outsider. 'No one's gonna believe you if you tell them' is a common refrain, and oh, for someone like me, that fucking rang true, because IT IS THE CASE A LOT. It can't be that bad, you're just exaggerating, he/she wouldn't do that, blah bleh bah bleh blah. Hell - Lackey actually dives right in and deals with the subject of abusive hazing, and while that was fucking over the top - shit like that does happen.
Lackey is melodramatic as hell but I never found myself doubting the story. I kept falling out of McCaffery's narrative and going, '...uh...?' whenever I did because I couldn't put my finger on WHY I suddenly felt such antipathy toward not only the protagonist but a ton of the other characters too.
I think I know why now. it's in how the bullies do their shit and why. REASON is important when it comes to bullies, even if it's 'just cuz'. 'They're jealous' is a story told to bullied kids so they feel better about everything (and will shut up and endure it and not rock the boat by proving that ignoring doesn't work - yes, I am bitter). Because that came up, and because in reality it is so rarely the reason or the only reason for harassment? Menolly's mean girls never seemed to escalate things. They stayed sort of baseline snipefight weaksauce rumour flounce (and annoyed me because - goddamn do I hate the EVERY OTHER GIRL IS DUMB model and it started to go there for me). Conversely when Talia didn't say anything the bullies picking on HER escalated to the extent that yeah the morons almost killed her. They figured they could get away with more and more shit because she was not saying a goddamn thing. That - yeah. That happens. If you ignore them they get worse. If you go for help and get none, they get worse.
Lackey's bullies are more of a jock frat than anything and while I think she probably got picked on as a kid too I never got the feeling this was vicarious revenge. Why? Because Talia doesn't always have a snappy comeback. She doesn't get to cut the rumours off cold and prove every doubter wrong. Menolly always lucks out when it comes to bullies, and anyone who picks on her is depicted as being shallow, classist (um McCaffery you are a fucking hypocrite), or just mean. Talia on the other hand is profoundly UNLUCKY when it comes to her bullies. Her mindset was like mine. "Fuck fuck FUCK these are popular kids and I'm this little n3wb, no one;s going to even CARE, maybe if I avoid the shit out of them aaahhh fuck D:"
While I found the bullies' practically gaslighting Talia in Lackey's book a bit 'j'buh?' (the vanishing-ink notes) it didn't topple outside the realm of plausibility for me.
The other big difference between the books is how the intelligent animals are handled. Now, this brings me to my beef about McCaffery - she assumes too much. You cannot just assume that your readers will have read every book that came before and know how the world works. If she explained in the Harper books how dragons can make you psychic, I couldn't find that part. It seriously looked to me as if Menolly just up and sprouted a bunch of new powers out of the blue to make her cooler (see also: Anita Blake). I had to be told by a friend that it's the dragons' mental mojo causing psychic abilities to awaken in people. Which - the hell, McCaffery. The hell. You have a character who is new to all this and thus because of that you have a excuse to 'splain things - and even expand upon WHY the psychic mojo links happen! But you squandered it!
Talia's latent psychic talent happens when she gets concussed by the jocks pitching her into a river in winter. She clonks her head on the ice. XD cliche, but it was plausible to me. And it was an explanation. It wasn't just kinda THERE with the expectation that you-the-loyal-reader would know things already.
Anyway back to the animals - Pernese dragons and their counterparts the little lizards are psychic. The lizards are at least semi sentient. So it pissed me off badly when they started out being treated as intelligent creatures who are okay with this little guitar-playing girl because she did them a favour (saving the little gold one's eggs from being rolled out to sea by the tide coming in - and fuck that was another thing, the DRAGON COLOURS THING - I DID NOT KNOW THAT because SHE DID NOT EXPLAIN GOD DAMMIT sorry), but they're relegated to cute little sidekick creatures and almost totally forgotten about until they're needed' plotwise or they need to do something cute like singing along when Menolly plays the gee-tar.
I was like, what.
Compare this to Lackey's Companion horses, who are ALSO intelligent creatures and are thus treated with respect. I cannot recall any time when Rolan was treated as a cute sidekick creature. Both Menolly and Talia get tapped by their companion-creatures as 'my homeskillet', but Rolan never gets relegated to tweeness. Maybe this is because he is a bigass horse and not a cute little lizardragon, but even so - it seemed to me profoundly disrespectful to the lizards!
So - yeah. That was a huge one for me. And I like dragons AND horses equally. While Pernese dragons being genetically engineered bugged me at first, I started to like them after a while, and thus was extremely annoyed to see the lizards sidelined until they were needed to do something cute or they were being used as a vehicle to advance the plot and pull Menolly into the main action when there was no other reason for her to possibly be there. Talia on the other hand gets pulled into the middle of things through association, through her Empathy, and through the Heralds being a big family to one another. It never felt forced.
But - gahd! Be respectful to intelligent creatures! I mean, yes, magical girls' sidekicks do get to be comic relief often (witness Kero and his pancakes), but they're never just shunted off to the side until something cute has to happen. They're a constant presence in their peoples' lives.
I dunno. I am not really interested in reading further in the Arrows trilogy because I don't wanna see Talia getting kicked around like crazy as most of Lackey's heroes end up being, but I did like the first book. I think if I read it again I would giggle at the cheez a bit more, and I suspect that if I'd read the Pern books earlier on i might have related better to Menolly but I doubt I would have done so for long - after all, someone who always wins against bullies would have struck me as a lucky stiff and pissed me right off. XD I know that how I relate to characters has changed a ton over time, but I'm still more sympathetic toward Talia because her world felt more THERE to me. She's the newb and I was seeing all this stuff and discovering it through her, and McCaffery never invoked that same sense of wonder in me. I couldn't feel the ZOMGCOOL! of the protag.
Anyhow, I don;'t know how to end this formally so I'll just end it. If people want to correct me on book details, they can feel free but for christ's sakes don't snap at me pl0x. I'm not saying McCaffery sucks and should expire, I'm saying I don't like hr writing very much. This is possibly because the Pern books were hyped all to shit for me, but - I just never was able to connect with the characters. I liked the world and the dragons much more. So yeah. I, personally, didn't like to books as much as some others, and I found that Menolly started to approach Sue territory. She was an Author's Darling, basically. She's nowhere near as bad as Anita Blake but - when a character ALWAYS has something to say and ALWAYS is able to prove the haters wrong to the point where they just look stupid, my suspension of disbelief stops suspending.
I don't just call any character a sue or stu either, and I'm not a misogynist who hates any woman with talent (both are accusations I've had thrown at me - hilariously by sexist little brats too) in a book either. I liked Talia, didn't I? XD And I adore Meg Murry and Vicky Austin and Aerith and Yuna and Cimorene and Usagi and Co. and Kayo and Fuyumine Naoto and for fuck's sake people I'm not a misogynist. I don't LIKE misogynists (or misandrists and if someone is one they are usually the other too, deep down), sexism pisses me off as much as any other bullshit judgmental fuckery, and - yeah. Sniff me arse. I don't throw tantrums when people say the Valdemar books are melodramatic and batshit because dude, MELODRAMA YES. And they do, from the summaries I've read, get batshit. I don't have tantrums when people point out the issues with Saiyuki or DOGS. Why do people take it so damn personally when someone doesn't like what they do? "you're a moron for liking it" is bullshit, yes, but all I'm saying is the Pern books were not my cup of tea. If that bothers someone, their being bothered isn't my problem.
Pern evangelizers are as bad as Whedon evangelizers and Twilight evangelizers. XD; it's good to be ENTHUSED but don't yell in my ears!
