i'd like to point out first, my del.icio.us tags include amtdi and non-con

You know, I thought I talked myself down off this one, because frankly, Twilight is not great literature and mounting a defense takes up valuable time reading non-con amtdi porn.

But you know, I just feel that inspired, plus I ran out of Dean/Castiel reading and my son still has Twilight in his locker. Go figure.

I have to know something; did I miss the memo that I'm supposed to be ashamed of being twelve? My apologies; see, when I was twelve? I never really considered to form my actions to meet an arbitrary standard that would come into existence twenty years later on my reading habits, because that? Would have totally pulled the Gor novels right out of my hot little hands.

As in, please to be putting down your AMTDI non-con for a second while ranting on how Twilight is ruining young girls. I will totally be there when fandom as a whole stops finding aliens made them do it rape as a fun and lighthearted fanfic pasttime. I mean, I will be there, but I'll still be writing it. Hell, throw in eroticized slave-fic with idealized sexual slavery and falling in love with your enslaver controlling boyfriend who stalks you...wait.

Writer responsibility comes up a lot with this, which I suppose is fair when one is writing cross-alien-species sexual hijinks and one is struggling to portray those sensitivity, or the reality of slave trafficking in the modern world, or hell, magical healing cock after rape and lets toss in mpreg for kicks, because there's a genre that's incredibly sensitive and socially conscious. I have zero interest in writer responsibility, to be honest, except for one key points--did they tell a story? That's it; that's where it starts and stops, with some codicils of audience. Twilight was readable to a huge group of people.

Maybe the mystery is the plotline? Because I agree; I cannot imagine why anyone would enjoy a fantasy novel about two people obsessively in love with each other and would do anything to be together.

You may pile your under the bed romance novels over to the left, please; lets do this right. Let's blackball the entire romance novel industry already. I want petitions against VC Andrews, Johanna Lindsay, Judith McNaught, Catherine Coulter, Virginia Henley (Okay, I could stand to lose her), and anything set in Viking England with a wee Saxon lass.

Seriously. I get hating them for being bad, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder; shaming young girls for something they've found to love is edging right into the reason I'm trying to stop myself from ever using the term "Like a twelve year old girl" again in any slash fic I write. Which will probably be something I'll have to pick up on beta because comparisons to teenage girls as insults to men is surprisingly common.

Please lay off the girls. And remind me again how Seeds of Yesterday ended. For the life of me, I couldn't find it with my other VC Andrews work.

Comments

[seekergeek.livejournal.com]

I've found that a lot of authors I liked back in the day are jerks in real life. That has absolutely nothing to do with what I liked about their books however. Knowing what I know about about these flakes, would I go out and purchase their books now? Hell fucking no, because I don't support crazies if I can help it. But that still doesn't change the fact that I found something in their writing back then that resonated with me in a way I deeply connected with. So, no, STILL UNSCATHED.

I also plan on writing green rider Pern slash one of these days because I know it makes the woman twitch. *is evil like that*

[niqaeli]

Dude, I maintain that the way to save Skies of Pern as a book -- well, other than getting rid of the Healing Power Of F'lessan's Cock which seriously I YELLED AT that book over that and I think I might've actually pitched it across the room from me -- is to make the green rider F'lessan falls for male.

I mean, really, it makes everything about ten times more interesting. It's something that F'lessan would really, really have to struggle with because it doesn't fit into his self-image at all and, like, the whole plot of that book *was* F'lessan struggling to find and make his place in the new world, only it really didn't come across as much of a struggle.

[seekergeek.livejournal.com]

I had quit reading the Pern series before Skies of Pern came out, but if F'lessan had fallen for a male green rider I would have been SO ALL OVER THAT BOOK. Alas, however, the author is appalled at the whole idea of gay green riders even though she made the perfect set up for them in the first few books. *facepalm*

And you know, that kind of pisses me off. It was one of the most striking things about the books when I read them for the first time. I was like, "Queen riders have sex with the rider of the bronze that gets their dragon? Huh. And greens rise to mate too. So a guys that ride a green must have sex with the guy who's bronze/brown/blue got their dragon. Okay,that's cool!" It was a little piece of world-building that I loved because it wasn't Standard Western Civilization morals. And then she blew it for me. *shakes fist at author for being really old and from an uptight generation*

Seriously, I'd still be reading the series if they had gay riders. Then again, I'm apparently a born slasher.

