Not-exactly-fmk: Gor and Yuletide

[melannen]

So in FMK reading adventures, I finally finished the first Gor book, that was voted K early on but I decided I wanted to read before dumping just so I could say I had.

I should have trusted y'all: it was mostly just incredibly pointlessly bland, occasionally rising to actively annoying. It wasn't even really bad enough to be interestingly bad. There was a lot more flying around on giant soulbonded warbirds than I expected, tbh (somehow I had though that Tarnsman meant "man of the mountain lake country" but I think that was giving him too much credit for having a vocabulary,) but the warbirds are so badly wordbuilt and lacking in individual personality and the flying scenes so lacking in joy that the only time I actually cared about them was when the abused half-starved ones were about to eat the MC and I roused enough to cheer them on. The plot is built on bad characterization and improbable coincidences; the language aspires to basic competence; you can very easy disassemble it into its component stereotypes; and all sense-of-wonder or hints that the MC is not a sociopath are missing. Also amused that the author refuses to comment on whether it's John Carter of Mars fanfic (it's really badly done John Carter of Mars fanfic, omg.) I understand the series gets far more batshit later, but I don't think I need to read far enough to find out.

Also, thank you all for your help with picking a yuletide nomination! I shall be ignoring the clear preference of the poll, and nominating Mr. Trash Wheel RPF. He didn't win, but he did win the vote of everybody I know who has taken a selfie with him, and their votes count 10x, sorry.

(this is Mr. Trash Wheel: )

I will also be nominating Professor Trash Wheel and a five foot long West African Ball Python as characters, of course. I am stuck on who should be my fourth nom, though. A modular robotic eel that hunts for water pollution? Lynyrd Skymmer? Some other celebrity of the waters that I don't yet know about?


Clearly there's a market for Always Coming Home, though. Someone else should nominate it. (If I requested it, it'd just be as "tell me a story of the Valley", so I don't care about characters.)


Meanwhile, I re-read The Girl With The Silver Eyes to prepare to nominate. That one does hold up very well! Things I had forgotten about this book: the muumuu wearing old fat lady who lives alone with her cats and her books and gives no fucks and is #rolemodel. The fact that Katie can TALK TO CATS. The constant references to other YA fantasy/sf novels by the same imprint that she is reading. How much this book distrusts all adult men. How much this book also distrusts all non-readers. How yes they have psi powers and are super-smart, but they're also explicitly non-neurotypical in a way that read a lot more Autism Spectrum than any of the books about supposedly autistic kids that I was reading at the time, and that's more of an issue for them than the psi powers.

The book really needs an active fandom if only so we can have epic fanwars about whether they go to the school or stay home. (9-year-old me wanted BOARDING SCHOOL BOARDING SCHOOL but adult me is like NOOO DON'T DO IT so I guess we'll just have to have the fight between ourselves. And whoever I can rope in via yuletide.)

Anyway I am stuck for character noms there too, because I want all the kid characters but I also want Mr. C, Mrs. M, Miss K and Jackson Jones.

Comments

[ratcreature]

So the Gor book didn't even have any kinky parts? What I heard about the series was that it was some kind of sadomasochistic rape-torture fantasy, which might work for my ID-fic buttons, but also that it wasn't well written, which is why I have never tried it.

Also the line between "hot" and "icky" is a tricky one in rape-torture fantasies, of course it varies for readers, but my trust in male authors to not slide onto the wrong side of my tastes isn't great. But it is hard to tell from reviews because many reviewers just wouldn't like any.

[melannen]

There were some vaguely-kinky parts in that there are slavegirls and it's implied at least some of them like being tied up, but the closest the book actually gets to "sexy" is one lady doing a private sexy dance with veils and then getting interrupted by angry men with swords before she gets around to even kissing the mediocre white dude.

You can sort of tell while reading that this is an author who's in the process of figuring out he has a D/s kink but I don't think he'd quite figured it out at that point. I think it got a lot more hardcore later in the series, and eventually he figured out that was the only reason anyone was reading and just went with it, but it's not really quite there in the first one. And it's definitely built on the "no woman is truly happy unless she's submitting to a man" idea, from what I can tell, so I suspect for me at least it would go over the line to "icky" pretty fast. Even with the later ones I suspect you'd be better off clicking a random slavefic on AO3.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, probably. It is also always vaguely embarrassing for me to read fiction where an author clearly wants to write kink, but doesn't seem to realize it.

And I am always baffled when that happens with any of the "BDSM" type of fantasies, because the major ones are all such a common set of kinks, and not hard to realize even pre-internet. I mean when I was a wee baby-RatCreature in those pre-Internet days I realized what kinds of (all vaguely disturbing, but hot to me) kinks appeared in my fantasies way before I had any attraction to specific (kinds of) people, and it was far more consistent. Actually the same kinds of fantasies only evolved into explicitly sexual ones with puberty.

But I mean, when I went looking for written porn as teenager before the internet was around, I obviously went to look to find a paper copy of De Sade's Justine because it was the famous work, and then alternated between "yes, this!" and "ick, no!" depending on the details. Anyway, considering this kind of fantasy is pretty much the most famous kind of porn around since at least the 1800s, it can't have been hard to realize what's going on with your ID even in the 1960s.

[cypher]

And it's always so obvious when the author is doing that! Terry Goodkind, I am looking at you. If you want to write stories about your self-insert being collared and forced to obey a beautiful woman, there is a market for that, but it's a market that will be better reached if you are straightforwardly writing the collaring-and-obedience story instead of trying to repeatedly shoehorn it into fantasy doorstoppers. Everyone can tell that's exciting to you. Except you, apparently.

[ratcreature]

I've never read Goodkind, but it sounds like I'd totally be into the porny bits, only it's not really worth it if you only get that pay-off on less than fifty pages out of a thousand...

[gehayi]

If you want a summary of what Goodkind's characters are like, go here.

Also, all of Goodkind's dominatrixes were tortured in childhood so that they would become doms, because no one could possibly be into D/s just because they ENJOY it.

[melannen]

I looked up an recent-ish interview with Norman after I finished the book (mostly to see if he was still alive - he's still alive and writing new Gor novels!). Apparently even after inspiring an entire new subset of kinksters, he knows nothing about the RL BDSM community and claims he's uninterested in it? IDEK. (It was really clear from the interview that in fact, he knew less about RL bdsm than your average 12-year-old writing fanfic in the late '90s.)

[ratcreature]

I guess you can't account for people's weird internal hang-ups.