Captive of Gor chapter 5

And now we're on Alt-Earth. As in Strawchick just wakes up there. Does this transition seem strange to you? Because I'm getting freaking whiplash.

Hey, Strawchick, what's it look like here on Gor?

...In the distance, away from the forest, I could see a yellowish thicket, it, too, of trees, but not green, but bright and yellow...In the distance, near the yellowish thicket, I saw a small, yellowish animal moving, delicately. It was far off and I could not see it well.

...so, like a dehydrated man's urine, then. I gotcha.

The spaceship has crashlanded, and apparently it flung Strawchick several hundred feet, stripped her of her chains, got her out of the stasis tube, and deposited her on the grass without her getting one scratch. Gor's got some pretty good roll bars in their spaceships is all I can say.

 And then we get to the next example of Author Just Does Not Get It:

On Earth I had not feared men. I had despised them. I had held them in contempt. They were so eager to please, so manipulable, so pliant, so meaningless, weak and docile. But these men, those in black tunics, and those who had been instrumental in my capture, I had learned to fear. They were the first men I had learned to fear. They would not be the last.

Time for a quickie education in your psyche, boys and girls. You project how you feel into other people's heads. And I do not mean you make them think thoughts. I mean that you decide what they are thinking. You are afraid of someone, so you decide that they KNOW you are afraid and they are making you feel that way on purpose. You feel you are weak. You assume everyone else thinks you are weak. I mean, it's so blatently obvious to you!

In this book, CONSTANTLY, John Norman projects his own emotional attitude into women. Because he feels manipulated, pliant, meaningless, ect, in the presence of women, he projects the cause into the women he writes. Strawchick knows she's doing this to men, and when she's robbed of that power she is the one unmanned. Which, boys and girls, is bullshit of the first caliber AND why this series fails at its own goal.

You cannot control how someone else feels. You can manipulate them into doing things, but the ultimate choice is theirs. If a dude wants to rape you? It's not your fault. He'd do it if you're in a tank top or a turtleneck. Same thing with the roles reversed. The entire Gor series is the author fucking screaming STOP MAKING ME FEEL THIS WAY at the top of his lungs, when it's his own psyche he's fighting with and not the women. And most chicks in my experiance are not walking across a quad luxuriating in making men pant. They're thinking about how not to fail their final, and that's all.

Moving on.

Strawchick explores the ship, steals food from an animal that scares the shit out of her, that sounds about as scary as a stray dog, and then leaves. She watches another spaceship, complete with bug-alien, destroy the first one. I know kind of why, but we're just going to forget about it and pretend the spaceships never happened. Norman had to explain how Alt-Earth is here, and Spaceship was the scrabble tile he pulled out of the bag that day. Moving on.

Everything that is anything attacks Strawchick. She describes fighting with a toothy vine that sounds an awful lot like a snake to me, either implying that vines have teeth or Strawchick failed the "Identifying poisonous things" part of girlscout training. And then the moons come out, and on this planet where everything that is anything has tried to eat her, she curls up in the grass and falls asleep. In the grass. That is probably out to murder her too.

I can't help but think about that scene in Hunger Games where Katness tied herself into a tree before she slept, and...

...you know? You know? You know? Wouldn't it be fucking awesome if the bug-aliens had screwed up and kidnapped Katness Everdeen instead of Strawchikc here? Katness Everdeen on Gor. Think about it. There would be arrows and there would be much shouting and many dead slavers in front of the Cornucopia, and she would probably find Alt-Peeta and Alt-Gale and manage to unbarbarianize them by getting a sponsor and Haymich to send her soap, and there would be much posing by said muscled un-barbarians and many plates of food porn, Cinna would produce awesome costumes out of white dancing silks that would be totally modest and yet make all the other dancing silks in red look fucking stupid in comparison and then everyone would be like, "Dance, bound slut" and Katness would be all "What the fuck is this shit?" before she drops a nest of Tracker Jackers in the middle of the slave camp and watches the halucinations and the face-melting begin, Beetee would help her set up a trap involving white and red silk and nightlock berries, she and Rue would eat a Tarn together and in the end, she'd overturn the whole Gorian regime with a rose and one single arrow to the heart.

She would make Tarl Cabbot kneel on a muttation-skin rug while Alt-Peeta helps her fake a pregnancy. It would be awesome.

Somebody do this. Please, somebody do this. The universe is incomplete without Gor/Hunger Games fanfic. We must rectify this. Now.

Oh, yeah. The chapter ended. With Strawchick asleep in the murder grass. Because she is not Katness and this is not Hunger Games and therefore not awesome in the slightest.

TOMORROW: A half-naked, lost Earth woman wanders around on a planet most famous for enslaving lost, half-naked Earth women. And this one is an idiot. Wanna guess what happens next?