[niqaeli]

Yes, it was implicit in the original books and somewhat more explicitly acknowledged in the prequels that covered earlier passes.

The thing about Anne McCaffrey that apparently is not widely known outside of con-going SF/F fandom is that she's genuinely not in possession of her faculties and hasn't been in a long time. She suffers dementia; my sister-in-law says that Anne was barely coherent when she saw her at what was one of her last public appearances eight years ago -- which means the dementia set in long, long before that.

Funny thing is, she didn't start spouting the strange and bizarre stuff about gays until about the time one would expect that the dementia was setting in. And the Pern books didn't have problematic subtext-rapidly-becoming-text re: homosexual behaviour until really quite late in the game.

Now, while the author isn't their work (hi, Scott Card!), I still feel that all things considered, I just can't hold against her a lack of logic that only made itself apparent after the dementia set in. :/

And as for a lot of the later books, well. She didn't write much of them and, frankly, Todd McCaffrey ain't nearly the writer Mom was.

(And, REALLY, Skies would've been an awesome book for it. Get rid of F'lessan's healing cock, and make him fall for a male green rider and suddenly it'd be a fascinating book. F'lessan's been fairly aggressively heterosexual, it would be a real struggle for him to deal with falling for a male green rider. Not because homosexual behaviour is any strange behaviour or frowned on the weyrs but because it would be completely outside his identity and sense of self and he's never had to struggle with those before. He was weyrbred and impressed a bronze and his life has never, really, thrown anything terribly unexpected at him.)

[seekergeek.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, Scott Card. *holds far away from nose and makes icky face*

So, are you saying that back when she was still in her right mind, she actually did mean to build a place for gay men as riders into her books? *is mildly confused*

[niqaeli]

I can't say what she meant to do or not, not being psychic -- I just know that the original books did male it implicit and that some of the prequel books made it more explicit. And I know that after that it just went all kinds of terrifyingly downhill. It got off onto blue riders being butch and masculine and green riders being effeminate -- because they take it up the ass, you see -- and it's awful.

So -- I mean. Whatever she meant to do, she did *have* them in her stories. I can't remember which story it was, but it was set in like the Twelfth Pass or something or other and there was a couple, brown/green or blue/green I can't remember which, who featured as significant characters and who were explicitly acknowledged to be, you know, a couple. I'd have to look up which story it is, though -- it's been a long time since I've reread.

And, me, I personally choose to believe that the downhill progression was the dementia; I really would rather believe she went out of her mind than that she was a horrible bigot. Especially a horrible bigot who fails at anything even remotely resembling logic and reason and sane thinking.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

The prequel that involves Sean and Sorka splitting the weyrs up also explicitly states that Sean was looking for male green riders since there was a blue rider who was interested in men and also because it of the problem with green rider maternity leave. Moreta had a fairly explicit scene with one of the blue riders talking about caring for his ill green rider weyrmate from a different weyr. And the book about the second pass was fairly explicit that green rider girls could get around the problem of blue riders preferring men by picking out someone else to be there during flights.

The most interesting to me was Jaxom, actually, about Ruth's sexuality when a green went into heat and everyone was waiting to see if Ruth would join in. The sexuality issue expressed there wasn't actually explored, but it did make me wonder if some of the riders were bisexual, since at that time Jaxon had a mistress but there was curiosity on whether or not he would react to the green dragon.

Yeah, no idea what was up with that in The White Dragon.

[fyrdrakken]

Pssst -- go get A Companion to Wolves by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. It's giant psychic wolves instead of dragons and in a quasi-Norse troll-fighting setting, but they clearly agreed with you regarding green riders...