Wait, what’s wrong with this? This pig-pile just got really unfair.
When she’s in the middle phase, she’s just a normal girl. In the two extreme phases, she’s impossible to deal with. I don’t see this as being any different than, say, trying to be with a lunatic bipolar chick. Except Chameleon was tripolar, if you will. So, yeah, I don’t understand what’s wrong with that.
Fucking 10 year olds with honey lube deserves a “Wow.” As in “Wow. I’m going to put a drill to my head so I don’t have to remember reading that.”
By the standards of the rest of this thread, it’s nothing. By normal human standards, having the main female character be either ugly and bitchy (because that’s what a woman becomes when she’s smart, right?) or pretty and stupid is sexist in ways that I have just realized I don’t feel like arguing about, so yeah, it’s TOTALLY FINE.
It is totally fine, because it’s not that both extremes are unacceptable, it’s that she can’t find a guy who will want to be with a hot dumb girl some of the time and a smart ugly one at other times. Although when I read that synopsis, my initial thought was that it was a slam on women for PMS.
i think mkozlows is pretty much spot-on that it is pretty blatantly sexist by normal human standards but WHAT DO I KNOW, i haven’t even read it… and never will
I read it as fairly sexist since her ‘time of the month’ determined whether she was tolerable or not. Not outrageous, but something I didn’t pick up when I read it at 9.
Regardless, I don’t recall anything really rapey in the Xanth books other than references to getting into young girls’ panties.
To be fair to Anthony, the human cows idea is just a variation on the girl in the Planet of the Apes book.
In that book, the chimp scientists try to get the guy(Heston’s character in the movie version) to mate with her(Nova in the movie version) in the cages. Of course he’s a civilized man, he isn’t going to bone her in front of a bunch of monkeys, even if she smokin’ hot.
So they put her in a cage across from him, then start bringing this huge(though size doesn’t matter) brute to ravage her. Of course the guy can’t stand the idea of sitting there watching some savage beast of a man tear up this delicate, if mute, flower of womanhood. So he does the old ‘you talked me into it’ routine with the chimps and he mates with her after all.
So it’s not like Anthony is the only one with ideas like this. The thing is the way he writes it makes you feel soiled while you read it.
And I think that Anthology stuff is freakier than the simple pedo stuff. It’s like comparing serial killers. What’s freakier, a guy like Ted Bundy, who’d go nuts and lop off heads and do assorted other evil, yet typical(for serial killer) things.
Or Ed Gein, a guy who was making a suit out of woman’s skins so he could prance around in it?
I vote the Ed Geins, with smaller body counts, are far freakier ‘wtf?’ characters. The Ted Bundys are the ‘meh, another one’ types.
The pedo stuff, offputting as it is, is sort of understandable, once you realize the thrust of his narrative.
The other stuff is just creepy weird in an almost impossible way(if you’re lucky) to understand.
Me neither, but internet searching says yeah-huh, and sure enough, chapter three of the first book has a rape trial, wherein the judge (not portrayed as a villain in the quick skim I’ve given the surrounding pages), gives this judgment:
Also, man, there is all sorts of non-consensual creepiness all over the place. Ugh, I can’t believe I thought that book was relatively innocent.
I would seriously recommend going back and reading some of the Xanth books through an adult’s eyes and looking at the subtext except that means having to actually read the Xanth books again. It’s quite rapey once you get past the puns. The way love springs get played off as a big happy joke is wrong, and when you have to sit in the head of a protagonist who spends a lot of time thinking about dragging women off to them so he can have sex with them, it gets pretty creepy. And that’s really only the surface, there are consent issues like whoa all over the place.
I take it back.
So do I. I am shamed.
looks at Lunch of Kong, then back at MatthewF, then back at Lunch of Kong, then back at MatthewF
Did I miss something?
All of this makes me wonder about the kind of impact that his books have had on the more observant, yet impressionable children who read deeply into the subtext of the stories. I wonder how it might’ve colored their perceptions of sexual consent or how they think of women.
I’m of the opinion that authors should only write about sex they have personal experience with. Now I’m scared that we’ll find out Anthony does just that.
In which case, in the unlikely event I ever meet Thomas Pynchon, I hope he uses lots of breath mints.
I’ve only read Spell for Chameleon, back in high school - which I’d completely loved in spite of all the weirdness. Though I couldn’t invest even through the opening of the second book. (Something about a flying sword interfering with the dude getting to a party? And all our friends from the first book are there!)
I recall what put me off the most about Spell was not the discordant maturity of sex infusing an otherwise goofy, juvenile book, but the discordant juvenility of the sex.
It was sex as though designed to satisfy a pubescent child’s naive fixations. Improbable situations contrived at length to arrange a dude’s face or hands accidentally(!!) landing on OMG bewbs(!!!).
Haunted me with the specter of some hyperactive tool twiddling his fingers and exclaiming, ‘how deliciously naughty!’
snicker
Oh, I’m pretty sure we got the thrust of his narrative, all right.
I read several of the Xanth books in high school, and enjoyed them. And I read the incarnations series and liked that well enough - liked some of the ideas more than the overall product I guess. And I remember liking the game choosing system in another series - Apprentice Adept perhaps.
I had no idea he was such a creepy dude.
Early on in the thread, I think they believed this was going to be a moral outrage thread at rare instances in Piers’ books, but I believe they then realized that the dude is a fucking wierdo that should be castrated at a bare minimum. So they kinda redacted their posts.
Never read him and so glad I did not. What freaks me out is his how prolific he is, how he still gets published and how many reprobates must buy his books. This thread makes me feel very unclean.
Isn’t the Apprentice Adept series the one where the protagonist has a fembot companion which, naturally, just lives to fulfill his every desire? In graphic detail? :)